When will our lives become about us?

I have had several brilliant conversations recently about all the ways we avoid taking the meaningful and sometimes challenging steps towards what we experience as the heartfelt purpose of our lives.  It seems to me that many of us have dreams or wishes of how we'd like to be, what we'd like to contribute in this life, what we'd like to do or what feels meaningful to us. And very often we push this to the back of our minds or simply ignore the deeper calling because of various 'practical' reasons. 

I remember doing The Artists Way (Julia Cameron) a few years ago and the phrase she used which really resonated with me was that we are always able to 'take small steps towards our dreams' whatever else we are doing in our lives to pay the bills or keep our commitments that we have made and which are important to us. 

I see so many people, including myself, avoiding taking those small steps, which we know deep down will fill us up with the delight of this life - and instead we get on with the 'normal' stuff of our lives, while this little nagging dream becomes quieter and quieter. 

At the moment I am experiencing a deeper awareness of this part of me which has me avoid the deeper calling as I fill my life with lots of things that feel necessary right now.  And I am seriously asking the question of myself - what am I REALLY here for ? This is sometimes difficult to articulate for me, but my heart speaks strongly in a language that may not even have words.  It takes a meditation (like the Secret Vow blog article I wrote a little while ago) to have me tune back in to this, and the more I close the gap between my daily life and my secret vow, the more meaningful my life becomes. 

The coaching sessions I am part of at the moment with my wonderful clients (and fellow coaches) seem to have a pattern about them and this is the theme that is emerging - as always I am deeply taken aback by how my clients show up for me in equal measure to how I show up for them.  Thank you to all of you for the conversations and for the deepening of my experience of life that arises as a result.

Let's fall in love again...

My dear friend Sue sent me this little piece of paper one day in the post and it said:

Let us fall in love again and scatter gold dust all over the world.  Let us become a new spring and feel the breeze drift in a heavens’ scent.  Let us dress the earth in green, and like the sap of a young tree, let the grace from within sustain us.  Let us carve gems out of our stony hearts and let them light our path to Love.  The glance of Love is crystal clear and we are blessed by its light. (Rumi)

I am putting this on this blog for two reasons:

1) I wanted to be reminded of how something so small like posting a lovely quote to a friend can lift someone’s day.

2) Because this quote speaks of our capacity as human beings to fall in love again and again and again.  It’s fascinating to me that we are capable of this, and I experience this a lot of the time.  My capacity to be unreasonably joyful and to feel a love that is far bigger than I am is growing which is a joy.  There are moments when I stop in the street overwhelmed by how much I love one of my family members, colleagues, my boyfriend or one of my friends.  It’s a curious thing because it can happen at the most odd of times, in the most unexpected places and it’s a total joy.

I am so thankful that being human brings this experience, and I am so grateful that there are fellow human beings that inspire this particular feeling in me.  Thank you to all of you lovely humans who have given me this experience of love, just by being who you are – and I am so grateful that I can wander along the street feeling it.

Integral Coaching - What it's all about

This is an introduction to the initial conversations you would have with me as a coach and it’s the premise that I work with in my coaching practise.

Background:

So it all starts when we are born, we have some innate qualities and we also have some capabilities that are present already. For example, my qualities may mean I am easily soothed or I am easily excited – I may have many needs or I may be very placid – often if there is more than one child, my parents can see and feel that I have a different ‘energy’ from my brothers and sisters, and they have different energy from me and each other. My qualities and attributes will unfold in time. I am born into some kind of family system which has its own language its own history and its own time, place and practices. All these factors get put together to create a ‘narrative’ – a story into which I am born. The ‘narrative’ answers the following questions: Who am I ?, Who are others ? What am I to do ? How should I engage in the world ?

In my early interactions in the family I am born in to, I quickly learn how to survive. I adopt a strategy to fit in and survive in the system. All the ways I could be are defined by how I figure out my way to survive in the family system. This way of being that has me survive creates and becomes embedded in my nervous system. My nervous system either becomes one that relies on the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system. My survival is either related to the ‘fight or flight’ hormones (sympathetic) which are turned on for me to survive, or the ‘freeze’ hormones (parasympathetic) which have me calm down and be still in order to to survive. We develop as human beings who rely on one of these systems for survival.

As adults, if we have been used to using our sympathetic nervous system to survive, we tend to go faster and be on the move more when we are under stress in every day adult life, and if we used our parasympathetic nervous system to survive, we tend to withdraw and disappear under stressful conditions. We can see that how we ‘survived’ as children gave us the nervous system we use today as adults. The effects of the use of these parts of the nervous system manifest themselves as the ingrained habits that become our automatic way of acting in our lives.

