Author: Ingrid Hoffman

July 13, 2012 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

When You Say Nothing At All

The Victorians had a language of flowers to express what they felt. Before them, Shakespeare’s Ophelia exclaimed, “Look at my flowers. There’s rosemary, that’s for remembering. Please remember, love. And there are pansies, they’re for thoughts.” Hallmark says it sometimes, in flowery cliché. But when words fail us, it is in the space in-between where deep levels of intense experience emerge from the silence. Viennese philosopher Martin Buber spoke of a sacred space between “I” and “thou”. A place where there is a dissolution of boundaries, where we meet as separate entities and merge to transcend the dense physicality of our bodies, bridge the fear that divides, sink softly into blissful connection. Throughout the ages, songs, poetry, literature, and now cinema, echo this plaintive yearning. In the movie, Notting Hill, Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) speaks for us all in that terrifying moment when we open our hearts, reveal our longing, and pray we will be loved in return. She stands before Will Thacker, (Hugh Grant playing his quintessential self) in a pair of flip flops and says with sweet simplicity “remember I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her”.

In the silence of disconnection lies a loneliness that devours the human heart. We staunch the flow of our scarlet life blood with sterile tourniquets: undemanding friendships in controllable portions – teaspoon by convenient teaspoon. Phantom friendships and shadowy lovers stay beyond our castle walls safely in the distance of social networking sites. We seek out only those friends or consult “experts” who soothe our anxious minds with palliative agreements, coddle our egos with judgements that suit our world-view, rock us back to sleep, draw the curtains so we cannot see the cycles of the moon, or hear the song of our soul calling us to grow.

“Boundaries”. A high currency word, much favoured by psychotherapists and life coaches, bandied about by readers of self-help books. Often these “boundaries” are the walls we erect with bricks and mortar from our egos. Walls that separate us from Life, from Love. Like gnarled bonsai in decorative planters, we live our safely contained, carefully clipped, little lives behind literal or figurative walls that block out the light of the sun and obscure the shimmering stars.

When we distance, judge, presume, and imagine that someone thinks or feels a certain way, in fact we have no inkling what they think or feel at all. Our stories about others say everything about us. It is only in our bravest moments of soul nakedness that we dare admit the truth. We’re hungry to be loved, to be special, and to be needed. “Can we start over?” Norman asks in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: “I’m not charming and I’m not good at repartee. My name is Norman and I’m lonely.”

It is in our moment of heroic glory that we detonate the boundary wall of lies; dismantle the gaudy facade of our charming, independent, important, busy, care-free lives. In the differences that we think separate us is our completion. In the ebb and flow of our relationships, the starfish of new growth. In our relationships we discover the sweetness of dying, as we release ancient fear, cross the threshold of solitude, meet each other on the bridge that arcs over the river of Life.

Alvy Singer says to Annie Hall as they end their relationship, “A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And what we’ve got on our hands is a dead shark.” Relationships, like sharks, need momentum, or they suffocate beneath the weight of mutual wounding, become hooked in nets, speared with words which say, “I don’t mind being on my own. I need to take care of myself, because no one else will.”

Words erect boundaries, and there are times when we must say nothing at all. It is in the silent spaces we discover the convoluted excuses we use we keep people at bay, afraid to say what we feel, terrified to ask for what we need. Perhaps, when we say nothing at all, we might dare take off the clothing of our self-depreciating beliefs. And stand naked as we reveal our longing for one another in the quantum field of Love.

Alison Krauss soars …

July 5, 2012 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Be Careful of my Heart

After the initial parabola of passion, affairs can be a descent into hell. A roller-coaster ride that skewers our heart. Scalds us with guilt and grief in the after-shock of transcendent bliss. In virtually every marriage code in virtually every society, adultery is unequivocally prohibited. In ancient Babylonia, punishment was death by drowning. And incredibly, in many places today, the perpetrators of this dastardly crime against the laws of man are flogged – 100 stripes, or stoned to death. For millions more, the punishment is divorce, financial ruin, loss of their children, ostracism from their families, or worst of all, the solemn burial of their authentic feelings, and their true selves deep within a life of quiet desperation. Increasingly in these financially austere times estranged couples rattle about in the empty shell of their marriage because of the mortgage repayments. Some stick it out for the sake of the children, the elderly parents, blocking their ears to the silent scream of indifference which brutalises the soul. The tender memory of the lover’s embrace bruises the skin for years to come, long after the albatross of the affair has been killed and thrown into the ocean depths.

Adultery comes from Latin – which means “ to pollute, or corrupt.” What is polluted? Trust? Ownership?

“Morality is a human creation. The Universe does not judge,” says Gary Zukav.

The psychological view sounds more like a laboratory study of Planet of the Apes. Therapists, like little boys, pull the legs off butterflies, break things into smaller and smaller pieces so that they can see how they work. Marriage counsellors urge couples to “work harder” at their relationships; they come up with strategies, hormones, and formulae to fit the broken pieces together again. In her book Adultery, Louise DeSalvo comments, “ perhaps adultery makes evolutionary sense: perhaps it is a pesky way our species guarantees its survival.” David Barash, in The Myth of Monogamy proposes, “ When it comes to human beings, there’s absolutely no question about monogamy being natural. It’s not. The male’s goal is to make sure his genes live on and therefore he sets out to fertilize as many females as possible. Women, on the other hand, spend nine months pregnant and then have to care for their children. So it’s in the interest of the woman to find one man who will stay with her, or at least help her take care of her offspring, and some might argue that the man is preferably wealthy or powerful. Females, by nature, are choosier and less opportunistic.”

