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!

Mental Fitness

Factor Analysis

One very accessible example of factor analysis, used by Shirzad Chamine in his Positive Intelligence (PQ) Coaching Programme is that of colours. If we were to ask a general audience how many colours exist, you may get a variety of answers, from hundreds to thousands, depending on their family status, education, pastimes, and interactions. Yet, we may remember hearing one time at school that there are only three primary colours; namely red, yellow, and blue, from which all the other colours are derived…

Mental Fitness

Flow

Desperation fuelled my courage to admit, for the first time, that there was a problem, and to ask for help. When this happened, my eyes were opened to the fact that addiction is a disease which cannot be overcome by will power. Power of a different quality, of frequencies higher than that the ego, were called for, if the malady were to be overcome. As Einstein often pointed out, we `cannot solve a problem on the same level of consciousness that produced the problem´…

Mental Fitness

Breathe!

My attention was first drawn to conscious breathing many years ago when, in an effort to strengthen my sense of embodiment, I first began to work out in the local gym. My trainer became exasperated because, instead of taking a deep breath before a moment of exertion, I would hold mine in..

Well-Being

Re-membering

`Well, as far as I can see from what we have unearthed to date, one aspect of your survival strategy in the very early years was to leave your body and take up residence in the various quarters of the mind: Logic, imagination, daydreaming, intellectual endeavours, analysis, pattern recognition, and the like. It is very understandable why you would have chosen this path, considering your emotional sensitivity and proclivity for sensory overload in the highly charged environment of your childhood. Now the time has come, however, for you to gradually begin to re-enter your body. It will do you good and will be helpful for the process we have embarked upon here.´

Transformation

Neuroplasticity

Two rich seams are coming together for me at the moment in which memory plays a central role. The first is my participation in the Positive Intelligence Programme, designed and delivered by Shirzad Chamine and his team in San Francisco. The thrust of this programme is to discover the saboteurs that stealthily create havoc in our lives until we bring them to light and disempower them, while bolstering our so-called innate Sage energies which recognise the gift in every single life situation, no matter how discomforting, and have the ability to provide purpose and lead us to true joy in our lives…

Mental Fitness

Reconfiguration

Thankfully, life generally provides the impetus to catch up on missed maturation at some later point, in the form of some crisis or other, which can be interpreted as an invitation to change. Should we decline the invitation, it will often pop up again at a later juncture, or even repeatedly, until we do respond and work through the issues which demand our attention…

Well-Being

Honesty

My severe lack of trust and incapacity for honesty rank among the gravest inevitable consequence of active addiction, especially when sustained over long periods of time. On waking up out of a blackout, for example, I often promised myself that I would `never do this again´, knowing full well, deep down inside, that it was only going to be a matter of time until the next one…

Uncategorized

Bereavement

My mind went back to the final months of my Dad’s life in the summer and autumn of 1977. At sixteen, I was the oldest child at home and spent much of my time at his bedside, in conversation, reading to him, and attending to his needs. Over those months, though I did not realise it at the time, he was sharing a very precious gift with me in showing how we can embrace the end of our incarnation in gratitude and with both dignity and humility…

Well-Being

Autonomy

We humans are, at birth, the most vulnerable of mammals. Whereas the foal will spring up and walk around directly after birth, we humans need almost a full year to even begin to learn how to walk upright. This is just one example. Our initial helplessness and absolute need of protection and nurturing is one of the things that differentiates us from our mammal cousins. It requires of us, as parents and carers, to expend great time, energy, and loving-care, to meet the needs and ensure the survival of our offspring in the early phases of childhood…

Mental Fitness

Fear

While my bravado helped me do many things and achieve ambitious goals in life, my fears drove me further and further away from knowing, and therefore, loving myself. Substance addiction to alcohol and marijuana, which started in my mid teens, seems to have maintained this strange equilibrium, and enabled me, for many years, to remain functional. Seen from afar, my life was a model of success when I finally crashed and burned in the year 2003, at the age of 42…

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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