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

Leading Meditation

I like the story about Mother Teresa being once asked by a young journalist to describe her daily prayer and meditation practice.
“I simply sit in silence and pray”, she answered with clarity.
“What do you say?”, asked the journalist, intrigued.
“Oh, I say nothing. I simply listen to God.” she replied.
“And what does God say? ” asked the journalist, sniffing a sensation…
“God doesn’t say anything, either,” responded the old nun with a smile. “God simply listens also.”
“If you have never had the experience, nobody can explain it to you,” she then finished, bowed courteously, and went on her way…

Community

Being “Good”

“A miracle is a shift from fear to love,” states Marianne Williamson in her commentary on “A Course In Miracles”. That shift, and the awareness of how it can be achieved, is now spreading through recovery communities like wildfire. By recovery communities, I mean the movement originally spawned by a bunch of alcoholics in New York City and Akron, Ohio in the late 1930’s which eventually spread around the world as Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, with membership in the millions, there are over 200 fellowships dealing with the plethora of addictions which plague humanity, such as Workaholism, Food Addiction, Gambling, and most recently, Media Addiction, to mention but a few…

Community

Shyness

Whenever I find myself alone among strangers in a dance class for couples to learn something like foxtrot, a feeling of distress begins to arise, with accelerated heartbeat, increased sweating, and light nausea, such that I generally leave before the real action begins. I console myself with the thoughts of how much I like dancing solo in a crowd, and even with fantasies that, one fine day, a beautiful partner will have sufficient patience and loving kindness to be able and willing to bear with me as I gradually master the moves, the rhythm, and the coordinated steps…

Community

Aloneness

The abused become the abuser. An inability to identify and grieve the losses of our early lives leads to the immense pent-up energies coming out sideways, almost always with destructive consequences. The generational chain is ancient, powerful, and has embedded itself in every cell of our bodies. Thankfully, we are now developing a consciousness and associated healing modalities which is helping us in breaking this chain, for the good of humanity as a whole. For more on this, the Twelve Step Programme of ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics – designed for anybody wishing to recover from growing up in a dysfunctional family) is highly recommended…

Health

Be Plankton!

For traction, the journey now needs the lighting of a fuse. This fuse is called “faith”. Without faith we are doomed to repeating and continuing patterns of thoughts, emotions, and actions governed by fear. With a little bit of faith, we can begin doing new things and doing familiar things in new ways. When we experience some healing as a result of this, the faith evolves into “hope”. Hope is just what the hopeless addict needs for this journey of liberation. On exercising the hope for a while and learning to cultivate hope within ourselves, the hope evolves further, this time into “trust”. Now we can ship oars, in the trust that we have everything we need for a successful journey…

PQ Mental Fitness

A Way Out

The substance addict is deeply ashamed and feels guilty about what he’s doing, and he cannot help himself. But he can’t stand the inner barrage of shaming and self-recrimination, so he projects his own anger at himself onto his spouse. He says: “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t drink! You’re the one who makes me drink.” And uses this kind of rationale so that eventually the spouse begins to feel “Maybe I am the reason. Maybe it is me! If only I could change and treat him differently, he wouldn’t drink.” In this manner, the spouse has become very neurotic and sick themselves and needs help…

Health

Realignment

They’re the people who come out on top, and I used to be one, so there! And I like university professors. But you know we shouldn’t hold them up as the high watermark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life. You know, another form of life. But they’re rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them, but something curious about professors in my experience, not all of them, but typically, they live in their heads. They live up there and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.”…

Community

DisAbilities

Inclusion is one of the main threads in the fabric of this story, as is the acceptance of the purity of the soul of each and every person, regardless of any damage the vessel of this soul may have suffered. In the end we are all “born that way”; this is the conclusion of the film when it comes to physical and intellectual disabilities. I like the fact that Patrick points out that the word “disability” contains the word “ability”. We all have abilities in our own unique way. When we look at the spectrum of autism, for example, I can see strong traces of that in my own personality, from an intense interest in patterns unseen by others, to an uncanny agility in numerical acrobatics, to a social awkwardness which I circumvented for decades by getting intoxicated (high) which helped me feel at ease in social settings.

Community

Inner Power

Insight does not always lead to integrity. Charisma does not usually mean honesty. Even respected philosophers or spiritual guides can struggle with the ordinary demands of daily life — relationships, parenthood, commitment, and even basic truthfulness. Sometimes people can be disingenuous in a very charismatic fashion. As Shirzad Chamine, the founder of Positive Intelligence (PQ) and developer of the PQ Mental Fitness modality points out, transformation is made up of 20% insight and 80% practice. We must walk the talk if we are to heal, grow, and thrive…

Community

Two Wolves

I like to see the two wolves as representing reality and delusion within my own perception. Our sorrow, our fear, our shame, our loneliness, even our despair; these are fragile and have no more substance than a shadow. This is the reality. We create the delusion, ourselves, when we begin to focus on our sorrows and fears in a way that adds fuel to them. The more we complain about them, over-analyse them, identify with them, or push them away, the more “real” they appear, the more solid and independent of us they seem to be, the more power they have over our well-being.,,

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.

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