Amanda Palmer Tag

March 20, 2013 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Who By Fire

One size does not fit all. Our bodies, our minds, our souls have a fragile grace that is matchless. We are beautiful originals, with a journey to take that will be uniquely ours. Yet so many still cleave to centuries of congested conditioning which has congealed our minds. We have learnt by fire, by water, by high ordeal, by common trial that it is very dangerous to leave the protection and the tyranny of the religious, social, corporate, familial tribe. One size fits all. New or unique thinking and behaviour have historically been brutally silenced. We have learnt that it is death-defyingly dangerous to be the sacrificial scapegoat. We have learnt by someone’s command or by our own assent how very lonely it can be in exile. Our brave hearts, our strong bones reverberate with the burnings, the crucifixions, the be-headings, the stonings and the suffocating clods of damp soil that silenced our ancestors who were buried alive, expunged from memory. They did not fit the tyrant’s mould. Heresy, blasphemy, treason! They asked for too much. Too soon. They were cut down to size.

Still we lop off those parts of ourselves that do not fit the standard norm of what is good, physically attractive, socially or politically correct. Still we sit in silence. Afraid to speak. Afraid to ask. We squeeze through the eye of the needle to find ourselves in Dante’s circle of Hell as we dance in the searing flames of pretence.

Alt-rock icon Amanda Palmer has gained acclaim and worn the fool’s cap of infamy as she has dared to ride the sacred cow of her truth. Giving voice to her uniqueness as a performer, a woman, a member of this human tribe, she dares to question, to challenge, to expose and to open her arms and her heart. She raises the Art of Asking to a sacred exchange between herself and her fans. She speaks of a world where one size does not fit all. Where people live surrounded by strangers in a vacuum of isolation and loneliness. And where it is possible to meet, to connect with a simple gesture and meet each other in a tender gaze.

So, as we silence our voices in the Medusa stare of self-doubt, fear of ridicule or reprisal, we must trust that by exposing our vulnerability, asking for what we need, exchanging what we can give, we will eventually find our flock of swans and learn to fly.

We must promise ourselves that we will keep an oracle eye on our own agenda. We must promise ourselves not to break our vows to ourselves or betray another when we lose congruence of head and heart. We must promise ourselves that we will try to speak our truth from that place in our heart which is generous and wise and loving.

“Consciousness is tough work,” says Carolyn Myss. It is tough work to be awake, aware, truly in our authentic internal power. It requires an act of will and spiritual discipline to pulverise our past in the pestle and mortar that contains the mustard seed of hope for each new day.

We alone are the custodians of our integrity. “The setting aside of one’s integrity is not required to win someone’s heart,” Neale Donald Walsch says. “But the setting aside of one’s anger may be. It is possible to make a point without making an enemy. It is possible to be right without being righteous.”

At the equinox today, let us celebrate another turning in the Great Wheel of the year, and dare to speak, sing, shout our own personal truth. Carpe Diem!

Leonard Cohen asks at O2 in Dublin, And who shall I say is calling?… Who By Fire?

March 11, 2013 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

I want you but I don’t need you

I have a friend who has perfected The Art of The Brush-Off.

He is a Vermeer, a van Gogh of seduction.

Relationships, his blank canvas. He blends his pigments on a palette of politeness. With panache he delivers the final flick of the brush. Perplexed friends and lovers wait for the visit, the call, the email. The “why”, which like the Second Coming, never comes. His septic self-loathing aches beneath the gauze of a white-toothed smile. His arsenal of languorous pleasantries conceal the immensity of his attachment to beliefs which bind him to his past – it is dangerous to need, to love, to be vulnerable. He leaves before he can feel the pain of rejection or the obliteration of loving. He unilaterally severs communication because the pain of self-enquiry is too excruciating. Like the Emperor who is wearing no clothes, he parades proudly wearing his assumptions about love and loss wrapped around him tightly.

Psychology proposes that we learn about love in the cradle of our source – our original family. That encased in our adult’s bodies is the child, the adolescent. That each one of us has lei-lines of feelings, associations, punitive judgements and an emotional resonance which underpin our adult relationships. That we drag our family complexes through the passage of time and meet them again and again in our relationships with our lovers, our children, our colleagues and our friends.

Yet we live at the dawn of a new paradigm of energy wisdom heralded by teachers like Carolyn Myss in her ground-breaking work in the ‘90s. This is the wisdom of the mystics and the shamans. A wisdom that has slumbered for centuries under the perfectly cloudless skies of rationalism. A wisdom that now stretches into the concrete canals of mainstream thinking: Everything is energy. Our thought are energy. Our thoughts speak through the mother tongues of our bodies. Our thoughts leak into our childhood time line, our previous parasitical relationship, our betrayal, our unfair dismissal from our last job.

So many of us define ourselves by our physical, emotional, or social wounds. These wounds (my mother was depressed, my parents divorced, my husband was an alcoholic, my family died in the holocaust, we were victims of apartheid ) create an archetypal bonding and security within our relationships. They colour our attitudes and beliefs. They are our “wounded child” that ties us to the thred-bare blue blanket of the past and communicates through the illnesses that manifest in our bodies and our neurotic behaviours. Wounds become a form of higly valued currency to control others subtly in socially accepted ways. When we pull out our wounds nobody challenges us anymore and we find a sense of tribal belonging with others who plug in, just like us. We don’t do this consciously. It is the stream of our inner dialogue that loops around the same stuck places where we ache and lose our connection to our core aliveness. Carolyn Myss posited that healing is as frightening to us as forgiveness.

“One may not reach the dawn, save by the path of night,” said Kahil Gibran. So often it is in the velvety darkness of despair that we glimpse the radiance of the morning star and draw our energy back to present time. So often it is in our pain that synapses cross and we finally have the courage and the will to unplug our energy circuits from our tangled perceptions of events. So often it is in the dawn of the new day that we embrace the jettisoned parts of ourselves and disembark from the leaky boats of relationships we once built with bent timbers. Loving ourselves enough may mean we walk away from lovers and friends who remain plugged into their own matrix of suffering and expect us to stay there with them.

We walk across the stepping stones of challenge to return to the warm welcome of our home coming, tempered by the heat of the fire that has burnt us black. We emerge more pliable, more resilient, more compassionate, and more attuned to the heroic strength of our own spirit. It takes enormous discipline and discrimination to hold on to ourselves and know that we alone are capable of reversing, re-framing events from the past.

Intimate relationships offer us opportunity become artists in the poetics of the soul. From the crushed bud of loss, from our own perception of rejection, seeps life-giving moisture to nourish the fragrant flower of our own authentic power. We can grow and flourish through forgiveness and love, which burns away hatred and fear in its blue flame. We can value ourselves enough to simply mirror the pain of those that scratch and claw at life, and not to take it on as ours. We allow our hearts to bloom as we hold on tightly to ourselves and don’t become entangled in assumptions or stories that we make up in the dark hours just before dawn. “Thoughts become things … “says Mike Dooley, “choose the good ones!”

Amanda Palmer sings poignantly I want you but I don’t need you