Monday, March 29, 2010

Waking up to the real transitions of Being a woman

  1. Have you spent years tolerating your body, hating it for what it is or what it is not. Do you usually get up in the morning, look in the mirror and have something less than inspiring to say to yourself about what you see. As we get older, we focus on our aches and our pains, our high cholesterol, or our potential health care issues. We try to subsidize ourselves with supplements and other health tips -- all in order to feel good about our bodies. For most of us, as age catches up with us, as the resignation builds up after years of holding on to more weight than we want or feelings of shame around the way we look or feel, we lose sight of the possibility of having a stronger and healthier body year after year. We lose sight of loving our sexy bodies and being inspired by our glutes and our abs.If you are ready to have a massive breakthrough in the area of your life called your body and your health, there is no better time than now. To create the body that you love, you must hold in consciousness a feeling and hear yourself sending loving messages while you create a vision, and I am here to assist you in doing this.

Friday, March 26, 2010

Why am I so Afraid to Love?


Love always creates fear because love is death, a greater death than the ordinary death you know of.

In an ordinary death the body dies, but that is not death at all. Body is just like a dress; when it is tatty and old you change it for a new one. It is not death, it is just a change: a change of a dress, or a change of a house or abode. But you continue, the mind continues – just the same old mind in new bodies, just the same old wine in new bottles. The form changes but not the mind, the shape changes but not the mind. So the ordinary death is not a real death. Love is a real death: the body does not die but the mind dies, the body continues to be the same but the ego disappears.

If you love, you will have to drop all the conceptions that you have about yourself. If you love, you cannot be the ego because the ego will not allow love. They are antagonistic. If you choose the ego you will not be able to choose love. If you choose love you will have to drop the ego. Hence, the fear.

A greater fear than death grips you whenever you are in love. That’s why love has disappeared from the world. Rarely, very rarely does the phenomenon happen that love descends. What you call love is just a false coin: you have invented it because it is so difficult to live without love. It is difficult because without love, life carries no meaning; it is meaningless. Without love, life has no poetry in it. Without love, the tree exists but never flowers. Without love, you cannot dance, you cannot celebrate, you cannot feel grateful, you cannot pray. 

Without love, temples are just ordinary houses; with love an ordinary house is transformed, transfigured into a temple. Without love you remain just possibilities – empty gestures; with love, for the first time you become substantial. With love, for the first time, the soul arises in you; the ego drops but the soul arises.

It is impossible to live without love, so humanity has created a trick. Humanity has invented a trick, a device. The device is: to live in a false love so that the ego continues on its own. Nothing is changed, and you can play the game of being in love: you can go on thinking that you love, you can go on believing that you love. But look at your love – what happens out of it? – nothing except misery, nothing except hell, nothing except conflict, quarrel, violence. Look deeply into your love relationships. They are more akin to hate relationships than to love. It is better to call them hate relationships than to call them love relationships. 

But because everybody is living in the same way, you never become aware. Everybody is carrying the false coin; you never become aware. The real coin of love is very costly: you can purchase it only at the cost of losing yourself. There is no other way.
Be courageous, don’t be cowards. The real mettle of your being is tested only when love arises. Never before it do you know of what mettle you are made. In ordinary life, in the marketplace, doing this and that, in the world of ambition and power politics, your real mettle is never really tested. You never pass through the fire.

Love is the fire. If you are really gold you will survive it. If you are not real gold, you will be gone. But I tell you that you are real gold.
Trust me – pass through the fire. Hesitation is natural, but don’t make hesitation a barrier. Even with the hesitation, pass through it. In spite of the fear pass through the fire. And only through the fire will the rose of your consciousness flower. There is no other way.

Excerpted from Come Follow To You, Osho
Love- OSHO International Meditation resort

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Demystify this thing

Over the many years I have been a coach one of the things I hear the most is "I don't know what I want so I will just settle for ????

My answer is we need to demystify this thing. For example the wine world reminds me a great deal of the art world. Far too many people feel unqualified to create art, insisting that they are not "the creative type." But when we leave art only to the artists we lose touch with our own artfulness, our own creativity and inventiveness, and block a portal through which we gain vigor and intelligence can make their way to us. We distance ourselves from art when we professionalize it, just as we disassociate from our own healing powers when we place total responsibility for healing only in the hands of a healer. This creates a system in which we do all the suffering and healers do all the healing.

We all possess creativity, however, although we may not all have the courage to act on it.