If only it were that simple. So often, in Love, the dots don’t join. Like the waxing and the waning of the moon, the human heart has phases of light when we turn to face the full magnificence of the sun; times of darkness, as we enfold the mystery of our passion close to our breast. There’s no book of rules, no etiquette to guide us through the perilous seas of Love. Do we throw everything away if Love comes knocking at the door, splintering our hearts, battering down the walls of the life we have built so carefully? Do we risk all for passion, adventure, the unknown, when the rugged terrain of a long relationship has been charted, co-habited. Do we stay, knowing there will always be more soul work, more growth work, as we grind away the sharp edges? Do we fall from the trapeze if there are no waiting hands to catch us? Do we encounter the paradox of forbidden Love, swooning as our hearts sweeten with joy while our minds crucify us between the thieves of Shame and Sorrow? If we’re the one that leaves, our parting of ways will involve a dismemberment of the life we knew. An annihilation of our old self. There will be dark nights when we wake with fear gnawing through our belly.

“It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for a while and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship one requires”, says Clarissa Pinkola Estes. At some time or another, we will come to the crossroads of choice, and the awakening of consciousness. So do we hone what we have into what our heart longs for? Do we differentiate, individuate, heal our childhood hunger … if we can’t be with the one we love, do we love the one we’re with? Or do we risk it all to leap like a salmon over the rocks, tumble over waterfalls following our instincts as a new impetus of growth calls us up to swim as if our life depends on it. And it does.

“There is some kiss we want with our whole lives,” said Rumi. Some of us may search for that kiss through our adolescence, our experimental twenties, and often turbulent thirties. We stuff the anger, the longing deep down. Numb our longing with the busy-ness of life. Is this as good as it gets, we ask ourselves, filling the hole in our heart with longer hours at the computer, the gym, the office, or another glass of wine when we get home.

It may take the catalyst of an affair to expose the cracks in the chalice of our marriage. It may take the sweet kiss of just one person to awaken us from our slumber. And one day, we take the risk…

Re-birthing our souls is never as simple as leaving the husk of a desiccated relationship, changing jobs, walking the Camino, or falling in love with someone new. It is an arduous task, which requires endurance… and courage. Unless we’re willing to look honestly at ourselves, merely switching partners will bring the same issues we tried to escape from with our previous partner, often leaving us marooned, stripped of our innocence. But if we are conscious, and serious about the tugging at our hearts, there are rich lessons in each new relationship, as we retrieve the long-buried parts of ourselves — our passion, our sensuality, our joy — our deceitful, destructive Shadow.

When, at last, we come to trust our own instincts, hear and respect our own voices, feel valuable enough to touch that fertile, erotic, vulnerable part of our self, buried beneath the sediments of cultural conditioning and wipe the sleep from our own eyes, we dare to risk bursting into blossom.

Our choices in love are sacred. Authentic love feels like a reunion, recognition, and if our ways must part, the love we once shared remains, all-ways.

Painting by Frida Kahlo

Tracy Chapman

You and your sweet smile
You and all your tantalizing ways
You and your honey lips
You and all the sweet things that they say
You and your wild wild ways
One day you just up and walked away

June 28, 2012 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Breaking the Silence

Today I break a five-week media fast. No internet, no phone, no movies, no books. No one’s opinions or thoughts but my own. Sweet interludes of solitude. Silence between the soft spaces of a nomadic rhythm of movement across the burnished wheat fields of Sicily. Rocked by the ferries that carried me over shimmering turquoise waves, progressing slowly from the toe to the thigh of Italy. I reflected on my life, silently observed my fellow travellers, some paddling with two thumbs across the siren screens of their iPads. Some attached by two slender umbilical cords emerging from each ear, staring into the distance with unreachable eyes. Sitting silent and still on the black beaches of Stromboli, I contemplated our world at this time of unsettling change. A time where advances in technology have irrevocably altered the way we think, the way we behave. At first, I observed my doppelganger’s addiction to a fibre optic world that chatters unceasingly, filling my head with a jumble of thoughts, the pretence of belonging to a “global village” which is as make-believe as Disney World.

As the weeks warmed into the jasmine-scented solstice, the yearning for simplicity, for silence carried me Home to myself once more. In quiet piazzas of rural Sicily, people still gather at ancient wells and fountains in the cool of the evening. They sit on benches, talking, listening to one another. Old men clatter over worn cobblestones on rickety bicycles, and like battle weary knights, dismount from their steel steeds to drink a glass of wine or sip a limoncello as the swallows stitch apricot clouds together with invisible thread. My doppelganger self imagined another life … what if?

As our world becomes less and less certain, the perennial questions, “Who Am I?” and “What if?” thunder across the abyss of disconnection and loneliness. Movies like Sliding Doors (1998) and the expansive Another Earth (2011) echo this age-old motif. What if we choose differently, who would we be? Philip K. Dick (his short stories now depicted in movies like Blade Runner, Total Recall, The Adjustment Bureau and Minority Report) is quoted as saying, “I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.”

Whether this world meets our standards or not, it is often a lonely, inhospitable place for so many. Alternative history, a parallel universe, a world where Big Brother watches our every move… where “artificial intelligence” out-smarts us at our own game, where we fall in love with robots. Out of our own minds we spin the thread of our own reality, and make choices based on a memory bank of feelings and subjective experiences that are echoes of a reality that does not exist. Or does it?

