Playful Perspectives

The Voice of the Elder February 17, 2012

As I woke up this morning and went outside there was a crow sitting on my car… “Wake up!” is the crow’s call to me. I had a call with some friends first thing this morning and I annoyed one of them, I triggered something and it created a mess. More mess.

I feel like I have created and am sitting in a big mess: this is a natural outcome of my default role judge and critic. In this pot of swirling energy, there is sorrow, fear, anger, injustice, determination, passion, resentment, self-loathing, vulnerability and longing.

I know that I made a lot of people ‘wrong’ with my unpopular perspective. I am sorry for that. My question then is how do I get to be right and they get to be right too? It takes me back to the Leap in the Co-active summit. I was judge and critic there too. How do people get to hold opinions that are entirely opposite from one another, and yet neither get to be wrong. How do these opposing passionate voices all get to be valid? I imagine sitting round a camp fire, and tossing pieces of wood into that fire and with each piece of wood a different perspective is thrown in. It catches fire and is transformed into energy. The elders just sit there and hold the space, they wait for all voices to be heard, for all the stories to come out. That once those voices are truly heard then they blow off with the wind.

No one member of their community, this circle, gets to be more extraordinary than the other, everyone has their piece that they bring to the circle. Mine is no better, no more valid than anyone else.

The step that is important in this process, for energy to be transformed is that all voices need to be heard. Where one voice is quashed or not validated, all those negative feelings remain, and there is a stalemate.

And perhaps I need to go further and say that I hear and understand those millions of voices of compassion, love and sorrow, that want to honour and respect the life of a brilliant, gifted voice that had an enormous impact on the world and the tremendous sadness that in many ways it was a life wasted by cruel addiction and a blindness to her own brilliance.

I also hear the voice of injustice that longs for that amazing compassion, love and sorrow to be directed at those who are invisible and unseen.

Unfolding the story February 14, 2012

The real question I want to play with is: What is education for? And I think that needs to be held in the container of: What are we here for? I want to play with these ideas and have no definitive answers, and the answers I may find, may well be wrong… but that’s the idea of playing.. trying things out, failing and finding other ways. As you create a new possibility, the opportunity arises from the question.

Remembering is a good place to start. Remembering who we are, remembering what we love to do, remembering where we came from. Story has such an important part to play in all of these places. We have our own personal stories, we have our own family stories, we have cultural stories, we have world stories. Each story whether its the story of creation, the development of humanity and the earth, the story of industrialisation, science, philosophy, evolution, faith… has a tale to unfold. Some of them we can only guess at, others we come closer to the truth as our ability to investigate becomes more and more specialized. Some of those stories look extremely different from your particular stand point, your cultural experience, your gender and your value system. There is one story that is common to us all, you are born and then you die. According to the UN Population Fund, I am the 3,619,848,244 person to be born amongst the current 7 billion. However there were 77,710,520,904 people who have lived since the beginning of history. All those stories! And one collective consciousness..

The media as we have seen has a huge role in developing current stories. I remember having a conversation about what I thought was an important news worthy story with one of my journalist friends and being asked… yes, great story, but whats the hook? What is going to hook the audience? No hook, no story… What is the hook, or what are the hooks that grab you? Grab your attention? What are the hooks that grab your child’s attention?

“Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief” by Rick Riordan has helped transform my resistant son into an expert on the Ancient Greek and Roman gods, demi- gods, heros and monsters. This author has captured his reader’s imagination in such a profound way that he is hooked on the classical stories. It is amazing to watch this resistant reader become enthralled by this story. My son is also extremely fortunate to have a brilliant English teacher who is unfolding the pleasures of Shakespeare to him: writing is very difficult for my son, he has significant processing difficulties, that mean he is very slow to put his ideas on paper and organize his thoughts. He has found “English” classes incredibly dispiriting so far in his life, and yet now with a teacher that is engaging him in story, he is being ‘hooked’ in.

