(Read to the end of this post for the winners of my competition last week.)

I’ve been through some black clouds this week, I expect some of you reading this have, also. But millions of people have it far worse than me, and probably you as well.

I was talking to a family member about this. She’s going through her own issues. We were discussing how to honour our own suffering without allowing it to define us.

Whether it’s physical, emotional, mental or practical, we all have problems, and sometimes they threaten to take us over.

The problem with problems

Image by Marja van Bochove

The problem is that the problem can run away with us. You know what that’s like: you focus on what’s wrong and so you feel worse and worse. Your thoughts drag you further and further down, like a muddy whirlpool. Your thoughts create a worse reality than you were in five minutes ago. Your suffering and problems will begin to define who you are if you let them.

But… if we don’t acknowledge our suffering we’re in danger of creating a Pollyanna on Prozac unreality for ourselves.

What doesn’t work

1. Beating ourselves up: “but so many people are worse off than me, I’m a really bad person to feel so sorry for myself”. That’s just going to make you feel guilty about feeling bad, on top of feeling bad.
2. Minimising it, telling ourselves what we’re going through doesn’t really count as “suffering”.
3. Other people telling you you just need to buck your ideas up (caveat: very occasionally that can be exactly what you need)
4. Ignoring the problem, telling yourself “I’m fine, really”. Because you’ll either go into a kind of emotional paralysis or your brain will kick back and pick up on the lie, which will make you feel worse.
5. Dwelling on the problem, brooding about it endlessly.
6. Doing nothing about it. A really bad option.

What does work

Here are a few suggestions:

1. 

   Image by D Sharon Pruitt

   Create a ritual to honour your own suffering. Sit down, clear some space for yourself, your feelings and thoughts and journal or draw them. Don’t censor yourself with any “shoulds”, and don’t minimise how you feel. Or light a candle or some incense and sit with your suffering, acknowledge it fully, for five minutes only. Or write a story about how you feel and then store it somewhere, perhaps in a beautiful bottle (to subvert the notion of bottling up your feelings), or bury it in the garden.

2. Use other people’s stories of hardship as inspiration, not as a stick to beat yourself with.
3. Do something physical, if you can. There’s nothing like movement to shake up the cobwebs and get those endorphins jiggling.
4. Gather a list of favourite inspirations that will give you some energy. I love this, and I often get up and dance to this or this.
5. Get some counselling or therapy or practical help. Sometimes we’re too proud and think we can or have to do everything ourselves (that’s a big issue for me).
6. If you’re religious, pray in your own tradition. If you’re not, find some kind of grounding meditative technique.
7. Find one aspect of the problem you can do something about, even if it’s just changing your attitude to it. Make a start on dealing with this aspect in some small way. Do something else small tomorrow. Baby steps build momentum.

Well, I feel better for even having written that. What are your suggestions for both honouring and dealing with your suffering? I’d love to hear them.

Competition results

Now, one way of healing ourselves is sharing with others, so I’m delighted to announce that I’ve drawn names out of the hat and two FREE places on Magpie Girl’s course Power Stories go to…

Drumroll…

Kel and Sulwyn!

Congratulations, I’ll send your details to Magpie and she’ll contact you shortly. I’m SO sorry to those who were disappointed.

Main image above by D. Sharon Pruitt

Elsewhere:

I love the way in which our faiths roll into each other. We are drawing to the end of Ramadan, and Abdur Rahman explains here the importance of these last ten days and their connection with seeking forgiveness.

Meanwhile, the Jewish High Holy Days are almost upon us, beginning with the celebration of Rosh Hashanah  next Wednesday, and lasting for ten days until Yom Kippur. Norman at Jewish Contemplative talks here about celebrating alone. “Each of us alone. All of us together.”

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Life isn’t always easy, is it? We get tripped up, tired out, over-committed, afraid.

That’s when we need to pull our communities and our stories around us like a warm blanket and let them draw out of us the strength and power that we all have, deep inside.

A great new e-course

Which is why I’m delighted to be a contributor to a new six-week e-course that Rachelle Mee-Chapman is launching at Magpie Girl on 13th September. It’s called Power Stories: tips and tales for standing in your own power.  Here’s the first part of Rachelle’s description of her course:

“Standing in your own power” is a phrase I use to describe a certain way of be-ing that involves listening to your intuition and following your gut. Too often, these things are programmed out of us by social norms and well-meaning institutions.

