Archive for November, 2010

The Death of Struggle

Monday, November 29th, 2010

The last few years have been very difficult years for me. Starting in around September 2008, the Universe has been conspiring to have me go deep within and look at very long term patterns and beliefs. It is no coincidence that this major shift in me has also aligned with the global economic crisis. Part of my deep inner exploration has involved looking at my relationship to money, my money habits, my sense of my value in the world, or lack of, and the larger system surrounding me, and money. It is also interesting for me to note that this two year deep dive was the very two years building to my half century. Questions raised included questions of age, health, death, and then the big questions…like what am I going to focus on for my next fifty years, what value do I bring, how do I want to show up in the world, and how is my value recognised?

Certainly during this time I have been simultaneously aware of both the pain of this…and the unfolding beauty of the experience, knowing that the end of this particular journey I would be ever closer to my own truth, ever more authentic, ever more at peace with my place in the world.

The most delightful part of this experience is now emerging. And I am both surprised and thrilled to say that I have recognised a pattern that has been so long term and deeply held, and yet so far below my conscious awareness.

That pattern has been a deep belief that life is HARD. Making it (surviving) is HARD. Relationships are HARD.

Fortunately I have been blessed with a very happy disposition, so while my belief was that life is hard, I have faced most days with both fortitude and a positive attitude.

However I have held that 80-90% of life is hard, and that you grab joy when you can.

No longer. While I love a good challenge and some serious problem solving, I am now choosing to see life as mostly wonderful, full of ease, grace, beauty and flow. If we look at nature, there is a beautiful daily reminder of this. Sure, there are cyclones, floods and drought, and the lions eat the lambs, but when nature is left to its own flow state, it takes care of its self very well. After the fire comes renewal. And if there are big, unpredictable events like a comet strike that renders whole species extinct, nature seems to get back to its task of regeneration. The small plant will grow in a rocky outcrop, against the odds. It is the nature of things.

I am now living from the place of life being easy. Making money is easy, surviving is easy. Relationships are easy. This is not a faux belief, but a genuine switch in the core of my belief system. How do I know?…there is no doubt. It just is so. Life is easy, beautiful, flowing filled with grace. Not only is this what I have felt inside, it is what has shown up on the exterior.Grace, ease, flow.

I have an image of the word ‘struggle’ lying bleeding to death.

What a relief. All these years to find that I was wired for ‘hard’. Ughh!! What a waste of effort.

Life is easy, beautiful and flowing. I am surrounded by grace.

I would love to hear from you about your core beliefs that have been guiding you. (Or limiting you.) Also, I would love to hear from people who have lived/ are living a life of ease and flow, emotionally, spiritually and physically.

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Posted in Guinea Pig C-personal category, Personal Development, personal sustainability | 6 Comments »

Avarice, Greed…and Gluttony

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

This is part three in my personal exploration of the 7 deadly sins and the 7 graces. (Part one, on Pride, and part two on reverence.) Also if you want to read the business version, Unchecked Pride in Business, and Reverence as a Business Practice, enjoy the different dimension they offer.

I have found the passion of greed/avarice difficult to grasp, mainly in distinguishing it from gluttony.

Both are about excess. Greed is an inordinate desire to possess more than one needs. More than one needs of wealth, of time, of status, of power, for example. Greed can motivate actions like bribery, betrayal, treason, all for personal gain. It also includes hoarding, theft, scavenging. Avarice is from lack, the Latin to crave. Craving and desire are the impulses behind greed and avarice.

For greed to exist, it must deny others of experiencing the same. For example, I may accumulate millions of grains of sand, but if my sand pile does not cause anyone else to experience lack of sand, or to suffer as a result, then my accumulation is not motivated by greed. In order for me to manifest greed I must be aware I have denied others. A young child takes her toy from her little brother because she wants to possess it and not allow him to. Raw as her emotional maturity might be, she knows that she denies him of her toy. Greed of wealth and or power means that I seek it knowing I will deny others of their own wealth and power. Greed is cunning, devious, manipulative. There is always a lack of….for greed to exist. Scarcity walks hand in hand with greed. The opposite of greed is generosity, a deep sense of abundance, plenty, charity.

Gluttony comes from the Latin, to gulp down or swallow and is about over indulgence or over consumption of anything to the point of waste.Too much, too expensively, too eagerly, to wildly. Gluttony is hedonistic, exuberant, and does not imply that there is a lack of…  Its opposite is moderation or temperance.

When I was 11 years old I went to an all girls boarding school. In truth I literally went from one age of awareness to another, catapulted with violence from a gentle world of fantasy, beauty and flow, into a world of comparison, envy and image consciousness. Within that first year I developed a psychological eating disorder. While it never manifest as overt bulimia or anorexia, for the next 17 years the thought of what I would eat, when I would eat it, how many calories it would have, how much exercise I would need to do….on and on and on….occupied every minute of every hour of every waking day. Then one day, after struggling with this for so long, I just decided that enough was enough. (interesting choice of words) I had better things to think about, smarter things to occupy my time and energy. That spending my life on this obsession was a waste of the grandest proportions.