It won’t surprise anyone who reads my blog that I failed English Language O Level… I hadn’t got a clue how to string a sentence together, or how to punctuate or how to control my written language. I still don’t. Its not something that particularly matters to me, I think its more about the ideas and images you are communicating, than the correctness of how you do it. Trying to teach me to understand the significance of grammar and punctuation was really at the time an alien concept. I was entirely bewildered by it, and thought that there was something wrong with me, that I couldn’t get it. And I made up that there was something wrong with me, that affected me and my personal story, for quite a long time… it wasn’t really until I found a creative flow in my writing that, until I found that narrative voice that I was good at expressing verbally… that I understood how to create sentences and structures. What is interesting to me about this, is that although when I am writing and putting my thoughts together in a stream, they maybe very disparate thoughts that I am connecting together. I can see the flow of the ideas; the connection is clear to me. How do I know if those connections are being made over there? What is the signal to me, that over there, they are getting it? How do I know if I have hooked them in? My husband says he sees the significance of the stories, but for him the real beauty is in the tools.

So again, what is education for? How do we get the best out of children? How do we get the best out of people? What are the common stories that will hook an entire class in? And what are the stories that hook individuals in? Their personal interests or passions? As Slade Suiter said in a fascinating conversation last night: Do we KNOW the children? Or do we NO the children?

Over there February 13, 2012

It is not comfortable holding an unpopular perspective. It is not that I wish to offend or disrespect anyone, by holding that perspective and yet I know that I do.

This thing called story is a very powerful tool. The media know how to use it, to grab our attention, to bring that which captures our imagination to the forefront of our minds, and to make human tragedy something so compelling that we will stay captivated, enthralled and entranced. In the ‘interests’ of the public, they will trawl through a persons baggage, their garbage, and with miniscule details of that persons personal life will bring them alive as a character, as a hero or more often anti-hero. We have been doing this for hundreds of years, the media today have it down to a real art.

My neighbour in Washington worked for a senior politician. Everything in the street was quiet until the day that this politician was caught doing something wrong. It didn’t matter what his record in politics was, his personal life had caught up with him. Suddenly we had fifty odd journalists camped outside our doors, all through the nights, all through the days. It felt like being surrounded by predators, waiting to pounce, perhaps more like pack animals, wild dogs, or vultures descending on a human carcass whose career was now in ruins.

The gaze of Sauron’s eye comes to mind, where is the focus of that gaze? If the gaze is focussed West, to the wonderful world of glitter and glamour, what is being overlooked in the East? My intuition always tells me when something that needs our attention is happening. I remember the initial reports from Rwanda about the chaos and indiscriminate killings, and thinking there is something awful happening here, and yet we seemed to do nothing. Infact we did nothing and I have read articles that have suggested Western Media was culpable for not stopping the genocide that was happening.

I saw a photo on Friday, from Syria, it was a banner saying “We are being slaughtered – where is the world?”. Well I know where the gaze was yesterday. If I was in Syria yesterday when the focus was on the West, I would question the values of this democratic world the West lives in. I know there are aid workers and journalists risking their lives to help and tell the stories, I know that there is a diplomatic process that needs to be pursued. I can only think that if Sauron’s gaze were focussed on the places that really need it, change would happen. How often does history need to tell us to act before its too late? Perhaps our celebrity envoys can help cast the focus – over there –

For me at least these are not separate issues, we are one world, one people, one consciousness.

Beautiful September 26, 2011

Three earthworms came slithering towards me out of the rain the other night.  It was a bit creepy, they can be quick when they want to.  Earthworms by all accounts represent examining the past!  Very appropriate: time to look over all we have been experiencing and examine and digest what is beneficial and that which we need to cast off.  Three earthworms asking me to look into my past and three crows telling me to ‘wake up’ on the balcony of the hotel in Miami.   Three earthworms, and a house full of ‘daddy longlegs’, which rather befittingly represent COURAGE.

