Give her permission,
Have the power
In her wavy dress,
to hold the reins
Of a mighty dragon
Defying the wind
With a sword
Commanding with the heart made from fire.
Only when the dragon would lay down
On soft and nurturing soil
Under tree fern leaves reflecting little waterdrops,
She would lay down with him, calm,
Earth wind metal and fire
Finally at rest.
B.C.
The flickering sounds of the fire in stillness
burning away the willfulness
floating On the holy river
like drop of water in the ocean
One falling into the One,
echoing the encounter,
Spreading stillness in the circles.
One falling into One.
The silence of potential,
What I feel
is unclear,
can my experience turn into exponential?
feeling Unity within
the connection becomes real.
I know I am here,
My body can dance out
This mess
Unknown to my words to express.
The dissonance between things
sways with the lightness of being
what more am I seeing
further from limitation blinded before by believing.
On the bar codes of consciousness
Falling like drops from the sky
I surrender my resistance, my control, my illusions
Less judgement – more trust
With open arms embracing a stranger
To feel welcomed
Body reassured
Relaxing into wonder.
Loving with opened eyes
Laughing with opened chest
Embracing with joyful heart.
improve wellbeing and relationships
In the program 9 steps for inner peace the second triad in the model is named Allowing your wants.
In allowing your wants we are looking into liberating yourself, which literally means how to get out of the prison of “shoulds”, guilt and shame.
These ideas and emotional blocks often prevent the clarity around what are actually our true heart desires. They are the protectors of fears, that we have developed sometime along our path in the life. They are the “I can’t”, “What will people think” sort of thoughts. They are the addictions, jealousy, bitterness, underlying issues of “ I don’t deserve to be happy”, “ not enough” syndrome kind of sources of behavior.
Part of this path of liberation is to get familiar with your saboteurs and develop more sage power. This concept of saboteur and sage was developed by Shirzad Chamine
Positive intelligence. He has identified one master saboteur and named it The judge.
When you work through The judge and various variations of it towards self, others and situations, it is helpful to identify the energy of this judge, the look and how it steals your perspective from your higher wisdom.
Besides Shirzad concept, there is also another aspect of saboteur, that holds a different energy that is also useful to get familiar with. The name of this one is The Brat. (Dora and Angelo Frasco, Healing course). You recognize the brat by quite immature, childish, sulking, walking away, avoiding, “not dealing with the issue in a mature way” kind of energy.
Both the judge and the brat would paint out an image of reality that seems so believable, but there is underlying fear and the choice you would be making for your behavior and decisions would be based on fear.
In a book Breaking free Overcoming Self sabotage (Linda Ellis Eastman and contributing authors) the following chapters give a great insight into what are we working through when we decide to develop more sage capacity in ourself and move more into our original essence. The chapters are: How to built healthy self esteem&stand up to your internal saboteur; Negative self-talk; Stop with the cruel words; Sabotage: the consequence of fear; De-clutter your mind; I am enough; learning to love yourself.
How do we work with these aspects of ourselves that are kind of protecting us, and yet it is not a protection that would serve our highest. Every time you manage to catch the saboteur, it is like overcoming a threshold guardian in a video game, which if you do manage to catch it and act from your wisdom, it is your entrance to level 2, to celebration, to more alignment.
It has been a fun month. Some challenges in between and lots to be grateful for. Above all I was resting more, sleeping longer, allowing more space. Summer in Europe, winter in South Africa.
I was exploring how can I be devoted to the journey of chosen self-development with finding my own way of keeping the promises to myself and not being rigid about it, or forceful.
I know that daily meditation practice is part of my daily hygiene to collect myself, ground, center in my heart, remind myself on the intention. And that knowing has just naturally became part of me. However, at one point though I observed that it has moved from the energy of Love to energy of Duty, which brought in somewhat mechanic feeling.
With that I gave myself permission to let go a bit, what happens if I allow myself to sleep a little longer, when would I actually feel from inside to sit down for my practice?
I think I just really needed the rest and some relaxation. In this month I posed a question what is a way that there is some discipline and also enjoyment?
The result was a feeling of deeper settling in my heart, a certain relaxed open spaciousness in my heart space and breath. It felt good and nourishing.
