Posts Tagged ‘Caroline Myss’

Beaten down by life, daring greatly

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

I have allowed myself to be beaten down by life.

There…I said it.

I have seen just how much I have let this be so. How much I have given up on dreams, how I have become afraid to step back into the arena once again, in case I fall flat. Again.

How I moved to this place one micro step after another, drinking from the kool~aid of modern life, slipping into conformity, mediocrity..beige..

Simultaneously, I have seen how low my commitment has been. Yep…true..true..

Ok, ok, I am not, as it may seem, taking a baseball bat to my soul and beating me senseless over this. But the awareness is quite breathtaking, stunning even. And subtle. Most people will not see this in me…

Disappointment…kind of the music I have been playing in the background, so low that only the very clever ear can hear. All those failed expectations. But the harsh truth of recognising that I have been a walking disappointment to myself brings me to a place of pause. Especially when thinking about how I am being in the world. And what that attracts. Like to like…disappointment made more manifest. The undercurrent of a Universe that I interpreted as seeming to say no to me…for all those silly reasons.. not being enough… not being smart enough..or worthy..

…ughh…the very thought of me showing up in life from the place of disappointment/failure/life~is~hard is quite nauseating.

It is not that I have not been committed to everything, I have just not been committed to many things..really really committed. I have, in my love of creativity and rampant entrepreneurialism, thrown so many things against the wall just to see if they will stick…I will give this a go, nope…didn’t stick, how about that…nope…still not sticking…try something else. There has been a steady commitment to trying. But as Yoda says…there is no try. Do or do not.

To give myself 100%, with total commitment…well I have four consistent places that I do that….in my health and sport….as a mother…with my clients, and in my own quest towards personal mastery. In these arenas I am fierce, resolute, unwavering.

But in reference to projects and my career…no pass.

The metaphor I used with a client the other day was a sporting one…from rugby…that if you are going to tackle another player, you better be bloody committed. Not only that, you see the guy going down before you leave the ground. Nothing half arsed about it. Launch yourself believing, seeing…knowing…the outcome.

As to dreams…how can dreams come true if we don’t give it our all…clearly choose…and give it everything? I know in my running I will keep going until I am almost dead. Quitting is not an option. How did I give up on my dreams…?

Maybe a better question is…were my dreams my own? My truth? My deepest yearning? Or were they the manufactured dreams of an expectation of success in modern life?

And…..if I know how to be committed in areas of my life, and I do it so very well …why not in my work and career?

When I was speaking to Caroline Myss last year, she said to me that I needed to take more risks. I found it a strange statement, as I felt that I have always been a risk taker. But she was right. I have been playing small, and fearfully. And very lacking in focus, and commitment. Kind of like a drunk man pissing against the wall…all over the place.

Its time to clearly choose and to give my all…

I am inspired by this quote..

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again,
because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly . . .”Theodore Roosevelt

It is time to dare greatly. And throw myself into the arena.

Who is joining me?

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Day 15. Commitment to vows, giving your all, integrity

Thursday, May 3rd, 2012

A morning in Mylapore
Interesting thing happened in this little time of change. I have seen more of myself, which is the point really.

I need to up my own integrity, which is no surprise…if I choose integrity as my platform, then it will be where I am most challenged.

Specifically, to do what I say. Or don’t say it. To the minutia. Big stuff like making appointments on time..this is easy. But its the little agreements with myself I am making that need a new level of rigor. It lives in language, and the language is precise. It needs to be precise. When I am working with clients on their people skills as a leader, I teach a level of precision in communication that leaves no room for error, assumption, or misunderstanding. (For an example of this see this article ) There is a time and a place for this level of precision in our own personal interior comms. “I will do this. I won’t do that. I may do this. I would like to do that but I won’t.” To tell the truth about what is true. To not do so is self deception, and we are all masters at self deception in some way.

Its time for me to do some self deception house work. To up the anti on my own little games.

In this process of commitment to vows, I am also moving from a kind of ‘poor me’ disposition, which I suspect has been sneaking in to my space over the last few years, so subtly that I have not really seen it, to a place of simply being grateful every moment, even if I don’t like the moment. Now this is a practice worth practicing. Its not the denial of the emotion, or the experience, but the recognition in the moment that I can choose how I respond. Does my energy become heavy and stinky/sucky, like a black hole, (which is the direction I sense it has been heading) or do I observe the emotion/experience, and recognise that it is not true, and refer back to what is true about who I am.

