Posts Tagged ‘Caroline Myss’

Exploring the Seven Graces and the Seven Passions

Friday, September 24th, 2010

Long time readers will know I am a big fan of the work of Caroline Myss. I went to my first workshop with Caroline in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1997.

In her latest book, Defy Gravity, she talks of the seven graces and the seven passions (more commonly known as the seven deadly sins), aligned with the seven chakras.

I have been listening to Caroline speak on Defy Gravity via her web site, where she has many hours of free video. I turn this into audio and listen to it while I run. I love her teaching and lectures even more than her written work. Over the weekend I decided to start my own deep dive into the seven graces and the seven passions, one grace and one passion at a time, and to write about each experience as it unfolds.

I will stay in each passion and grace for as long as required. I would love to share this journey with others, so please, if you want to join me, let me know. If you are really keen we can also schedule a time for a skype conference call to go deeper. I am open to every or all possibilities. Suggestions, interest, discussion, options welcome.

I suspect that by going deep into each one, not only we we become familiar with how these passions and graces play out in our lives, but we will also clearly identify how we want to move away from, or closer to…how do we live in reverence? How can we bring more reverence into our lives? How does pride show up for us? Arrogance, hubris, superiority?

I am also writing a similar series for the Positive Deviant web site, looking at the graces and passions through the lens of business. I posted the first article on pride here.

Here is a simple chart of the passions and graces aligned with the chakra’s.

Want to play? Let me know?

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Breakdown USA

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

splitapplerock

I was 23 years old when I first visited the USA. I spent four months there, traveling through about 40 states. Since that time I have been back over 45 times.

Today I read a wonderful piece in the Huffington Post by the very insightful Caroline Myss. I have not been paying too much attention to US politics since Obama’s election.

After my first trip to the US my impression was that the rest of the world was going to get to watch the modern day equivalent of the fall of the Roman Empire. Breakdown USA. Why did I think that back then, so many years ago and at so young an age?

The United States of America appeared to me even then to be drowning in excess. That really was my impression. Spoilt. “Trans” arrogant, if that is possible. The kind of attitude which comes after years of being in an elite position, where it is no longer held as anything but deserved. “Forget the hard work, we deserve it just because.” Pure entitlement. And the rest of the world. “Forgive me, but do other people exist? I had no idea.”

I know I may sound anti American, and I am not. I am speaking of my impression of the whole, and not the parts. I really like the USA, hence my 45 plus visits, and have lived there off and on over the years.

Back in 1984 I was like some exotic bird, with my accent and origin.”Ooh..how come you speak such good English?” was a frequent question, “being from Australia?” (We don’t speak English in Australia?) (I did get asked this very same question by a professional person and citizen of the US only about 4 years ago on one of my visits. I was horrified and felt like telling this woman to climb back under her rock, if she wasn’t capable of learning a little about the world out there, beyond her privileged shores.)

Each visit I get off the plane at LAX and feel reduced to a number. No wonder people fight for their minute of fame. And until recently, was treated as was all incoming international passengers, with less regard than a mangy dog by the staff at LAX. (They must have gotten so many complaints over the years that they finally decided to teach the customs and immigration staff to be pleasant to other humans.)

Fast forward to the last few years. Like the rest of the world, I have watched in horror, which was then reduced to incredulous amusement, at the antics of the US political scene. What did it say about a country that they elected a buffoon to lead twice? And free world…if the US citizens think they are free they are under an enormous illusion!

However, I am a big picture girl and it did become apparent that Obama would not have been able to even surface if it wasn’t for the parody of Bush. So thank you Mr. Bush. On the grander scheme of things you did your job perfectly and I really am grateful to you.

Now we have Obama, who I get has massive personal integrity. The man comes from light in a world that is consumed by dark. Bush was not the dark one, he was just profoundly incapable of making a decision on his own, and was surrounded by very dark people.

My heart goes out to Obama. He is the lamb to the slaughter, surrounded by a pack of hungry wolves.

It is no small thing that the teens of the world (and a few of us older folk) are consumed by a story about vampires and wolves.(The Twilight series of books, for those who have not been aware of the massive pop cultural event sweeping the world.) Bloodsuckers and werewolves. The light/good vampires fight against the very nature of their inhumanness, refusing to fall back into the dark ways of sucking the very life out of humans. They have spent centuries curbing their intrinsic desire for more blood, their greed and thirst to kill and destroy so that they may thrive. All around them are the vampires who for centuries have not been able to transcend their primal, base nature.. They revel in their blood lust. Insatiable, cruel, predatory.
And the werewolves, represented in the books as Natures way of creating an antidote to the evil of the human blood lusting vampires. Birthed from deep in the indigenous cultures, and only resurrected when the balance goes wrong. Hmm..sound familiar? Maybe the Twilight Culture senses a larger metaphor lying deep in the romance of this story that has captured the hearts of millions.
The human and the immortal. But not just any immortal. The immortal who overcame his base nature to kill and be immune to the suffering of others.