In mythology, fiction and folklore, the doppelganger was a harbinger of death or ill fortune. A spirit double, a bi-located self appears in all mythology. In modern movies and literature, where parallel universes exist, in cyberspace where avatars fulfil our fantasies, doppelgangers can be anything we want them to be in the Wonderland of our own imaginings. We can experience those parts of our psyches that we wear like the whisper of silken lingerie: The noble, the generous, the compassionate, and the wise. We can try out for size the “good” Dr Henry Jekyll or the “evil” Edward Hyde. In the undulation of daily life we can experience the doppelganger as we experience the paradox of the human condition, the duality of our perfection. There may be times in our lives where we dwell in the dark valley of negativity and depression, and no amount of therapy or self-help literature will lure us up to the Light… until we are ready to experience being in the Light.

Or the time may come when we become weary of our own games and courageously step into the new reality of seeing our relationships with new eyes, focusing on what is good, right, affirming, about our work or our living conditions. As in fiction, from the mists of our past, emerges a New Self concealed beneath the old one. And like a snake shedding its skin, we embrace our vulnerability as we let go one “reality” and accept another. To have something new, something better, we may have to give it all up, whether this is a relationship, a job, a belief about ourselves, others, or the world. Our old ways become as tattered and lacklustre as the wings of a butterfly as it finally flutters to the earth after its brief moment in the Sun.

As we consciously stay alert, aware of the thoughts and feelings that pinch and chaff, the emotions that resonate in our bodies, we can choose another reality, experiment with the Mystery of this life, stepping out of our limited perspective with its attachments, neurosis, judgments to give ourselves and the world another chance. As the Buddha said, to practice meeting life on its own terms instead of straining to make everything manageable, familiar, and safe. And then we begin again to experience this tremulous dew drop of life with all its paradox and all its wonder. In a reality that is here and now.

Do not go back to sleep.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

don’t go back to sleep.

you must ask for what you really want.

don’t go back to sleep.

people are going back and forth between the

door sill where the two worlds touch.

the door is round and open.

don’t go back to sleep – Rumi.

Art: Pakayla Biehn’s Dreamy Double Exposure.

Breaking the Silence – Loreena McKennitt

May 18, 2012 In Astrology, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

The Wind of Change

We cannot ignore the wind of change that is blowing across the world right now. We are living at a tipping point of turbulence and transformation that will test our spiritual mettle. Pluto and Uranus, harbingers of metamorphosis, square one another once more – as they did in the 1930s when our world was darkened by the impending devastation of a second world war. The counter culture and awakening of the 60s, set against the template of a conjunction of Pluto and Uranus in Virgo, is fermenting. We cannot ignore the wind of change that demands that we all commit to own roles as supporting actors on the stage of this collective drama. As the tempest rends the veil of illusion from our eyes and shakes us from our self-absorbed, self-serving Western mantra of ME, we will hear the fierce rattle at the windows of economies and governments. We will witness the annihilation of the tenuous structures in our own lives. These winds that shake the barley may blast us from the echo chamber of our minds, unstop our ears, open our hearts. As Einstein said, “no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Now more than ever we require a new dimension to our consciousness, a new way of Being in a world where nothing is certain.

Most of us know that the external props in our lives are as flimsy as straws when the wild wind blows. The real battle is not outside ourselves, but within our own soul, and Guidance is there during times of trauma and times of calm, if only we will be still and listen. The Fear that blocks our path may in reality cloak our greed, our vanity, our laziness, our resistance to grow. We may come to a point in our lives when we hunger for more than external insignia of status or a flimsy sense of our own power. The savage grace of a devastating illness, a crisis of loss may be the hallowed moment of our own personal Truth. In the 1200s, an Islamic scholar, Jalal ad-Din Rumi spoke for an inner jihad, not a war against the infidel, but a struggle against the ego. Nothing and everything has changed.

To live authentically in this new world, we will require grit and integrity and the spiritual strength to hold the tension of opposites. Acknowledging, not disowning, or allowing someone else to carry for us our neurosis, our vulnerability, our pettiness, our greatness. Holding the paradox that is our humanness, within a new framework. We cannot reach the soul through the intellect. Our quest is to dismantle the “I”. To enter, as the Spanish mystic, Teresa of Avila, who lived in the burning times of The Inquisition (1500s) said: “let us remember that within us there is a palace of immense magnificence”. The soul is in us, it surrounds us. Yet, one of the disadvantages in living in this modern age of “reason” is that intellect functions with logic, bottom-line analysis, research, spread sheets, strategy, right and wrongs. The intellect seeks solutions, wants results that are measurable. And the soul’s subtle song cannot be heard in the babble of the mind – it speaks to us in parables, metaphor, dreams and fleeting impressions, that float far from the constraints of cause and effect – beyond the borders of “hard work”, outcome based goal setting. The soul does not dwell in the house of Fairness or Reason. It resides in the Mansion of Mystery. We are living in Mysterious times. Jung said that the anima was the face of the soul. She was the Feminine, the vessel of Mystery, the antithesis of logic. Many mysteries are beyond the limit of Reason. They cannot withstand the scrutiny of the curiosity or dissection.

So when we empty ourselves of who we are not, release the need to hide behind a bogus self, the Light pours in to the hollow chambers and infuses us with feminine creativity. When we dwell in the realm of soul ful ness, we are in our dharma, the natural order of things. We are being who we truly are, with no masks, no artifice. As we open our hearts, calm our minds, become more grounded, more sensitive and sure of Who we are… we will dance like dervishes in the vortex of the wild wind. Celebrate as it howls at the doors and rattles the windows of our lives.

