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

Grieving Revisited

Even those obvious losses were impervious to my efforts to grieve. My heart felt numb. Nothing stirred, but for an inkling of rage deep down inside. Like many in such a predicament, I chose the solution of self-medication using the drugs, – legal and illegal – which were freely available to us as teenagers in the 1970’s, and the process addictions of the False Self such as workaholism, co-dependency, and ego inflation which are so lauded in the culture of today’s global, post-modern, consumer society. I became convinced that I couldn’t grieve because I didn’t know how to “do” it. Only much later, after years of living in addiction recovery, did I come to the realisation that grieving is not something we “do”, but rather something we “be”…

Community

On Purpose

The central argument Frankl makes is that life has meaning whatever the circumstances, even when profound suffering is encountered. The title itself is the core message: we can and must say “yes to life” not because of circumstances, but in spite of them. It is easy to say “yes to life” when everything is going well. If that “yes” is contingent on circumstances, however, it can never be sustained because, as we all know, circumstances change as much as the weather in my native Ireland. Everything, even our existence in this incarnation, is transient…

Community

This Time

Even the most articulate and hard-working of us may find we cannot erase the imprint of a parent who was too busy or depressed to notice us or who seemed to consider us a burden. We then interpret this as our caregiver wishing we’d never been born. When we internalise such stances, our shame, if it could speak, would repeatedly tell us that “the world would be a better place if we were dead”. Our lives change only when we reconstruct the missing inner maps that should have been formed in safety and attunement…

Business Performance

Unlearning

When I thought I was heading to the most densely populated central quarter of town, I could feel the energy of the city ebb away into the calm of the countryside, beyond the countless improvised homes of the peri-urban belt. Then, in a moment of clarity, the riddle solved itself. Of course! I had, as always, been working on the premise that the sun was in the south. Not here! Roughly 2,500 km south of the equator, the sun appears to be in the north. This was the first of many lessons in unlearning which came my way during my African adventure…

Peace of MInd

State of Grace

When the guided meditation concluded, we all slowly “came back”, stretching limbs in all directions and blinking our eyes to re-adapted to the artificial room lighting. There were many smiles to be seen on the faces of the small group which had thus gathered in our corner. After a period of silence, a conversation slowly began to unfold on what we had just experienced. We quickly began to explore such topics as connection and alienation. Why is it that, during deep meditation, some of us find our bliss tempered by sadness, even grief. And what about the high degree of sensitivity that some of us manifest? Is high sensitivity simply more than a somatic or emotional manifestation? Is it not primarily spiritual sensitivity?

PQ Mental Fitness

Redemption

That is what the Twelve Steps are all about: a shift in perspective. Before we begin the journey of recovery, we are caught firmly in a trap that we cannot spring through self-sufficiency or mere egoic willpower (ergo the need for a “Higher Power” of our own understanding). We also suffer from a chronic perception disorder because of having lived so long in chaos, overwhelmed mode, denial, delusion, and the suppression of all the emotions we could not process or endure during the first, formative years of our lives. As traumatised adult children, we see the world as we are, not as it is..

Health

Change Paradox

The caterpillar does not engage in a coercive attempt to change herself into a butterfly. She is wholly at one in her caterpillar existence. Without this self-acceptance of “what is”, the organic transformation cannot take place. How do we get to such a point of growth and development? The first step is to quit running away from our version of “what is”. Our society stimulates us to be on the run, around the clock. Addictions, both substance-related and behavioural, are the grease that keeps the wheels of our modern global consumer society moving. As long as we buy into the lie: “I’ll be happy when…” we will be tilting at windmills like our old friend Don Quixote…

Leadership

Violence

Down on all fours, searching in vain, he hears the voice of a policeman who has happened upon the scene.
“Good evening, Sir. How can I help you?”
“Thank you, Constable. I have lost my keys.”
So, the policeman also gets down on all fours, pulls a flash light from his pocket and joins the search. After ten minutes, they both stand up, perplexed and disheartened.
“Are you sure you dropped them here, Sir?”, asks the policemen.
“Oh no,” says the man. “I dropped them in that dark side street across the road over there.”
“Well, why in heaven’s name then are you searching here?”
“Because it is bright here, in the lamplight,” was his laconic answer…

Community

Generational Grief

My new friends in AA suggested placing my focus on what was needed in terms of new behaviours in the light of this discovery. The first, of course, was not to take the first drink. Much more was to come later, in the form of a new design for living as described in the Big Book of AA and summarised in the Twelve Steps. That work is still ongoing today, one day at a time. I also had a bizarre hunch in those first months, one that has been recently confirmed in my heart and soul, without solid external evidence: That I am the grandchild of one or more alcoholics.

Community

Family Matters

From the child’s perspective we could apply the Zen proverb: `We never step into the same river twice.´ It is not the parent, per say, that determines the experience, but the relationship between the child, at any given moment, and the parenting at that same moment. Each interaction between a parent and any one child is a reprise of stepping into new waters, and for each parent-sibling combination there is a different river. In the overall picture, my impression is that our parents always acted with the best of intentions. Like all human beings they had their good days and bad, and sometimes their actions were determined by inner Saboteurs of which they had little awareness…

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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