This course is designed to help you tap into your intuitive source of guidance; and to shut down noisy interlopers. As a result you will move through life from a place of powerful internal authority.

Learning to STAND results in:

• a strong sense of direction about personal relationships
• confident, “right fit” work decisions
• the strength to live into your own spiritual or religious beliefs
• a life that feels stable and energized – not timid and depleted.

Sounds just right, doesn’t it?

Now in the interests of full disclosure, I must tell you that if you book a space on Power Stories using the link in my sidebar to the right, I get a financial reward. But I would not recommend anything to you unless I believed in it, and I’ll be joining in the first Power Stories course myself.

You can read more about the course and the contributors at Magpie Girl: just click here.

Interview with Magpie Girl

Rachelle

Here’s an interview with Rachelle about her course. And keep reading to get to an exciting offer at the end of this post.

1. What inspired you to develop and offer your readers this course? My post *8Things I know about Standing in Your Own Power really resonated with Magpie Girl readers, and people emailed me asking for more information and advice.  I’m always excited by topics that emerge organically from the community. So I created more material around the topic, since it was such a felt need.  Many women struggle with standing in the truth of who they are.  Institutions, male influence, cultural images of “ideal” women – all these can push us around. Yet my young daughters, ages 10 and 12, intuitively stand in their own power. This tells me we aren’t meant to shrink and hide ourselves. I believe we can recover the ability to be powerful.
2. How did you decide what other voices to bring into the class and what do you think the diversity of voices brings to the course? Because learning to stand in my own power is a growing-edge for me, I wanted to recruit partners in the process. I thought of women who just hum with power, confidence, and kindness; and invited them to participate in the course. The lessons I received back from them were incredible! Having so many voices in our teaching pool helps us learn from a wide range of life experience – gay/straight/bi, married/divorced/single; child-free/mothers, 30/40/50 – there are so many perspectives amongst the contributors; it’s bound to meet the needs of far more people than my voice alone could impact.
3. Do you have a favorite aspect of the Power Stories? I’m really pleased that it has collection of learning tools – essays, podcasts, videos, and worksheets.  That variety makes it very textured and accessible. And I love how communal it is – both that the idea for the course emerged out of the Magpie Girl community, and that it is led by a collection of amazing teachers. Plus I get a kick out of some of the downloadable treats my design partner is cooking up!
4. How does Power Stories tie into the other work you do on Magpie Girl, and Flock ? At Magpie Girl I provide care for creative souls. At Flock we are building an online soultribe for spiritual misfits. Power Stories offers a skill-set that both communities need. Magpies need to stand in their own power to develop their artistic voice and to make room for creative pursuits. Flock members need a deep-rooted stance to support them as they re-define faith and spiritual practice in their own powerful terms.
5. How will the course fit into busy lives? You can read each lesson in Power Stories (or do each worksheet) as they arrive in your email box every couple of days. Or you can save them up and give yourself a bunch soulcare goodness on a self-styled weekend retreat. It’s up to you. Plus, I’m sort of a lackadaisical minimalist. I like a nice turn of phrase, but I don’t want to read filler. So each piece of material is honed to be beautifully to the point.

An offer you can’t refuse

Rachelle’s course will normally cost $100 (£65) for the six weeks, which seems like a pretty good deal to me, given all that’s included. And I’m really excited to say that I have two spaces on the course to give away for free. Nada. Nothing. If you want to be one of two lucky readers to get this six-week shot of strength and wisdom for absolutely nothing, leave a comment on this post or email me and I’ll pick names out of the hat next Sunday, 5th August.

Elsewhere:

While we’re talking about strength, you might want to take a look at a post called What Do You Want to Look Like. Not what I normally talk about here, but I love clothes. Although I think slavish fashion victims are pathetic, it’s easy to underestimate what our appearance says about us. Don’t compromise. Look the way you want to look.

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I was thinking about money the other day.