“The future’s in the air
I can feel it everywhere
Blowing with the wind of change…”

Scorpions – Wind Of Change

Artwork by Keith Burnett

May 11, 2012 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Wishin and Hopin

So often our approach to Love reflects the narcissism of our attention deficit times. We yearn to meet our soul mate, “The One” who will instantly ease our ache for intimacy, breathe hotly on the dim embers of our libido. We search for our soul mate who will share our interests, hear us, hold us, make us feel alive, young, bright and beautiful again. We encounter our soul mates in the first rush and blissful fusion of romantic love. That feeling that we have met before, that we are meant for each other. We return, innocent again, to The Garden of Unlimited Possibilty. A soul mate is defined as a person for whom one has a deep affinity, especially a lover, wife, husband – The World English Dictionary. This deep affinity awakens us from our slumber when we fall in love. When the shaken-not-stirred heady cocktail of chemicals bursts like champagne bubbles in our brains as we delight in the beauty of The Other; recognise the Divinity in ourselves. We float weightlessly, deliciously, in the amniotic warmth of our Return.

As a foundation for a lasting relationship, the drunken intoxication of meeting a soul mate is a Grace-filled initiation into the art of Love. And yet those of us who have endured times of travail on the long and often rough road of a committed relationship, or been shipwrecked on the inhospitable shores of loss after a brief ill-fated love affair, may wonder how this bliss of affinity is possible? In even the most compatible of couplings, there surely will be moments when a cloud of discord darkens domestic bliss? Barbie and Ken struggled to get through the brambles in their on-off romantic relationship – Mattel announcing in a news release that they had split up. Barbie’s broken heart healed once more when she become “friendly” with the Australian surfer, Blaine – never trust a woman with torpedo boobs and 3m femurs! The search for our soul mate is so often a fruitless quest for some ideal, some fantastic object of transcendence. A Big Ask, when most of us are little children in adult bodies.

If the relationship is to emerge from the chrysalis, there will be drops of blood. We will be required to strain and struggle from the warm, creative cocoon of romance in order to stretch and grow our wings, or they will remain forever crumpled. And when we fly free, as we must, we will collide with situations and behaviours that test our tenacity, bring us face to face with disowned parts of ourselves – and our lover.

The Imago model evangelises the concept that our soul mates are our wound mates. Says the high priest of this school of thought, Harville Hendrix, “We always marry someone for the purpose of finishing our childhood.” So when we are ready for adult commitment, more often than not, our unconscious mind selects someone who has positive and negative traits similar to those of our parents in order to have another chance to heal ourselves. All too often, though, we end up reliving the patterns that hurt us in the first place and stay stuck in a furrow of frustration, expressing our pain through criticism and angry words. Relationship guru, John Gottman believes that it is not conflict itself that lies at the root of relationship problems, but how it is handled. “Venting anger constructively can actually do wonders to clear the air and get a relationship back in balance,” he admonishes. But when what Gottman calls the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” – criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling – come crashing through our bedroom door and remain there, this is when the real work of repair and behaviour change begins. Or we can choose to descend into the sulphurous hell of an invisible divorce, where we live disconnected, like marionettes, going through the motions of marriage, “for the sake of the children”. And some of us hurt so badly, we dismember our love in the gruesome carnage of divorce.

Energy follows attention. “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them,” Albert Einstein said, yet we stay in the battle zone, guns blazing. When our needs aren’t met, we cry, sulk, have tantrums, withdraw – or walk away in the darkness of the Nigredo before the alchemy has worked its magic. Every time you “invest” in the negative, you are honing your ability to detect faults. Your energy amplifies the annoying and the fragile, and you create the conditions that allow your problems to grow like weeds in an unkempt field. Our spiritual work is in the templum of our relationships. “Only in Relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction and certainly not in isolation. The movement of behaviour is the sure guide to yourself. It’s the mirror of your consciousness; this mirror will reveal its content, the images, the attachments, the fears, the loneliness, the joy and sorrow. Poverty lies in running away from this, either in its sublimations or its identities,” says Krishnamurti.

And still we wish and hope. We cast wide our net online. We sign up for soul mate encounter groups. We think we have found The One, and embark on the perilous journey of commitment with meagre provisions, believing that with minimal effort, no change in our rigid behaviours, things will organically grow and we will live happily ever after. Relationships are like gardens. They require tending and frequent pruning to encourage new growth and fragrant flowers. Often it is in conflict and despair that the real growth happens. Rumi says, “When the grapes turn to wine, they long for the ability to change. When stars wheel around the North Pole, they are longing for our growing consciousness.”

Elizabeth Gilbert says “People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave.” This may be Ms Gilbert’s painful experience, but for some, a soul mate is the person who stays long enough to allow us to feel safe. Stays long enough to heal our hearts so that they can blossom and breathe intimacy. It is with the soul mate that holds our hand as we journey over the rocks, knowing not all roads are smoothly paved, that we come to know what Love is.

Says Melody Beattie, “Accept each part of the journey as it comes. Let each stretch of your path be what it needs to be … slow down a bit if you need to, but don’t stop.”

Wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’
Plannin’ and dreamin’ each night of his charms
That won’t get you into his arms… Dusty Springfield 1964

Barbie and Ken

Artwork: Waiting, by Donato Giancola

May 8, 2012 In Astrology, Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Dust in the Wind

Shall I leave my job, my relationship – can I afford not to? Shall I move home, live in the country? Am I ready to get married? Like mendicant dervishes whirling in the hurricane of our own confusion, we are blinded by the dust that swirls around the deeper truth of our questions. We falter, circle around the truth, obsess about the peripherals, back ourselves into the either-or, the no-escape corner, where we sit, huddled in the sandstorm of our immobilising fear.