I am curious now to explore further with autumn routines and kids starting school again, where is this practice going to find its place again somewhat organically, aligned with my overall intention of gentle, appropriate, to my Highest. With sobriety, openness and curiosity I will explore the unknown, follow the true heart feeling and observe.
This week’s theme is linked to feelings and emotions. The mindfulness of emotions and feelings is one of the foundations of mindfulness practice, therefore one of the essential practices and talks. Working with emotions and feelings requires patience and fine tuning into realizing what is a clean feeling, what is interpretation, what is emotion – reaction to something and what is that saying to us, what are we doing with it.
In relation to this topic I am sharing this month one of the past observations and writings with respect to a strong feeling or emotion and how does it feel to be with it.
Slowly I have learned
That this what I feel
is not the whole of me.
A part that in that moment took over the rest
So strong that all other parts
Hid away behind the bushes and the rocks
Timidly observed this giant
Taking over the stage,
Forgetting it is not alone.
Even my soul in the moment of this coup
Could buy into this illusion
And forget that what is looking at Is just a finger on the hand,
Pointing so vigorously that It feels like sea sick with gaze caught up in mesmerizing movement.
You are an important finger, and so is the one next to you.
With deep breath I land back in my heart, my center,
With another I stand in the middle of my head,
I hold the third to notice more.
Soon there is much more to see,
In my humbleness I smile to the change.
The wind blows, the silence comes
It’s gone a moment later.
Did you catch it? Did you hold it? Did you let it go?
Create more space for trust and be free
There are couple of great journals out there that can support your personal growth. My favorite journaling experiences were: Brene Brown, The gift of imperfection, and Glennon Doyle Untamed.
In my experience finding a good friend with whom you can share a journey can be a fun way that also supports you to express in words and have inner discipline to gain clarity. When you get together for sharing, either on a walk or coffee, lunch, this becomes a nice social activity, where you also have a safe space to be listened to and for you to listen to another person and through listening other perspective widen yours.
Currently I am with Michael Singer’s Untethered soul, Practices to journey beyond yourself, and my journaling partner is a fellow coach and a close friend.
Compared to the other experience this journey includes a lot of mindfulness practices (which I can recognize from the course for Mindfulness meditation teachers) and a bit less artistic then the previous two. Saying that though I still need to remind myself how actually mindful practices bring me to a present moment, to connection with my body and breath, how I do manage to become aware more what is a thought and how to come into the stillness of my being. It is there I find more peace, love and freedom. This can sound a bit like a hippy, at least that is my judgement. However with being grounded in everyday life, family, work and practices this becomes more a way of inner being with a lot of sober seeing the truth, the mix of feelings and emotions and the ability to skillfully hold it all.
I am choosing one part from the Journaling practices that I find useful (M.Singer, p. 160)
“You think about your psychological well-being all the time. That constant, anxious inner talk is a form of suffering.
Have you noticed how many personal thoughts are going on all the time. The next time you notice fearful thoughts, pause for a moment. Ask yourself if you want to be that person or do you want to be free?”
This is a poem that I share with my clients as a simple example of how we can find something about our body that we love and appreciate. Often I hear women pick up and focus on the parts of their body that they don’t like or they would change and fix. This is an invitation to find and focus on the positive at least as equally as our mind can be pulled into negative.
Choose what you love
I love my hands, the elegance, how they feel and how they look when they are touching clay, most of all from my body, I love my hands.
I love my limbs, they are long and athletic.
I love the soles of my feet.
I love my ribs and how they expand.
I love my liver and kidneys.
I love the inner perfection of aligned working together.
I love my honesty and willingness to learn.
I love my heart and willingness to look into it, even though I often feel afraid and confused.
And sometimes I just feel oh my not again, why do I want to look into how I feel time and time again. I rebel.
Then reminding myself to stay with, look deeper, see more. (B.Cukjati)
In mindfulness there is a saying Pain is inevitable suffering is optional. According to Buddhist teaching if we follow the noble Eighfold path, we can overcome suffering.
8 fold path is a list that includes moral virtue, wisdom and meditative culmination of heart and mind. The list of eight is the following:
Intention to aspire to make the aligned choices with the 8fold path and be gentle and understanding to self is a good starting point.
