I want to thank all the people who have written to me from all over the world in response to my newsletters. I love getting your emails. Please let me know if there is anything in particular you would like me to focus on: a question or challenge you might be working with.

People have been asking me where I’ve learned what I’m writing about. These newsletters are not literature! They are reports from an ongoing practice and investigation that is my life. I discover most of what I am writing about in the relationships, inquiries, and dialogues I have with my students and clients.  The courses, retreats and sessions are the laboratories in which we drill down into the living wisdom that reveals itself, again and again. I call it ‘deep learning,’ the kind of learning that takes us down to the ground of our being.

“Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?” (‘Last night as I was sleeping,’) Antonio Machado

David Mackenzie reminded me last week of James Hillman’s book, ‘The Soul’s Code.’ Hillman is a prominent Jungian therapist. He speaks about the myth of the hero/heroine in our world, and what an illusion it is. The heroic approach demands what I call ‘false courage’, a will of steel, and endless struggle. As a hero or heroine, we are invested in being strong, in ploughing our way through obstacles, in never admitting defeat.

Years ago in New Zealand, my friend Deborah Pearson was training and performing as a clown called Bopaloppa. Bopaloppa was a magnificent clown, and very funny. One day Bopaloppa and another clown were having a ‘clown duel’ to see who could be the funniest. For the first time ever, Bopaloppa wasn’t winning. No matter what she did, everyone was laughing more at the other clown. Finally, at the very end, Deborah gave up. Defeat was staring her in the face. She pulled off her clown nose, and sank to the floor of the stage in despair.  At that moment, she won the heart of the audience. She could feel it in her whole body. She also realized that if she had not pulled off her clown nose, if she had allowed that defeat to be part of who Bopaloppa was, she would have won the duel.

The heroic approach does not include helplessness and defeat. These experiences are avoided at all costs. The heroine charges on towards the goal, the prize, the victory. There is no time to stop and ask for help. It’s not part of the equation. Early this morning, I was remembering all the comic book heroes we grew up with.  Did they ever show any vulnerability at all? Did Spiderman or Wonder Woman ever ask for help?

The point that James Hillman makes is that eventually things don’t work out for the hero. In stories and fairy tales she or he does well-not in real life. Sooner or later, things start to collapse around the hero. And then he becomes the victim: ‘I tried so hard, I’ve struggled so long, I did everything I could, and things still aren’t working.’ The victim is the flip side of the hero. They are eternal dance partners. You can’t have one without the other.

There’s a lot that is being shunned and avoided in that dance. That’s why it doesn’t work. Half of life is being excluded.  It is actually a denial of our essential wholeness, of the way that life actually is. Life isn’t just about being strong, making things happen, pumping up your will power like a muscle builder. Life is about everything- falling down in the mud, knowing how it feels to be totally helpless. Defeat is not a bad thing. If we can really open to it, defeat can be one of our greatest teachers.

We bump into obstacles all the time. They are not something we need to get rid of or destroy. They do not mean that something is wrong. The obstacles are our path. If we can allow ourselves to just slow down, soften, and relax a little, we can discover a very different way of relating to what is standing right in front of us.  When we begin to open to it, we discover that this wall, this rock or hard place, is not as solid or impenetrable as it appeared at first. And sometimes if we are very quiet, we see a little tiny gap that we can slip right through. It was there all the time, but we were too busy trying to scale the wall, or knock it down.

We humans seem to be addicted to struggle. I don’t think that’s a new thing. Our conditioning just functions like that, until we get tired enough of it, until the last shreds of the heroic struggle are just too exhausting to sustain. Maybe for some people, there’s an easier way to transform. For me, and for a lot of my students, exhaustion has been the most powerful medicine.

When I was much younger, I taught swimming for a while. I’ve always loved being in the water. For me, swimming is about letting go, allowing the water to hold you up. When I was teaching new- born babies, they would just lie there and float, all by themselves. Their bodies could still remember their time in the womb. But the older children, and the adults, how they thrashed and struggled!

They related to the water as though it was an obstacle, something they were supposed to defeat. How many struggles like that have you dreamed up, in your life? What would it be like, to allow life to hold you, like the water does, as soon as you allow it?

‘We’re groggy, but let the guilt go,
Feel the motions of tenderness
Around you, the buoyancy.’ (Rumi)

with love
Shayla

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please send it to a friend. If you wish to subscribe, (it comes out every few weeks) just email me. I totally respect your privacy and will not share your personal information with anyone else. You may need to put my email address in your email ‘friends’ list. You can unsubscribe at any time by pressing ‘Reply’ and putting ‘Remove’ in the subject box. To read back issues of my newsletters, go to my website at http://www.barefootjourneys.net

Barefoot Journeys Offerings

‘The Gift of Presence’:

This course is designed to bring you into direct contact with your unconditioned presence, the core of your being. This presence is a harmonizing and liberating force that empowers you, aligns you with your deepest integrity, and releases the sense of separation. Only when you open to this vast field of awareness, do you begin to sense what your purpose is, and how to express that as a human being.

This approach is about opening, questioning, listening, allowing and letting go. It is grounded in the body, in the heart, and in your day to day life. It invites you to love and embrace every aspect of who you are-the power and the vulnerability, the fierceness and the tenderness, the human and the divine.

I’m offering ‘The Gift of Presence’ weekend retreat in St. Augustine, Florida, April 13-15.

In Nelson B.C.:
The ‘Gift of Presence’ 8 week course starts Feb. 13.
The Oxygen ‘Alchemy of Writing’ course starts Feb. 15
There is still room in the 2 courses at Selkirk College-‘The Heart of Communication’ and ‘The Alchemy of Writing’, which start next week.

I offer all these courses as distance learning- available as personal coaching, over the phone and internet. Please call me for a ten minute chat if you are interested. 250.352.7908

All of the details are on my website: http://www.barefootjourneys.net