It is interesting for me to look at this process of divulging my journey to the cyber world.  Sharing the inner mechanisms of my world, making myself incredibly vulnerable, by revealing my past and my experiences of it.  People in choosing to read my blog, get to choose how they respond.  My hope that underpins putting my  ’inner work’ out there, the struggles and observations that I experience, is that it will help people in some way, some may be able to identify with parts of it.  And when I say ‘help’, in other ways I wish to challenge too.  Challenge people to be curious about their own personal responses, their own personal experiences, where are they not awake?  My guess is if you have a strong emotional response to what I write, then there is work there for you to do to.  Whatever that response might be.

If you want to heal the world, you need to heal yourself.  If you want to change the world, you need to change yourself.  If you want to ‘wake up’ the world, you need to ‘wake up’ to yourself. If you don’t care about the world we live in, what do you care about?   The more conscious we become, the more conscious our world becomes.

My experiences in my teenage years left me in a place of deep loneliness, with thoughts of suicide.  I longed for someone to see me, I longed for someone to rescue me, I longed for someone to love me, I longed to be special.  And that longing has sculpted the path of my life.  However that loneliness still creeps up on me today, and even at times this weekend I have felt deeply alone. There is no denying it, as a teenager I was alone.  I experienced these things on my own, I had no one to turn to for help, no one there guiding me, no one really with an eye on what was going on with me.  It is truly saddening to think about that.  And yet what  I really  love about this whole ‘digging’ experience, is that it has uncovered for me perhaps the final layer of mystery. I realize how things I experience today are so deeply set in the experiences of my past, the loneliness that I have felt this weekend, is the loneliness of my teenager.  This is a gift to me, because now I get to rewrite the past and have a different experience of my present. I can go back into those times of deep loneliness and I can show my teenager, that she is not alone at all.  AND I need never feel that loneliness again:   THE FINAL PIECE OF THE PUZZLE BECAME CLEAR WHILE MOWING THE LAWN YESTERDAY.   I need never experience that disconnection, from myself, from others or the world again,   BECAUSE  I am there, I understand her, I love myself, I see myself, I see and love my vulnerability, I see and love my heart. I see and love my soul.  I see and love my body.  I don’t need someone else to do it for me, because I am beautiful and powerful enough to do it for myself…  So if you noticed that the rain became glorious sun yesterday, you will know why!!!!

Now that really is a cause for CELEBRATION….

The Process September 23, 2011

This is the process as far as I understand it, and I’m not sure that I do have real answers.

As much as I could pretend everything was ok, because from the outside, it really does look like everything is ok; there was always this underlying low grade pain.  A low energy, that makes doing things particularly at home an incredible effort.  It feels like something is wrong.  That the numbers don’t add up.  Its even more difficult to believe when perhaps in my outside world, I appear strong, happy, alive and excited about life.  In fact in connection I really do feel like that and it is genuine aliveness.  However when I retreat back to my home, to the monotony of the daily dross, a sadness or urghhh feeling comes over me.  It may take a few days or a few weeks even, but I will go to that place.  The voices say “what is wrong with you?”  ”can’t you enjoy what you’ve got” “you are so much luckier than the majority of people living in this world”  ”shut up and be grateful.”

The other part of this is that I had disassociated myself from any of the pain about those teenage years.  That is not to say that I haven’t dug into it before, or gone back and done work on other bits of it.  The rapes though had rather carefully or skillfully been avoided, to the extent that I thought they had been dealt with.  So they were a bit like a blind spot.  It might be staring everyone else in the face, if they know about that trauma, but to me perhaps I had so disassociated myself from them that they were dismissed as a cause for why I might have this low disconnected energy.

I also think that the idea of forgiveness is quite pertinent here.  I had created a story of forgiveness for all the parties involved.  Somehow I naturally saw events in the scheme of something bigger, but having put that story of forgiveness on top of the actual feelings about it, I had perhaps created a psychological barrier to it or a mask or a veil.  Rage and anger, at the vile abuse of events so awful, is the appropriate response.  And actually, either side of the rapes, were situations that warranted rage and anger.   We wonder about the recent rioting across Britain, but how many parents are absent?  How many parents are even aware that they are absent? Even if they are around, they may not be present?  How painful is it for young people to have no one there for them?  And what happens as a result of this?