Why would I do that at all besides overcoming the suffering, is because there is something in me that deeply resonates with what Tara Brach presented as two wings that we are cultivating: the wing of Love and wing of Wisdom.
Now true wisdom doesn’t mean that we have read and memorized x amount of books and we can intellectualize on the topic for hours. Maybe you have come across this pyramid that says we can have data, then usage of data is information and information used in practice and integrated with learning is wisdom. And true Love also is not romantic, is deep, it’s strong and powerful and not mushy at all.
Yesterday I came into a room and I could hear a pigeon trying to get out and trying to find its way. He was banging into the glass repeatedly, not recognizing where the window ends and where there is freedom of him flying away. I have learned that if you approach a butterfly, or a bird and trying to hold them and put them outside, they become more scared of your presence and that hectic wanting to go out accelerates or totally freezes. This time I decided to try to approach the pigeon with as much stillness that I can without my nervous system automatically reacting to the unusual situation. And I put on the thin gloves for me and the pigeon sake. I don’t know who was more scared. I could feel the wings reacting, and I could feel my belly reacting. So I needed to find a space in myself to hold and let go. And we managed. I let him go and he flew away.
Or how the website Tricycle says it: https://tricycle.org/magazine/noble-eightfold-path/
“Here compassion represents love, charity, kindness, tolerance, and such noble qualities on the emotional side, or qualities of the heart, while wisdom would stand for the intellectual side or the qualities of the mind. If one develops only the emotional, neglecting the intellectual, one may become a good-hearted fool; while to develop only the intellectual side [and] neglecting the emotional may turn one into a hard-hearted intellect without feeling for others.”
To be honest one can, well depending on personality some more then others, easily fall into taking this in a prescriptive way. Or… there is another way of keeping that knowledge somewhere in mind and observing oneself:
This for someone who studies Buddhism is oversimplification of the richness and depth it is offered in text, yet I am sharing this through my own lens and putting this in practice to the extent that is available for me at this point and it might serve as a spark of thought and action for some of you as well.
Dr. Gladys McGarey is a centarian who is considered a mother of holistic medicine. I was drawn to her by her recent book The well lived life and then watched her ted talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7w44sd1N44 and listened to a podcast with her on the www.thegoodlifecoach.com/253-2/. Besides her practice, she has previously published also following books: Living medicine, The physician within you, The world needs old ladies.
Today she is 104 years old and as far as I could read up on her, she is still offers life consultation.
In my recent articles, I delved into the topic of longevity and examined the lives of centenarians. Yet, what truly captivates me is the example of Gladys McGarey. At the age of 100, she not only delivered a Tedx talk but also maintained a 10-year plan. Using a walker equipped with a watch tracking her 3000 steps a day, she demonstrates that embracing assistance is perfectly acceptable. It’s her vibrant attitude toward life, fueled by what she describes as “Juice,” that truly makes life an incredible journey.
In the interview, she emphasizes the significance of discovering one’s own path. When she says “find your own,” I interpret it as developing a personalized approach to self-care rooted in love, care, and a thriving mindset.
As individuals, we often seek the recipe or grant ourselves permission to engage in certain activities. After hearing her perspective, I decided to permit myself to be more flexible in selecting self-care practices. Typically, I tend to overthink whether something is a genuine need or excessive indulgence. By allowing a bit more freedom to follow what feels good, I address my internal questioning of “Can I?” and challenge the ingrained discipline that tells me I don’t need certain things. This adjustment involves granting myself more permission to enjoy and acknowledge that it’s okay to do so.
What does that mean in practice? When we feel the Love and Life running through our bodies, we recognize our conditioning to control and allow ourselves to surrender more for Life and Love to move through us. This is where for me mindfulness of the body plays a role.
As we practice this mindful awareness, we also adopt an accepting attitude towards whatever arises, acknowledging that every aspect belongs to the current experience. This gradual acceptance and allowing facilitate an internal shift, paving the way for the unrestricted movement and flow of life and love through our being.
Dr. McGarey says: “You [have to] feel and know life is there to be lived. You have to live it,” she says. (source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/08/5-ls-for-living-a-long-fulfilling-life-from-a-102-year-old-doctor.html ):
Life: ife is like a seed. It has a shell around it. It has all the energy of the universe within it,” says McGarey. According to McGarey, life’s positive transformation requires our activation. Symbolically, in the Hippocratic lifestyle, the process of sprouting signifies an awareness of the seed, water, and life itself. This year, I involved my son and husband in a beginning-of-the-year ritual where we expressed our intentions using sprouting jars. It symbolized a proactive step towards initiating positive change in our lives.