It is tempting to hand over decision-making to our guru, our therapist, our rabbi, our priest. It is tempting to search for the answer to the dilemma that bedevils us outside ourselves. When we beseech someone out there to tell us what to do, we mute The Wise Man or Wise Woman within who know that the answers to the deeper questions are always found within the stillness of our own hearts.

No authority figure can ever know the sacred landscape of our soul. Their lives will be very different to ours; through the choices they have made, and if we follow their advice, our journey will be their journey, no longer ours. It is we who are the hero or heroine of our own story. When we reach the silence of surrender, that tipping point of acceptance of the situation, just as it is, we may come to a plateau of new perspective where we cease feeling sorry for ourselves, angry at someone else. Only when we stop blaming our partner, our friend, the organisation, or ourselves, can we sift through the chaff of fear and pain, our resistance to change; the guilt we may feel at “ letting someone down”, or the belief that we are “needed” by someone else. Only then can we know that our soul is calling us to new territory. “Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behaviour, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity. ” said M. Scott Peck. Observe the old scripts, the raucous voices that shout out their opinions. They may be the static that distorts the signal of our truth. When we close our eyes and connect with our full aliveness, tap into the perennial stream of our own power, we liberate ourselves from the shackles of indecision. When we cease wishing and hoping for things to be different, chaffing at our restraints, longing to escape, we can make a sober assessment of our situation, and reclaim our power to choose differently. Byron Katie says, “Suffering is optional. The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with reality… Which is more empowering –“I wish I hadn’t lost my job or I lost my job; what can I do now? ”

What we can do now is make a leap in passion and in trust. Witness the fleeting sandstorms of insecurity, conflict, loss, blame and guilt. What we can do now is to take responsibility for what it is we want, then commit to our wise decision, knowing that we are deserving of goodness and happiness.

Our lives, this world, are in a constant process of change, a continual cycle of birth, death, re-birth. The cycles of the planets symbolise above what is unfolding below: Pluto and Uranus, cosmic catalysts for change square up against one another again from June 7^th, provoking collective and personal change and new growth. Watch as political and economic events reflect the tension and metamorphosis. Feel the tension in our own lives, the need to slough off old skin, discard the mask, reclaim our original face.

A spiritual journey is a long process through desolate valleys, up steep mountainsides. Often it is our unhappiness or dis-ease that catapults us out of our entropy, arouses our quest for a more authentic life. We live in a state of paradox as we journey through the mystery and complexity of our daily lives, and deal with the consequences of the choices we make. “To proceed very far through the desert, you must be willing to meet existential suffering and work it through. In order to do this, the attitude toward pain has to change. This happens when we accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth.” – M. Scott Peck.

In those desert storms, clarity comes in moments of deep silence. Then we need to ask ourselves if we have the courage to follow the wisdom of our heart, accept the situation for what it is, take responsibility for the choice to walk across the threshold and enter a room we have never visited before.

Kansas

Now, don’t hang on, nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky
It slips away, and all your money won’t another minute buy
Dust in the wind
All we are is dust in the wind
All we are is dust in the wind
Dust in the wind
Everything is dust in the wind
Everything is dust in the wind
The wind

Artwork: Sandstorm by Rebekah Osorio

May 3, 2012 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Between Two Lungs

It is our in-breath that holds us in Life. And yet it is when an opportunistic virus squats in the warm moistness of our body, and our lungs rattle and wheeze in the echoing silence of the night, it is only then that we experience the desperate urgency of that vital breath. We can live for weeks without food, days without water, only minutes without the hallowed air that connects us to the world around us. Yet, how often do we move mechanically through our days, without pausing to marvel at the miracle that is our body. Until we wake from our stupor… until something goes wrong.

Many religions place care of the body as a sacred responsibility. The body is the temple for the soul, a physical form through which we all experience spirit, our humanness. Yet paradoxically, these same religions condemn our carnality; denounce our bodily functions, shame our sexuality. We have lost our ancient connection to the land, to our own animal bodies. We worship at the altar of the mind, banishing our bodies, mutilating ourselves in our vain quest for some standard of “perfection”. Physical fitness is extolled in the media and in Western culture, yet below the skin of the perfect body, lurks a fetid abscess of shame which poisons our blood, defiles our bones. We subjugate our natural cycles, starve our hunger for touch, use them like landfills for the garbage of shame and self-abuse. The memory of fear, loathing, and trauma, lies in the vaults of our musculature, stays, silenced in our timid, shallow breathing.

How many of us love our bodies? Care for them as we would minister to a beloved pet or a cherished child? The black rat of dissatisfaction gnaws in the belly of this body we say we love. Our bodies remain charred uninhabited landscapes. We’re talking heads, amputated from flesh and blood, swinging in space. So, there comes the day when our athletic knees fail us after years of hip misalignment, and we must genuflect. Our facial muscles atrophy from mis-use of botox, our shoulders ache, immobilised by static hours at the computer. We are dis-embodied – unable to access the intuitive wisdom – or the raw courage to defy the herd mind and attune to what feels self-nurturing.