I have thought about what motivated this obsession. More than the body/image it was an obsession based on scarcity. On there not being enough. Not enough experiences of food, of eating food, of going to food places. The “not enough” has run my life in many more ways than food, and sadly, without realising I had done it, I replaced my not enough ‘experience of food’ with not enough time, books, knowledge, money, skill, smarts…on and on…not enough. Never enough. I am not enough. Until recently, this has been my mantra. No longer.

In writing this article the question I sat with was is this greed, or gluttony? Is ‘not enough’ greed, or is it gluttony? Or does it have pieces of both? In exploring the answer I have explored both greed and gluttony, seeking to understand their intrinsic motivators.

I am not an overtly greedy person. But the ‘not enough’ has ruled my life for 41 years. These last two years of internal re-calibration brought about through a series of exterior events has forced me to really sit in the ‘enough’ question.

What is enough, when will I know I have enough, when will I know I am enough?

These questions are very significant questions for all of us to ask. Our world is warped to breaking point because of our addiction to greed and more…

I would love to hear from you on your thoughts on greed, on the distinctions between greed and gluttony, and where you think the mantra of ‘not enough’ fits.

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Manifesto of conscious men to the divine feminine

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

The continuing journey into the feminine

Several years ago I spent some time with my good friend Jerome on his visit to my local community. Jerome is an African American, and quite unmissable in a crowd. He is large, tall and has a smile that breaks all rule books on smile dimensions. We were talking about how being black is still such a stigma in American society. It occurred to me while I was speaking to him that I had some awareness of being a marginalised citizen not for the colour of my skin, but for my being female. I had never thought about this before. I had never seen myself as specifically anything, other than human. I have, since that time, given this much more thought.

I have never been a ‘feminist.’ I am certainly not anti men. The history of my life demonstrates that I spend more time with men that women. I like so much about men, and as most people who know me would know, the masculine side of my personality is well developed. Finding the feminine has been the harder part of my journey.

At the same time, I have become increasingly aware of just how difficult and ‘unfair’ it is for women to succeed in a male dominated world. One of my colleagues, after struggling for seven years, took the drastic action of paying a retired ex CEO and entrenched member of the secret ‘boys club’ a high fee to get her in the door. She now has 7 of these guys on her pay roll around the world, and her business has gone through the roof. In order for her to succeed, she needed to hire the ‘front’, just to get in the door. Smart, but also very sad, and very telling of our corporate culture world wide.

And then of course you have the very serious cases of overt female repression ….the female genital mutilation, the rampant sex trade of very young girls, the large wealthy global institutions who still, to this day, will not recognise women as having equal status in their hierarchy (The Catholic Church, to name a few)…and I could go on and on. It is quite amazing to me that we have this issue still…and yet we do, and it is deeply entrenched.

As a marathon runner, it is stunning to me to know that it was only in 1984 at the Los Angeles Olympics that women were allowed to enter the marathon. I was 24 years old.

We have certainly made progress. However, what we are talking about it thousands of years of habit, culture, indoctrination, inbuilt genetics, cellular memory….deeply entrenched, even beyond the conscious awareness of most men and women.

So when Arjuna Ardagh and Gay Hendricks published their first iteration of the conscious man’s manifesto to women this last week, I sensed that something very significant was going on. This is one of those small gestures that will be likely to have a very significant ripple effect. (precession)

Reading the manifesto brought tears to eyes. I had a felt sense of such a deep sadness, a sadness that went beyond me as Christine. I felt a sadness for all of the women, past and present, who have been marginalised by being born a female. Of the millions of women who were, over the course of 600 years, burnt at the stake for being intuitive, or able to work with nature to formulate herbal remedies. If ever there was a holocaust (from Old French holocauste, via late Latin from Greek holokauston, from holos ‘whole’ + kaustos ‘burned’ (from kaiein ‘burn’ ) then this was one of the first of them. (I am told many men also were burned for supporting their women.)

When I look at the predicaments we face today, I wonder, as I am sure many of you do also, is there a trimtab that just may cause the shift we know is essential to effect the kind of change we need? I have always felt certain that this trimtab will be a black swan. The unexpected, left field, one in a million kind of event. Quite possibly it could be a gathering of enough men around the world, in a virtual way, to give their energy, interest and blessing to the manifesto of conscious men to women. History has shown time and again that to tip the scales, we do not need a majority. Instead a small minority, around 10% is enough.

The inspired people behind The Girl Effect also sense this path.

Just as I told my friend Jerome those many years ago, he needs to heal the part of himself that experiences his blackness as an issue for him; women, myself included, need to learn to love and embrace their feminine fully. Given that our culture has done a very good job of  damaging/deleting/discrediting the divine feminine, for many of us women, this is an experience in unlearning and undoing…and then rediscovering what has been lying dormant for eons.

Only when we have healthy women, and healthy men and the beautiful partnering between them, will we step into the full power that is part of our human heritage. Not one, not the other, but both, together, in glorious worship of each other.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this…..

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