To explain: I currently work as an interim human resources project manager, taking on a series of short-term contracts. I just started a new nine-month contract, which is quite a long-term deal for me, a longer commitment than I ideally like. But as anyone who works freelance knows, there’s a sense of worrying that the work will dry up.

So I started thinking about how long I really need to work each year to support myself. I took this nine-month contract as a baseline and started playing around with some calculations.

And I had one of those eureka moments.

They say time is money, so I started thinking about what I buy in terms not of how much it costs in money, but how much it costs in my life passing by.

How long do I have to work to “earn” that book, that pizza, the groceries, that weekend trip?

I started a spreadsheet to record my purchases in time as well as money; it was a  revelation. It really helped me distinguish between what is of real (non-monetary) value and what’s just a passing fancy.

It makes frugality more attractive because by being less impulsive in my spending, I’m putting time into my piggy bank. And that can’t be taken away by a recession.

What do you invest your time in?

Image by kekremsi

Elsewhere:

Sally Lever has a great post called Frugality for the Terrified – click here to read it.

And if you’re interested in the mechanics of counting time, here’s what I did:

I took as a starting point that I don’t want to work at a conventional job for more than nine months in a year. (Actually I don’t want to work at a conventional job at all, and I hope this will be the last one, but that’s another story!)

So I took my gross earnings for this nine month period and deducted a rough sum for tax.

Then I divided this net amount by nine to get a monthly amount, multiplied that by 12 to get  net annual earnings. I divided the annual sum by both 52 to get weekly earnings and then that by 35 to get net hourly earnings.

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I remember reading about the separate worlds we inhabit in Richard Bach’s book Illusions:

…You live in the same world, do you, as a stockbroker, shall we say? Your life has just been all tumbled and changed, I presume, by the new SEC policy… You live in the same world as a tournament chess player, do you? With the New York Open going on this week, Petrosian and Fischer and Brown in Manhattan for a half-million-dollar purse, what are you doing in a hayfield in Maitland, Ohio? You with your 1929 Fleet biplane landed on a farm field, with your major life priorities farmers’ permission, people who want ten-minute airplane rides… and a mortal fear of hailstones…are you telling me that four billion people do not live in four billion separate worlds…?

I recently started reading a very unusual blog by Sway, a young man in prison. It’s called Sometimes These Walls Talk. So far outside my own experience is life in prison that I’ve been reluctant to comment up to now, almost not knowing what to say, how to contribute.

In his very first post he talks about not having access to a computer in prison, having to write his posts on paper and give them to a friend to transcribe. What luxury I live in by comparison, what conveniences I take for granted.

But Sway is by no means self-pitying. His writing is interesting, with glints of wry humour, and the stories he shares are compelling. I think this is a life of huge promise and optimism, despite his current circumstances. And the practical person that I am is fascinated by his description of how the prisoners build up relationships, with a technique of passing notes tied to combs, called fishing. He describes this in a beautiful post, Fishing for Poems.

We all  share human characteristic and have many experiences in common, but essentially I believe each of us inhabits separate yet interconnected worlds.

Why not go and visit Sway’s world, you won’t regret it?

Image by Robert Donovan

Elsewhere:

One common experience we all share in our humanity is of the loss of those we love. Several blogging friends have been bereaved in this past week. For them it’s the start of a long journey and their own experience of prison. I was very moved by Abdur Rahman’s timely reflection on death and love, A Link in the Chain. It contains great comfort.

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In the small corner of the provincial English town in which I currently live, there’s a local post office. It closes for lunch each day, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays it closes for the entire afternoon. I find this intensely irritating. It inconveniences me and it goes against all modern ideas of business as a service to its customers.

And yet…

I strive to live a simpler, slower life. How difficult is it for me to take into account the well-publicised opening hours of a small sub-post office run by only two staff, who work hard enough to deserve an undisturbed lunch break and some time off each week?

Not difficult at all really, but the notion of service is so ingrained in us in our 24×7 world that this post office arrangement seems almost deliberately antagonistic.

There’s a lot about service in the Christian Gospels as well: being of service to others, offering oneself in service to God and community. Service is expected of Christians (and of many other faiths, Islam for example.) But Christ regularly withdrew from the crowds. We have his example of rest, and the whole piece around keeping the Sabbath holy. I am a personal advocate of having “Sabbath moments” throughout the day.