As Caroline Myss says, “Our biography becomes our biology.” So coming Home to the body requires listening, in silence, to the body’s innate wisdom to heal, to regenerate. It may take years to silence the critical voices in our heads that push us beyond exhaustion, that quell our instinctual hunger and desire. Jung talks of the Eros principle to describe this sense of interconnectedness, this sense of being fully alive, awake, in our fleshy moist bodies. He connected Eros to the archetype of The Mother, the feminine, the connection with the Earth, with sensual touch, with food, with nurturing, with relatedness to all things. Eros is our life force. When the feminine is demonised, devalued, she slips silently underground. She falls asleep, emerges angry, erupts as dis-ease. Somatised emotions sing to us our soul-songs of pain.

In the patriarchal West, we honour Logos – the masculine. When masculine and feminine energies are imbalanced, as they are in so many institutions, and religions, what emerges is competitiveness, perfection, specialisation, over-rationalisation, greed, mis-use of power, and the ultimate insanity – war. When masculine and feminine are out of kilter, we try to transcend who we really are. So often it is an illness, some kind of physical break down that brings us Home to surrender, so softly to the warmth of our bodies. Says Marion Woodman, “This is your body, your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known. “

So, as we allow our minds to become still energy enters, the feelings overflow… we begin to breathe deeply, filling our soft bellies, receiving… Life. As we learn to trust, to take seriously the honour of loving our body, our dreams bring us precious pearls in oyster shells of metaphor, and imagery. They speak to us of dis-ease in our body if we are attentive, long before our bodies talk to us through symptoms. Or, perhaps an “accident” may open the door to a room in our psyche we have never entered. “Injury is an essential part of the life cycle of any active biological organism,” writes Josh Schrei. “Only in a world in which we seek an endless summer and a lifestyle of perpetual comfort would we consider injury as entirely negative. Our very life cycles say otherwise. Our mothers birth us in pain and rapture, structurally altering themselves — and often being injured — in the process. We ourselves are born through a passage that puts tremendous pressure on our new frames and warps them out of symmetry right from the start… The reality is that injury — like all things in this realm of physical preciousness, up to and including death — is a gift if we take it as such.”

We cannot destroy our energy; lose our power, (to anything or anyone). It is there all the time, in the sacred landscape of our body. In the heart, between our two lungs.

Florence and the Machine – Between Two Lungs

Dreams of a Saturday Morning in my Lover’s Bed – art by C.S. Scogins.

April 27, 2012 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Falling Slowly

Growing into wholeness can take many years, or it can happen in an instant. That Grace-filled moment when we can be alone with ourselves and truly like who we are. Often it is the spectre of fear that blocks the threshold to the brilliant blaze of full aliveness. We flounder as we grasp the elusive memory of wholeness, the melted butter richness of contentment, often so difficult to sustain in the context of our relationships, our working conditions, our financial worries. Reality congeals around us, enveloping the spark of hope; we are becalmed, stagnant, stuck. We lose our way in the dark woods; confront the black wolf of our own shadow. Phantom-like we float through the motions of marginal living, unable to feel even our joy, as we sit, silent, inconsolable. Yet through the symptoms in our tired bodies, our souls scream out from the abyss of our own isolation. We know what we don’t want. But do we have the clarity, in our sleep-deprived, crowded lives to glimpse the spark of passion that gives meaning to our existence? Do we know what we really love?

The lives we create with the thoughts we think, moment by moment, day by day, may obliterate that spark. Like the little Match Girl in the Hans Christian Anderson adaptation of the fairy tale, we wander the icy streets, staring into windows at abundant tables, Christmas trees bedecked with baubles and gingerbread sticks, the cosy log fires of other peoples’ living rooms. We sit in the nook of our days, striking match after creative match, depleting our life force, snuffing out our passion… settling for the falling star of the job, the relationship. We believe the slippery lies that freeze us to death. Perhaps our biggest fear may be that if we free our minds of the thoughts that petrify us, open our hearts, we will make those big life changes that will crash through the flimsy structures of our lives. Our marriages will be torn asunder, we will resign from our jobs, alienate our friends. Often that is exactly what does happen. And yet, if we stay with padlocked heart in the dark dungeon of routine chores or cup cake fixes – a new hair style, a pair of expensive shoes, a holiday, or interior design project to distract us – the price we pay for living in the safety zone will exhaust our spiritual bank account. We will project our dis-ease upon others in our homes and offices, we suffocate our souls with addictions, and we numb our bodies with medication. Eventually we must pay a price for a life unlived. “What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as Fate, ” said Jung.

The way of the heart is the way of the “sacred warrior” said Chogyam Trungpa. There is a danger in feeling our hunger, dismantling our defences. But what also happens is that when we free-fall and smash through our fear, the angels send us white feathers to guide us on our path. We may need to crash and burn. To rise, like the phoenix from the ashes of our lives, burnt black, transformed irrecoverably.

Changing base metal into gold is not done with bells and whistles, but in the darkness of the night. In our dreams, our daytime reveries, the sudden surge of recognition that feels strong and authentic in our bellies. Like goddess-saint Brigit of Kildare’s ever-burning flame, our light will not be extinguished unless we douse it ourselves. No man, woman, god out there can extinguish our own Divinity. It is there all the time if only we will turn towards the Light and warm ourselves at the fire. The spark we need might be a fragment of a conversation we overhear in the supermarket, the lyrics for a song; encouragement of a friend, a skilful therapist, to coax the green shoots of new growth. Sometimes we are required to dismantle the fortress of our hostility and our fear, granite stone by granite stone. To fall slowly into the ocean of our tears and swim to shore. We will always be required to work honestly, consistently to see through the smoke and mirrors that distort our truth. We will always be required to silence for ever the competing voices in our heads – our parents, our society, our siblings or friends – and recognise the sound of our own true voice. We will always be required to have a genuine desire to change our lives. To be vigilant that our journey towards self-awareness is not simply self-absorption or narcissism. Only then can we fall slowly into the reality of our lives. To begin to live in conscious relationship by being truthful in our communications, realistic in our great expectations. To laugh more, guilt-trip less. Only then can we savour the blissful beatitude of being in flow in our lives; in harmony with the whole cosmos. Healed, and whole.

