Weekly Reflections

An Oasis is a good place to pause and reflect. Each of my weeks provides ample inspiration in terms of topics; from coaching sessions, conversations with family and friends, my own reading, or one of the many podcasts I absorb when on the move. A topic will resonate with me early in the week and I get great pleasure from the iterative process of drafting, revising, polishing, and finalising each essay. Then comes the selection of a suitable photo, usually a product of yet another creative hobby of mine. I invite you take a little time out, to create your own six-minute oasis, find a comfortable chair, and read. You will hopefully find some inspiration from or a degree of identification in these Weekly Reflections. If you do, feel free to subscribe to this section. You will then receive future installments directly by email. Also, feel free to share the link among your circle of friends and associates. Finally, feedback and comments are always most welcome.

EnJOY!

Community

Solitude, Community, Service

Community is, in essence, solitude greeting solitude. The Great Spirit in me speaking to the Great Spirit in you. To be in community means to build a home around the essence that rests at the core of each of us. This beautiful translation of the Sanskrit term “Namaste” expresses it best: “I honour the place within you where the entire Universe resides; I honour the place within you of love, of light, of truth, and of peace; I honour the place within you, where, when you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us”…

Mental Fitness

Rewilding the Spirit

Instead, with recovery over time, we come to the realization that nobody, no relationship, no success, no shining toy, is coming to rescue us and heal what’s broken on the inside. In this new-found clarity it dawns on us that we already have our very own garden which contains everything we have been seeking and all we need. That garden has always been waiting for us. An inside job beckons…

PQ Mental Fitness

Reparenting

Looking back, it emerged that the family in which I grew up had thought me to deny my true feelings in the service of a pain adverse and emotionally illiterate dysfunctional collective dynamic.
How de come out of denial about our traumatic childhoods and regain the ability to feel and express our emotions? The short answer is to accept and befriend the feelings, allowing them to bubble to the surface, and to simply be, without manipulating, wallowing in, or fuelling them, in the trust that `This too shall pass´…

Leadership

Into Action

For my emotional sobriety, I avail of a variety of resources such as the Twelve Step Recovery Programme, the PQ Mental Fitness modality, and further elements from ancient spiritual to most recent neuroscientific practices, including many body-based therapy forms which have emerged over recent years. These help me retain, and where necessary, regain my balance, always following the principle of `progress, not perfection´…

Health

Carcinogens

Further, more detailed data on these rising figures published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that from 2010 to 2019 in the United States, breast cancer accounted for the highest number of cases in the under-fifty population, while rates of gastrointestinal cancers were rising the fastest. This dramatic increase in gastrointestinal cancers alone demonstrates the implications and risks associated with our modern culture…

PQ Mental Fitness

Resurrection

The necessity of `dying to the old´ is the crux of the challenge. For, no matter how we have matured, an old script etched on our psyche keeps admonishing us to avoid the dangers and pain of death at all costs. Better the devil we know than the devil we don’t know, the Saboteurs declare. They also incite blame and resentment, which perpetuate the old. Forgiveness is the product of Sage, an indispensable component of relinquishing the old, to make way for the new: Father, forgive them for they know not what they do…

Health

Food?

Evolution is a slow process. Our bodies have evolved over thousands of generations to extract and digest proteins, calories, and vitamins from organic food in a certain way; ultra-processing interferes with that. It’s not necessarily that we’re eating too many calories (which we are) and engaging in insufficient regular exercise (also true), it’s that those calories, now synthesised, are coming in a way that our bodies cannot effectively assimilate. This is the advent of the Super-Size-Me Effect…

PQ Mental Fitness

Aloneness

Intelligent beings that we are, we develop strategies to survive. The first element is to identify the cause of the problem. The idea that our parents are not up to the task of child-rearing is so cataclysmic that we deduce that the problem must lie in the only other variable of the equation, namely in ourselves. The pain, shame, and guilt resulting from the conclusion that we are unlovable are easier to endure that the spectre of incapable parents, on whom we are still fully dependent…

Community

Global Consciousness

The Mind Command piece is pivotal. When we recognise that the Saboteurs have become active, we use brief powerful body-based exercises to bring us back into the present moment. These produce the effect of circuit-breakers in our stinking thinking, so that, in this new placid awareness, we can consciously switch from Saboteur to Sage, and thereupon determine our next move…

Community

Courage

Worrying about what others think of us leads to a constrained life where actions are taken not for personal satisfaction but for external validation. It is we, ourselves, who engineer the role of becoming a puppet on a string, even without the participation or even the knowledge of those who are ostensibly `pulling our strings´…

Community

Going Upstream

Imagine a village in the foothills of a major mountain range, a village where time has appeared to stand still, bisected by a river, always cool from the glacial melt, framed on each bank by snowfields in winter and bright, iridescent, buzzing meadows in summer. Life was carefree and easy in this village until a strange phenomenon arose. First, a lone body washed up on the edge of the pool right in the middle of the hamlet. The inhabitants were perplexed and shaken. This had never happened in living memory. The corpse, which could not be identified, was respectfully buried in accordance with the cultural mores and the villagers returned to their daily routines…

Men's Circles

Alexithymia

A case was described whereby a struggling client — a very successful man by all the criteria of our society; self-made millionaire, respected in the community, handsome, fit & healthy, seemingly intact family life, vibrant social network, etc. — was having difficulties in his “empty nest” marriage because he felt that his wife was not displaying sufficient willingness to have sex with him whenever he (apparently often) wanted. “Oh boy! “, I thought, “this is not new to me.” Thinking back to my VIP (Very Important Patrick) days, when I was proud of the fact that my average working week surpassed sixty hours, when, as an executive in a multi-national corporation, I racked up many hundred thousand air miles, it was clear to me that I, too, had fallen prey to the “sacrifice indulge syndrome”…

Community

Totality

In her book, Arendt notes that, by stoking tribal nationalism, any nation of people can be persuaded that it is surrounded by “a world of enemies”. This paranoid state then makes way for the ideology that states that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with and better than all others, thereby excluding the very possibility of a common family of humankind, a sisterhood and brotherhood of all humans, indeed of Creation as a divine whole. For such a ploy to succeed, the innate human sense of community (among peoples) and belonging (to the wider sphere of the natural world) needs to be smashed…

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