But despite being aware all that, it still makes me illogically angry that I have to think about what time it is before I walk down to post a parcel. I don’t want that limit.

What limitations are you unwilling to accept?

Image by Post Box

Elsewhere:

Let’s give ourselves a Sabbath moment by looking at this beautiful visual meditation of seeds by Elaine at Green and Berries.

And in choosing the image to go with this post, I was delighted to find on Flickr whole groups devoted to photographing British post boxes and post offices. It shows that eccentricity lives on in my country! Here’s the Postboxes by postcode group, just for fun.

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Well what a delight, Sue at Discombobula has been kind enough to pass on to me the I Love Your Blog award! I’m very grateful and am in pretty august company.

The idea is to list ten things that you love, and pass on the award. Check out Sue’s post here where she lists her ten things. (Pay no attention to the undeservedly nasty things she says about lapsong souchong tea though…)

I’m going to bend the rules here in a couple of ways. First of all I’m not going to pass this on to any specific blogs. I don’t want to leave anyone out. If you want to play, please do.

Second, there are so many more than ten things I love that I’m going to narrow my focus and give you my ten favourite movies of all time. They are in alphabetical order because I would find it impossible to put them in order of preference. And I’m cheating by including a couple of duos and a trilogy as single choices.

So here my top ten movies:

Baghdad Café

Directed by Percy Adlon, this 1987 film is a magical exploration of life and possibility, starring Marianne Sägebrecht as a lonely German tourist in the U.S. who turns up at a run-down desert motel after a row with her horrible husband. She befriends motel-owner CCH Pounder, becoming the catalyst for all sort of change in the process. The late, very great and hugely under-rated Jack Palance provides superb support.

Casablanca

What’s left to say about Michael Curtiz’s 1940s classic romance? Every time I see it I’m almost shocked by just how extraordinarily beautiful Ingrid Berman was. The film was just one of many scheduled to roll off the studio production line at Warner Brothers that year, no-one realised one of the all-time greats was in the making. For me, one of the best scenes was the French patrons at Rick’s café drowning out the Germans by singing The Marseillaise. There’s a clip of it here.

Chocolat

One of the most enchanting films of all time, and for me at least, one of the few which is actually better than the book it was based on.

Lasse Halstrom’s film has a cast to die for, led by Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp, supported by Lena Olin (Halstrom’s wife), Alfred Molina, Judi Dench and Carrie-Anne Moss. You know it’s a strong cast when the lesser characters are played by people like John Wood, Leslie Caron and Peter Stomare! I found this video compilation above based on the party scene towards the end.

Godfather I and II

These films are also far better than the book. Coppola’s direction, Willis’s cinematography and indeed Puzo’s screenplay based on his own novel take this film into a whole other realm. As an illustration of how an emphasis on the importance of family and community can sit side-by-side with extreme violence, I think it’s unrivalled. (Although Road to Perdition comes close.) And I’m not at all sure whether Brando, Pacino or de Niro have ever matched their performances in these two films. It’s just a pity that the third part of the trilogy was so bad.

Kill Bill I and II

I’m a big fan of Quentin Tarantino’s imagination, quirkiness and grandiose vision. He’s a kind of demented Hitchcock. I could almost have chosen any of his films for my top ten, but I find myself coming back to Kill Bill more than to any of the others, partly because I’m a fan of David Carradine, partly because all the characterisations are so completely over the top and the visual styling is superb. A ripping yarn indeed!

Lord of the Rings Trilogy

I’ve only ever stayed up to watch the Oscars live once, and that was in 2003, when the third film in Peter Jackson’s trilogy, Lord of the Rings Return of the King, swept the board and won all eleven Oscars for which it was nominated. I jumped up and cheered when it won Best Picture.

LOTR is one of my all-time favourite books, and in some ways the films couldn’t possibly live up to them. The first film in particular is rather flawed: not all the special effects work that well, Ian McKellan’s performance is a bit over the top and Orlando Bloom’s rather wooden. But taken as a whole, this trilogy is an absolutely amazing accomplishment. A tip? Try and get hold of the director’s cut special edition DVDs with extended footage. They are much better than the original films and have all kinds of fascinating features on how various effects were achieved.