From afar, where my view of the USA is very different, I sense that Obama has been neutered. Caroline’s article speaks so clearly of this.

So where does that leave us?

This is the bigger question, and the one that inspired me to write this article.

In my dark night of the soul article I wrote about our pathway to change as humans. In my years of experience in health and healing I have observed that the majority of us do not change unless we are brought to our knee’s. That it takes catastrophe, massive illness, disaster…for us to finally, finally be open to change.

Today I really got that this is what will happen in the US and maybe with the rest of the world. We need the disaster. The USA has only one path, and that is to break. It truly does need to fall. And fall deep. The financial crisis, the warm up, is not deep enough. I am not a doom and gloom merchant, and I do actually see this as a very positive situation overall, although the path through this period is like to have a very high cost. Last year I wrote about the shift that has already occurred, and earlier this year I wrote about my own meltdown, stating that I felt that we all had to go through our personal meltdown, and probably a collective meltdown. And that if you haven’t been through your own meltdown yet, buckle up for its coming to you and your neighborhood as sure as day becomes night.

All of us can no longer afford to pretend that big changes are not afoot. All of us need to wake up every cell in our individual and collective body. We need to learn creative integrity, and creative resilience. We need to be able to move with the change, instead of resist or ignore it. Our ability to be creative, flexible, dynamic, conscious, compassionate, informed, collaborative and have the biggest view possible is not an option.

I pray for President Obama. I really get that he is working with truth and light. But he is surrounded by darkness, of the worst kind. Insidious, malevolent, cancerous. Like the dust storms that smothered the East Coast of Australia this last week, the darkness gets into everything, and has been doing so for years, through little atrocities, that have settled silently in the corners of our souls, often beyond the level of our awareness. We have agreed to so many of these little atrocities, bit by bit. Each and every one of us. Our silence is killing us.

If I had a crystal ball, I would see the collapse of the USA, and in its collapse, the near fall of many other countries. If Obama lives through this break down, instigated not by his hand, but by the powerful forces around him, then he may well be one of the people who can lead us through the valley of the shadow of death. But as he is today, he is neutered, impotent.

And on the other side of this break down, we have, as we have had throughout history, the powerful capacity to rise through the ashes. Wiser, happier, rid of the toxic dust of silent agreement to the little atrocities. More whole. More able to live in harmony with nature.

The evil bloodsuckers who have not managed to ride above their base instincts will succumb to the vampires who have left their primal ways behind them, and have agreed to work together with the werewolves called forth by the wisdom of the ancients. And the human and the immortal shall be together in love. Amen.

Your thoughts…?

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Meltdown

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

The days have gone sliding by since I last put words on a page. Caught up in life, finding my way to carve a path in the busy day to write.

So much has occurred. Life gets really interesting when you let go and surrender to Universe. I stand aside from myself and watch the strange and mysterious events show up, ever in wonder at the miracle of it all.

We are in a Meltdown. The whole world. Individuals, companies, states, nations, and the environment.

I have just surfaced from my own meltdown. People all around me are either on their way out, on their way in, or have no idea that its about to hit. Many of my friends and colleagues have already forged the path through and are looking at the world with new sight. I do believe that for those of us who are already through will be needed in force to help the masses as they awake to the fact that the fabric of their existence has been ripped apart.

This is a time of deep structural change. A global shift. No longer can we get away with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. All of us need to face the massive change inside and out. There is no running too…only delay of the inevitable.

If you are up to date with science, you will know that everything is connected. There is no such thing as having a thought in your head in isolation. There is a collective way of being, a global mind set, cultures, tribes, and world views. So using a term like “meltdown” is not to be taken lightly. As Buckminster Fuller would say, we must always start with Universe. And our current situation is not just another recession. No, this one is a confluence of events-a crash of the titanic forces…the environment, the economy, our values system, globalisation, technology, peak oil, energy, any form of fundamentalism, poverty, the increasing gap between the rich and poor.

