Foundations
As this has been the major theme of my own experience, it appeared that the time had now arrived to `pass forward´ the guidance and support which has so generously been given me during my life. One of my main qualifications could be described as `having made almost every mistake that can be made´ along the way and `turning the respective experiences into gifts´…
Fasting
In hindsight, I see that all me daemons (Saboteurs) had come out to play, preying upon my existential fears (future) and criticising me for not better preparing my new business venture, which had not been unfolding as my optimism had declared it should have (past). This is a classic example of a stance of resistance to `what is´, the main source of suffering for all of humankind…
Setbacks
It seems that many of us are like the Japanese holdouts, soldiers, many of whom were discovered in the jungles of Southeast Asia and the Pacific over the decades following the end of World War II in 1945, who, due to their remote locations, had not gotten word that the war was over. The last verified holdout, Private Terou Nakamura, surrendered on the island of Morotai in 1974. We are still fighting the war of our childhood and the bombardment we face is that of the Saboteurs. We originally developed these as tools of survival. In that respect they have served us well. The question today is: `Are they still serving us well?´…
Generational Trauma
For example, the facilitator would ask the client to give a summary of the topic that she hoped to resolve and would then ask her to select, from the participants (many people had never met each other before), people to represent themselves, their mother, father, grandparents, siblings, etc – those people considered to be most relevant to the work at hand. The client didn’t participate actively in the constellation, but rather worked from the side lines in tandem with the facilitator…
Anger
The home in which we grew up did not engender the capabilities or provide a toolset to deal well with emotions. Apparently, anger was a tabu. Ironically, it was also ever-present, mostly in the passive-aggressive manifestations of the wetting of beds, rolling of eyes, and the slamming of doors…
Imagination
Loud voices, cramped spaces, the physical danger of contact sports, tension in the air at home that could be cut through with a bread knife, – these poised challenges to me which were not easily overcome. Fear began to creep into the picture more and more. As Cornnelia Funke has one of her characters state, `fear kills your mind, your heart, and your imagination´. I would add that it also leads us to shut down our vulnerability….
Expansiveness
I am reminded of the image of a group of famished people sitting around a huge cauldron of soup with only spoons of ridiculous length at their disposal. Far longer than a human arm, they make it impossible to feed oneself. Then one person gets the bright idea that they should each feed the person opposite. In this manner an individual problem is solved by means of a collective solution. All are ultimately satiated…
Woodpeckers
Like the woodpecker in the quote above, coaching participants who tap twenty times on a thousand trees may get nowhere but stay busy. Those of us who tap twenty-thousand times on one tree, get dinner. The PQ Programme supports us in staying the course until the benefits of our efforts can be truly experienced. We then find ourselves on the path of cultivating Mental Fitness for life and reap the benefits of improved personal and professional outcomes…
Transference
Carl Gustav Jung, one of the founding figures of depth psychology and psychotherapy, referred to the integration of supressed aspects of our personalities as `Shadow Work´, the idea being that, as we emerge from childhood, we consign those aspects of our history, thinking, and behaviour which we find unpalatable, to the shadows, in the hope that they would somehow be rendered harmless or even disappear…
Christmas
The fire was already burning brightly in the hearth, and, in the heavily curtained bay window, the large, decorated Christmas tree with its baubles, figurines, lights, and shining tinsel provided a further source of warm light for the happy scene. Towards the end of the melee, we found ourselves wading ankle-deep through a kaleidoscopic sea of reams of torn wrapping paper, each child creating their island with the gifts they had gratefully received from various relations, near and far.