The Matrix

I love Sci-Fi at the best of times, and this film blew me away when I first saw it. Why? Because the world of the Matrix, in which our conscious lives are imaginary and are regulated by an unseen intelligence, is exactly how I was convinced things were as a child. Perhaps they are. This film is an amazing feat of imagination by the Wachowski brothers, brilliantly plotted and portrayed. So, will you take the red pill or the blue pill?

Shawshank Redemption

I put off watching this film for years because I didn’t see how something set in a prison could be uplifting. Of course now I know better, and although prisons are grim, hope flutters around the corner somewhere, and we have so many examples over the ages of people who have been catalysts for change in prisons, like Tim Robbins’ character here amidst the brutality. Many of you will be familiar with this iconic scene from the film, when beauty comes unexpectedly to the men at Shawshank.

Singin’ in the Rain

Funny, uplifting, superb dancing, wonderful slapstick, catchy tunes, interesting snippets of cinema history: what more could you want?

Trois Coleurs: Bleu

And finally, because life is sometimes almost more than we can bear, the first of Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy, with Juliette Binoche’s searing exploration of bereavement and the rebirth of possibility.

So thanks again for the award, Sue, and please play along with ten favourite things if you want to.

To end on a high note, if this doesn’t get your feet tapping, nothing will:

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I’m delighted today to publish a guest post by Marian Van Eyk McCain, editor of a new book GreenSpirit, Path to a New Consciousness. Marian has long been one of my favourite writers and I was happy to meet her in real life a few weeks ago and spend time in her beautiful corner of the English countryside. Over to you, Marian:

Another of those gardening catalogues just came. I am forever taking myself off mailing lists but somehow it keeps happening. This one is from the firm that sold me the little fig tree I blogged about last year so they have my address again.

I leaf through the pages as I eat my breakfast. Colour co-ordinated flower beds…shades of blue…or would you prefer shades of pink? Eeek!! Forget it! This is my garden, for goodness’ sake, not my living-room. (Mind you, my living-room is not exactly colour co-ordinated either, I have to tell you. Well why should it be? It is a living room, not a showroom.)

Nature, where I live, is not colour-co-ordinated. Yet everything Nature creates without human intervention, like this tangle in the hedgerow, this glorious, riotous, multi-hued tangle, goes together perfectly. Nature is messy. Life is messy.

Was it because those 19th and 20th Century philosophers had fantasies of ‘taming’ Nature that they so admired the neat and tidy? Think about Victorian gardens, their straight paths, their topiary, their forced, unnatural symmetry. No, that’s not for me. I don’t see beauty in that. Just a misguided desire for control: an overweening arrogance. It is the arrogance that brought us to where we are today, on the brink of environmental freefall as the strain on our ecosystems takes them to a tipping point from which they may never be able to recover.

When I look at the tangle in the hedgerow I see beauty, vibrancy, the life force made abundantly manifest. Messy? Sure.

In fact, as we now know, the process of evolution has always needed—and still needs—messiness.

Complexity theorist Jean Bee, one of the contributors to the new book GreenSpirit: Path to a New Consciousness, writes:

Complexity theory has arisen, over more than half a century, out of the work of many scientists and social scientists who seek to investigate the implications of embracing the world as messy, interconnected, open to influences and change, able to learn…Essentially, this work tells us that:

• Things interrelate, affect each other in a messy, complex, systemic fashion
• Variation and diversity are necessary for creativity, change, evolution, emergence
• Things build on the past, but not with clear one-to-one correspondences and cause-effect relationships
• There is more than one possible future; the future cannot be reliably predicted from the past
• At key moments or tipping points, radically new features and characteristics can emerge
• Top-down design and control will certainly have an effect, but may lead to unintended outcomes

Systems which are diverse, richly connected and open to their environments can evolve a sort of form, or patterning, and this may be more harmoniously in tune with its surroundings that one imposed from above.

