Author: Ingrid Hoffman

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

Wonderful Life

Do you sometimes feel you are living your life like a hamster on a wheel? You wake up, go to work, wonder where the week went? Do you feel as if your wild self has been domesticated, harnessed by duties, demands, dos and don’ts? That the moments of happiness are fleeting clouds that scud across the surface of your life?

It takes a strong wind of change to topple us from the high wire of our sleepwalking lives. A fragment of conversation that comes to us, like the fragrance of sweet jasmine. A book, a song, an interview on YouTube which invites us back to a deeper place where we embrace our Wholeheartedness. Something quite unexpected that reminds us that Life is mysterious. “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – Hamlet.

I have just read Dying to be Me, Anita Moorjani’s story of the “terminal lymphoma” which ravaged her body for four painful years. Anita was rushed to hospital, her vital organs suddenly silent. Like Snow White, in her glass coffin, Anita lay in a coma. Her doctor told her grief-stricken family that she had only a few hours to live. Anita describes the near death experience (NDE) that brought an instant release of the fear that was stifling her life force. In her profoundly moving account of what she learnt after returning to her body, she delivers a simple message to the world. It is a message we have heard, but not heeded, for centuries. It is the one thing we all find so difficult to really do: To Love OURSELVES unconditionally. To step out of our own way, and let things flow.

Yet, who is the Self we must love? And how do we nurture and love this Self if we have tasted only neglect, or blame, even cruelty, in our families of origin? How do we love ourselves with gentleness and compassion, if we don’t know how? If our core belief is that we are unworthy, that life is hard or dangerous? How do we soften, how do we love fearlessly if our instincts are blunted, our hearts shielded protectively?

We live in a Petri dish of fear in the West. We fear the sun, we fear growing fat. We fear losing our loved ones, we fear losing our source of income. We fear old age, we fear death. We fear love. We fight AIDS, we support “Cancer Prevention” campaigns, we take out insurance, invest our money in hospital plans, bolster our sense of safety with imaginary security – money in the bank, stocks and shares – our beliefs are fuelled by lack and aspiration. Like automatons we march with the tribe mind to the drum beat of fear and competition. We juice, read self-help books, exercise, go for regular medical check-ups, but if we cannot truly love and honour ourselves, we sit passively on the Ferris wheel of life, vaguely aware that the interludes of happiness are ephemeral. Round and round we go, living in the past, living in the future, never in the Now.

Anita Moorjani says she believes that her cancer manifested in her body because of her enormous fear of living. Now she wakes in the morning and asks herself, why am I choosing to be alive today? And she lives from that perspective, in self-love.

So we may experience ourselves in illness or in lack. We may lose our way in the labyrinth of our seriousness. Our minds may be filled with discord, dissonance. We may entangle ourselves in the straining and resisting we call stress. Meister Eckhardt said that “when the soul wishes to experience something she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own image”. Beneath our Promethean thrust to discover, analyse, grasp, we blind ourselves with the glare of our stolen fire to the brilliance of the Light with ourselves. Like Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers, has been there all the time. So, all we can do is to be very gentle with ourselves, find the humour in our grumpiness, our acting out, our blaming others – ourselves. Until we decide not to. We can waken to a new day. Remember that we are all part of a magnificent mandala of creation. Look deeply today.

Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.

Extract from “Call Me By My True Names – Thich Nhat Hanh.

Dying to be Me

Artwork by Emelisa Mudle

Wonderful Life

July 25, 2012 In Astrology, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Dante’s Prayer

Some experiences create a gentle ripple that gently rocks the smooth surface of our lives. Others strike and devastate, leaving us standing in the charred devastation of a world now precarious, darkly uncertain. What is now contained, tagged and labelled as “The Denver Shooting” to describe the unspeakable tragedy that exploded into our consciousness last week, was depicted in the sky script at a time when the Dark Knight, Pluto, in T- square with Uranus and Mars – power, unpredictable, explosive rage, harm to the public, depicted by the Moon trine Uranus, quincunx Chiron, sextile Mars, in the fourth house, the house of endings. *

When I heard the news, I was pinioned to the cliff face of shock and then engulfed by a wave of sorrow – sorrow for those lives touched by the actions of a young man still in the tender budding of his adult life. Sorrow for James Holmes, blinded by the madness of his own rage, his own suffering, his own inexorable compulsion to do what he believed he had to do. What a soul contract. The astrological picture of the event has a sense of fatedness. And in its wake, I have sensed an uneasiness, a sense of collective memory that has been nudged again to remember all the unspeakable acts of horror and violence human beings have perpetrated against each other, animals, and our earth home for centuries. From its dark lair, anxiety yawns and stretches ominously, breathing its fetid breath onto the lives of so many who hold their breath and bow their heads and hurry about their day. Pain lies in stagnant pools that ripple when we receive news that shocks and terrifies, pulling us into the undertow of what spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle has called “the pain body.” And as we resist what is, the slippery stresses of our lives gain momentum, and slither into debilitating anxiety, pessimism, or crippling depression. They become embodied in physical symptoms, as we block the energy flow that may be our ally. We lose our way, and like Dante, find ourselves in exile, utterly alone in the dark woods, where we must face our demons, wandering, wondering, when will this ever end?