As adults we can ask ourselves what we do to get by under stress? Do we fly off the handle ? Do we close down or collapse? Do we fade away? Do we lose our power to get things done?
This foundational narrative has a very significant effect on the continuum of narratives (or stories we find ourselves in) that come to us in our lives. I will have certain competencies and will know how to act so that things either happen or do not happen – I know the effect I can have. Our sense of possibility and what life is gets formed by our foundational narrative.

The world we perceive through this narrative, and which makes sense to us, informs how we act. Being in the world, and living from our narratives means that we pay attention to certain things and we ignore others – the narrative we have is shaping our perception in every moment. What we are paying attention to and what we are ignoring brings forth the world for us. In our narrative, we are at home, at ease and our nervous systems are used to this.

Integral Coaching:

In our lives there are interruptions, things which disrupt our normal way of being, which challenge the narrative we are in and which threaten the way of surviving that we have developed. We will all attempt to use our normal strategies to deal with these disruptions – sometimes they will work, and sometimes they will not. Sometimes we don’t want to use the same strategy as we have always done, as we realise it has never really worked in the first place. At some point we find that the disruption is too big for any of the survival strategies we have under our belt, and in this disruption there is a chance for a new narrative to emerge – one that would require changing our language and our practises in order for a new way of being to unfold. For a new narrative to form – there has to be an opening that has us be willing to admit that we ‘do not know’.

At the start of a coaching relationship, we are looking at what it takes to make real changes and we ask whether we can see the automatic reactions that we live in every day. Integral coaching is about examining deeply held habits and questioning them so that we have some more possibilities in our lives than what is currently in front of us. It’s about learning to respond in fresh ways, it’s about discovering other ways of being that mean life can be experienced differently.

The nervous system is difficult to change. It has the strength over us that it had when we were children. As an adult it is possible to stay present when our nervous system kicks in with its automated habits. We find that certain practises build the capacity we need to stay with discomfort even when our nervous system is crying out for us to do the habitual things we always do to cope with stress. This is when the nervous system starts to change itself – when we do not act, we just let it be there.

Every time that we do something that we are habitually not accustomed to, our nervous system changes. For example, when you yell, it gets easier to keep yelling, when you do not yell, it gets easier not to yell the next time. Integral coaching is about ‘coaching’ the nervous system. The practises we take on in Integral Coaching are about shifting the nervous system – a good practise addresses the nervous system directly. We become interested in discomfort, in being with the sensation of not following my habitual impulses.

The Secret Vow

I take a moment to be still and relax into my body and to this space. I breathe gently and I soften into this moment with my body and breath.  I feel my feet, my legs, my arms and scan my body, relaxing any tension I find.

In this moment, I connect with the deeper part of me that knows why I am here, that knows what my true contribution to life is.  I connect with the me that is wise, the me that knows the answers.

In this connection with myself, I notice the secret promise I have made, the secret vow I have made with myself to be here in a way that is aligned with my purpose.

My purpose spreads into what I do, how I am in my relationship to myself, my closest and most intimate mates, my family, my friends, my colleagues, those I teach or mentor, my neighbours, my acquaintances, strangers and people I have never met before. My purpose is the energy with which I hold myself in all of these interactions.

I take a moment to relax my body, to breathe gently and connect to the centre of myself and my life force.  In this place, I become intimate with my purpose, my energy, the ‘me-ness’ that I know so well, that hasn’t changed in all of time, through my birth, my childhood, my adulthood to now…..
I take some time now to remember the vow that I have made, and I can choose to make the vow from this place of truth right now, I can write my vow now or remember it – however it appears to me.  I can feel the vow that I have made and I let this become strengthened and expanded commitment to myself, my life and to everyone I touch – that I may be the loving kindness that I was made as.

This blog was inspired by the poem by David Whyte below:

All the true vows – by David Whyte. 

All the true vows
are secret vows
the ones we speak out loud
are the ones we break.

There is only one life
you can call your own
and a thousand others
you can call by any name you want.

Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body,
don’t turn your face away.

Hold to your own truth
at the center of the image
you were born with.

Those who do not understand
their destiny will never understand
the friends they have made
nor the work they have chosen

nor the one life that waits
beyond all the others.

By the lake in the wood
in the shadows
you can
whisper that truth
to the quiet reflection
you see in the water.

Whatever you hear from
the water, remember,

it wants you to carry
the sound of its truth on your lips.

Remember,
in this place
no one can hear you

and out of the silence
you can make a promise
it will kill you to break,

that way you’ll find
what is real and what is not.

I know what I am saying.

Time almost forsook me
and I looked again.

Seeing my reflection
I broke a promise
and spoke
for the first time
after all these years

in my own voice,

before it was too late
to turn my face again.