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

Sweat Lodge

I sat in complete blackness, except for the glow of the red-hot stones and the firefly effects of the herbal offerings placed upon them before the dousing with water began. When the water did hit the stones, there was a loud sizzle, both audible and tangible. This moment was cathartic. I found myself sweating profusely in what seemed both the `Womb on Mother Earth´ and the actual womb in which I was gestated so many years ago. The former gave me great comfort and solace, while the later came close to inducing panic…

Mental Fitness

The Rest Test

It has been demonstrated that any person who practices PQ Mental Fitness daily for 40 days or more, experiences palpable benefits. The metric for PQ is that, for every negative thought or feeling we experience over a day, we have at least three positive ones. This is as true for our self talk as it is for our communication with others…

Business Performance

Waste

Transformation processes can be mandated from the top. This never works. Alternatively the team can be engaged to come up with the ideas and then execute. This is a much better approach. If the Saboteurs remain invisible, however, true transformation will never be achieved. Sustained transformation requires the `Coaching from the Inside Out´ provided by the PQ approach. Only by identifying the Saboteurs, and applying the on-going practice of PQ Mental Fitness to keep returning to Sage, will the desired transformation begin to shape new ways of interacting in high-performance teamwork…

Mental Fitness

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…

Mental Fitness

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?´…

Mental Fitness

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…

Mental Fitness

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…

Business Performance

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….

Business Performance

Body

Ten years later in Germany, during my first foray into psychoanalysis, my therapist ventured that it was time for me to return to my body. What a novel idea! I was clueless, however, as to how this could be achieved. He suggested going to the gym. Hanging out at the gym was not my cup of tea but it eventually brought me into contact with members of a cycling club, which I eagerly joined. In my first full year, I racked up 5,000km on my newly acquired racing bike! The re-entry had begun…

Community

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…

Community

Trapped

As long as we are constantly hijacked by our Saboteurs, fear rules our lives and the lives of those around us. This takes place sometimes very obviously, sometimes more subtly. Fear’s toolbox contains a very powerful device that, if not addressed and relinquished, will ensure that the old order will forever rule the day. This device is denial. For many years I stewed in the juice of denial. Sara Bareilles describes the dynamic eloquently in her sublime song “Orpheus“:
Missing the world
The one you knew
The one where everything made sense because you
didn’t know the truth…..

Indeed, many of us didn’t know the truth for long stretches of our lives. Denial has an important role to play in our survival…

Leadership

Mind The Gap!

My general observations lead me to conclude that we are either in autopilot and react in line with the coping mechanisms and survival strategies we developed before our fourth birthday (approximately) or, having developed sufficient awareness, mindfulness, and mental fitness, we learn to pause before responding to whatever stimuli cross our paths in a conscious, loving manner – beneficial to the healing, growth, and joy of all concerned. The term “autopilot” may be considered charitable. Some would call it “sleepwalking through life” (Dr Allen Berger) or even refer to a “Zombie” existence. And of course, this is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon…

PQ Mental Fitness

Balance

So, it was really telling when, in a recent yoga lesson, we went though balance exercises which included the Vrikshasana (The Tree Pose, where standing on one foot we bring the other to the inside of our upper thigh), that the terror of childhood – as a felt state – returned. My heart began to race; I began to sweat and couldn’t maintain my balance for longer that twenty seconds. Of even more interest was the fact that my breathing froze. Despite all the insights and, indeed, practice in so many other modalities and situations, here we had the default patterns re-asserting themselves immediately, and with a vengeance…

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