For Ray. “Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.” Rumi

Paula Mills. Feather art. Glen Hansard Falling Slowly

April 20, 2012 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream)

We encounter them in our offices. They live amongst our families. We befriend them online, in our friendship circles. They are the beguiling strangers we meet on our travels. Men and women who leave us depleted, disorientated, disempowered, sucked dry.

They travel in groups. Wan-faced teens with vacant eyes. Pale bodies indelibly stained with tattoos, savagely pierced with shiny metal – fag ends of ancient initiation ceremonies that once embraced and bound neophytes to the tribe. This fragment of tribal belonging so often lacks a spiritual profundity. So they live their lives vicariously, vacuously. Umbilically attached to the iPod.

The vampire is a shadowy figure that has sunk its sharp fangs into myth and legend in every culture for thousands of years. Cursed, defiled, denied, damned, the un-dead reappear in popular culture, often eroticised: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Interview with the Vampire, Bram Stoker’s Dracula,True Blood,The Vampire Diaries, Twilight. In modern culture, the vampire is mild mannered, courteous. No ghoul or hideous monster. The scene is always the same. A naive, but always willing victim invites the vampire into the home or bedroom, where it sucks the red life blood from a proffered neck to sustain its own life force. There is a chilling sense of fatal attraction. A passive complicity, an enchantment, as the victim exposes her seductive neck, or lies alluringly asleep. Night after night the Vampire visits. The Victim wavers, weakens. Then, bloodless, transforms into a cadaverous demon ravenous for a fresh source of life-blood. Vampires have lost a connection to their core aliveness. Circumstance, or Fate, has battered their ability to connect with Source, the Divine, leaving them lost, alone, going through the motions of living. In movies, TV series, the old myths are coloured with swooning eroticism. The early recorded stories were very dark and carnal, with brutal destruction of the vampire-turned-victim by the ordinary village folk. In myth and fairy tale the hero or heroine is enchanted. Lost in a dark wood, displaced, far from kith and kin, vulnerable. In poetry, love stories, the unconscious psychic connection between lovers becomes the macabre death-dance of victim and persecutor, as lovers merge, fragile psyches become possessed by these devouring archetypes. John Keats describes this sense of enchantment:
Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing… La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

Celebrities captivate sycophants into their orbits. Movie stars, singers, models can be literally possessed by the vampire archetype. They feed off their advisors and groupies, the “love” from their audiences, and in turn are devoured, leaving in their wake the detritus of drugs, drink and deception that destroys. Often suicide is the only way to leave the emptiness. We can constellate the vampire archetype in our own lives in the victim- persecutor dance brutally played out in so many relationships. In fear and lack, we may constellate people into our lives who polish our egos, make us feel needed, loved, important for a while… and together we germinate a symbiotic relationship that leaches our joie de vivre, saps our sense of self, sucks out promise, all hope. “Loneliness, physical or spiritual, may allow this complex to manifest. Falling in love is another common way to become vulnerable to this manifestation. Many vampire stories tell of women or men who unwittingly fall in love with a vampire, and after marriage become their victims” writes Bob Johnson.

Studies on incest and paedophilia tap into the vampire archetype. The vampire complex lurks like a hidden virus in families, surfacing again and again in successive generations. Until someone breaks the ties that bind…

Bob Johnson continues, “Vampire lore suggests incest because the most startling aspect of the folkloric vampire is that he must first attack members of his own family. His victims are preordained to be those he loved most in life. Modern versions do not always include this element, but it is almost universal in vampire folktales. And so we have the vampire father and mother who must first attack those they love.” James Twitchell, in his book on incest writes about the vampire: “I cannot think of any other monster-molester in our culture who does such terrible things to young victims in such a gentlemanly manner. He is always polite and deferential, and his victim is almost always passive in return.” The deeply disturbing movie, Trust deals with online sexual predators and the shattering of trust in a family as a 14-year-old girl is groomed and lured by the vampiric Charlie.

Not all victims of vampires become vampires in turn. Some survive to write books, appear on talk shows. Young children escape the savage breast of a vampire mothers or a psychically devouring father. Elizabeth Lesser escaped her demon lover and wrote about her experiences in Broken Open. We are not required to become vampires. We allow ourselves to swoon. We stay too long. We deny our instincts. We vacillate, procrastinate, assuage our doubts, wish and hope it will all get better…. It never does. Without a strong sense of authentic self, a spiritual fountainhead that sustains our thirst, a sense of meaning, a philosophy that animates us when events in our lives darken all the silver linings in the clouds, we float in a void, drained of our life force, or sit, waiting at the window. Passively, we vacillate, procrastinate, and loiter in the darkness of our own fear, our own terror of living our lives with blood red passion…

So our holy quest is to discover for ourselves that source of spiritual succour. To connect with our inner world through music, dance, poetry. To discover an activity that gives meaning to our lives. To draw into our lives those relationships that nourish and delight. It takes courage to dismount from the Ferris Wheel of busyness and distraction. Often it is an act of will to sit in a field of daisies, and listen to the whisper of our soul, the heartbeat of the earth. Like Parsifal, we need to ask the right question. And then take action to save ourselves.

