Relationship

February 6, 2013 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Like a Virgin

New – fresh, innocent, exciting … we are curious primates, irresistibly drawn to things that look different, that we have not tried before. Advertisers bait the hook with words and images that attract our insatiable appetite for novelty and variety. Our hunger for “newness” is in direct conflict with the jaded repetition of most of our very ordinary lives. The searing surge of sexual attraction we feel when we fall in love, soon dissipates as we grapple with the practical realities of earning a living, calling the plumber to fix the blocked kitchen drain, packing school lunches, and giving our harassed spouse a peck on the cheek as he hurries out the door to join the flight to the concrete city hive.

How do we see enchantment, magic in the ill-tempered scowl of our frazzled life partner who has been sitting behind a desk all day? Where do we find a frisson of excitement in distant eyes? How do we continue, year after year, to arch with delight at a touch that has grown so familiar and find intimacy in the tangle of tasks that require left brain engagement? When do we allow time for romantic reverie, erotic fantasy conjured up in expansive imaginings? Alain de Bolton, in his new book, How to Think More about Sex, proposes that the ethos of modern marriage “with its insane ambitions and its insistence that one person can plausibly hope to embody the eternal sexual and emotional solution to another’s every need” sets us up for bitter disappointment. He suggests that love, sex and family were wisely differentiated from one another historically for very good reasons. Like oil and water, they do not mix. The elevated high of romantic love that inspired the chaste troubadours in the twelfth century to write sublimely beautiful songs and achingly beautiful poems was fuelled by the sleepless suffering of unrequited love. Raising a family and earning a living were never urgent desires of lusty eighteenth century Parisian libertines. Says Bolton, “the impulse to raise a family has been well known to the largest share of humanity since our earliest upright days in East Africa. In all this time, however, it seems to have occurred to almost no one (until very recently, evolutionary speaking) that this project might need to be fused together with constant sexual desire as well as frequent sensations of romantic longing at the sight of a fellow parent at the breakfast table.”

Love and marriage. Horses and carriages. We are conditioned, admonished, to balance our wet erotic urges with the harness of constrained convention. And yet, the swoon of a stolen kiss, the delight of a brush of skin, the intoxicating scent of newness, awakens the beast within our bellies. What we think is romance, or love, nearly always comes in the guise of someone who makes us feel all shiny and new. And the fee at the tollgate of adultery may bankrupt us, liberate us, or lead us on a circular road right back where we started – new horse but same carriage.

In Greek mythology Thanatos was the daemon of death. Thanatos and Eros dance together, two polarised forces. Eros thrusting into the hot rush of life. Thanatos sucking us like the undertow into cold dark waters of death. Perhaps the monumental challenge we face as modern-day humans is to navigate through the narrow inlet between these two Titanic forces, paying homage to both.

Without Eros there would be no great works of art, no new inventions, no unfurling of passion that galvanises us to cross continents, discover the hero within, experience events that crack us open like juicy pomegranates and flood our lives with sweet pink juices. Eros confirms our existence is real, vital, infinitely creative.

The icy blackness of Thanatos quenches our flame, pulls us down to the stark finality of endings. Ego deaths are accompanied by a retinue of unspeakable isolation and grief. Loss of a sense of Self so often ensues after a dance in the flames that burn us black, leave us charred, irrevocably. When we step aboard the sailboat of a committed long-term relationship, we are required to use the compass of common sense to deal with the myriad practicalities of survival. We are summoned to bend with the winds of change as they hurl fiercely against our sails. We are asked to be humbled by our own humanness and the contradictions of living with another who is so different and yet so familiar as to seem invisible to the arrow of our ardour.

It may be impossible to feel weak at the knees with a heated rush of lust when our rumpled partner staggers through the front door after a long day at the office. It may be ludicrous to feel anything but resignation as he burps in unrestrained satisfaction, leaves the loo seat up, uses the last of the milk, and clips his toenails while sitting on the side of the bed naked and not so sexily exposed.

A night in an unfamiliar hotel, a steamy romp on fresh new sheets while the kids are at a sleep over might fan the flame of passion. Maybe it could be a shared adventure with just a hint of danger that throws you trembling, quite unexpectedly, together once more. Homo not-so-sapiens may require plenty of thrills, spills and surprise to bring out the hirsute wild man or wild woman in us all.

So as you lie together on rumpled sheets, or hold his hand and feel his skin against yours, remember to open the window wide. See in the softness of the moonlight the innocence of his familiar face. Remember there was enchantment there once. And if we use our artist’s eye and our poet’s imagination, we will find it there again.

Madonna – Like a Virgin

January 23, 2013 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Do You Want The Truth or Something Beautiful?

Activist-clown, Wavy Gravy once said “We’re all bozos on the bus, so we might as well sit back and enjoy the ride.”