It was as much a painful leap to shift from the old story, the forgiveness story to the anger.  It was a huge emotional leap.  I know that that sounds strange and almost incomprehensible.  It is so easy to feel anger at many situations in life, and yet to not feel any for your own.   In my old story, I was safe, I had survived.  When something like that happens to you, you don’t really have anywhere to go… or at least I didn’t.  No where safe.  My best friend knew about it, but she was 13 too, I am truly grateful that she was there for me but she and I didn’t have the skills necessary for dealing with it…  so either because of shame, fear, guilt, you learn a strategy for keeping it inside, or at least from potentially threatening people.  Ironically I really don’t like secrets…  So I didn’t keep it as a secret, I could talk about it later, as something that happened.  But no real association with it.

So the process I went through last week involved, making that leap to anger.  Quite simply that.  I think.  They say that depression is repressed anger.  And so the release, which will have to be practiced, allowed me to be present, it released me from a veil.  In a sort of Eckhart Tolle way,  the ‘pain body’ was standing in the way of me being fully here now.  I kind of knew that too.  I just didn’t know what the pain really was.  Perhaps thinking that it was my ‘lot’ in life.  In ordered to explore the rage I used an imaginary writing process.  There I could experience the anger, and express it.

The process goes on, because, NOW, I am experiencing a panic.  It is a panic, that produces all kinds of addictive behaviours.  Going to the fridge, checking in on the computer, smoking and drinking lots of coffee and tea.  It could be the vulnerability of exposing myself.  It could be a feeling of being cut off from source.  I don’t feel safe.  It could be back to the teenagers fear of no one being there for me.  It could be a fear of how readers are interpreting what I have written…  ( do they think I’m attention seeking, manipulating, do they believe me????).  Also what is noticeable is that there is an effort from this place to leave home, there is a voice inside that is saying “stay at home you are safe there!”    Actually while it is very uncomfortable, I understand at some deep level that it is actually part of the process, and another way I disconnect from being here now.  So it also has a level of excitement …. that I know I am alive.   Not sure where to go with this panic…. (perhaps not to the fridge!) … be with it?…  feel it?… not run away from it?…  AND BREATHE……

Dangerous territory September 22, 2011

I want to write this morning because I have had a difficult week, and yet I may have had some sort of breakthrough.  This is written for those who may be experiencing or have experienced similar paths to mine.  My mother is fully aware of the story, and she is deeply sorry.  My father has died, and I imagine is deeply sorry.

The last post rather ironically is ‘celebration’, celebrating all that I have in life.  And I have A LOT.  I’m blessed in so many different ways.  And yet, I so often feel disconnected from that.  My default place is sadness or a kind of urghh.. feeling.  That urghh feeling is SO prevalent in many of my posts.  Even possibly in the celebration one.

This was the subject of my last coaching session.  Helen said that her body and intuition were telling her that I was experiencing this disconnection because I was raped as a teenager.  When she said that my first place to go, was ‘haven’t I dealt with that?’ ‘isn’t that just a story from my past?’ ‘haven’t I forgiven those involved, understanding that it was nobodies fault really’……. SO I THOUGHT….  I guess I must have created a disconnection, a deep disconnection to myself and my life at the time, a kind of padding that prevented me from actually experiencing the trauma of those times, probably a survival mechanism.  I know that the first thought was when I was raped for the third time, this is my body, not me.  He can’t hurt me.  The first two times I was so young and naive I really didn’t know what was happening to me.  The third time I was still young and naive but I knew what was happening.

