Published Monday, 31st October 2011
Now running ‘Conversations Without A Purpose’. These sessions are available for anyone who would like someone to talk to outside of their normal circle of friends/ family and contacts. They are an opportunity to off-load and be listened to and to have someone be fully present to you for an hour. These are not coached sessions or therapy sessions, just a conversation during which you can talk about anything you like. Can be booked as a one-off or a series, whichever you prefer. Please see the ‘one-to-one’ page on the website for further details.
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Published Thursday, 20th October 2011
There are times in life when things just don’t go the way we had hoped or planned. Perhaps a conversation we were having with someone at work or home didn’t go how we thought it might. Perhaps we return from a holiday to find the fridge has gone bust and the TV isn’t working or perhaps we get news of someone we care about becoming ill. In life we all encounter unexpected challenges and twists we had not anticipated. Despite our best efforts we learn in painful ways that we are not after all the Masters of the Universe.
In my early twenties I went over to Long Island, New York to stay with a great-aunt of mine. Amongst other things she gave me a bookmark she had designed and on the back she’d written a prayer composed by Reinhold Niebuhr: ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference’. Both the bookmark and the words have stayed with me since then.
The prayer that Niebuhr composed has been used by recovery associations but it is also a useful philosophy for life. Increasingly much of the coaching work I do is around helping people through times of transition. This may be working with leaders who are faced with providing direction to others during times of uncertainty and rapid change or working with people on a more personal basis who are attempting to lead their own lives and are perhaps faced with more individual challenges. Applying Niebuhr’s prayer to our own situations and lives can help in working through the difficulties of transition.
Firstly, in asking for the serenity to accept the things that cannot be changed this presents the realisation that there in fact are some things that cannot be changed. In our world of modern technology, huge scientific advances and rapid response, we get lured into thinking that everything can be controlled and everything can be fixed. It can’t. For instance we cannot control the seasons, we cannot make a day longer than 24 hours, and despite our most optimistic attempts to have a barbeque when the sun comes out there’s nothing we can do to when the heavens decide to open and it pours with rain. These may seem obvious but sometimes the givens of life are very much overlooked. Attempting to change things that cannot be changed leads to much frustration and heartache. It also means we fail to see that a larger force is often at play, which would take us to a different place if we could surrender to it. It can also mean that we can miss out on the mystery of life because we are too intent on having things go our way. Far from it being a depressing notion, accepting that some things cannot be changed can bring about a certain amount of peace and freedom.
Then we have the request for courage to change the things we can change. Often because we are focusing on the things that cannot be changed we are blind to the things that can be changed. Furthermore, there are often things we can influence even if we cannot completely change them. To change what can be changed however does require courage. Too often we are inclined to say ‘There’s nothing I can do about that’ when actually there’s everything we can do to about it. This requires growing up. This requires acknowledging and accepting responsibility to do something when we’d really rather not. It is much easier to pretend that we can’t do something than to acknowledge that we can because then we have to take some kind of action instead of just complaining. This can be tough because it exposes us to our insecurities and fears which really lie behind the reasons why we don’t act when we could. It puts us up against ourselves. But moving forward does not just require courage. It also requires developing a compassion towards ourselves and those around us and a commitment to strive for something better.
Finally, the prayer requests the wisdom to know the difference between what can and cannot be changed. This is the tricky bit because it is not always obvious. Whilst wisdom is gained through age and experience it also resides in intuition and following our intuition is frowned upon in a world that is built on logic and reason. It also means separating out what is our business, what is someone else’s business and what is God’s business, or the Universe’s business, or whatever larger force you may believe in. For example, if you move house and have a house-warming party, whether or not you choose to invite me is your business. If you do invite me, whether or not I choose to accept and come along is my business. Assuming you do invite me and I do attend, the fact that I might meet someone there who I haven’t seen for 20 years, and who I didn’t know you knew and you didn’t know I knew, is the Universe’s business. Far too often in life we are tied up in attempting to fix someone else’s business, or the Universe’s business, and don’t attend to our own business.
If we do begin to attend to our own business this means we focus on the only person we can ever change and that can be a lifelong challenge. It means changing what can be changed and surrendering to the rest. It means setting our sails but being open to where the wind might take us. It means having some direction in our lives but allowing larger forces to play a part and trusting where that might take us. As Joseph Campbell says: ‘We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us’. So when life doesn’t go our way perhaps we need to be open instead to going the way of life. Who knows, it may eventually take us to a better destination than the one we had planned.
