Archive for category: Personal Coaching

                      “…bent on building an ennobled world of dignity for all…”– Maria Popova

In 2010 the Dalia Lama proclaimed “The world will be saved by [the] Western woman.”

Recently the Pope declared 22 June as Mary Magdalene Feast Day.

The International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers gave the world this message:

“As you move through these changing times… be easy on yourself and be easy on one another. You are at the beginning of something new. You are learning a new way of being. You will find that you are working less in the yang modes that you are used to. You will stop working so hard at getting from point A to point B the way you have in the past, but instead, will spend more time experiencing yourself in the whole, and your place in it. Instead of traveling to a goal out there, you will voyage deeper into yourself. Your mother’s grandmother knew how to do this. Your ancestors from long ago knew how to do this. They knew the power of the feminine principle… and because you carry their DNA in your body, this wisdom and this way of being is within you. Call on it. Call it up. Invite your ancestors in. As the yang based habits and the decaying institutions on our planet begin to crumble, look up. A breeze is stirring. Feel the sun on your wings.”

In 1988, though not original to her, the former USA State of Texas Governor Ann W. Richards said “If you give us the chance, we can perform. After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.” 

Irrespective of how the subordination of girls and women and the disparaging of all that is feminine became the norm… No matter that our doing so is inexcusable and unjustifiable… No matter that all of us—girls and women and boys and men—are conditioned to debase more than half of the people on the planet because of their sex… In the name of human decency… In the name of dignity…. In the name of Love…

Personally, as an activist of the human heart… of decency, with a bent toward that which is just… We must now direct our attentions and resources to counterbalance the forces diminishing the Feminine. We must do so with our unequivocal action in support of women’s power, place, standing, voice and contribution—to feminine wisdom and process. We must do so while maintaining the dignity of boys and men and the Masculine. We must take a stand within ourselves to think and act differently within ourselves… With one another.

We are in the midst of a transition of epochs: we are leaving the patriarchal and moving into an honoring of the Feminine… an honoring of girls and women… Though the path ahead is arduous, we must now construct the circumstances for furthering—for enabling—cooperative and collaborative partnerships of Feminine and Masculine… of women and men. This will take generations to realize of course, yet we must do our part now to enable succeeding generations to do theirs.

In these actions we will heal ourselves, one another—and avail ourselves to see into and work hand in hand with the otherwise ‘unseen’ Universal forces of Wisdom—we will see into the forces of the Mystery beyond mind/imagination, body and matter.

Were we to look into the eyes of the 13 Grandmothers we’d see there is no New Age dribble expressed here, but rather, ancient Wisdom from our future…

                                                                                                                                          Jackson Pollock

“Change in society is of secondary importance; that will come about naturally, inevitably, when you as a human being bring about change in yourself.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti

Some scientists say the universe is expanding. Others say it’s contracting. Mystics see the universe as a dance of opposites. Easterners speak of Yin and Yang.

Concerned about global chaos? Be calm. Concerned about greed? Be generous. Concerned about hate? Be unafraid. Concerned about an insensitive world? Be gracious.

Concerned that governments and business are uncaring? Care for another and experience the love that ensues. Concerned about the world’s ill-will? Be kind. Concerned about evil? Do good.

​You lonely? Connect with another. Unhappy? Do things you love doing. Is the world moving too fast? Slow down. Complexity got you by the throat? Simplify. Too much in your head? Come to your senses.

Want to live boldly? Counterbalance things!

Wanna really be bold? Value, understand, honor, respect, care for, love, and support the self-confidence of girls and women. See them. Support gender equality at every opportunity.

​Many cars have GPS. You know how they work: they chart a course from our current locations to our destinations. They continuously calculate the relationship between our here and now and our desired there and then—and re-choreograph our movement when we veer off. We do this in our lives too. I’m curious whether the places we seem bent on going are actually the places we imagine them to be? I’m curious too about being goal directed by things out there versus meeting our deeper needs. Just wondering…

​GPS records our starting points. It remembers. No matter our present situations or seemingly similar destinations—because each of us have differing points of origin—we can never compare our experience, positions nor degrees of progress with others. What do we need in order to let go such comparisons? I wonder…

…The safest and easiest way to drive at speed through sharp or broadly sweeping curves requires fixing our sight on a moving point. Where we place this moving point depends on:
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1) which side of the road’s centerline we drive on,
2) whether we’re on a multi-lane road,
3) whether the curve in front of us bends to our right or left.

In North America we drive to the right of the road’s centerline. Here on a road having one lane in each direction approaching a right bending curve, we need look to the painted line near the right edge of the road in front of us. We must fix our sight on a point on this painted line as far into the curve as we can see—and continue moving this point into and around and through the curve—and beyond as the road straightens.

Were we to look elsewhere instead, our systems would take us there. If we become aware of this change in course we would need to exert additional force to again move in our desired direction. Sometimes we right ourselves. Sometimes no.

As we coordinate our systems of attention and intent (navigating curves elegantly in our own ways) by seeing that moving point in front of us—and connect these with our mind, body and environment, we more graciously approach the contours our journeys bring—whose changing conditions we only discover by approaching and moving into and through them. In our connecting we join larger forces informing our motion, applications of effort and creativity.

—In this flow—we are the Mystery’s graceful escorts.

How and where will you look this year?

                                                                                                            Photo: Vivian Maier
“I’m happiest when I’m happy.” — Shane Koyczan

As Bert Hellinger ended one of his classes saying “May you know joy irrespective of circumstance.” I wondered how the hell ya do that. Now nearly twenty years later I’m getting purchase on these abilities. There are people who’ve finished their lives—completed their ‘karma’. I’m not one of them: I do my work. I bring what comes. Thus my blogging arc on Happiness and joy.