Isn’t it interesting that the collective word for this crisis is “meltdown”? Also “credit freeze?”. Caroline Myss, one of my beloved teachers, has talked about the great depression and the language that was used at that time. People and nations where ~crippled~. At the same time the world was also dealing with a polio epidemic, in which people, including the American President who walked the people out of the depression, was crippled. It was only after the economy was no longer crippled, and the prevailing psyche was also no longer crippled, that we found a cure for polio. We had to move through the collective language and experience and find a place that was not crippled, in order to come through.

From an archetypal point of view, expressing our global economic crisis as a meltdown links this event directly to the meltdown in our environment…the emergence of climate change..the melting of the ice caps. The economic crisis simply cannot be disconnected from our environmental crisis. They are two faces of the same coin. A credit freeze, somehow speaks of free flow of money being caught in the ice-in the ice caps? If so, we need the ice caps to melt in order to free up the flow. Are we seeking to continue to rape the environment in order to free up the God called cash? Is this what we are asking from the expression of the collective unconscious? Or is the freeze simply our paralysis? Extreme fear blocking flow?

Just like the crash of ‘29 crippled people, our crisis is causing meltdown, in a holographic way and on every level. The very parts of us and the world that we have held as being solid are melting before us. The prevailing feeling is of walking on ground that is unstable, shifting, unpredictable. Humans like certainty,constancy, and mild to zero change.

Well folks, embrace change. Because it is the strongest event in the room right now, and it is blowing a gail.

What is the change that is required of us to move through this?

What is it that needs to be restructured inside us all? What parts of ourselves do need melting down? These are the questions we all need to ask, and explore. For as surely as the wind blows, the work to be done is both internal and external.

For myself, I had to look at some of the big questions? What is money, what is wealth? Success? What do I value? What parts of myself are no longer valid and needing expression, and what parts of myself will emerge through the meltdown. Do I have credit freeze? Aka–are there parts of myself that are frozen and not in flow? (Internal)

Finally, given all this, how do I now express myself in the world? (External) What value do I offer that is required in our post meltdown world? Or, even, how can I support people and companies through the meltdown?

My meltdown was not pretty. I wasn’t sleeping, crying a lot, occasionally paralyzed with fear. I spent a lot of time speaking with my coaches, and my mastermind group. I wrote in my journal. I prayed. I went through waves of hopelessness, and completely lost all sense of possibility.

I discovered that slowly, over many years, I had lost parts of myself that are essential to my being. These parts had been buried, because other parts had become dominant. Kahlil Gibran describes this in words far more eloquent than I am able.

~And tell me, people of Orphalese, what have you in these houses? And what is it you guard with fastened doors?
Have you peace, the quiet urge that reveals your power?
Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summit of the mind?
Have you beauty, that leads the heart from things fashioned of wood and stone to the holy mountain?
Tell me, have you these in your houses?
Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, the stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master?

Ay, and it becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires.
………
Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning to the funeral.~

What I needed to meltdown was the parts of myself that had become my master. Things like working like a fiend to be able to buy more stuff. Spending money I didn’t have. And the belief that had overtaken me that said that in order to get my goals met, I needed to do x,w and z. And that I was responsible and that only I could create this via my actions. Be in action–create–create. The burden was on my shoulders. I also needed to meltdown what success means to me. Hmm…would I rather a big goody bag, or a life of rich experience? And then to really choose a life of rich experience. That is not to say we cannot have both. But to take on life, really go for it, surrender completely to it, and be completely OK with what shows up. To get that there is a bigger plan than I have any idea of, and that the daily, moment to moment surrender to this is where my joy lives. This is a successful life. To be in uncompromising integrity to self and others. And to do that I need to slow down and listen, the let go and trust, before I take action. To act from spirit and with grace by my side. To take Universe/God on as my full business/life partner.

The parts of me that I have found again, that were frozen within (my interior credit freeze) is the belief in the miraculous. That life doesn’t follow some straight path of cause and effect. There is a whole other dimension here that is beyond our comprehension and will be forever so. I had to remember the world of grace, and synchronicity, and the mysterious. I have known this all along, however I discovered I had forgotten how to access this…and that more than anything, this is my starting point. I found the path to this by recognising that I had also lost connection to a daily experience- a full bodied experience- of beauty. It is through music, classical, instrumental, that I can ~be~ joy in a heart beat. More than just looking at a sunset, being a sunset. Being joy dancing bare foot on the beach.

Again quoting from Gibran

~But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Into that seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.~

I needed to meltdown those rigid structures to find the immense well of beauty and love, and truth that have always been and will always be. That this is the life I choose. First and foremost. Watered by the springs of compassion and shared with beloved friends. Is there anything else?

What joy…

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