If you make discerning your callings your priority, then the "quality" of  your creative efforts is determined by how honest they are, how true, the EXPRESSIONS are to your INNER EXPRESSIONS. It is not determined by popularity, or marketability, or technique, or talent. Think of yourself as having a genius in the original sense of the word, which meant having a genie, a guardian spirit, which everyone possesses - even animals.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Previously Hidden

When we become immersed in any creative activity, we bring on ourselves a sense of rapt attention, of rapture, of departure from ego, from time and from place.We see in to the heart of things and get a glimpse of something that was previously hidden. In this way the creative act is a mystical experience.

Soul is closer to movement than it is to fixity, said Socrates, and loss of soul is the condition of being stuck - fixated on something, as the psychologists would say - and overcome by the downward - pushing forces that govern all bodies: gravity and inertia.

The arts, being about creativity and therefore change, are ideal for leading us toward movement, whether we do a dance with life on the line or oscillate between stepping up to a canvas and stepping back or go in hot pursuit of a calling.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Strength of a Call


Strength of a Call

The true strength of a calling seems to emerge when the shadow does and you get to see how you deal with that.

Joseph Campbell once said that “where you stumble, there is your treasure,” referring to a story from the Arabian Nights in which a farmers plow catches on something in the dirt, and despite much struggle he can’t dislodge it. He finally stops, digs in the ground, and discovers that his plow has caught on a metal ring attached to the door, through which the passageway leading to a treasure. Wherever our mossy primal fear reside – our fears of the dark, of death, of being devoured, of meaninglessness, of lovelessness, or of loss – chances are good that beneath them lies the gems of wisdom and maybe a vision or a calling. Wherever you stumble – on a tree root, on a rock, on fear or shame or vulnerability, on someone else’s word, on the truth – dig there.

Whatever lies beneath the surface will usually put up a fight to stay there, and this goes for some of the wildlife we’re likely to encounter in diving into our own pasts. We’re up against that which doesn’t want to be remembered and wants to remain anonymous, invisible, mute, to  cover itself with dirt and leaves and hide while the posse gallops by.

We’re up against whatever we have rejected throughout the run of our lives; the parts of us that split of and went tumbling away; our unlived life; the animal that sleeps at our doorstep.

These unlived parts can include ‘negative” qualities, such as anger, fear, weakness, aggression, vanity, idealism, lust, laziness, tears, everything we were instructed n ot to talk about because it was too embarrassing and too private, all the ghettos and back alleys of our psyches. The unlived parts of us can also include “positive” qualities, like power, leadership, trust, compassion, commitment, sensitivity, creativity, faith, exuberance, and the contents of that 90 percent of our brains we haven’t figures out how to use.

These rejected parts include whatever wasn’t loved, respected, and accepted in us by ourselves, our parents, teachers, peers, religion, and culture. Carl Jung called it our shadow. Robert Bly calls it “the long bag we drag behind us.” In all those qualities that were disapproved of by the people whose approval we needed in order to survive, or believed we needed.

In whatever we rejected, though, is something that a part of us wants, and there lies a calling that we should follow, if only for the sake of completing the jigsaw and healing the past.

Faith will eventually ask of the faithful “What are you willing to give up in order to follow your call?” Sacrifice, says Thomas Merton, is “the shadow in the calling”. It reminds us that we pay a price for every choice and that life doesn’t hold still. It constantly gives over this for that: it wears down its banks and changes course; it’s a propeller that spins so fast it appears to be solid but you don’t dare and try to grasp it.


If calls take us toward what we most deeply want anyway – authenticity, integrity, the full complement, the uncut version – then shining a light into the shadow is part of our deliverance to that outcome, part of our passage. “Everything rests on awareness that a hidden life exists,” the writer Joy Williams says


Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Colli K Christante

Colli K Christante
Name the Pain
http://christante.blogspot.com

Name the Pain

Name the Pain,” theologian Matthew Fox says.

By naming our demons we diminish their power over us. We reform them from demons back to diamons. Daimons were the origin of demons. They were divine spirits, demi-gods, intermediaries who passed notes back and forth between gods and humans. The Latin translation of daimons is soul. As such, they can be either creative or destructive, depending entirely on whether we receive them or reject them. By negating them, we turn them into angry spooks, consigning them to what poet John Milton called Panadaemonium, the capital of hell, and an apt decription of what happens in the human psyche when our guides are driven underground, when a force as powerful as the shadow is scorned.

Since shadow is largely what is unloved in us, and in some cases with good reason, reintegrating these parts will mean attempting to love them as if they are strangers who might be gods-but it’s still critical to keep our wits about us. Loving our own cruelty, rage, or vengefulness or narcissism is different from identifying with it or giving it license. Treating the devil with respect is not the same as worshipping the devil. Dealing with the shadow demands the ability to deal with paradox. Shadow must be love and transformed. It is intolerable and it is in us.

