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

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.,,

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…

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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