Beneath the frosted icing that overlies every Lance Armstrong, Kim Kardashian or Tiger Woods, whom we adore and then vilify, is our very own delectable humanness. We have all been erratic, dishonest, mean-spirited and selfish. We have all betrayed, and been betrayed. We have all lied, withheld, presented our false faces to the world. So often we find ourselves mere spectators, looking through net curtains at the lives of others – those people we imagine to be happier, richer, more passionately in love, more successful, more fiercely outrageously creative in life than we are. We hold them high above our shoulders, then let them fall. We are blindsided by our copycat version of the truth, which is just one truth in a casket of truths that all shine like rubies when the light falls upon them. Perhaps the truth does not set us free but is the mote in our eye. Our “truth” is so often a carriage that turns into a pumpkin at midnight, as we return from the ball of our subjective perceptions. The stories we tell ourselves about the world are so often like the wily Gingerbread Man – eaten by the even wilier fox that, of course, has his own version of “the truth” which justified his appetite for athletic Gingerbread Men.

Anais Nin and, allegedly, the Talmud suggested that “we do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.” Perhaps the truth is that there is no truth. Each human heart is the same no matter how famous or infamous we are. Rich man, beggar man, thief: even the poorest of the poor have hearts that beat out their soul songs. Even the richest of the rich feel the sharp sting of loneliness as they gaze upon their smiling circle of sycophants.

We may isolate ourselves, in imagining that we are unique in our failures, the heat of our yearnings. Or we may gorge like vultures on the public humiliation of others. We hide our secrets from each other – our holy longings, our heartache, the ache of our bewildering disappointments. And like self-deprecating clowns, we make light of our pain, diminish the untidy details of our humanness. We don’t want to appear weak or sad or self-absorbed, so we lightly say, “I’m doing well, thanks” as the shame of our secret rustles in the dry straw of our life.

“Run, run as fast as you can; you can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man” is the refrain from the old fairy tale. As we run from our pursuing thoughts and that uneasy feeling that we are out of integrity, perhaps we could stop and breathe in compassion for our vulnerability that creeps into the corners of the lies we make up about ourselves – and others. We are not alone in our fears, our pain, our aloneness, our moments of madness. We all have the same foibles; we all rumble along through life in all our guises, rich and poor, famous and infamous; we are all in the same old bus here for a magical mystery tour and it’s often quite a ride.

Oh, and if you see a Gingerbread Man running down the road. Eat him.

Just close your eyes and make believe I am happy to deceive … sings the delectable Paloma Faith

Photographs: Gingerbread men by Candy Caldwell, portrait of instructor Nadene Rogers at her “Art of Clowning” class, and the powerful Hearts ad campaign – United Colors of Benetton

January 9, 2013 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Now is Here

Be here now wrote Ram Dass in the 70s in a book that brought ancient eastern wisdom to the hungry hearts of western spiritual seekers. “Know that Faith and Love are stronger than any changes, stronger than ageing… stronger than death..”

Be here now, as this first month of the New Year stretches and yawns after the blowsy revelry of the final days of December.

Be here now in the effervescent bubble of the promises we made to ourselves, the intentions we resolved to hold on to and the changes we were going to glide through with ease and with elegance.

An unexpected brilliance of silver and gold flashed in the burnished branches of a discarded pine tree that lay on the pavement this morning waiting re-cycling. A tree that once grew in the soil and fed on sunshine and water will return to the earth, perhaps as a blaze of light and a flutter of ash in the cycle of life and death, endings and new beginnings, just like you and me.

New beginnings are springtime surges of urgent impetus. Bright green shoots of Hope. Brave envisioning that slices a swathe through thickets of fear and negative self-talk. New beginnings are like the vows we make to one another on our wedding day.

The bright burst of clear energy of this ego-less intention sprouts from the pure chambers of our hearts and climbs the rungs of the days and months like brave Jack who clambered up the thick stem of the beanstalk. It is this little bean of hope that contains our courage to look upwards, not down. To keep on climbing, though the storms clouds gather and thunder booms menacingly. Through triumphs and disasters that ratchet up our lives and make us appreciate more deeply the beauty and the brevity of our experiences as they fall through the hourglass of time.

To be here now requires a perceptual shift.

To be here now requires the will to bear the unbearable. If not now, then when? What are we postponing? What great fear anesthetises us from our own delight? Our own cracking open into new growth.

To be here now demands that we spin straw into gold and see the beauty in our bleeding fingers. This New Year we may be invited to step over a new threshold so that our soul may pour its light through the cracks in our egos, through our learned behaviours, our neuroses, our weakened bodies and over-loaded minds as we are buffeted by setbacks, splintered by the sharp sword of loss.

To be here now is to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time for what we have come here to experience.

photographs by Adam Hanif and Heather Liebensohn

Now is Here – Clannad.

December 14, 2012 In Astrology, Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Skyfall

This is the end. Hold your breath and count to ten … This portentous year of 2012 has been a shamanic journey of self-growth and spiritual home-coming for many on this planet. For some this has been a sky fall year where things “happened out of the blue.” Our bodies once robust and infallible began to falter. Our relationships demanded more honesty, more compassion. Our work brought us gifts of humility and gratitude, or a firm conviction that we must remove ourselves from a toxic environment. For millions on this planet, 2012 offered no choice. No time for self-reflection. No peace or contentment. As we approach the solstice many of us may feel, as Marion Woodman says, “dragged towards wholeness”.

We speak lightly, foolishly, of change and “transformation” as if it was a Gok Wan make-over. Trans-formation is a radical changing of form. A literal or metaphorical process of dying. And transformation involves the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. “Most of us can only let so much go at a time,” says Woodman.

