When obstruction and resistance holds a golden opportunity

Britain is a crowded island which is heavily congested. If something breaks down, the knock-on effects are huge. How often have you been on a motorway when the journey has been halted by an accident and there you are, unable to move and there’s no way out? You just have to sit there and be patient, along with a huge line of other cars and lorries? It's a bit of a metaphor for life.

Faced with escalating petrol prices, feeling jaded with motorway congestion and appreciative of the time I might get to write, I decided to go by train to Leeds on Sunday. Bad move! I got to London Kings Cross terminus to find all trains weren’t running due to a cable problem at Welwyn Garden City. Everybody going north was stuck. Lots of people were crammed into the terminus, with lots of baggage and families in train, looking hot and bothered. “Consider travelling tomorrow”, we were told. So I went to a different terminus, Euston, and got on a train to Manchester, intending to change for Leeds. The train stopped outside London, and then crawled along, due apparently to a tree having fallen on to the line and hit a train. Why did I not go by car? Why not catch a plane? Why not go home (I’m in the West Country) and get my car? Why is nobody giving any clear information?

Being stuck somewhere is a hugely frustrating experience. I can do being frustrated very well. The thing is, the more I do it, the worse things somehow get. It’s like the universe sends me more things to feel frustrated about, more delays, more obstacles. The more in a hurry I might feel, the more things will get in the way.

So, what’s the lesson? If something isn’t working smoothly, it’s well worth while to stop, to pause, and to check out the internal process.

It’s very important to look at what’s going on. This type of occurrence is a nice example of how our egoic expectations and fears cause us, me in this case, to get out of sync with intentional flow. What is needed here is a clear intention that I want something to happen and then get out of the way and allow it to happen. Allowing is key here, the natural flow of the universe which in its way, if we are clear about our intention and feel positive about it, will deliver.

But no, the ego gets in the way. Will there be delays, will there be congestion, will there be a seat for me, will something fall on the line (gales were forecast)?

So what do you do? Well you might get even more angry and determined and, yes, with forceful determination you might get a result. But you might get an awful lot more of the resistance too.

Another possibility is….yes, you’ve guessed it! Surrender! Let go. Just give the whole drama up. Get off it! You’ll need your way to do that, of course, and this takes learning. I’ve written before in this blog about dropping a negative line of thought. Here, I’m talking about letting go of any attachment to things being or working a certain way.

The art of surrender is, I think, one of the most powerful lessons on the path of self-discovery and self-realisation. It is something the ego fights like mad. Because it goes right against what the ego wants to do.

When we let go, all is simple and easy. We relax, feel calm, are able to connect with our interior Self once more – and open up the way for the unconscious mind to tell us things, for our intuition to work, to allow us to connect with the universal flow, for our minds to engage more constructively with the matter, to allow other options to emerge, and for other things to occur. Have you ever found that if you’ve let go of something you’ve wanted, it’s somehow happened?

To surrender, you have to truly let go of it, whatever “it” is. Completely. No hidden attachments lurking underneath, no secret longing for “it” to happen, no resentment, no judgement, no blame towards others, no resurrecting of the issue later, no self-blame.

In meditation, you let go of the conscious working of your mind, focus on your breathing or a mantra or whatever, and allow yourself to be present with what is. This is a simple example of letting go, and if you think about it, you probably do it a lot.

So today or tomorrow, as you go about your day, give yourself time to notice when you might be getting attached to things being and going a certain way, and practice surrender, letting go, and notice the pure simple release that occurs, and an opening, an opportunity, for you connect with all that is.

I wrote this on that train, by the way! In the end the connections all worked out fine!

To thine own Self be true

Those of you who help other people professionally might find this interesting.

I was at a meeting of fellow humanistic psychology professionals on Saturday last and the discussion turned to the impending statutory regulation of psychotherapy in the UK. I am not a psychotherapist but I am married to one and I use a psychological dimension in my coaching. So I was very interested.

A lot of the debate centred on the apparent preference in government for psychotherapy and counselling to follow the Cognitive-Behavioural model. It doesn’t seem to allow for the potential validity of other approaches for particular conditions or for the choice of the client, and respect for diversity is central to humanistic practice.

There are those who are concerned at the increase in the dominance of the “medical model”, whereby one is diagnosed and held to be “unwell” and have a “deficiency” or “disorder”, needing treatment by an expert. For humanistic practitioners, no one is “unwell” and each is the best expert on him or herself. In my training, for example, we talked instead about past creative adjustments to life which might not always serve us and about how we might choose differently in future as we created new meaning.

Also, there are those for whom being regulated and humanistic is a contradiction in terms. After all, a humanistic practitioner is committed to helping a person become fully self-regulating. I also heard that the government felt that the “patient” had to be protected, although I was not clear that the psychotherapy profession were doing a particularly bad job of regulating themselves and didn’t feel very impressed by the record of other professions who already had statutory regulation.