This emerging worldview, which seems more in tune with our personal experience of life, creates a powerful new image for all sorts of institutional thinking, including spiritual traditions. It is itself paradoxical and uncertain in that we are less clear how to act, how to intervene. Does it mean there should be no design, no leadership, no control? Is emergent structure always helpful and generative? Might we not just sink into chaos and disorder? Indeed, are our current problems the result of too much control or not enough? It raises issues of ethics, of the politics of participation, of power and domination. There are no easy answers. But imagining that the world is predictable and controllable when it is not is not helpful either; our current economic, social and environmental crises are, perhaps, ample evidence of that.

So we shall, as the contributors to this book suggest, try new ways of being in this 21st Century. We shall search for solutions to the problems that beset us. We shall build new infrastructures. With any luck, we ourselves shall continue to evolve, at least in terms of our awareness, our consciousness our understanding of who and what we are in relation to the rest of Nature. We shall, I hope, finally rid ourselves of the arrogance that has led us so far astray.

Who knows what interesting tangle will result? Let’s hope it is green and lovely and full of vibrant life.

All images by Marian Van Eyk McCain

About Marian:

Marian Van Eyk McCain is the author of three non-fiction books, including The Lilypad List: 7 steps to the simple life (Findhorn Press, 2004), a primer for living simply and lightly on the planet.

She is Co-Editor of the GreenSpirit Journal and Editor of GreenSpirit: Path to a New Consciousness (O Books, 2010), a new anthology with a Foreword by Satish Kumar and contributions from Brian Swimme, Matthew Fox, David Korten, Stephan Harding, Cormac Cullinan, Chris Clarke and nineteen other writers. (The book is being launched in London on Wednesday July 14th by Jonathon Porritt – click here for details.)

Marian’s main website, which reflects her keen interest in ‘green and conscious aging’ is at Elderwoman.

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Obedience is an old-fashioned and emotive word, isn’t it? Memories of childhood and school. Makes me want to yell “SHAN’T” at the top of my voice!

It’s one of the three vows Benedictine monastics take. I’d love to know how you react to the word and the concept.

What is Benedictine obedience?

First let me offer my interpretation of what this means in the context of Benedictine spirituality:

Image by Vieux Bandit

The first word of the Rule of Benedict is Listen. Obedience is about listening. The listening ear, the listening heart, humility before God.

Benedict’s primary model is Christ himself, and his obedience to God, unto death.

The Superior holds the place of Christ in the monastery, the monks as disciples, who listen and learn in obedience, although Benedict accepts the Superior may not always be right.

Benedict also says we must show obedience to one another, to respect and be patient. He says no-one should pursue what is to his or her advantage, but rather what is for the good of others. Tough one.

Joan Chittister says this:

How is it that a Rule that purports to deal with the spiritual life can possibly put so much stock in the human dimensions of community? Obedience to God is imperative, yes, but so much emphasis on obedience to a prioress or abbot, to leaders whose mundane lives are as limited as our own, almost seems to make a mockery of the very concept. If this is a life centered in the call of God, then why so much attention to the human?

“The answer, of course, is that the human is the only place we can really be sure that God is. It is so easy to love the God we do not see but it is so much more sanctifying to serve the God we learn to see in others.

What about the need for disobedience?

Joan Chittister is quite a good example of this, actually, because she is certainly considered very disobedient by the Vatican. She believes the Catholic Church should have female priests (gasp!) and is not shy about expressing this belief. For her, the moral issue overrides church leadership diktats.

And what about everyday life? How does the artist reconcile the imperative to express her art with her responsibility of caring for her children? How does the businessman make a decision about closing his company and putting people out of work so he can be obedient to a deeper calling? For that matter how does a Benedictine monastic make the decision that it’s time to leave that life behind?

What do you think?

I’d love to know what you make of this rather old-fashioned word, obedience. What are you obedient to? How do you listen for the still small voice within, and what it might be leading you to?

Elsewhere:

Over at Magpie Girl’s Flock, we’ve been talking about the importance of self-care, and I really liked this post in her main blog which talks about combining life as an artist with chronic illness. Listening to your own needs is an important part of obedience.

Image by Noel Zia Lee

Coming soon!

Finally, if you enjoyed my Greenspirit video, watch out for an interesting guest post coming here at Anchors & Masts this Friday, 9th July.

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Often when I’m talking about the Enneagram, people get worried that discovering their personality “type” is going to put a label on them.