Love: “Love is the activating factor. It cracks the shell,” she says. “It’s the whole aspect of life as we come into it and take our first breath.” For me that is that watering aspect, watering with love, adding water to the seed.
Laughter: “Laughter without love is cruel. It’s mean [and] cold,” McGarey says. “But laughter with love is joy and happiness.”
Labor: Labor with love is bliss. It’s why a singer sings, why a painter paints, why I became a doctor. It’s what juices you up. It’s what makes you really know: ‘This is who the inner core of me is.’” Pay attention to what drives you, she adds.
Listening: “Listening without love is empty sound,” says McGarey. “But listening with love is understanding.” When you’re able to find people who understand you and what your purpose is, life becomes more fulfilling.
Gratitude can be a foundation for the 5ls. The practice of gratitude gradually opens up to Acceptance and Love. Gratitude is a very fertile ground to the 5ls.
The other day I was cleaning up the old children’s books, choosing what to keep and what to pass on. One of the books that I kept as a reminder was a book called: “We are going on a bear hunt.” This book has a repeating line: “we can’t go under it, we can’t go over it, we got to go through it.” And so it is that I have this story as a reminder that when we get a challenge, you keep on steady going through it. That reminds us also Tara Brach in her book Radical acceptance. She writes: “The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom. Clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart, is what I call Radical Acceptance.”
We today use the word holistic for many different things. McGarey explains that when they were coming up with the word that would offer complementary side to traditional medicine, they were thinking of including three elements:
When I was with on the international conference for Enneagram practitioners in Cape Town, organized by Integrative 9 (https://www.integrative9.com/) one year they call it Holism. As a guest speaker Ginger Lapid Bogda has been guiding us more through “What does it mean to be whole?” so there is this aspect of holy or whole.
How to understand holy? For someone who is religious that would mean belonging to or coming from God, sacred. For someone who doesn’t follow a particular religion the meaning might be: regarded with or deserving deep respect, awe, reverence, or adoration (source: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/holy). Or to someone else, maybe the understanding of the origin of the sound of word might bring the most value in understanding: ME holie < OE halig (akin to Ger heilig) < base of OE hal, sound, happy, whole.
In this article we have explored Dr. Gladys McGarey as an example of a person, who at the age of 104 is an inspiration for all the 5ls she writes in Living medicine. Life itself is a medicine she says and may this article inspire you to cultivate this 5ls, gratitude and recognize where you get stuck in Fear and with gentle determination move through it to more Love.
Our AISCT connect choir’s choice to sing Alphaville’s “Forever Young” sparked my curiosity. Navigating healthy lifestyle choices and inspired by Hippocrates wellness institute, I questioned what is this about living forever? Unlike Alexander the Great, I’m not on a world-conquering mission, and the pursuit of immortality feels daunting.
However, I aim to live well, maintain a strong body and sharp mind, and good heart, for activities like playing with grandchildren and doing my daily chores, maybe writing, coaching and enriching relationships with others. Studying mindfulness, rooted in Buddhism, reveals the power of radical acceptance, even in challenging situations like disability. So with that in mind that being able bodied is what I am now, and being aware that for some people all body and full breath might not be available and still can find an attitude there which gives inner contentment.
Besides the Forever young song, I am sharing in this article some conclusions from Netflix documentary on centenarians, dr. Atitia’s book Outlive, practices that are part of Hippocrates lifestyle and mindfulness practices.
Netflix’s exploration of centenarian lives became a source of inspiration and reflection. Witnessing the lives of those in Sardinia and Okinawa, I found myself drawn to the simplicity of their joy, the richness of their relationships, and the purpose that infused each day. What stood out was their lack of grasping for health and youth; instead, it was their natural way of getting up in the morning and engaging in life. Their stories prompted me to reassess the markers of a fulfilling life and consider the profound impact of social connections, purposeful living, and physical engagement on overall well-being.