This is the end. The mid-summer or mid-winter Solstice 2012 marks a zero point as the sun ingresses into the sign of Capricorn 11:15:25 AM in Greenwich, England and at other times in other places all over the world. Collectively we stand at the door of the sweat lodge where we must sit in the heat of global warming, the discomfort of overpopulation. Collectively we must heed the final drum beat of a way of life that will and must change irrevocably. There is a sense of “Fatedness” about the GMT chart for this solstice. Jupiter (signifying Faith, Hope, Belief, and a sense of Expansion), Saturn in Scorpio and Pluto in Capricorn (herculean systemic breakdown, a kind of cosmic colonic irrigation) form a YOD which is also called “The Finger of Fate” or “The Finger of God”. Jupiter is at the focal point of this YOD. It is the signal for inevitable change and transformation to occur in the outworn structures of our civilization.

The sun will rise on December 22^nd 2012. The sky will not fall down chicken-licken. Our computers will not crash. There will be no cataclysmic ending. Just another turn in the great wheel of the year.

The Maya apparently called this day “Creation Day’. Author of the Gaia Hypothesis, Peter Russell writes,”rather than a precise date on which major changes happen, I see 2012 as the temporal epicentre of a cultural earthquake.”

The skyscript fortells of profound and inevitable change, which will be fiercely resisted by many who cling like bloated ticks to power, gorging on greed. Pluto will be uncompromising and relentless in breaking down what is no longer necessary to our personal and collective evolution. By December 2014, Saturn will bring to the surface all that is darkly hidden in our lives personally and globally. The square between the Sun and Uranus in this chart heralds radical change, upheaval and liberation from the old ways. The Moon makes a separating square from Pluto. We are living at the end of an epoch. The dark hyperbole of the apocalyptic prophecies terrify. They cut close to the bone. We are entering an age of breakdown of hoary old structures, outmoded beliefs.

This is the end of verdant girdles of rainforest. This is the end for wildlife that follow ancient migratory routes now barred by barbed wire fences and the splattered spread of concrete cities. This is the end for the Sumatran tiger, the Vaquita porpoise, the Javan and African Rhino. This is the end for the polar bear. This is the end for the ancient amphibians. This is the beginning of the end of life as we know it. We stand on the brink as individuals. As a species. As sea levels rise, a mass extinction of as high as 90 percent of our earth’s creatures, writes Mark Lynas in Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Global temperatures will be hotter than they have been for the last 50 million years. Most of southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East will be uninhabitable. Millions of men, women and children will migrate in great masses in search of food, water and lebensraum. Perhaps “this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper,” as TS Eliot wrote starkly and with chilling prophecy in The Hollow Men.

“We have passed a critical threshold”, a new report from accountancy firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers states. “Even doubling our current rate of decarbonisation would still lead to emissions consistent with 6 degrees C of warming by the end of the century.” This report urges radical transformation in the global economy. Rapid implementation of renewable energy. A halt on deforestation and industrial emissions. Now.

On December 21^st 2012, many will gather together in prayer or meditation. And for millions on this planet, the solstice of 2012 will be just another day. Unless we all choose differently. We may not individually be able to halt industrial emissions or stop the slaughter of the rhino, or the melting of the polar ice caps. Our urgent task now is to Love and to Be Loved. To walk lightly on this beautiful planet. To honour all living things. We cannot afford the luxury of negativity and scepticism. We will simply have to “pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off… and start all over again.” Living our lives more consciously. “It’s only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth – and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up that we will begin to live each day to the fullest as if it was the only one we had,” wrote Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. We all have a limited time on this earth, collectively and personally. Our Faith (Jupiter ) will be our only solace and ultimate salvation.

So at this sacred portal. This turning point in the great wheel of the year let us take a moment to be still and to listen to the bird song. Let us breathe in Hope. Let us open our hearts to give and receive Love. Let us feel the heartbeat of Mother Earth and allow our own hearts to beat in unison. We are stardust. We are of the same essence as this earth, this boundless universe. We are witnessing the death of the old, the birth of the new.

This is the end. And the beginning.

The inimitable Adele’s incomparable voice soars above the haunting lyrics of Skyfall. This is the signature song that frames the 23rd Bond movie, and a powerful anthem to herald the End Times.

December 6, 2012 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

There is a Season

The weeks before Christmas leave me breathless. Perhaps like me, you have a clamorous inbox of shoulds and ought-tos. An avalanche of choices, decisions to be made. Deadlines to complete before the holidays. For many of us, uncomfortable emotions pop like Christmas crackers at family gatherings. We toss, turn and fret over problems that are still-born. How do we soothe the seeping hurt that curls cold fingers around this season of exuberance and joy? If this is the first, or one in many year ends that swirl around the carousel of loss, we may be still mourning the presence of the one we have loved.Our heart may ache inexplicably as the old year ends with such finality. As families gather together we may feel unspeakably alone amidst the tinsel and the gaudy lights. How do we draw up festive ebullience within ourselves when our well is dry? When what we really want to do is close the door, turn out the light, stay home tonight – and tomorrow night?

