Sliding Doors Tag

July 4, 2016 In Astrology, Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Ride on

Ride On 1 Life’s challenges bring us second chances. An illness appears in the guise of an opportunity to heal a ruptured relationship or reconnect with a family member. The loss of a job may be the way through to a long-buried dream that opens into a new life direction. Life’s challenges may bring us another chance to turn towards Life and Love once more.

We’re living in “interesting times”. The world is in a constant process of change. And now we’re in the eye of the storm. Countries are disengaged. On the brink of divorce. Re-engagement will require courage and the resilience to bounce back, regroup in the face of personal disappointment, loss or betrayal.

For more astrology listen to this week’s New Moon podcast.

Ride On 2 “Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen,” says Brené Brown, author of Daring Greatly. Showing up to be seen for many of us sounds a lot easier than it is. We’ve been wearing a mask for so long, it cleaves to our skin. We may lose face. Have to admit we were wrong. Say we’re sorry and make amends. Courage and resilience don’t come naturally for most of us as adults. Losing a home or a source of income, the dismemberment of divorce, are—for most of us—catastrophic events that split our psyches along old fault lines that formed when we were malleable and very young. Our scar tissue aches. Resilience, that brave act of rebounding, is made easier if we have emotional attunement with others, good enough mothering in early childhood, a sense of belonging to family, a community. The ability to turn in and towards instead of pulling back and turning away is something we must learn and practice daily.

Ride On 3 Dr John Gottman, scholar, researcher and author of The Science of Trust says that sliding door moments build trust. “Trust is built in very small moments, which I call “sliding door” moments, after the movie, Sliding Doors. In any interaction, there’s a possibility of connecting with your partner or turning away from your partner. Of all the terrible betrayals, there is a particular sort of betrayal that is more insidious and equally corrosive to trust. The betrayal of disengagement. Of not caring. Of letting the connection go. Of not being willing to devote time and effort to the relationship. The word, betrayal evokes experiences of cheating and lying, breaking a confidence, failing to defend us to someone else who’s gossiping about us, not choosing us over other people. But the most dangerous in terms of corroding the trust connection is disengagement. When the people we love or with whom we have deep connection, stop caring, stop paying attention, stop investing, and stop fighting for the relationship, trust begins to slip away and hurt starts seeping in. Disengagement triggers shame and our greatest fear of being abandoned, unworthy and unloveable. What can make this covert betrayal so much more dangerous than something like a lie or an affair, is that we can’t point to the source of our pain—there’s no event, no obvious evidence of brokenness. It can feel crazy-making.”

Ride On 5 Astrologically, we’ve all been affected in some way by the energy of Mars Retrograde and Neptune square Saturn. Mars is gaining momentum now as he moves direct through the sign of Scorpio and the Saturn-Neptune square is still in force, symbolised by the waves of immigrants seeking refuge, the political Game of Thrones. The word change means to to make (something) other than what it was, to alter, to bend, crook, to become different. And to change we must take action (Mars) to bring our hopes, our ideals, our dreams ( Neptune ) into manifestation (Saturn). And in order to trust another we must trust ourselves to be fully present during life’s random encounters. Writes Brené Brown, “nothing has transformed my life more than realising that it’s a waste of time to evaluate my worthiness by weighing the reaction from the people in the stands.”

We have a choice in how we perceive the world around us. There is no final destination in our personal journey. There is no end to our Becoming. The passage of time sculpts and shapes our values, our preferences and our perception of the world around us. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’re ever been. We can dare to pause, consider, differentiate from the hive mind. We can trust. And ride on. images

Christy Moore— Ride On

Sliding Doors, the 1998 romantic comedy, depicts those split-second choices that unfold like skeins of silk into futures not yet lived.

Oryx Photograph Jeanne Thompson

My upcoming workshops are in Dublin, 15 Oct, and Cape Town, 5 Nov.

To join, please email: ingrid@trueheartwork.com

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