Dr. Peter Attia’s book, “Outlive,” delves into the science and art of extending our healthspan and lifespan. As a renowned physician and longevity expert, Dr. Attia explores the factors that contribute to a longer, healthier life. From nutrition and exercise to cutting-edge medical interventions, “Outlive” provides a roadmap for those seeking to optimize their well-being and outlive the conventional limitations of aging. He, very similar to what we include in Hippocrates lifestyle, puts an emphasis on including different forms of exercise, emotional health, nutritional biochemistry, intake of protein as we age. (Outlive, p.17) he writes “Exercise is by far the most potent longevity drug. No other intervention does nearly as much as to prolong our lifespan and preserve our cognitive and physical function”.
In the Netflix documentary they have established in Sardinia a correlation between the steepness of the village and the lifespan. But surely those people don’t approach this: “ oh I need to get in so many steps a day”, for one lady that walk is simply a way to get to the church.
As we find in many wellness evaluation, the quality of sleep is “critical to our innate physiological repair processes, especially in the brain. As any parent knows the accumulation of sleepless nights does sum up to more irritability and reactivity. The quality of sleep can also be largely affected with the food we consume throughout the day, the amount of water intake, stress levels. Looking holistically how to improve sleeping we look into combination of habits, nutrition, tending our emotions, breathwork, supplementation, evening rituals and our reactions when we wake up at night. What we call our secondary emotions. The mood that we are in, affects our thoughts and emotional wellbeing. So there is the whole interconnectivity to be addressed.
When we are using Hippocrates wellness framework for lifestyle mentoring, we follow a holistic model called RESILIENT: responsibility, emotional mastery, sustainability, integrity, living food nutrition, nourishment, exercise immunology, transformation. This is a plant based model. For some people this works really well. Especially those who are unwell and they commit to holistic approach, they are willing to try out a plant based approach much more then someone who considers themselves currently healthy.
In my family the rest of the family is eating everything, I am only one on plant based nutrition. We are committed to buying local vegetable produce on the market, so that majority is organic, no cow’s milk consumption and minimum dairy in general, we have our own filtration system for water, solar powered house, composting for organic waste, recycling, and a balance and mindfulness of meat consumption and quality in the week. Both with my husband trying to consider eachother’s needs, and meet eachother with love and respect to what each is following. Trying to keep an open mind and heart to put honouring of self, the other, the relationship and family first.
And at last I am bringing in to this writing the practice of Lovingkindness from mindfulness meditation heart quality practices. In Science direct (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0889159113001736) I found a published article “Loving-Kindness Meditation practice associated with longer telomeres in women. Telomeres are protein structures found at both ends of each chromosome and play a vital role in preserving the information in our genome. A small portion of Telomere length may serve to determine the lifespan of a cell and an organism”(source: National library of medicine, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3370421/). Previous research suggests a link between behaviors that focus on the well-being of others, such as volunteering and caregiving, and overall health and longevity. Deepak Chopra in his future of wellbeing was including for this reason volunteering in our weekly schedule as part of lifestyle that supports wellbeing. In the research mentioned above they examined relative telomere length in a group of individuals experienced in Loving-Kindness Meditation (LKM). This is a practice which utilizes a focus on unselfish kindness and warmth towards all people. The conclusion of this study was “Although limited by small sample size, these results offer the intriguing possibility that loving kindness meditation practice, especially in women, might alter RTL, a biomarker associated with longevity.
Furthermore we can also mention the Heart rate variability and longevity studies. As a heartmath coach, we use HRV as part of the training of the heart. Heartmath practices such as quick coherence technique, heart lock in, heartbased breathing are supportive to maintain heart coherence, a balance between parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, correlation with vagus nerve tonus, heart rate variability and longevity.
Navigating Alphaville’s melodies, Dr. Peter Attia’s insights, and centenarian tales on Netflix, I am crafting a personal symphony of timelessness. It’s not merely about the quantity of years but the quality of moments, the depth of connections, and the resonance of a heart fully engaged in the dance of life. Through this journey, I strive to harmonize the pursuit of youth with the wisdom gained from introspection, embracing a life that is not just lived but celebrated in every note of existence with having the courage to live with an open, trusting heart. Including the knowledge about healthy lifestyle but not becoming a prisoner of “shoulds” and forgetting the joy of life and simplicity of being in tune with the moment