Stevie Nick’s lyrics depict the vampiric dance

“Now and others say…. she’s not really real….Like a candle burns bright, wants to burn faster~ well maybe then… at least she really feels.. Burning like a candle in the middle…She’s lonely, lost…she’s disconnected. She finds no comfort in her surroundings. Beautiful, Insecure, she has nothing. She moves from situation to situation…. like a ghost. Then she sees him ….candle burning….”

April 13, 2012 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Cannon Ball

Sometimes it is a slight tremor that cleaves a reservoir of ancient sorrow.

A rebuff by a friend or family member. An email, a text, you thought you had deleted, that besieges you, ravaging your heart. Sometimes it takes a cannon ball to crash through the structures of our carefully constructed lives: a trauma in the shape of death, divorce, or terminal illness…

This week, grief came to call, throwing a dark shroud over the landscape of my life. The death of my beloved, chocolate-coloured Burmese released a deluge of sorrow, plaintive echoes of an unbounded lamentation.

Each one of us has a unique journey. A timeline marked by graves of grief, some neglected, some still tended daily or on certain occasions. For some, letting go, moving on, comes easily. Others flee from the ravenous jaws of grief, buffered by a smokescreen of a smiling face, or the distraction of a full schedule.

Times of sorrow are not events, but transitional processes that unfold slowly. These are sacred times in our life journeys. We are obliged to review, to reminisce. To embrace the lacerating pain, and make up a story that makes sense of it all, for us. It is at times of mourning that we must forgo the busyness, the anti-depressants, the avoidance and embrace the weight of silence that descends in the wake of loss. It is at these times we must fully experience the darkness, contemplate the nothingness, without trying to replace or substitute. Our inner children require nurture (not a spa-day of pampering), our bodies require rest, nourishment, a withdrawal of the senses. Our souls require silence, so that grieving can become sacred, rituals relevant.

Grief can be deeply unsettling, disturbing, and uncomfortable for others to witness. So often, I find myself stumbling over words, mumbling platitudes, sending my “deepest sympathies”. Shakespeare knew that grief requires framing: “Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak, whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bides it break.” And physician and pathologist, Sir Henry Maudsley wrote at the dawn of the twentieth century “sorrows which find no vent in tears may soon make other organs weep.”

Kahlil Gibran observed “Tears and laughter are inseparable. The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain…. Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy. Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced…”

We cry when we are joyful, and when we are overwhelmed by grief. Emotional tears differ from the slicing-of-onions tears. They contain hormones and endorphins which are a moist balm to the searing pain. Tears herald the depth of feelings, reveal relics of unresolved emotions. But only words can identify what lies buried in the heart.

In life, there are those people and animals we deeply love, those we meet in body and mind, a few very precious souls who know our souls. They may be born into homes, cities, countries, so far away from our original starting points. Through our choices, and the complex interwoven chainmail of synchronistic events, our journeys converge; mingle, often for just one brief tremulous moment. Tempus fugit … time flees. With each passing milestone, an anniversary of a death, or a birth or something new, the sweet remembrance of a time tinted now with nostalgia, we become aware of the transience of this life and the Mystery of it all. Sorrow can be a gestation period, long cold waiting in the dank bunker of nothingness… The bittersweet memories, “little bit of your taste in my mouth…” the faint perfume of sadness, the remembrance of deep sense of aloneness that pervades our lives cyclically in a heap of broken images. The inconstant ebb and flow of feelings. The fallow periods of sorrow that herald the bright bud of hope. We may appear less efficient in the world of doingness, and feel as though we are falling apart. We are. Everything will be a mess, and we are required to laboriously re-build from new foundations.

Sorrow, melancholy, depression, like the clouds that scud across moonlit skies to obscure the pure luminescence of the lunar face, are ephemeral, always cyclical. Like the ocean, they ebb and flow, to flood our shores with boundless energy and inspiration, or recede like the tide, revealing shards of broken shells and glistening pebbles etched in the wet sand.

Do we really ever get over ourselves? Should we even try?

“I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one” the bard said. Some walk lightly, some dance and sing along the way, others have a more sombre journey. A friend of mine shared that she had discovered a pair of pearl earrings in a velvet lined box. She had worn them only once. On her wedding day, a dewy-eyed bride, dressed in white. For her, these lustrous orbs from the watery deep enclose two tear drops of a frozen memory, the chronicle of a sacred day. She described how she had enfolded the cool silky smoothness in her hand, revisiting that time in her nascent life, to feel once more the featherlike nudge of innocence, and the bittersweet lamentation of enormous loss.

Many of us may cope by framing a new narrative for the lost dreams and disappointments that lie in wait like sharp stones on our path. Nelson Mandela told a friend of mine who had a private luncheon with this iconic figure of the joy he experienced in his incarceration when he and the other prisoners would sing together as they worked crushing rock in the quarry, day after day in the searing sun and scalding wind. Many public figures have a narrative of their lives which fits their public persona. Often their birth charts may suggest otherwise. Nearly all of us have misty water-coloured memories of the way we were … our version of a prism of an event, faded by time, embellished by the re-telling.

When we are ready, we re-frame the story in the picture gallery of our life… or float like a cannon ball… until we understand why we are sinking… Damien Rice

THE TINY BOAT

God bless this tiny little boat
And me who travels in it
It stays afloat for years and years
And sinks within a minute.

And so the soul in which we sail
Unknown by years of thinking,
Is deeply felt and understood
The minute that it’s sinking.
Michael Leunig (1945- )