Ancient traditions and spiritual wisdom are underpinned by the knowledge of the silent circuit of the great wheel of the year. As the seasonal energies realign with the solstice, our body rhythms realign with the seasonal shifts. Western medicine is largely ignorant of what shamans, Chinese and Indian healers have known for centuries. Our minds, our bodies, our psyches have cycles. The calendar year may be coming to an end now, but we may still be in the midst of a long winter cycle of intensely private grieving. The lyrics of a song played on New Year’s Eve may draw us back to a different time and another place, to a small unmarked grave where a piece of our heart is buried. We may be gestating a new greening. Or we may heroically be at the zenith of our own personal summer where we resolve to bring our Best Self to the silent spaces in relationships that speak eloquently of pain and disappointment, loss and longing.

The calendar year is a man-made construct. In the cyclical nature of our own lives, let us take time to pause in these weeks before the holidays. Perhaps to tenderly anoint the scars of painful losses. Perhaps to finally relinquish all our hopes or expectations of things being different. Perhaps to find the Grace to accept those things we cannot change. Endings can be stock taking times. Times to acknowledge that if we were ready to make those changes in our life, taken that different road, we would have. Times of knowing that we did the best we could at the time.

So let’s go gently as the weeks gather momentum for the crescendo of the solstice on December 21^st. Amidst the Christmas carols that loop repetitively from sound systems in shopping malls and supermarkets, the frenetic hurrying to buy what we think our loved ones want, the strenuous exertion, the anticipation in the planning, the doing, as this calendar year draws to a close, let us be kind to our weary bodies. In the flurry to buy food, gifts, stocking fillers, ask yourself today what is it I truly need now? Amidst the bright babble of the office party, the fairy lights of the crowded malls, amidst the heated rush of hurry, re-claim a few moments of sumptuous silence in the gap between the in-breath and the out-breath. What do I truly need now? The answer may come as one of those delicious surprises we find behind the tiny windows of the advent calendar. Our needs may be quite simple really. More sleep. This might mean loving our self enough to get into bed earlier. A sudden craving for rice pudding and custard that brings comfort reminiscent of a childhood when it snowed and all the word was white? This might mean buying pearl rice and switching on the oven to pre-heat. The strength to forgive the one who has hurt us so deeply. The willingness to forgive ourselves for hurting them too. This will certainly require humility and Grace.

What we need may be priceless. The simplicity of being in the presence of those we love with all our human hearts. A pause in the busyness. Time to think. The strength to say no. In a voice that speaks as authentically now as it did in the 12^th Century, the mystic Hildegard of Bingen invites us to “glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth’s greenings. Now, think. “

Know that our soulfulness ebbs and flows. Know that it has seasons of joy and of sorrow. So as the gyre of this year comes full circle, take time to harvest the abundant treasures of your heart. Tell yourself how well you have done, how far you have travelled, how very brave you have been. Cultivate a garden of gratitude. Pause and smell new fragrances. Stop and really see the moon and the stars. Savour the flavours of this season, and know that this too shall pass.

Art by Julianna Bright.

The Byrds sixties classic – Turn! Turn! Turn!

November 22, 2012 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Daisies of the Galaxy

“Be glad. Be good. Be brave.” Wrote Eleanor Emily Hodgman Porter in her best-selling novel, Pollyanna. The year was 1913. This simple statement resonated in the matrix of the Collective Consciousness as the dark war clouds blotted the sun over the Balkans and young men were soon to drown in their blood in the trenches of World War 1. Ninety-nine years later, we continue to enlist in our private battles for survival – financially, emotionally, or spiritually. When everything around us seems to be falling apart, this steadfast statement bids us first and foremost, to be grateful. To conduct our lives with integrity and valour. The fortitude and unwavering optimism of eleven-year-old Pollyanna offered the comfort of hot-buttered toast and a cup of sweet tea at a point of impact in western civilization when there was no going back. When to be glad, good, and brave, was one constant beacon amidst cataclysmic change.

So often we hit a wall. Collide with an immovable force that profoundly alters the trajectory of our life: the accident, the lawyer’s letter, the termination of our employment, the conversation with our doctor that leaves us haemorrhaging hope. We stand at the door unopened. We tremble; we know with every fibre of our being that there will be no going back. When we cross this threshold, this crossing will reverberate across future decades of our lives – and the lives of those we love so fiercely. When we take those fateful steps, we feel in the deep silence of our heart, that we have to choose: to be angry, bitter, desperately powerless to change or control what has gone before. Or to be glad, good, and very brave. Pollyanna is a virtuoso at making deliciously sweet lemonade from the tart lemons in her life. She adroitly gathers comfort and joy from the shards of pain and misfortune. And she is skilled at playing The Glad Game. The rules are simple: find something to be glad about in every circumstance of your life.

Happiness, and her twin sister, Joy, dance in Gratitude, in the “little things that are the hinges of the universe” according to newspaper columnist and novelist, Fanny Fern. Gratitude is a spoonful of sugar to crankiness. Gratitude is like a garden. It requires careful tending if we want it to flourish. It may require gentle coaxing back into bloom after a storm or the cruel crush of frost. It certainly takes a good sprinkling of imagination and a stir of magic to feel it sometimes, and yet like the fairies that sit on our garden wall and fly about our heads as we water the rose bushes, it is always there if we look. If we believe.