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Published Wednesday, 7th September 2011
Nature is full of opposites: night and day; light and dark; sea and land; winter and summer; male and female, to name but a few. Eastern philosophy promotes Yin and Yang – two opposite and complementary natural energies that combine to produce a whole. In this world of advanced technology and heavily constructed cities, we can lose sight of the fact that we, too, are part of nature. We are not separate beings from the rest of the world. What exists in nature exists in us. In fact it is purely humans who have divided the cosmos into opposites and how else could it have occurred to us to do it unless we had the prototype of such a division within ourselves.
This is an interesting concept when it comes to personal development and transformation because generally speaking we prefer not to think about that. Instead we prefer to classify events and people as good or bad, for us or against us, in or out. From early childhood, we are brought up with the ‘good-‘uns’ and the ‘bad-uns’, cops and robbers, Cowboys and Indians, and Beauty and the Beast. In other words, we are one or the other but not usually both.
As human beings, however, we all have light and dark within us, good and bad, forces that are healthy and constructive and forces that can destroy and harm. We are a conglomerate of opposites, some of which we recognise and accept and some of which we don’t. Many of the unacceptable aspects of ourselves are hidden from us. Carl Jung first used the term ‘shadow’ to describe the repressed or denied part of the Self; the aspects we split off and dissociate from and the parts of ourselves we are afraid to show.
As infants, we are born expressing the full breadth of our human nature, without editing or censoring. As we grow up, however, we learn that certain slices of our nature are unacceptable to the people around us. Maybe we are shamed for crying or told to be quiet for asking too many difficult questions. Perhaps we are ridiculed for wanting affection or attacked for being in the way. We develop coping strategies for whatever happens to us in childhood and adolescence by denying aspects of ourselves, building armour and merging with whatever we need to do to protect ourselves. This serves the purpose of allowing us to survive whether on a physical, emotional or psychological level but these coping strategies become hardwired and carried through into adulthood where they may no longer serve us. However, even if we are given everything we could hope for as children that does not necessarily mean we go on to function well as adults since we may carry into adulthood expectations of entitlement, a feeling that everything should go our way, and an incapacity and unwillingness to deal with life’s difficulties. Either way, we emerge into adulthood as a combination of positives and negatives, some of which are on the surface and some of which are beneath the veil of consciousness and in the realm of the shadow.
If we can begin to see our own shadow side, there is a chance that the process of achieving wholeness can begin. But if the shadow is beyond our awareness, how can we begin to recognise it? Furthermore, do we even want to see it and what will we do with it once shown? Do we have the courage to face it and address it and ultimately overcome and integrate it? This challenge is one that sits deep in the human psyche. It is the subject of many books and films which originate from the human imagination and archetypical images. Lord Voldemort is such a challenge and threat to Harry Potter precisely because he is a part of him. In Star Wars, Darth Vader is the embodiment of power misused, The ‘dark side’ proves to be the father of the hero, Luke Skywalker, and as such a force that also resides within himself. The battle played out on the screen of such films is the battle of the human psyche. It is the struggle of human goodness against its own shadow. It is not a fight that exists between one person and another but a battle between two sides of the same person.
This is so difficult for our egos to accept that we project it onto the outside word. However, goodness exists in the world because it exists in us. Cruelty also exists in the world for the same reason. We can deny it, repress it and disown it. Or we can learn to face it, in all its ugliness and challenges, and seek to integrate it. Many spiritual practices and religions that encourage ‘rising above’ our baser instincts only serve to disinherit and disown the shadow. Our wholeness and greatness is not reached by dissociating from our wild natures, but by accepting them as present, understanding what they can teach us about ourselves, and finding a way of integrating them. Nothing can be healed or resolved through avoidance or denial. Our task is not to attend to the forces ‘out there’ but to recognise that our work lies in attending to our own internal battles. The Shadow is the portal through which we must pass to become whole human beings. Paradoxically, when we begin to undertake that task, our ability to positively impact the world around us begins to grow.
If you are interested in learning more about the Shadow, I will be launching a workshop in January called ‘The Shadow of the Psyche’ which is about facing our challenges as a route to wholeness. If you are a therapist or healer working with others this will be of particular interest. If you are curious about how you can gain access to your own shadow, this workshop will reveal some of the ways in which our shadow is cast and how we can begin the difficult and challenging task of blending the two sides of our own nature.
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