We tend to resent being labelled, but we label ourselves all the time: conservative/liberal, gay/straight, old/young, extrovert/introvert. Some of our labels are factual, some are a question of degree, some are more important than others. Some may not even be true. None of them give the complete story of who we are.

So what use are they?

I recently took the Myers Briggs typology test again. (I used this site, which is fully accredited by the Myers & Briggs Foundation. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the MBTI measures where we focus, how we deal with information, how we make decisions, and the structure we prefer to use in dealing with the outside world.) I’ve taken this test before, but always in a business context, and this time I actually answered all the questions truthfully, rather than how I thought I should answer.

My new results (INFP) aren’t really the point, although it was a real ‘aha’ moment for me. What is important is that all these personality systems and tests are just a parlour game unless we make use of them.

I believe the work of our lives is twofold: doing and being.

And like the eagle, we must circle closer and closer to who we really are, because the two are intimately linked. If we don’t know ourselves, we won’t know what we are really meant to do.

Ayn Rand once said:

To say ‘I love you’ one must first be able to say the ‘I.’

That’s why I believe so strongly that structured ways of looking at personality, such as Enneagram and MBTI are really helpful, and that these “labels” are to be worked with in reflection, exercises, prayer and observation, not just left as a brief moment of illumination.

What are your experiences of helpful labels?

Image by playingwithbrushes

Elsewhere:

Claire writes about coming home to herself here, and Lucy talks here about the different parts of the song that make up the whole.

And happy 4th tomorrow to all my American friends!

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Today is Summer Solstice in the Northern hemisphere, the longest day of the year, on which people gather to greet the sun at sacred sites such as Stonehenge. As I stand in my wild garden today, I see and hear dozens of bees conducting their age-old sacred dance in and out of the flowers.

But this year, at the same time earthy people are celebrating the energy of the sun, we are grieving as oil spills like the Earth’s blood into the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s easy to blame BP, but we are the ones who use oil-based products, and far more of them than we need. We need to live more simply, we need to do our bit.

I was moved by a post last week by The Pollinatrix, which you can read in full here. In it, she quotes a prayer request by Chief Arvol Looking Horse of the Wolakota Foundation.

Here is some of what he says:

The dangers we are faced with at this time are not of spirit. The catastrophe that has happened with the oil spill which looks like the bleeding of Grandmother Earth, is made by human mistakes, mistakes that we cannot afford to continue to make.

I ask, as Spiritual Leaders, that we join together, united in prayer with the whole of our Global Communities. My concern is these serious issues will continue to worsen, as a domino effect that our Ancestors have warned us of in their Prophecies.

I know in my heart there are millions of people that feel our united prayers for the sake of our Grandmother Earth are long overdue.  I believe we as Spiritual people must gather ourselves and focus our thoughts and prayers to allow the healing of the many wounds that have been inflicted on the Earth.

As we honor the Cycle of Life, let us call for Prayer circles globally to assist in healing Grandmother Earth.

We ask for prayers that the oil spill, this bleeding, will stop. That the winds stay calm to assist in the work. Pray for the people to be guided in repairing this mistake, and that we may also seek to live in harmony, as we make the choice to change the destructive path we are on.

As we pray, we will fully understand that we are all connected.  And that what we create can have lasting effects on all life.

So let us unite spiritually, All Nations, All Faiths, One Prayer.  Along with this immediate effort, I also ask to please remember June 21st, World Peace and Prayer Day/Honoring Sacred Sites day. Whether it is a natural site, a temple, a church, a synagogue or just your own sacred space, let us make a prayer for all life, for good decision making by our Nations, for our children’s future and well-being, and the generations to come.

My hope on this Solstice day is that the disaster in the Gulf will finally bring people together, will finally encourage us to change our lives and live as part of the Earth, not as if we are in charge of her. Perhaps it’s a futile hope, but I choose to think it is not. So today, 21st June, is a day upon which people all over the world are invited to gather in prayer for the healing of the Earth.

Will you  join us?

Image by vintagedept

Elsewhere:

Treehugger is a good place to keep up to date with the oil spill, and all kinds of other environmental matters. A lot of our over-use of resources is because we think we have no time. Sally Lever has some good questions about The Tyranny of Convenience.

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