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

Summer Solstice

We arrived on the first day of the retreat in awe of the wild, beautiful natural surroundings of Ballycroy, Co. Mayo in the stunning, pristine, natural landscape of the Erris Blanket Bog. Here in the wild West of Ireland, it would be no surprise to encounter selkies at dusk where the sand dunes meet the ocean on the further shore of the estuary, the confluence of the two black-brown rivers as they dissolve into the broad, salty ocean. This encounter with the “wildness without” is conducive to our opening up to the “wildness within”, a wildness that often gets buried beneath layers of societal expectations, childhood coping strategies, urban living, busy schedules, family obligations, and the superficialities of life in our driven consumer society…

Community

Indivisible Reality

When we say a person has her feet on the ground, we mean rooted in reality, perception unclouded by denial, delusion, illusion, grandiosity, or anxiety, all states that skew our sense of reality. If we can’t even recognise where we are, we will have enormous difficulty in getting where we want to go. It’s a bit like asking Google Maps to take me to “Cologne Cathedral” and when the prompt comes to submit my current location, I enter “unknown”. Even Artificial Intelligence algorithms are going to have great difficulty in providing accurate directions under such circumstances…

Mental Fitness

Source

When we operate in hyper-rational mode, those with whom we interact tend to become intimidated, especially if the are less analytically inclined. We appear to them as emotionally cold, even harsh. In doing so, we proliferate a pattern we experienced as children, whereby our feelings and perceptions are discounted and belittled. The tragedy in adult life is that we are now doing this to ourselves, in our own inner dialogue, as well as to others. In the work of our circles, we men begin to transcend this old, ingrained pattern, get in touch with our feelings and – further underneath – our intuition…

Community

Boundaries

It is incredulous that we survived such experiences as children. The abuse was bad enough, but the icing on the cake was the fact that no one was there to turn to for solace, for protection, for understanding, for solidarity, for a comforting hug. I dared not bring it up with my parents for fear that a second round of punishment would ensue. This stance emanated from my observation of how my parents treated older siblings in similar circumstances. I was smarter than that, I surmised. Into that trap I would not fall. It is this “no one being there for us in our time of need” which is described by Gabor Maté as the “über wound”…

Business Performance

Impassioned

This points us again to the importance of compassion once awareness has begun to germinate. The Saboteurs are both sly and powerful when it comes to maintaining their control over our lives. If we begin to beat ourselves up for the Saboteur pattern we have just discovered, we are right back in Saboteur mode again. Here we need to learn to be like a discerning anthropologist. We look clearly at what is before us, to see it as it is, without judgement or evaluation. We simply ask: “What is going on here?”

Community

Vulnerability

It was all those jagged edges that bewildered and overwhelmed me, that had me on the run almost from the time that I had learned to walk. Now I can see that these were the product of the unexpressed grief, the denial, and the crazy making which characterized the family in which I grew up. There was no one there to hold me with my jagged edges, so I simply covered them over in the hope of avoiding further mutilation. When we hide things from others for long enough, they become hidden from us too. Yet beneath the armour, the wounds continue to ache. And then they begin to fester. Only when the pain becomes intolerable do we cry out for hope.

Community

Dealing With Fear

I have had countless discussions with others in recovery or on the threshold of such an approach. The hallmark question that has emerged from these interactions is: “How safe did you feel while growing up? To my genuine surprise, an overwhelming majority of people answered that they often didn’t feel safe, and then went on to describe aspects of a nebulous state of distress which comprised one or more of the following: danger, risk, peril, threat, hazard, jeopardy, trouble, distress, chaos, unpredictability, instability, vulnerability, violability, etc….

PQ Mental Fitness

Relationships

Having grown up in circumstances in which we often felt unsafe or even threatened, we are always in a stance of defensiveness and high alert, parrying the balls that life hurls at us, non stop, in the cosmic pinball machine, never having or taking the time necessary to bring sufficient awareness to the situation, the awareness that would enable a creative, conscious response. We soon became exhausted and chose, as a survival strategy, to tune out of the insufferable pain we carried deep inside, in every tissue of our bodies. The irony is that we need to encounter, embrace, and transcend this pain if we are to get well. The prerequisite is that we relinquish the old habits of “zoning out”; be they by means of ingesting substances or engaging in addictive processes, or both…

Leadership

Edie

Edie didn’t let fear dictate her thoughts, emotions, or actions. Not for long, at any rate. When she was first invited to speak at a post-war convention in Germany, at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1990, she refused. After some conversations with Bela, however, she changed her mind with the perspicuous explanation: “If I don’t go it would mean that Hitler had won after all!” This ability to discern what was driving her intentions, and her willingness to change course whenever she discovered that fear was lurking in the shadows pulling the strings; this awareness and vitality has always inspired me. It is something which can be cultivated on a daily basis…

Community

Regrets

“Compassion” (or “Empathise”); the love of self, others, and circumstances. “Explore”; the love of discovery, of expanding our scope of experiencing the endless abundance and opportunities of life. “Innovate”; the love of new ideas and breaking new ground. “Navigate”; the love of purpose and deeply held values, – and aligning our thoughts, emotions, and actions with these values. And “Activate”; the love of moving from thinking and feeling into taking action, while guided by the Powers of Sage. We move through life drawn by love rather than being driven by fear…

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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