Melody Beattie believes. “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity.”

Physicist Stephen Hawking who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in his twenties believes. He once told the New York Times, “my expectations were reduced to zero when I was twenty-one. Everything since then has been a bonus.”

Gratitude, like Love, is a choice. It’s an inside job. If we feel like Cinderella, no pumpkin carriage, no diamond tiara, glass slipper, or handsome Prince will make us authentically, radiantly happy. If we play the Glad Game, and cheat because we don’t truly — in our authentic truthful hearts — believe, but go through the motions, we cannot evoke the magic. We cannot fake it ’til we make it. We cannot buy, Botox, or bargain our way to Gratitude and contentment. We cannot pretend to be Little Miss Sunshine if we feel like The Snow Queen.

Lévy-Bruhl and, later, Jung, wrote of the Participation mystique. That mystical participation that can manifest in situations and material things in our lives. That sense of wonder and magic that is inherent in small children and has been codified as The Law of Attraction. We are required to “always look on the bright side of life” as we bravely embrace the contradictions, the baffling complexity, and buckle up for those roller coaster rides that leave us whip-lashed, aching and bruised. Says Neale Donald Walsch, “gratitude in advance is the most powerful creative force in the universe. Most people do not know this, yet it is true. Expressing Thankfulness in advance is the way of all Masters. So do not wait for a thing to happen and then give thanks. Give thanks before it happens, and watch energies swirl!”

Gratitude must become habitual for the magic to work. Author Sarah Ban Breathnach invites us to write down five simple things we appreciate each day. “Things like my morning coffee, the beauty of my mountain home, the music of the songbirds sharing my backyard, the health to enjoy this day, and the freedom to do what I love…. You simply will not be the same person two months from now after consciously giving thanks each day for the abundance that exists in your life. And you will have set in motion an ancient spiritual law: the more you have and are grateful for, the more will be given you.”

So observe those wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings. Give thanks that the silver white winters will melt into springs … And like Maria, in the Sound of Music, simply remember your favourite things … “when the dog bites. When the bee stings. When I’m feeling sad. I simply remember my favourite things… and then I don’t feel…so bad.”

Eels – Daisies of the Galaxy

Take heart my little friend
And push back your seat
Soon we’ll be far away
Far from the street
Where you learned how to be
Not what you are…

I’ll pick some daisies
From the flower bed
Of the galaxy theatre
While you clear your head
I thought some daisies
Might cheer you up..

Firelight and Kingfisher by artist Molly Brett

November 12, 2012 In Astrology, Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Cause I Love You

We talk glibly of Love as if it can be bought like a bag of pastel-coloured macaroons. Or conjured up by a psychic who says, deftly spreading a well worn deck of cards: “now let’s look at the love-life!”

We talk flippantly of Love as if Love can be compartmentalised into a neat life all of its own. As if Love is a play-thing, to put aside when we tire of it, or it becomes too big and boisterous for our small stingy lives. Each one of us yearns (whether we will admit it or not) to be loved and cherished. To have someone to love and cherish in return. Yet still we lazily window-shop for Love on dating sites. Foolishly mistake Love for Sex. Are not truly brave enough to do the inner work to weed our garden so that a small seed of Love may grow tall in the sunlight.

Many of us live our lives vicariously through the lives of other heroes or heroines. We balk at provocative choices. Terrified we may expose our soft-bellied vulnerability, we manacle ourselves with the cold steel fear of rejection, memories of past betrayals, disappointments. We play it safe, never daring to throw the dice lest we score too high for comfort. Then one new day, we awake to find our fervent prayers have been answered by a benevolent god! How we tremble and shake in unspeakable terror as we stand on the precipice; afraid to take that giant leap, to tumble weightlessly into Love. Afraid to do what it takes to be with the one we cannot be without. Love, like old age, and death, is not for the squeamish. To fall into Love requires valour. To stay in Love demands tenacity.

Science makes an attempt to measure the power of Love by assigning our light-headed omnipotence and euphoria to dopamine and oxytocin. Mood-altering chemicals that flood our brains and make us feel ecstatic. Our right (emotional intuitive) brain lights up like a Christmas tree, and our left (logical language) brain is all shook up, without words to adequately describe … well, nothing really matters any more, except the urgent desire to be with the one we love forever and ever … Astrology describes the synastry, the poetry of the composite chart of a relationship, yet not our warm arousal from a long slumber and our pulse that beats with ardour, urgent passion. We can measure the how. But why we fall we fall in love, why we swoon in the languor of our eroticism, why we bow our heads to our heart’s holiness, why we enter the hallowed portals with blouse unbuttoned, tossing our hair in the face of our morbid fears, remains a Mystery. “Nothing is Mysterious. No human relation. Except Love,” Susan Sontag wrote.

Love is the song of our soul, our connection with our own Divinity. We must take in Love through all six of our senses; imbibe it through all our orifices. Experience it, fully, bravely, with all our human hearts.

“Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced,” wrote John Keats who lived his life brightly, like a tremulous dew-drop, and died at twenty-five, having all too briefly experienced the intensely real burn of passion. Love is the substance of Life. And death. “We must love one another or die,” Auden wrote. And cantankerous Philip Larkin affirmed in his famous ode to immortality, “What will survive of us is love”.

There comes a time when we simply cannot go on rummaging through the closets of our childhood looking for reasons for why things happen as they do. We cannot go back to the postage stamps of our past fumbled attempts at Love. We must dredge up our strength, our courage, to stop punishing ourselves, each other. Risk using our imagination to see the perfection within one another. Bravely continue our pilgrimage, with blisters and bleeding feet, ravished by our own longing. Tenderly follow the scarlet blaze of our own life essence that carries like sweet perfume and mingles with the still night air.

We have just one choice: To allow our hearts to rule, and the warmth of our lover’s perfect body to caress us back to life again.

When my heart came to rule
in the world of love,
it was freed
from both belief
and from disbelief.

On this journey,
I found the problem
to be myself.

When I went beyond myself,
the pathway finally opened.

Mahsati Ganjavi (12th Century)

Art by Irina Vitalievna

James Blunt – Cause I love you.

November 2, 2012 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Shelter from the Storm

Storms wreak havoc, flattening the white picket fences of our suburban lives. They unbolt the fury of our suppressed emotions, galvanise us into acts of heroism, catapult us out of our inertia and distil our values. They photoshop the Kodachrome into uncompromising black and white. They test our faith. Challenge our belief that everything that happens “to us” in our lives is for our Highest Good. The Titanic storm that loosed its fury over the East Coast of America this week is a metaphor for the tumultuous storms that sweep through the crowded subways of our psyches. When all around us is falling apart we can either tug at the rip cord, parachute into unmapped territory or seek shelter from the storm within the austere bunkers of our isolation.

Hope Springs is Hollywood’s rather awkward attempt at portraying the frozen despair of a couple locked in an icy tundra. They live in a barren landscape where there is no connection, no intimacy – a stuckness. Like so many couples, they are unable to find a way through to connect with one another physically, emotionally – or honestly. This being Hollywood, the movie must have a happy ending and upbeat music lest it all becomes too poignant and painful, but it is a small glimpse into the winter storms that blanket so many relationships with great sheets of ice.

Every living creation has a life spark, an energy field of power. In our relationships, we so often rattle like tumbleweeds across the desert storms that rage for years: afraid to ask for what we long for, lest we are disappointed. Terrified to step into our authentic power, because it feels safer to stay small and infantile and allow our partner to carry the power for us. Reluctant to examine with gentle hearts – what do I really need to be happy? What do I truly value?

Every human relationship has changing weather patterns that display subtle shifts of power. In families, in offices, in friendships, in the intimacy of our marriage beds, dark clouds gather as we flex our muscles of will, control, or subversion. Like Love, Power is a paradox. Beneath the veneer of the dominating husband and the submissive wife, or vice versa, power is inverted. Often it is the soft-spoken Victim that holds the sword of ultimate power. The carer that swabs the oozing wounds or lifts skeletal bodies from the wheel chair, that has supreme sovereignty. Many of us stay in powerless roles. We may implode into a dank depression. We may literally become immobilised with an illness that wastes our flesh, rendering us as little children once more. Our power haemorrhages in angry tantrums. It seeps out in subversive acts of sabotage. It weeps in the chill of our numbness, our withdrawal, as we wriggle, like worms impaled upon a savage fish hook in our attempts to avoid our own greatness.

Many women channel their anger or their desire into subversive, subterranean canals where it trickles silently for years in the darkness. It may erupt in dreams that bring images of ferocious violence or forbidden sex. It may speak through the symptoms of dis-ease in our bodies. Or it may be released when our partner finds another lover, granting our unconscious yearning for liberation from the shackles of a marriage in name only. When we identify with the Victim archetype, we may become addicted to the turbulence of frequent storms in our lives as a catalyst for the release of pent up pain that festers. Our barbed wire defences keep us separate, divided, from our true self and from the intimate connections we crave.

Our soul is the repository for our authentic power – our vibrant certainty, our tenacity, our effectiveness. If we can pause in the epicentre of our storms of anger. If we are silent in the nuclear fallout of the arguments that blind us to the innocence of our tormentor. If we can gently examine our sympathy-inducing passivity and acknowledge our dependence upon other’s approval, our fear of personal power, our mistrust in our own strength… if we can speak of our fears, our resistance, our longings, our insecurities… Authentic power may mean acceptance. It may mean faith. It may mean that we stop apologising for who we are. It may mean that we look directly at ourselves and begin cutting away at the pastiche of false selves that superimpose on the masterpiece beneath.

I love this quotation by Neale Donald Walsh: “Sculptors have to look at the block and begin cutting parts of it away before their vision emerges in the marble. Look directly at the block if you want to create the art”.

So from beneath the rubble of our lives, we must courageously retrieve the blocks of marble, and with patience and reverence, stop and look directly at the indomitable soul that lives in the silent centre of our being.

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!

The Tempest William Shakespeare.

Image from http://abiggerworldyet.wordpress.com

Bob Dylan gives us Shelter from the Storm.