Reading a piece by Caroline Myss yesterday, she quotes. Darkness is not despair or a punishment but an invitation to withdraw from thoughts, ideas, beliefs and inner patterns that are dead in me.

Finally in this last 24 hours of self reflection, I have observed that my own voice is not very strong. When we see a great performer on stage what makes them great is that you know they have left nothing of themselves behind. They took a huge risk and brought their whole selves to the performance. This is what gets us off our feet. It doesn’t even matter so much how perfect their voice is, or if they made a mistake. It’s that they gave their all. Every last ounce.

And the audience is wanting them to do this. Willing them. We want to get on our feet. We want the goosebumps.

So in closing this little epistle, this is my question. Are you bringing your whole self to your work/your art/your life?

And if not, why not?

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The metaphor of Easter, on finding forgiveness and relinquishing justice

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

One-Winged Angel
Creative Commons License Photo Credit: v1ctory_1s_m1ne via Compfight

As we grow up and become fully adult, which takes a lifetime or more, one of the last areas we need to release is our relationship to justice.

In our human life, much is going to be experienced as unfair. Bad things happen to really good people, to innocents..This is the way of it. It feels wrong. It hurts. Its confusing. It can’t be explained using our rational mind.

In the Christian text, as in many other spiritual texts, “Justice is mine” sayeth the Lord. We are advised that justice lives in the realm of the divine. The Lord of Karma, or God the Father or whatever Universal field you ascribe to, is responsible for ensuring justice prevails. Divine justice is rarely dispensed on our time cycle, and in the way we would like it. Wise, methinks, for if humans were really allowed to decide exactly what is justified, all of the time, and according to our schedule, we would have a very nasty place to live. Even now, with our ‘justice system” evil so often prevails at the level of human existence. Justice is often awarded to the side with the biggest bank account to hire the brightest lawyers, or to the person with the most overt or covert influence.

But to be at peace with divine justice is not an easy progression in our development. There is a lot of letting go, acceptance, forgiveness. It requires quite an evolved human being.

The Dalai Lama was questioned… “Why didn’t you fight back against the Chinese?” The Dalai Lama looked down, swung his feet just a bit, then looked back up at us and said with a gentle smile, “Well, war is obsolete, you know ” Then, after a few moments, his face grave, he said, “Of course the mind can rationalize fighting back…but the heart, the heart would never understand. Then you would be divided in yourself, the heart and the mind, and the war would be inside you.”

The Christian story of Easter provides a powerful metaphor for our human experience around justice. It also carries a strong archetypal pattern of our pathway to finding peace with divine justice. This pathway, similar to the hero’s journey, has several critical components. They all need to be walked, to be lived, if we are to really find our peace with divine justice. There are no shortcuts.

It starts when Jesus goes into the garden of Gethsemane after the last supper.

1. Jesus beseeches God to release him from this task.

You are not going to want to do what it is you have to do. When you appeal to the heavens for help, you will hear nothing. Silence. Plus there is no escape route. You feel trapped.

2. Jesus was betrayed by one of the 12 apostles, Judas Iscariot, for 30 pieces of silver.

Your friends will betray you. Or some force will betray you. This will really sting, and feel very unjust.

3. Jesus accepts his fate after repeated appeals.

You did make an agreement, and like it or not, you do accept it. Some peace is attained.

4. Pontius Pilate tells Jesus that he has the power to let him go. He appeals to Jesus to say something so he can be released. Jesus says nothing…he has made an agreement. Jesus resists the temptation to deny his path. The easy out (sell out) is ignored.

You will be tempted. It will require staying true to your self. Probably against all odds. This is an extreme test. If you fail, you go back into the cycle, and often remain in the cycle for a lifetime.

5. When Jesus is hanging on the cross he feels abandoned. “Why have you forsaken me?”

Abandonment is essential for this archetypal pattern to be released. Feeling completely isolated, alone, forgotten, rejected, unloved…when this sets in deeply, you are moments from release…keep your nerve. The light is coming.

6. Finally, Jesus remembers that justice is not his to give. It is for the Divine to give. He finds forgiveness and is released.

You will find ultimate surrender and peace. Not always by dying physically, but by dying to your attachment to righteousness.

The metaphor of the Christian Easter may be applied no matter who your God, or what your religion. The journey of justice transcends dogma.

Knowing the journey, and the steps on the journey may provide solace to you. In my own recent life I have felt the pain of the 5th step so many times. Moving from step 5 into step 6 has been one of my hardest lessons.

I would love to hear your experience on this path, or the places that test you the most.

This article is inspired by the work of Caroline Myss

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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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