Novelist Isabel Allende says “A scary cellar accts as a stimulus to the imagination,” which is why she hides, in her own basement, “sinister surprises” for her grandchildren: a plastic skeleton, treasure maps, trunks filled with pirate disguises. Myth is also full of dualistic nature of the diamonic:

Pluto the Roman name for Hades, god of the Underworld, is also the god of Wealth.
We need to acquaint ourselves with our shadows and past in which it leaves it’s tracks, however, in order to become aware of as much of our experience as we can, to have as much information as possible to draw on for our own journey. We need to go bodily down through activities such a journaling, active imagination, bodywork and have spend some time just mucking around and getting to know the place. We really are meant to stick our noses in our deep strata. Annie Dillard once wrote. “When you move in, you try to learn the neighborhood.”

Danger lies not in the shadow itself but in the panic; in the acute anxiety that grips some people when confronted by some of the material there; in the fear of losing their footing in the conscious world because of what they find in the unconscious; in the fright of what they truly feel.

Above all, says Thomas Merton, take it easy. “The shadow is a frightening reality, and anyone who talks blithely about integrating it as if you could chum up to the shadow the way you learn a foreign language, doesn’t know the darkness that always qualifies a shadow.”

Not all suffering, to be sure is redeemed with gifts and talents-some times people grow up in sick families are just crippled by it – but the cold truth about turning a wound into a gift, if that is its nature, is that first you must FEEL it. You’ve got to be willing to go back and re-encounter the grief of it, starting with the brute fact that you got a bum deal, that justice is beside the point, and no one is going to make it up to you. The past cannot be changes only our attitude to it can be.

The past shapes us, but by following the deep calling to heal ourselves and throw off old curses, we may be able to reshape our response to the past and perhaps even the way  in which we remember it. Sometime we are called to move backward so we can move forward with a greater sense of ourselves, and with a greater confidence.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Childhood in a room


Surrounded by the deepest jade ocean waves it did not matter which room I was given when I arrived at the villa. The first 5 nights were in the master bedroom, although I never really settled into that space. Night 6 and my friend’s family started arriving. Asked if I would mind making room for a couple I moved to another room. Being single I only require a single bed. Opening the bedroom door I stepped back took a breath and realized I was entering the room I had never been in. It was a beautiful child’s room filled with toys, books and residual laughter from days when children played and slept here.

I’d like to say my family was a safe forum for expression, that I actually talked about my mother’s death or even my mother’s life and that I found a family member who provided much-needed emotional support. But none of this was true. My sister was married with a beautiful baby girl only one year old. My brother was married, lived a far bit away. We were raised by two different sets of parents. When I returned to my real parents my brother and sister really did not take me in. My real dad was an alcoholic. Shortly after my mothers funeral I sent out thank you cards. My dad sat at the table drunk. There was never another word spoken about my mother.

Silence and suppression transformed me into an emotional mannequin, frozen with proportions so perfect they were never more than ideal. The morning my mother died I entered a zone of counterfeit emotion: no tears, no grief, little response at all except a carefully monitored smile and an intense desire to maintain the status quo.

If I could not control the external chaos, I could at least try to balance it with my internal reserve. How could I give in to intense emotion? Raised from birth to age 6 by my uncle it was he who told me at the funeral I had to be strong because I was now on my own. He knew. At 14, I was on my own.

Families like this mine are not rare; many households view even the most innocuous expressions of grief as reminders of the loss, and they shy away from confronting collective pain.

Grief does not vanish because we try to lock it up in a sealed drawer, yet that is the way many of us are encouraged to cope: ignore the pain and it will go away. Anyone who has tried this approach knows this is not true. Ultimately the thing that makes you crazy is not that your mother has died rather, you cannot talk about it. The sounds of silence begin and then grief will find a way to seep out elsewhere, through our eyes ands ears, through our very pores.

 “Without suffering there would be no joy, what dark is to light. Pain is prod to remembrance. The way of escape is wisdom.”
-Paramahanoa Yogananda Autobiography of a YOGI

Thursday, March 4, 2010

After the Funeral

Walking behing my mothers casket out of the church, my uncle holding me up-right all I could hear was "you must be strong - you are on your own now. I remember standing over the grave. It seemed like it would never stop when they were lowering the casket. I wondered how deep they would put my mother.

After the funeral, all I wanted to do was be alone on the ice but I was far from my skates or ice.

Today I send love and light to Joannie as she says good-bye to her mother and starts down the road of grieving.