October 25, 2012 In Astrology, Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Between The Shadows

In real life lipstick comes off when we kiss our lover. In real life our noses run and our mascara meanders darkly down our flaming cheeks. In real life the people we love with all our hearts die too soon.

In real life we reach cyclical turning points, each one of us on our very personal journey, which will lead us inevitably across the threshold into the shadowy unknown. So often we stray from the path, lose sight of our Life Purpose. Dante Alighieri wrote “when I had journeyed half of our life’s way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray.” We stand at the threshold, not sure of who we are or who we are about to become. For many of us threshold times can be disorientating, painful, even terrifying. To our ancestors, thresholds were holy places. The Latin word for threshold is limen. It was a sacred space guarded by the gods and goddess: Janus, Hermes and Hecate. As we traverse the space in-between we may have lost our faith in the primal gods or goddesses. We have only our Faith and the tenacity of our spirit as we follow the elusive lantern light of our becoming, to meet the shadowy dark night of the soul. We may not know that they are still there to guard us as we take the perilous journey across liminal spaces, and that the supernatural elementals, the faery folk surround us as we wander alone through the dark woods.

In medias res, in the middle of things, is a fecund state of birthing. A profoundly sacred crossing where we are required, at every age juncture, to ask ourselves “Who is the I that stands at this point of no return?”

There are no right ways or wrong ways of crossing a threshold. We may eagerly seize new opportunities to pioneer a new path, to live our “unlived lives”. We may garner those scattered or buried parts of ourselves and become more conscious, more whole, more of Who we truly are. Or we may crouch in rigid status quo, or regress to old ways of being.

Transition times are holy times. Marriage, divorce, the birthing of our babies, the end of a career, the beginning of a new one. The inevitable ageing of our bodies. The ultimate transformation of our dying. Transition times are accompanied by conflicting emotions. Joy, trepidation. Fear and unspeakable sorrow as we leave the old behind and step into the new. The transition from youth to old age is a threshold we must all traverse. There is no elixir for eternal youth. Each one of us will exhale for the very last time.

The Pluto in Leo generation in the Western world (those born between August 1938 and October 1956) have capitalised on transition times associated with ageing in a plethora of therapies, books, blogs and workshops. Pluto in Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius and Capricorn generations will deal with the process of age and death very differently, I suspect.

Baby Boomers living the affluent west mostly do live longer than our grandparents did. Midlife has become a moveable smorgasbord, celebrated in cinema and song and glamorised in specialist magazines aimed at the over 40s. In a feature entitled Fifty Shades of 50, journalist Lisa Depaulo writes with breathless ebullience about a brand-new breed of 50-plus women – stronger, smarter, sexier than ever, dubbed the new Alpha Goddess who has a penchant for fast cars and luxury holidays, travelling solo and saying “it’s my turn”. The article bubbles on cheerfully, “almost every woman I know over 50 seems to be doing things that none of us were expecting to be doing at our age. We’re making choices, in both little and big ways, just for ourselves.”

Demographics and photo-shopped aspirational women’s magazines aside, shrewd Pallas Athenas were rare – there just was no room for a brand- new breed of Alpha Goddesses on Mount Olympus. Despite the sacrifices of The Suffragettes of the 19^th and early 20^th century and the courage of the Feminists of the ’60s, between the shadows of our politically correct social constructs there exists today the very same polarisation in gender and power that has existed for eons. In affluent societies, many women in midlife and in their elder years live in straightened circumstances after divorce or the death of their spouses. Women still do not, in the main, earn as much as their male counterparts. Women still bear, birth, and nurture the children.

Each one of us will have thresholds to cross. Yet not all of us will have the luxury of time or sufficient financial security to say “it’s my turn” as we support our children through their college years, nurse our dying parents, care for once-virile partners, now stricken with depression or facing terminal illness. We find we don’t have the physical strength, the financial clout, the confidence or even the inclination to be an Ageing Alpha Goddess. We find we have never wanted to travel solo to Peru, buy a sports car or learn to play the piano. In real life, we accept that we have lived more years in the past than we have allotted to us in our future. In real life, we do not all die peacefully in our sleep.

So, in real life, we distil the essence, the magic from the simple things in life – a hug from the one we love. Watching a bumble bee in the languid embrace of a still summer afternoon. The intoxicating scent of white jasmine.

In real life, it is time that becomes the most precious commodity. Many men and women enter the second and third acts of their lives with less attachment to fast cars or yet another pair of shoes, less clinging on to the bricks and the mundane mortar of life. More reverence for the here and now.

“Opposites throw light upon each other”, said the philosopher Schopenhauer. Our lives are animated by the dappled shades of light and darkness, chaos and meaning, the cacophony of sound and long stretches of silence… And in the silence we begin to notice the brilliance of the rainbow as it arcs over the rain-washed sky. And how quite suddenly, the swallows have returned for the summer.

In our life’s transitions we may find our purpose, our passion. In our ageing and in our dying we may discover the meaning of Love, and in the shadows of our inevitable parting, our redemption.

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life? – Mary Oliver.