I was invited to go back with my teenager and a few ‘guardians’ to help me confront the demons of the past.  Who was I going to choose?  Who was really responsible for me being where I was?   Of course, absent parenting, was a massive contribution.  I reluctantly selected my mother.  I deeply love my mother.  I understand exactly why she was in the position she was in.  So what did I want to say to her…  WAKE UP…  see me.  Be there for me, see who I am, support me, guide me, help me.   Be my mother.   So I started this work with the aid of Helen, and somewhere in my heart it cracked and the emotion poured out, because I was SO alone as a teenager.  No one had the eye on that ball.

And because I am like a terrier, I couldn’t stop there.  I had to take it on to the others responsible.  My father. And the three young men involved.  Using an imaginary writing process, I had an entire crew of supporters or guardians to go into the past and challenge, change the story.  Of course memories of things like that, images haven’t left me.  They don’t have any particular emotional sting to them, they are just images, perhaps I cringe at the thought of them.  Is that shame?  And yet if I saw those images and watch that film of my own children or any other children/teenagers experiencing those kinds of things I would be deeply upset, and enraged.  So what does that tell you.  Stuff that doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger…. or perhaps it just makes you harder.

It was a really difficult emotional leap, to go from the ‘old’ story and feelings.  In the old story, nobody got to be wrong, my parents were screwed up because of their lives and their pasts, I was unfortunately caught up in that and desperately seeking love and wayward, and the boys were just doing what boys will do if they get a chance.  The new story involved other people taking responsibility.  Taking responsibility for a teenage girl, lost, vulnerable, lacking, and surviving in the way she could.

So I rewrote the stories, it was nigh on impossible even in my imagination for my dad to take responsibility.  He was so good at deflecting responsibility.  And then even with the witnesses in the room, the voices of dissonance came in….  ’Is that what you are making a fuss about?’ ‘that wasn’t really rape’ ‘where were the knives?’ ‘things far worse have happened to me’ ‘you were clearly up for it’.  Re-writing the stories, the interviews created a well of sadness.  It was a very tough day.  But with the bit between my teeth I carried on.  Later that day I tried to connect with my best friend.  He wasn’t available, and even though he knew something of what was going on, he still wasn’t available.

That was really the tipping point.  Because, it WAS NOT OK, that he wasn’t there for me.   Suddenly I was in touch with a rage, how could my best friend not be there for me, while I was suffering like this.  AND THEN I made the connection. RAGE:  IT WAS NOT OK, that my parents were not available for me as I was growing up.  IT WAS NOT OK, that I was ‘drinking in the pub at 13, and someone violated me on the floor of the pub toilet.   IT WAS NOT OK, that I was taken to the top floor of a multi-storey car park, not because I was going to be romantically shown a view from the top, but as I found out if I didn’t do what he wanted I was in danger.  IT WAS NOT OK, that someone took advantage of my vulnerability, with absolutely no interest or care about me.  Apart from anything else I was still a child.  IT WAS NOT OK.

I feel so much more connected to myself, and to my life, as a result of this process.  Its not finished I am sure.  And there is more..  The utter lonliness I felt during this process.. but that is enough for now.  I wanted to share it, because I hope in some small way it may help someone else.

Celebration September 5, 2011

Where do you put your focus?  Is it on the things in life you haven’t got, or is it on the things in life you have?

This weekend I was invited to share in the celebration of a premiere of a musical in Reykjavik.  My friend had written and produced with his co-star a musical based on the characters they have been developing over the last few years.  It was a huge success, and although it was in Icelandic, there was so much to enjoy about the whole performance.  The impact, what you can pick up even when you don’t understand the language and the shear enjoyment of watching your friends achieve and enjoy and share their creativity.  And, there was a little celebration for me there too.  I was celebrating being a small and yet significant part of the process.  I asked the question which helped throw the pebble into the water.  What do you want this year to look like?  And if you could really dream about this year what would you do?

There was another celebration too, because the ‘after party’ was held in a bar, where I had done the same thing!  Asked the question or seen the possibility….

