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

Emotions

In my family of origin, as I experienced things, there was no common language for dealing with the multitude of feelings that are integral to the human condition. It was as if we tried, in a group effort, to read Anna Karenina in the original without any prior knowledge of the Russian culture, language, or even the ability to read Cyrillic script. Emotions are sometimes characterised as `feelings in motion´. A wide array of emotions exists. The following list captures those generally identified as the most common: Acceptance, admiration, affection, amusement, anger, angst, anguish, annoyance, anticipation, anxiety…

Community

Spiritual Experience

Every roomful of recovering addicts is a roomful of miracles. For reasons beyond our comprehension, we had been guided and protected up to that turning point and had been granted sufficient clarity to make the decisive choice. The prospect of death thus became a constant companion to us, not in any morbid sense but in a way that helped us cultivate gratitude for simply being alive in a world which, we gradually discovered, also contained tenderness, beauty, and wonder…

Community

Solid Ground

For many of us who lose their way having emerged from dysfunctional families, the opportunity arises when, after a period of active acting out in substance and/or process addiction, we finally get sick and tired of being sick and tired, and `hit bottom´. While this is not an ideal way of finding solid ground beneath our feet (we usually land on our ass, in fact!), it does enable us to finally begin inserting a solid foundation into the skimpy structure of what our life had become…

PQ Mental Fitness

Response-Ability

Our brain, therefore, if stuck in autopilot, will keep flooding us with emotions. Without the ability to pause and reflect before responding, we generally get caught up in the mental reactions or even reflexes of old, of which we are not aware. And we are generally not aware that we are not aware. Today’s world is in many ways an echo-chamber of the earliest circumstances of childhood. This impulsivity tends to get us into a lot of trouble, with ourselves and those around us, causing conflict, strife, even disease…

Community

Shining Our Light

Any absence or lack of connectedness has more to do with the adult parents and caregivers than with the child herself. It is precisely because the caregivers are not emotionally and spiritually equipped to provide what the child needs, especially in the sense of being seen, and provided sufficient affection and safety to continue being her True Self, that she begins to experiment with ways of `earning´ or effectuating exactly that. We begin to develop a False Self to have our needs met. Rather than viewing this as a maladaptation, we can recognise in this the innate intelligence of evolution. Coping strategies secure our survival, after all…

Community

Trauma-Informed

The survival strategies and coping mechanisms we develop in those earliest of years become etched on our neurobiology, especially our limbic system. The good news is that discoveries are being made right now, which help us rewire the brain and retrain the body such that we can heal from the wounds of the past. It is often a case of learning the three-step process of regulate, relate, and reason. An unregulated body cannot successfully engage in the subsequent steps. The inability to relate, both in inner discourse and with those around us, will keep us beyond the range of sound reasoning…

Community

Self-compassion

In a process akin to peeling an onion, we work our way to the realisation that, while others may be the ones to activate feelings that challenge us as we make our way through the day, the source of our suffering is to be found not `out there´ but within us, namely in our emotional dependencies on people, places, and things to help us feel worthy and lovable. Suffering occurs when I take up a stance of resistance to the pain. Pain is inevitable, suffering is voluntary. If only this, or if only that, then I would feel OK. In Dr Berger’s words, Emotional Sobriety is a shift from `I’m OK if´, to `I’m OK even if…..´.

Community

Reconnecting

Neglect occurs when the fundamental needs are not sufficiently met for longer periods of time or our cries for help go unheard or, indeed, are met with an angry or punitive reaction. Stress activation and the resulting dysregulation become the central dynamic for daily survival. Stress becomes the dominant pattern in both our waking and our sleeping hours. In situations where the parenting is consistent, predictable, and nurturing, the stress response systems become resilient. They grow in proportion to our overall development and needs. A healthy sense of self emerges…

Mental Fitness

Ritual

My daily walk along the Rhine is a blessing. On reaching the water, I pause to reset my compass for the day. Inspired by the wealth of ritual which has evolved over millennia among indigenous cultures in North America, known as the Medicine Wheel, it comprises greeting five elements: the Four Directions of the compass and the Vertical Axis. First, taking a few deep breaths and feeling into the soles of my feet, it involves facing east, bowing while silently reciting; `East – Air; every breath a new beginning…

Community

Supersedure

The fact that our species has reached such heights in the creation of beauty, — the music of Mozart, the paintings of Monet, the poetry of Rumi, etc — has produced great scientific innovations, and is filled with stories of loving-kindness to each other in the most challenging of circumstances, reminds us that the human potential for love is boundless. Why do so many of us operate below our full potential and what can be done to rectify this? How can we restore the abundance of self worth to ourselves and others once it has been impaired?

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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