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July 2022
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What do you do with a problem?12/21/2020 “May you have enough challenges Telling your own story to yourself is the most powerful thing ever. Reckoning problems and successes as the same, most people in dying remember Love. People who love grieve. “To be a spiritual warrior, one must have a broken heart; without a broken heart and the sense of tenderness and vulnerability, your warriorship is untrustworthy.” ~Chögyam Trungpa If a problem is defined as the difference between an actual situation and a desired situation then What Do I Want is both your first question and the one you must ask again and again. Your chances, your ideas, your problems are constructs which shape your values and build your character and inspire you to live your life and legacy. Your choices are your truth...neither right nor wrong but just your own. You enter the forest at the darkest point, We make our own problems when we believe our own lies, when we choose perspectives that do not serve our best interests, and when we fail to give our all. We make our own problems when we lose faith in ourselves. We make our own problems when we get attached to the stories we tell and the expectations we create for ourselves and others. Perhaps in life, it is not about trying harder...perhaps it’s about resisting less. “If you don’t want to be disappointed, don’t get appointed to a particular future.” Stephen Gaskin Do not let loss drain the color from everything. We all need loving support to be our best selves. We all need to be heard. We all need courage to stay curious. We all need rest from overwhelm. And we need heroes to follow when the going gets tough. “Happy people die whole...it is something that happens in us, through our active participation in life, through the choices we make during the brief interlude of our existence as animate beings in an animate universe. Wholeness itself is a participatory act — both a faculty of being and a function of becoming, to be mastered and refined in the course of living.” Robinson Jeffers Telling our story to others can be the most powerful thing ever too. Nick Cave, the wickedly creative and full human, rock star on stage and in the scrum of life, writes The Red Hand Files: “you can ask me anything.” The following is Issue #126, November 2020. Hey first I wanna say really like your music i have lost my beautiful wife in cancer and my dear brother in covid 19 my question to you is how keep you going on after lost your son its hard sometimes to keep going on with life. MATTI, STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Dear Matti, There is little to say to someone who has lost a loved one that is of itself any real help. That has been my experience. Language falls short before the immensity of the experience of grief. There are simply not the words. My well-meaning and desperately worried friends would speak into my grief, using words that made no sense. They would tell me that my son lived in my heart, for example, but I genuinely did not understand these words because when I searched my heart I found nothing but chaos and despair. One desperate morning, however, I did the most simple of things and perhaps this can help you with the loss of your wife, and your brother, more than my words. I sat by myself, in a quiet space, and called upon my son by name. I closed my eyes and imagined lifting him from my heart- this tormented place in which I was told he lived- and I positioned him outside of my body, next to me, beside me. I said, “You are my son and now you are beside me.” These few words had a powerful , vibrational effect, and this simple act of imagination was the first step in a process that would eventually lead me back to the world. By performing this act I was temporarily released from the rational world, a merciless place that gave me no peace, and given access to an impossible realm where I would form an increasingly resolute relationship with the spiritual idea of my lost child. I began to feel Arthur’s presence. I talked to him. He talked to me. I took him with me wherever I went. I toured Europe and America with the ‘In Conversations’ show and he sat with me in my dressing room, or later at night in my hotel, or he escorted me onto stage and stood there beside me. I felt emboldened by his constructed presence, or perhaps true presence- who knows? What did it matter? I felt increasingly empowered, unafraid, as I allowed him to accompany me out of my boundless grief. Sometimes, on stage, I would look out at the audience and feel a collective spiritual influence attending to everyone. It was a deeply powerful experience and testament to the restorative force of our imaginings- that child of God, that divine invention- rescuing me from my catastrophic heart and in doing so freeing himself from the convulsion of my grief. Matti, forgive me if this makes no sense to you, but perhaps there is a way to summon your wife and dear brother and release them from your despair so that they can attend to you- allow them to become your spiritual companions in that impossible realm, to look after you in their imagined presence, and guide you forward until things get better. For they do, in time, they do. Love, Nick Changing your thinking
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What do you do with an idea?12/14/2020 I realized what you do with an idea... What do we humans do, really? We think. We create our own reality with ideas which shape our life and in death our legacy. We find our ideas in the questions we ask and the language we use as we seek to be seen and to belong. “We may think we can control our grief, our terror, or our shame by remaining silent, but naming offers the possibility of a different kind of control. When Adam was put in charge of the animal kingdom in the Book of Genesis, his first act was to give a name to every living creature.” Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk. We create our own reality. Ideas come from where we put our attention to what we know and what we tell ourselves about what we think- or the idea we have- about what we know. How truthful we are with our ideas either helps us to be kind to ourself and grow or catches us and holds us stuck. “We do not see things as they are we see them as we are.” Talmud We create our own reality. Ideas have inherent polarity...good ideas/bad thoughts, generous ideas/resentments, public/private. When we become stuck, our emotions can bully us: “fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.” Pema Chodron. We create our own reality. I know that if you think life’s a vending machine When we put our emotions into our ideas they become our beliefs. Our beliefs can lead us to judgement. If we seek to create our own reality in a meaningful way it helps to understand that “words create worlds.” Abraham Joshua Heschel. We create our own reality. “The truest story is always the widest one. It’s the one that folds in the highs alongside the lows, the losses alongside the gains. It looks forward and back. It runs in a jagged line rather than straight. It tells us we must go on, even when going on seems impossible.” Cheryl Strayed. We create our own reality. “The capacity to create and understand the meaning of ideas is considered to be an essential and defining feature of human beings”, explains Martha Beck, one of the pioneers of the profession of Life Coaching. She developed a program of inquiry known as The Work- as below- to move us through our beliefs (and pain!) as we seek our personal truth (and a meaningful life!) Is it true? How can you absolutely know it's true? How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought? Does that thought bring peace or stress into your life? What images do you see, past and future, and what physical sensations arise as you think that thought and witness those images? What emotions arise when you believe that thought? Do any obsessions or addictions begin to appear when you believe that thought? How do you treat the person in this situation when you believe the thought? How do you treat other people and yourself? Who would you be without that thought? Turn the thought around. Now find at least 3 specific, genuine examples of how this turnaround is true for you in this situation. Do another turnaround? We create our own reality. So too, Brene Brown investigates ideas especially those around vulnerability and shame. She focuses her lens ‘does this serve me or trigger me?’, champions our humanity, and encourages we ‘welcome flies to the picnic’. We create our own reality. We’re all going to die, We create our own reality. “To become learned, each day add something. To become enlightened, each day drop something.” Lao Tzu. We create our own reality. Forgiveness is as important as gratitude. We create our own reality. “It’s impossible,” said Pride.
“It’s risky,” said Experience. “It’s pointless,” said Reason. “Give it a try.” whispered the Heart.
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What do you do with a chance?12/9/2020 When something extraordinary shows up in your life, Chances. Opportunities. The stuff of life. Chances are where the road diverges in the wood or along the trail. How we cope with chances is existentially Being and Doing. “When soldiers go to war, they don’t fight because they hate what is in front of them, they fight because they love what is behind them. When they return, the defenses they created to protect their loved ones are the same defenses they must lower to return to them.” G.K. Chesterton. It is through agency and creating our way through that we get what we want. Glennon Doyle says “The braver we are, the luckier we get.” Still, chances represent change. Change can be scary. Loss is woven through each and every life. Some losses, like baby teeth, make way. Other losses, like losing a limb, persist as phantoms. Loss of a loved one is part of our loving life. Being human happens within suffering. When we do not hide from our sadness, our disappointments, our lives don’t diminish they expand. Living fully means means more than just staying alive. “When we come to accept that life is just one damn thing after another and determine to be happy in between, that is when we have grown up.” Katherine Hepburn. We cry tears to process loss and reduce our emotional stress. We cry tears as we connect deeply with one another. We cry tears to dilute our frustration, rage, and disappointment. American Psychological Association researcher Bylsma explains that “one theory of crying is that it helps the body to return to a state of homeostasis after being overly aroused—whether positively or negatively. Right after that peak in arousal, whether it’s immediately after winning an Olympic gold medal or walking down the aisle at a wedding, tears might help bring a person back to a baseline level of functioning.” Tears are one of our most important body functions because through tears we involuntarily express the gamut of our true emotions. Tears are where our mental and physical health come together and we experience joy and sadness as equally important. Tears are also healthy and nutritious comprised of proteins and antibodies and can have antibacterial and antiviral properties. Tears help us sleep better, strengthen our immune systems, and lower blood pressure and stress levels. Tears are also treatable symptoms of distress and depression. The sage Ida agrees “Feel your feelings when you feel them.” Adults make between 15-30 gallons of tears per year. There are three types of tears which are all chemically distinct. The tears that protect our eyes are called basal tears. Reflex tears protect our eyes from external irritants. And then we have emotional tears which women shed at a rate approximately 5 times more than men and apparently the Australians cry most. People under stress as or who are lying blink more making more tears. "We conclude that there is a chemosignal in human tears, and at least one of the things the chemosignal does is reduce sexual arousal," study author Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, told LiveScience after the research was published in the journal Science. Most of us cry between the hours of 6pm and midnight. Also, it is a physiological fact that the first tear to fall from the right eye is for happiness while the first tear to fall from the left eye is for pain! Tears are our water. Water holds memory. We are 70%+ water. The same water here on our planet is the same water that ever was...it just circulates. Dobedobedo! The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, |