I was in a circle of dear friends the other night, people I have known and loved since I came to Nelson. As I looked around the room, I realized how much wisdom I had received from them over the years, and how long it had taken me to follow a lot of their guidance. It was quite a humbling and clarifying moment--to come to terms with how long I had been receiving such good advice, without being able to implement it.

It helps me to remember the same thing, going the other way, in my work as a teacher and coach. I can offer suggestions to people, and they may not be able to follow through, not now, and maybe not ever, no matter how much they respect me and what I offer.

I was working with a client of mine the other morning, who is struggling with some big challenges in her life. She was able to access a voice inside her being that was strong, sane and full of wisdom. I spoke to this voice for a while and then asked it, “How does Sara (my client) feel about you?”

The voice replied, “Well, she never listens to me.”

“Really? “ I said. “Why not?”

“I’m not sure, “ the voice replied.

So I asked Sara herself. Another voice inside of her spoke up:

“I can’t listen right now, “ she said. “I’m in too much pain and fear. “

I felt myself take in the simple truth of what Sara had revealed. There was simply nothing to argue with. I realized how true this is for most of us, when we are in a hard place. It’s not that wisdom is far away--it’s often right inside us, as it was with Sara. But she couldn’t access it, because there was a part of her that simply needed to be held with deep compassion and no pressure at all.

It’s strange how easy it is to skip this part of our journey. We want to jump over it, or around it, and find something to do , somewhere to go, someplace to reach, something to understand. Instead of just attending to what is right here, to what simply needs our unconditioned presence. How did we forget that it is presence, this space that does not demand, or push, or resist anything, that is the foundation for everything else? Without it, we can make so many efforts, and end up just interfering with the natural process of healing that is waiting to happen, all by itself. .

This is an email to a friend:

I was doing a coaching session tonight, with someone whose mind was troubling them. We spoke about ‘the voices’ and all of ‘their bad advice’ as Mary Oliver puts it.

“What do you do?” she asked. “They are so persistent.”

“Yes,” I replied,” and we take them so seriously, as if we are in a war with them, on the front line. “

I suggested she could respond to the voices in the way you described the other day, up at your place: “Thank you for sharing, and I’m moving on now..” She thought that was very funny and wise, and we both sat there, laughing about it, for quite a few minutes. I think this is one of my favourite things: learning to laugh at the mind, and all of it’s cunning tricks. Sometimes, finding our way in this labyrinth is so much easier and simpler than we have ever imagined.

One of the ways that we develop and evolve is in our relationship to suffering, both our own pain and the pain of others. This relationship to suffering is intimately connected with our relationship to life itself--being a human being in the universe.How do we relate to this life we have been given? It’s a big question, but if we don’t face into it, things remain murky and confused, and we allow our life to be governed by ideas and voices and beliefs that may no longer be relevant to us.

How do we relate to sorrow, disappointment and loss? Are we still struggling to change or get rid of these aspects of life on earth?

Here is another question that is part of this inquiry:
How do we care for ourselves in midst of the wildness and unpredictability of human life?

Many practices help us cultivate certain aspects of who we are..One dimension our being that can help us a great deal is the warrior.

We can contrast the warrior with the soldier. The soldier represents the parts of our conditioning that we developed as young children: our survival personalities,which often start to feel very oppressive, like a heavy burden, as we grow older.

Let’s feel into this living sense of the difference between the warrior and the soldier:

The warrior carries nothing on his back. The soldier carries a lot--guns, food, maps, clothes.

The warrior shows up fully in each moment. The soldier plots a course from past to future and attempts to follow it.

The warrior follows his inner knowing. The soldier follows orders.

Click here for more...

This is an email reply to a coaching client and a dear friend who asked me to help her with her consistent sense of being ‘a failure.’

I’d like to share with you some of what has arisen in me since our phone call the other night. It’s been a very enlivening thing for me, to open to possible ways that we can work together in relation to this old, persistent feeling of failure. I spent yesterday just holding the feeling of our conversation in my heart, and asking, without putting pressure on myself for a pat answer, “What would really help you, where you are right now?”

The first thing that arose was writing..A lot of the work I do with people is more verbal, or bodily orented, but with you, I would like to offer quite a bit of homework in the form of writing. I think writing can be a very powerful tool for you right now. And the first thing I would like you to do is send me that poem, that incredible poem, about being nothing and no-one, that ends with ‘Who wants this much greatness?”

