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The Pause
This month, I started working with a new holistic coaching client. We’ll call her Jill. Like many of us, Jill is having some recurring issues and situations that are unpleasant and have plagued her most of her life. She knows she is ready to finally bring them to the surface and then purge them once and for all. Wanting to escape or circumvent the pain is a natural human reaction, so you can imagine her annoyance when I said that this would be our starting point. If we don’t look at our pain, we have no idea where we are wounded, and if we can’t identify our wounds, how can we ever know where to start the process of healing them?
Beginner’s Mind…Again
Last week, I was excited to see my personal belongings being loaded on a truck and headed to NY, where they will set sail to meet me in my new home across the sea.
As the moving van pulled away, I was reminded of the first trip I took there in April. Leaving Rome and heading deeper into the countryside, I had a bit of a panic attack as I started to ascend the road leading to “the rock” upon which my hilltop city rests. Within minutes of arriving at the place where I was staying, it suddenly hit me that I had never been to this part of the country before, didn’t know a soul, and didn’t speak the language. But fear of the unknown quickly turned to excitement of the unknown as I reminded myself that I was going to have the opportunity to have beginner's mind again and to see so many new things that were waiting for me to discover.
The Open Palm
When I was a young child, I couldn’t wait until I was an old person (which I was sure all 40-year-olds were). I thought the years of working would be finished, and there would be financial security, a solid relationship with the person I would grow old with, and a house full of children and grandchildren. Naively, I thought that all of the trials and tribulations of life would be behind me. But as I have exceeded the doddering age of 40, I have come to see that the picture doesn’t always look the way it was envisioned in youth and that those lessons, and the pain that often accompanies them, do not stop.
The Birth of a Venus
I have been thinking a lot about the energy of spring. It is a time of year when many people start to feel excitement as they shake off the dormancy of winter and prepare for life to start to sprout up again. Personally, this spring feels more like a time of renewal than ever before as I leave to find a home in another country and prepare to give birth to a new life.
Permission
I’ve been asked a lot lately about what possessed me to make the radical changes to my life I’ve made this past year and the even more radical ones I am embarking on in the next couple of months. What made me leave the comforts of the life I knew is a question I get from people (particularly women) excited to see me designing a whole new life but seemingly resigned to not daring to dream themselves.
New Year, New Visions
Happy New Year!?
This is something we say this time of year, but it occurs to me that this is more of a question than a statement. Whether it will be happy or not will be significantly impacted by the energy that you bring to it.
The Stranger
I recently heard someone say that freedom wasn’t “nothing left to lose” but rather, “nothing left to be.” What a powerful statement on the peace that comes with finally finding and accepting one’s authentic self.