As a life coach I get to do this, I get to help people get things out of their lives, that are longing to be out there in the world.  That’s cool right!  Something to celebrate!  And I know that I am a light in many people’s lives, I am playful, naughty and fun.  And yet, and this is the glaring inconsistency I am rarely the light in my own life.  I rarely allow myself to celebrate me, and if I do a self-sabotaging thought will pop in almost imperceptibly and take me back to a default place of sadness or longing.  That I am not enough, that my life is not enough.

I see people, I understand people, I see their crap, (especially when they are trying to hide it.)  I have a radar within that is absolutely fixated on the truth.  It is my gift.  It is dangerous, because I tell the truth and in so doing can often throw people away.  When I was training to be a coach the leader of my course at the time, Helen, who is my own personal coach, said do you look for what’s right in someone or do you look for what’s wrong.  I naturally saw what was wrong, which isn’t very helpful if you are training to be a life coach.  And can also be very helpful if you are a life coach, because it is often the thing that is ‘wrong’ that is getting in your way.  So I trained myself to look for what’s right.  The absolute glorious potential of the human beings that come into my life, who they are and what they can be.

However, my default place with myself is to look at what I haven’t got, and that makes me sad.  It locks me into a spiral that I can never be satisfied or enjoy what I have.  On Friday I got an email from Tut: The Universe which said “If you want a miracle to happen, don’t focus on the miracle, focus on what you would like the picture to look like after the miracle has happened.”

I sat in a cafe with the Sun blazing down at my body and I felt my heart healing.  That I was no longer prepared to look at my life for what I don’t have, for what I do have is a gift to make me whole.  I have everything that I need.  Yes I have a deep emotional body that can feel great depths of sadness, and aren’t I lucky that I have a capacity to feel. However I don’t need to burden myself with always feeling that pain.  That is a choice because I also have this extraordinary capacity to create, receive and give love and light in the world and that is special.  That is to be celebrated.  So where I can create laughter in the world, I am now going to give myself the gift of creating laughter within, for me.  To celebrate and be grateful each day for who I am and what I have and all those people in my life who have helped me create this celebration.  And the difference is the language I train my thoughts to create.  I can be this or I can’t.  And actually I just can.

Cool huh!

Time and Space August 29, 2011

I want to put a marker down.  To touch ground and say that I am here.  Yesterday I had an image in my head, an aha, about my journey these last six months or so.  I don’t know what it is caused by, or whether or not a process has been happening.  I can only say that around the time of my grandmother’s death I started to make my life smaller.  I started to say no to commitments even though they gave me energy, they made me feel alive, part of something, they reflected my wider values.  Along with the decision to say no, was the sense of guilt and responsibility that you have let people down, fallen in their regard for you. It is an uncomfortable feeling.  I started to do this in other areas of my life, some just by checking out, and others more purposefully or consciously, with different degrees of responsibility.

It was hard for me to let go of some of these commitments because they did give me pleasure and value.  And yet the one place that I struggled to be, was home.  Home in me and home within my home.  I have talked about the drudgery before, the yearning to escape, and yet at New Year, I made a commitment to place my focus right here, on home and all that that is to me.  Struggle would be one word that springs to mind, as I describe the experience of home.  It is very hard to be present here.  It is a beautiful home, gorgeous yet challenging children (who’s aren’t?) and a wonderful, fully supportive husband.  So what was ‘wrong’ with me that I struggled to be present here?

And what I have found, like a vortex, that when you gather all your energies in, and you are left with you, your thoughts, your emotions, is that action is the path to acceptance.  I can sit all day and wallow in how awful the drudgery is, it is very easy for me to get stuck there.  Or rather than looking at the weed that needs to be pulled up, or looking at the pile of clothes that need to be put away, and looking at all these things that I ‘need’ to do, and then thinking about how much energy they will require to do them at some point in the future: if I mindfully take action, the struggle and resistance is superceded by an energy that can purposefully get it done AND set the struggle at bay.

Whilst I am not particularly proud of how ‘small’ my life has become for now, I am delighted that I have found a meditation that enables me to be at one with the struggle.  Leadership and Self Deception by the Arbinger Institute describes this process far more fully than I am here.