In this series I’ve riffed on with inherently unstable writings—not for me, but for some there’s dissonance in what I write: I don’t mean not agreeing politically for I don’t give a rip about politics. We know that a state’s policies are insulated from its politics: policies continue on irrespective of who’s in office. We know too that political rhetoric is discordant and distracts us from doing what’s necessary. From seeking contexts from which change arises. Solutions are not in found political action.

The necessary changes we seek are those within ourselves—those urging us to think, feel and act differently. To be aware. Clear. To be relaxed and powerfully resolute while flexing and letting go of what we need leave behind. To go where we must to go. To do what we need to do. To be ourselves irrespective.

Dr. Milton H. Erickson said something to the effect that we need to attend to joy for life brings the other things. Our systems require the buoyancy of joy and happiness. We need to really want this buoyancy. This joy. We’ve become inured to pedestrian existences: We have forgotten to remember that we are the chefs at the French Laundry–yet living out macaroni and cheese lives.

We need to believe Happiness is possible for ourselves. We need to know what to do to capture joy and Happinesses’s attention. We need to understand how to do these things. Experiencing Happiness in our bodies reifies its value, its necessity. Though we have active imaginations susceptible to suggestion, direct sensory experience is called for—of necessity for we are sentient beings.

The cacophony of the world is intensifying, growing louder—becoming more discordant. More than ever we need mental and emotional composure—harmony. Internal consonance. We must sit fully and easily in our bodies while feeling vital, relaxed, peaceful, clear—powerful.

For this we need the leverage of Happiness. We need flirtations of joy and encounters with humor–for in their resonance, they and we, form formable partnerships of equanimity. This is an ‘on the ground’ thing inside ourselves. This is the difference that makes the difference. Nothing changes out there until things change on the inside. This requires disciplined doing. We can’t think our way through and into the leverage necessary to carry us onward in these times.

Want to change the—your—world? There are things to do immediately. Of course we will fail. Failure is but feedback. Discovery lies in here. Make these discoveries. Then do things differently. As these things become practiced pieces of our repertoire Happiness expands enabling us to do more out there—if that’s your bent.

1) Say what you mean.
2) Mean what you say.
3) Do what you say you will do.
4) Say what is so for you, when it is so, without blame or judgement.
5) Do the things you love to do.

“May you know joy irrespective of circumstances.” — Bert Hellinger

Have you had the delight of witnessing a two year old tell their mother “You’re not the boss of me!”? If so, you are indeed privileged. There is a knowing inside each of us that we are sovereign. Though we are irrevocable members of our ancestries and families of origin—all of our other belongings, e.g., marriages, employments, etc., are voluntary. Though we belong, we remain particular and individual—autonomous. We are neither owned by anyone nor are we another’s possession. We subordinate to no one. No form of life is superior to nor inferior to another. We stand sovereign though there exists ethnic, religious, familial, commercial, national and personal mores bent on telling us differently. Bent on treating us as subjects. And, we’ve internalized their stories.
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Though we’re distant from this deepest knowing, no one is the boss of us. This reality and our knowing of it predates our upbringings and the training we’ve undergone in the world’s paradoxical hopes of getting us to forget what we know. To forget what and who we are. In our forgetting we rally-on, oblivious and unawares being good representatives and good embodiments of our learned stories—believing that the identities others have ascribed, or those we’ve made for ourselves, are actually who we are. They are not. Inasmuch, we falsely believe we know ourselves. The majority of us do not know who or what we are—nor do most of us believing that we know, actually know! This is spoiler alert #1.

The thing is we cannot know ourselves. We are an expression of the unknowable Mystery. Yet we can adjust our thinking, actions and expressive motion for our lives to become increasingly more resonant and reflective of the numinous Beings—the drops of the Mystery’s Universal Intelligence that we are. Paradoxically, we do this by learning what we can of ourselves through our direct sensory experience…and by being changed in the process.

In recent posts I’ve pointed to the non-negotiable geographies of ourselves and the importance of identifying and defending them. Like it or not, we are most aware of our non-negotiable areas when they’ve been breached. In such moments, we so want a good life for ourselves and feel most distant from it. Whether we use these words or not, we want a relaxed equanimity for ourselves—a safe, responsive, vitally alive and creatively expressive peacefulness within our skin—a good life.

Nowadays our world’s hegemony does little to mask the horrors it perpetrates in service to its ends. We do not go a day without seeing and hearing reports of terrorizing circumstances that others experience. Many of us fear such visitations.

Spoiler alert #2: The greatest perpetration of terror is not taking place out there in the world’s lovely cities nor in the geopolitically interesting corners of our world—Rather—the greatest terror is being perpetrated within ourselves by ourselves and is being rained down upon ourselves in each and every moment that we deny and refuse to be ourselves—in each and every moment that we deny and refuse to creatively express the promises we are here to fulfill—in each and every moment we that we deny and refuse to think and act graciously, kindly, compassionately and generously—and in each and every moment that we deny and refuse to claim our prodigious personal power—and every time we refuse to claim and defend what is non-negotiable within ourselves.

Letting go is itself a great power. It is time now, to acquire this power: It is right now, to let go of the personal arrogance of us thinking that we are small and inconsequential; to let go of arrogantly buoying the falsity of low self-esteem and self-worth; to let go of arrogantly denying our individual dignity, innocence, beauty, creative capacities and our robust strengths and power—and our capacities for clarity———and, for refusing to claim our unflinching capacities to Love.

I write not of politics but rather of Love. Happiness need no longer elude us. Claiming our personal power is a one of our happiness makers.