Art by Casey Baugh. Between The Shadows – Loreena McKennitt

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

Whisper a prayer to the moon

Our creativity is the full expression of Who we are. It unfurls, like the rainbow-coloured tail of a kite on a windy day. It arcs through the clear blue skies of our imagination. It soars to distant galaxies. It whispers a prayer to the Moon.

Yet so many of us give up on ourselves so easily. Our inner critic curls her lips and whispers, “what a stupid idea” when we believe six impossible things before breakfast. As we hop-skip along the stanzas of a poem and turn cartwheels across the notes of a melody, we stop, suddenly, foolish. Then she says a little more sternly, “and just who do you think you are?” Awkward. Self-conscious, we judge and condemn ourselves to a life behind the bars of our meticulously constructed prison cells. Perhaps we blame the gaoler husband. Perhaps it is the ailing parent, the needy child, the punishing work schedule that keeps us securely padlocked, safe from our spontaneity, our joy. Pablo Picasso once said that “Every child is an artist; the problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” Jung spoke of the “Divine Child” archetype, “the child is that which brings the light into the darkness and carries the light before it.” Emmet Fox mentioned “The Wonder Child” – the true self, the Child that lives within each one of us that beckons us to spiritual regeneration. The Wonder Child archetype represents our soul’s yearning for trans-formation. It manifests as the sense of wonder, the awe that we feel when we look upon something greater than ourselves. The magic of believing, with unwavering certainty that miracles do happen. That everything will be alright in the end. It manifests in our delight as we follow a silvery snail trail that meanders across a dewy lawn to the fairy toadstools at the bottom of the garden; when we gaze in awe at the Milky Way. For so many of us The Wonder Child is an infant in exile, banished from our adult lives. Says Marion Woodman “As long as we are determined to move at our swift, logical pace, our child remains hidden. The soul-bird put away in a dark box in childhood needs time, needs silence to learn to trust again.” In the clatter of our over-scheduled lives, we fear our little soul-bird’s joyful song; we shy from the exuberance of our scarlet creativity.

The 17^th century heralded a new evolutionary blooming on the World Tree. In the West, the Age of Reason – the Age of Rationalism – ushered in a philosophy that snuffed out the belief in miracles and wonder; relegated the “unseen” and the “mysterious” to the slag heap. The “irrational” was feared, trivialised, disowned. Science became the new religion. For almost 500 years, The Wonder Child lived and played with musicians, performers, poets, and painters. He lived in myths and fairy tales – the hero, the baby in the manager, The Little Prince. Collectively, we internalised the concept of the suffering artist. The creative person who carried the success and the failure of his or her own endeavours utterly alone. This heavy burden crushed the creative life force from those who embody The Muse. Keats, Byron, Plath, Jonker, Joplin, Winehouse … crumpled wings, broken bodies piled high upon the funeral pyre of creative genius.

Is this a symptom of the hubris that lifts us on feather and wax wings that melt as we fly too close to the Sun? Do we carry the Collective Wonder Child on our shoulders, stagger under the weight of our divine burden? Must we, like the wretched Eve, be condemned by a misogynistic psychopath god who proclaims spitefully, “I will sharpen the pain of your pregnancy, and in pain you will give birth.” Must we perish as we give birth to our creative progeny?

Carl Rogers and a team of psychologists made a study of the dynamics of creativity. The consensus would certainly not surprise a pre-schooler: the necessary ingredients were playfulness, spontaneity, the ability to be present, to live in the now, the ability to focus, a sense of wonder and the capacity to be one’s own “locus” of evaluation – to delight in what you have made. A tough call for the fragile psyche to straddle the magical, imaginal realm and the insatiable demands of a material world where we are only as good as our last offering on the altar of creativity. We speak of creative blocks. Resting actors. We silence the baying voices in our own heads with narcotics, alcohol. We open the door of the gas oven. To be playful, spontaneous, present, focused. To delight in what we have produced. A tough call when the rent is due and we must chop wood carry water. Not always easy when our teenager stays out all night drinking, when our father is ailing. Not always easy when we move through the lunar cycles of our relationships.

The ancient Greeks had Nine Muses, each one a chthonic divinity who bestowed in-spiration upon mere mortals – poetry, art, music, astronomy, and writing. The ancient Romans called upon The Genius. Author Elizabeth Gilbert proposes that we do not have to internalise the Muse. We do not have to live anxious, tortured lives. We do not need to self-destruct as we race after our Wonder Child. If, like the Greeks and Romans, we allow the anthropomorphic goddesses to bring us inspiration– from afar – we can remain mortals, not custodians, not neurotic wanna-be gods or goddesses. Not Wonder Children – 24-7.

To restore the Natural Order, these magical divinities must remain in their sacred groves. They must dwell at the crystal clear springs of prophecy. They must inhabit the walls of our work places. They may inspire us from afar. All we must do is show up when they call.

Says Elizabeth Gilbert, “Just do your job. Do your dance. If you glimpse some kind of wonderment just for a few moments… ‘Ole!’ to you, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.”

Art by Kay Nielson. Out flew the Moon.

Eleanor McEvoy – Whisper a Prayer to the Moon.

My darling, my darling

So crazy, so charming

It’s just that it happened too soon

But I send you my wishes

My hugs and my kisses

And whisper a prayer to the moon