Archive for March, 2010

This poem by Hafiz was read last night at the Moon Group I belong to. I made me sit and ponder (always a good thing) 

With That Moon Language

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me”
Of course, you do not do so out loud; otherwise
Someone would call the cops
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us
To connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon
In each eye that is always saying,
With that sweet moon language,
What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

March has just flown by, and for me it has been a diverse month with a raw food retreat, teaching, talks and workshops, session and treatments, visiting old friends and connecting with new people. I also feel like I have been cocooning again – you know how when you sleep you process the day’s events and consolidate, rest, heal and grow? On a larger scale, that’s what this last month has been like for me – and I feel ready to bloom now that Spring is here!

Watch this space ;-p
.

.
(Added 2 hours later…)

Coincidentally, I’ve just been catching up with reading the blog posts in my inbox, and Jonathan Fields (the guy from Awake @ The Wheel, Career Renegade, Tribal Author… a regular inspiration for me to keep doing what I’m doing, because there are people like him out there who keep doing what they‘re doing) – well he posted about Building In Space. That is, allowing yourself downtime to provide a chance for inspiration to hit. That is, not trying too hard all the time, because the best ideas often turn up when you’re in the shower, on your daily run, or while you daydream. That is, when your mind is freewheeling.

(Except he explains it much better.)

That’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately. I’ve also been talking about it and it’s funny how quite a few other people have been talking about it too (quite apart from the fact that blog posts get posted on the same topic) – and about how you can be a bit harsh on yourself and feel you’re being unproductive and lazy while you’re freewheeling. Not so.

So be gentle with yourself.
Listen to what your body, mind and soul are telling you if you feel the need to rest and play.
Allow yourself creative downtime.

Caveat: Listen to yourself with honesty; recognise when you need downtime, sleeptime, childtime – and when you’re just practising avoidance and procrastination. If you are, what are you running away from? Procrastination is a pet topic of mine. I’ll go into it another time.

This article (by me!) has just been published in the first issue of Back to Nature Magazine, a free magazine about sustainable businesses and alternative therapies covering the South West. For more information, to advertise or to contribute articles, email backtonaturetoday@live.co.uk.

One cold January morning in 2007, a man played the violin in the arcade outside a subway station in Washington DC. He performed six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes, during which time a little over one thousand people walked past, most of them on their way to work. When he stopped in between pieces and at the end, no-one acknowledged the silence or applauded. A few people slowed down to listen to his playing as they were passing; six stopped and stayed for a while.

The man was Joshua Bell, one of the best classical violinists in the world, playing some of the most intricate pieces ever written for violin, on an antique Stradivarius worth 3.5 million dollars. Two days prior to playing in the subway, he sold out at a theatre in Boston where average seats went for $100. He played incognito in the subway as a social experiment organised by the Washington Post about context, perception and priorities: in a banal setting at rush hour, do people perceive beauty? Do they stop and appreciate it? Do they recognize talent in an unexpected context?

Expect the unexpected

The fact that this experiment involved one of the best musicians in the world performing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the best instruments available is nearly irrelevant. Many of the crowd of commuters who saw him play had little or no knowledge of classical music. Those who enjoyed the performance did so in their own way: some stopped to listen; some noticed as they passed, enjoyed their brief exposure to beauty and carried on their way. One commuter who was interviewed later admitted to not having noticed at all due to family circumstances and listening to an iPod.

Admittedly, a subway at rush hour is not the most appropriate setting for a crowd’s appreciation of classical violin. If you had been one of the commuters, how would you have reacted to this unbidden demand on your time? Would you have paused to appreciate the experience, or would you have yielded to other pressures and rushed on? While we generally make arrangements to savour beauty in an appropriate time and place – see an exhibition, go to a concert, make a point of going for a walk in the autumn sunshine – it is also essential to be able to appreciate unexpected beauty and wonder when we encounter it. We don’t always think of stopping for a few moments to bask in the experience… but we can. It’s up to us to be like one of the six people who paused to listen for a while, to have a child’s capacity for wonderment and delight, to make sure we take notice and embrace the experience.

“The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.”
(Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way)

Choose joy!

We get caught up in the rush of everyday modern life, especially – but not only – in our busy cities, and we forget that we are the ones who make our pace of life. We can choose to slow down and allow ourselves to stop for a short while when something catches our senses, before rejoining the flow of modern humanity a tiny bit richer for the experience. Even when we think we can’t, and we believe we are trapped in a frenetic cycle of activity between home, childminder, work, shopping, cooking, putting children to bed… in reality we always have a choice. No-one is going to change our lives but ourselves. So it’s time to wake up to the possibility, and choose wisely! Choose to pause for a second. Choose beauty, choose inspiration, choose joy.

Yesterday evening I went to a business networking meeting. Those were 3 of the most SQUARE hours I have spent in a long time.

Some of the other attendees were fierce women in suits, the type who carve out a career in male-dominated industries by being masculine themselves. They put themselves across as being in-your-face and direct, yet I felt they were guarded and mistrustful of others. A few of the women there had trained in bodywork e.g. massage, reflexology and aromatherapy, and also NLP (neuro-linguistic programming). I couldn’t see that they were very much in touch with their bodies or their minds and emotions. I didn’t really connect with anyone new.

I’m glad I went though. It made me realise several things.

I am who I am. In the past I would have tried to fit in and be like everyone else, probably by dressing quite corporate and conventional. Last night, I wore a black and red ribboned top, flarey black skirt and made a point of not removing my lip ring. I’m good at what I do because I am the way I am. Like it or lump it.

I walk the talk. I’m a bit of a hippy. I’m pretty hot (understatement alert ) on personal development, I prod people into examining their emotions when they are in a flap (I prod myself too – lots), I like juicing, some of my friends are into raw food, several do yoga, I hang out with people who have an awareness of the states of their minds, emotions, bodies, and the interconnectedness thereof. Growth is an on-going daily experiment. (That’s part of my Manifesto, by the way.) I just don’t get people who make a big show of paying lip service to the whole holistic / lifestyle / balance / personal development thing, and don’t do it.

I am blessed to work and play every day with beautiful people who have a high level of authenticity and personal integrity, who are not afraid to look at what is going on for them and to share their processes, so that communication and connections are strong and supportive.

I create this reality. Although I recognize that I am lucky, I also appreciate that I am attracting these wonderful people into my life through the vibration I am putting out into the world. Like attracts like and so on. I’m happy to be the person I am, it means I get to hang out with all sorts of cool people.

A reality check is useful once in a while. I am used to my hippy-ish social circles and forget that for some people a “raw food retreat” conjures up the images of fasting, eating lettuce and celery sticks, and hugging trees while chanting. I forget that my normality is not other people’s normality, and that the things I take for granted aren’t common knowledge (yet). We create our own reality. When we change how we are in the world, the world changes in response. The key to being happy is loving others; to love others we must first love ourselves, and we do this through acceptance and forgiveness.

And these, children, like at the end of a Scrubs or a He-Man episode, are the lessons I learnt today.

Keep it real. Oh yeah.