I’m not going further into the debate as it gets very technical and is probably more relevant to those in the field. However, I was aware of how strongly I was feeling about it, even though I’m not a psychotherapist, how caught up in the drama I was. Yet again I was hearing about a tendency for those in authority to extend the arm of regulation into another area of life. This last decade in the UK has seen a large amount of this. So, was this a fit of “John Bull” or John Wilkes, leaping to the cause of liberty? Was this a resonance with the politician David Davis who recently resigned in protest at the extension of imprisonment without trial in the land which originated “habeas corpus” and Magna Carta? Yes, I can do liberty pretty well.

Is this another of the strong feeling that’s around at the moment of feeling besieged by forces beyond our control? There’s a lot of people at the moment feeling under an enormous amount of economic pressure right now as fuel and food prices rocket and redundancies increase. People are feeling very concerned. Going to join the next fuel protest?

Was the rebel part of me out in force? Yes, that can certainly be the case. I can do rebel big time, accompanied by doses of paranoia. I can also do the cause of justice pretty well too - any person or persons suffering perceived injustice.

I guess if there is particularly something I feel passionate about, it is that, behind the ups and downs of human affairs, there’s a healing process at work within us. Yes, there is a frequent oscillation between the individual person’s impulse to discover and realise more of their potential and the need of the group to manage interpersonal relations in the interests of all. But what I care deeply about is that whatever government “does”, I am also self-realising. That is my process. But I need also to appreciate that what happens “out there”, like interfering government, is also something that I am creating, even when I give my thought to it.

When we are faced with seeming adversity, when things don’t seem to be going as they should, that is in part because that is how I am thinking. I am giving my energy to it, I am helping to bring it into being.

I can and do express how I feel and support others in what they wish to do for causes I support. But I also need to look within and ask myself in what way I am contributing to what is occurring.

Put it another way, I might shift my awareness into conceiving ways of taking responsibility for my actions rather than be a victim, be fully present with being a totally professional person committed to service for its own sake, be unattached to feelings of paranoia etc., model in my own life and in my awareness and feeling how I am self-regulating and self-actualising, and let go of my shadow. What is happening “out there” is also a part of me, which I need to resolve within me. Above and beyond that is a Self that observes what happens with benign and compassionate detachment, unattached to the drama.

To thine own Self be true.

Subscribe to Meditations of a Life Coach by Email

Where is your sanctuary?

Do you have a place of sanctuary to which you can periodically retreat? What for you is a place of sanctuary?

For many I guess it’s a religious place and many may think of a monastery, say. In the Middle Ages, sanctuary was also where one went for safe keeping against the vengeance of some one, say in a Cathedral or other religious institution. Or it might be a special place in your house or garden, or a place you go to to get away from it all. For me, it’s a quiet place suitable for reflection and contemplation, for going within, to read, to meditate or, like now, to write. But it’s a time for inner stillness and, because of the place I’m in, to connect with nature which right now is lush with the ripeness of mid-summer.

I am currently having a short break at our French home in the department of Lot et Garonne. We are situated in a small bastide village on a hill top overlooking the lower Lot in South-West France. From our house and terrace we look out across the valley to the hills opposite.

It is a spectacular location, obviously well chosen for fortification by one of the competing interests in the Hundred Years’ War, with a vantage point looking down the valley towards the valley of the Garonne and up the valley too. A lot of English have purchased property in villages like this and I sometimes speculate that we have atonement to do for past lives of rape and pillage inflicted on the French population by marauding English armies under the likes of the Duke of Bedford.

Today it is a very peaceful environment, full of fruit orchards on a large scale and famous for its pruneaux d’Agen. If you want to get an idea of the landscape, you can click on this link www.france-sud-tourisme.fr (you might need video software like QuickTimePlayer - then click on the map at the point for Lot & Garonne, then click on the list of places - Castlemoron sur Lot - then pick left image in the box at the right hand corner. The sounds are authentic).

In another sense, the place of sanctuary is also within me. I find this is a great place to notice my still point within me, where I feel at one, peaceful and contented. Feeling joy at experiencing this environment is another gateway to access my inner joy. There are many gateways. It might be the delight in a small child’s face, as I experienced last night when my wife and I were out dining to celebrate her birthday and the child tottered past our table with a beam all over her face. It might be music, it might be poetry, it might be laughter, it might be memory, it might be inspiring words, it might be an intimate moment with a lover, it might be prayer or meditation. There are many moments when we can pause, take time out, breathe deeply and allow ourselves to connect with ourselves, with our inner vibration, with the vibration around us, with our own bliss-full inner essence, with the vibration of others – and remember who we are.

What is so important is to do it, to connect. It can need an effort, and maybe to take ourselves out of our ego state we may feel reluctant to come away from our absorption with the temporal, but by so doing we open ourselves up to be able to harvest the fruits of what is so easy and effortlessly available – another of life’s paradoxes.

Subscribe to Meditations of a Life Coach by Email