The second thing that came up was creativity...One of my deepest feelings about you is that your authentic nature is relentlessly creative, and that whether or not you end up with a great job by the time you are 80, there is a core part of your being that wants to express itself creatively, just because that is it’s nature, not for any goal, or sense of accomplishment, or approval,

Click here for more...

I think it works both ways, all the time..just when things are going really great, something difficult happens, and just when life really seems to suck, something great happens--maybe not such a great huge thing, but one of those totally beautiful, unexpected moments just arises, out of nowhere. Like this image, of the Utah prairie dog, who stands like this, in silence, for 30 minutes at sunrise, and then again at sunset, a full thirty minutes in deep stillness.

Utah_prairie_dog.jpg

Someone just asked me about the difference between New Age teachings like the Secret, and the kind of work that I do. I think the way that Byron Katie says it here, is pretty clear.

The Secret: “You can have whatever you want.”
The Work: “You can want whatever you have.”

The Secret: “My will be done. I know what’s best for me.”
The Work: “Thy will be done (=Thy will is done). What’s best for me is what actually happens.” (In A Thousand Names for Joy, Katie says, “God’s will and your will are the same, whether you notice it or not.")

The Secret: “You can control your thoughts.”
The Work: “You are not the thinker. It’s not possible to suppress your stressful thoughts. But when you question them, they let go of you.”

The Secret: “You can manifest your positive thoughts as reality.”
The Work: “Reality already is the best thing that could be manifested. When you realize this, you’re home free.”

The Willful and The Intuitive Self

I’m sharing this coaching session because I feel that the kind of conflict my client was struggling with permeates our collective consciousness in North America, and perhaps in many other places as well. Our incapacity to slow down, to listen, and to rest is part of the insanity that rules our world right now.

This is a dialogue that evolved in a session with a client of mine, a dialogue between two voices, or two very different aspects of her being. We all have these different voices--it doesn’t mean that we have multiple personality disorder. Our personality has always been like this: a field of consciousness in which many different voices live and interact. Think of Walt Whitman: “ I contradict myself, I contain multitudes.”

To open to healing, wholeness and full integration involves a process in which we learn to listen to each voice with kindness and respect, understanding that no matter how destructive the voice appears to be, it has, at the core, a positive intention. In some therapeutic models, all these voices that seem to hold us back or cause us pain are part of a whole system called ‘The Protector.’ The Protector, and all the voices that come from it, is trying to take care of us, in the only way it knows how. We cannot grow, evolve and awaken until we forgive these voices for the suffering they have caused us, and until we forgive ourselves for listening to them!

My client was experiencing an ongoing battle between two very different voices. She calls one of these voices her gentle intuitive self, the one “that wants to be nurtured, to go through life with ease.” She calls the other voice her willful self, the one who pushes her into action and achievment. The willful self is not gentle, and it experiences her intuitive self as weak.

Click here for more...

I’m posting a copy of an email I’ve just sent to a coaching client, about opening to the power and basic sanity of the feminine voice:

Here’s what came to me, and it was in response to what you said about feeling that you are not being as loving in this situation as you would like to be. And also what you said about feeling that what is evolving for you in this relationship is a mirror for something more universal, something that is happening for many women.

I feel that there is a desparate need for the voice of women, the heart of women, to emerge and be heard in the world right now. And it is a voice that has been deeply supressed for thousands of years on our planet. I know many men who are also feeling this way, and looking for ways to support the women they know in acknowledging and following a radically different kind of intelligence. Stephen Lewis, the envoy at the U.N. who has been dealing with the Aids crisis in Africa, is one of these men. He speaks with great passion about how differently things would have gone in Africa, if the women there had been in charge.

I experience a strong and beautiful feminine energy in your presence. And I think what is awakening in you right now is the awareness that this feminine way of being is not loving in the way we have been taught. Compassion can be soft and sweet, but it can also be fierce and wild. We need both sides, one without the other is only half. It seems to me that it is the fierce compassion that is emerging in you right now, and I know from my own experience, how difficult it can be to open to that. Fierce compassion says “No” when it needs to say ‘No,’ it draws very strong boundaries, and it even destroys, instead of nurturing, when that is what is being called for.

I guess what i want to say is, “You don’t have to be loving. You just have to be fully and freely yourself--that is where the healing is, that is where the awakening is, beyond all of our ideas about love, into a radical experience of integrity and deep honesty about what is actually working for us..”