The ego sups on man’s madness – and we step towards our predetermined Fate blindfolded – unless we begin to glimpse new possibilities, imagine our way through the dust that obscures, begin to use language that strives to mirror our thoughts. Our soul contract for this lifetime is not a grid of frozen inevitability if we trust our own energy, use our instinct, and evoke our faith to lead us out of the cul-de-sac of fear. I do believe there is a fate that has already been apportioned to us. It is depicted in our birth charts. Yet, when the life of someone we love has been stubbed out, in a cinema, on a motorway, in their own home or office, no spiritual platitudes or intellectual ramblings will remedy our pain – until we are ready to heal the thought that has created the pain. Until we can find meaning in our suffering.

The movie adaptation of the 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is a modern allegory that deals with the nigredo, the blackness, of grief and loss after the bombings of the Twin Towers. The hero is a nine-year-old boy, Oskar Schell, who tries to make meaning out of the death of his beloved father, whom he believes was one of the many souls who jumped from that towering inferno on that fateful day in September.

In alchemy, Nigredo means putrefaction, decomposition. In astrology, the transit of Pluto can become the pestle and mortar where we are pulverised, where we lie dismembered, in our congealed blood, and where we must piece ourselves together, bone by bone. In fairy tales, the hero encounters characters in the form of old hags, wolves, giants, or dwarves that test and challenge him, but also reward his perseverance and humility with magical assistance. In this deeply moving story, Oskar meets men and women who guide him on his path through the darkness of despair, bringing new insight, and acceptance of that which is incomprehensible, and perhaps always will be. His quest ends with acceptance and a clearing in the darkness of the forest: “So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!”

So in the aftermath of the dark night in Denver, and the collective shock and sorrow; in the murky mists of our personal tragedies, all we can do is to minister to the minutiae of our daily lives, all we can hope to do is to accept the inexplicable, and live in “the now”. All we can do is believe that things are unfolding, exactly as they should, entwining fate, encoded in our DNA, in our birth charts, where there is “a perfect plan” with the choices we make in each moment. All we can do it to trust that there is a mysterious force that will guide us through the dark woods, if we pay attention to the symbols, the metaphors, and look beyond the mechanical Newtonian view of the universe… trust that we are in the perfect time, the perfect place for our soul’s contract. Our soul knows when it is done – our relationships, our work, and when our time has come to leave our body. And then, our clay feet will grow wings to fly above our limited human awareness, as our flawed human hearts stay open to love.

* Paul Saunders gives an intelligent astrological update on the aftermath of the dark night in Denver:

Loreena McKennitt

“When the dark wood fell before me
And all the paths were overgrown
When the priests of pride say there is no other way
I tilled the sorrows of stone

I did not believe because I could not see
Though you came to me in the night
When the dawn seemed forever lost
You showed me your love in the light of the stars…”

July 16, 2012 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

How You Remind Me

“Life is difficult”, wrote M.Scott Peck in 1978. This simple sentence reverberated in the Collective. “The Road Less Traveled” sold more than 10 million copies. There is a cold comfort in the famous one-liner. For most of us, life is difficult. It is brutal, unfair, painful. “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” ( Macbeth )

Life, as The Buddha said, “is suffering”. It takes enormous courage to face into the onslaught of “slings and arrows of misfortune” – some of us run as fast and as far as we can. Some of us numb our rage, our disappointment, our bewilderment. Some of us go through the motions of living, dragging the ball and chain of our fear, murmuring positive affirmations, buying organic, diligently going to the gym, meditating to mantras. There are times in our lives where we must pare away the myths of traditional religion. When we must question old models of spirituality and cultural conditioning. There are times when we must embrace our own flawed humanness, and alone, we must blaze a trail through the dark woods. Stare the Monster in the eye.

To be Whole is not easy. To mine the psyche and bring to the surface All that we are, requires scrupulous integrity, and spiritual discipline. There will be days, weeks, even months, when we may wander, lost and thirsty in our aloneness. When some inexplicable, savage event sends us spiralling into an abyss of unreachable despair. When we ask ourselves, over and over again, “what’s it all about?” Today, to remind you of Who you are, I share with you, a spoonful of sugar – the fierce wisdom of Cheryl Strayed. On February 14, 2012, Strayed revealed herself as “Dear Sugar”, the formerly anonymous author of an online advice column at The Rumpus.

Cheryl Strayed departs from the agony aunt formula, and shares her own struggle and angst:

“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

“One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her sceptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life. Say thank you.”

Thank you.

Habit dulls our minds. We complain, and begrudge. We’re haunted by the ghosts of our past, tortured by what we could have, should have done differently. We look through the narrow prism of our lives at what is missing, and fail to see what is there.

So often it is a calamity, a rending heartbreak, a debilitating disease that rips away the predictable map of our lives, rendering us lost and afraid, without familiar landmarks. Yet, if we look up at the stars, not down at our feet, we will see a sparkling sky that stretches into eternity… And as we walk, one step, one day, at a time, we come to sense a deeper awareness of what we have failed to notice in the jingle jangle of our compromised lives: the acts of kindness and love that sprinkle our days like peach blossoms, the honey-sweet oblivion of a restful night’s sleep, after nights of dry-eyed awakeness; the mist that caresses the nape of the morning, the smell of toast, the cuddle-comfort of a cup of tea.

Suddenly, the savanah stretches before us, an undulating sea of golden grass beyond the walls of familiar repetion of routine that entangles, chokes our clarity, blurs our sense of proportion. Tentatively, we begin to walk differently upon the earth, recognising the sacredness of each experience, glimpsing the Divine in a dew-spangled spider web, a scudding cloud, the china blue of the sky dome. Knowing that from smoke and ashes, new green shoots will grow.

So, today, return once more to the soft space within your own heart. Give the world – and yourself, another chance. Sometimes you just have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again. Remember Who you are…. And Celebrate.

Nickelback.

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.