The Bear and the Turtle

I changed the name of my Blog this morning to:

The Bear and the Turtle
Brightening Consciousness, Slowing Down, and Learning about Moderation and Movement

I will also be updating my “About This Blog” page in the next few days. I realize that I am still absolutely committed to the original intentions that I set and still will hold the practice of Moderation 1/3 2/3s. I will be on the program and slip off and write about it here. However I am so aware of wanting to write about other things and to watch how my consciousness develops in all parts of me. In fact that is what I have been doing, primarily, for the last 4 or 5 months primarily. Integrity and impeccability were starting to be challenged, as I wrote less and less about the stuff going on with my body and more and more about what was going on with my consciousness in my spirit, emotions and mind. My original intent was always to integrate all four parts of me. I feel I have been quite successful at that and I need to continue to be vigilant in that intention. I love mySelf more then I ever have, I am conscious of being more integrated then ever. Each area needs attention and focus. My body continues to be a size and shape that isn’t consistent with who I know I am, and yet I am more comfortable in my skin and with my body then I have ever been. My spirit is awakening and discovering all sorts of new things, and yet I still feel like an undisciplined seeker of spiritual wisdom and awareness. My emotions are finding ways to powerfully fuel and empower my actions, rather then stopping and spiraling me out of control, and yet there are subtle emotional realms that remain a mystery to me. My Heart-Mind is learning to slow down and breathe, to rest in the certainty and clarity of what it sees, knows and is in the question about, and yet I can still get caught in being right and stuck mentally.

So I am very grateful for this journey and very aware of the gaps I have to close. I am also aware of all the gaps that will continue to open up as I close the ones in front of me, this is a lifelong quest, not something I can check off the todo list at some point in the future.

Why the Bear and the Turtle?

The Bear in my vision is always standing.

Well the bear is so much of who I am. My medicine name is Diamond Bear. In the teachings that I am studying at the center of the model is the “diamond of human consciousness”. The four points of the diamond each hold parts of that consciousness. The Bear holds the energy of both nurturer and fierce protector. So as Diamond Bear I am the nurturer and protector of human consciousness. I brighten it. My purpose statement 30 years ago was and is “I wake people up to their aliveness and creativity”. When I got my medicine name I realized that something needed to be added so “I wake people up to their aliveness and creativity, and I point and protect human consciousness.” The Bear is in the House.

Ancient and not in a hurry.

Turtle is where I feel like I am headed. Turtles are all about SLOW. They know that slow is fast. As I step more and more into my elder/grandfather energy I see turtle as an important ally. Turtle carries their home, their world with them wherever they go. When I am in my turtle energy I have strong boundaries and can relax and breathe into a kind of patient and trusting place that is not threatened in any way, a place that has plenty of room for other ideas and people to contribute their wisdom into the soup of consciousness.

The Bear and the Turtle is what this next period of time in this blog will be called. There is no hurry any more to get anything right or fix mySelf or anybody else, there is a need to maintain integrity and impeccability to the best of my ability. This is what these two marvelous totems bring out in me.

Stepping Into My Grandfather Energy

Nothing Speaks Grandfather Energy To Me Like This Sea Turtle

Wheew, what a past week or so it has been. I got on the plane a week ago Thursday for NYC and a wild and beautiful group of Leadership Graduates, hung with them in my elder consciousness to the best of mySelf’s ability. I spoke, or should I say riffed, for an hour or so about consciousness and transformation, two of the most important things to be riffing about these days. I sat in my ease and just let it flow and as I let it flow, I would take these connective pauses and look out and see in the audience people leaning forward hungry for more and I would see people leaning backwards and soaking it in like a meditation and I would see people falling asleep, and as I looked out there I would feel it was all good. I actually had the thought of when the grandfather gathers the generations around him and tells a story or does a slide show of his first trip to Australia, and all the ways that the family gather around him. Like that grandfather I was fine and not having a single controlling or insecure thought going through me, like “wake up this is important” or “everyone SHOULD like me and respect me enough to at least pretend like they do”. Those old reactions now belong to a powerful past. A past where I KEPT people awake and didn’t honor their dreaming time because what I had to say and do was important and it needed attention. I needed attention. As I looked around that dance studio in NYC and riffed on about all that wanted to flow from me I didn’t NEED that attention at all. I was just completely enjoying mySelf and whatever was bubbling up for me in the moment. I was feeling into the “WE” and loving everyone. It was a good feeling. When I was done, I didn’t care if it was “good” or not, I didn’t care whether people got “value” or not and I didn’t care if anyone even understood what I had said. I had just said what I wanted to say in that moment and was complete. I was available, as a good grandfather is, to be appreciated and loved and respected. I was fine with any feelings of challenge and question, and so I didn’t notice it much if it was there. I finished and left the room feeling more complete then I ever have felt after being in front of a group of people.

I left NYC and flew to NC to meet up with the Chickadees. This elder energy followed me there and I had an entirely different leading experience. I have sought the elder energy before in Leading the Leadership Program and found it illusive and hard to hold onto. That old warrior would pop his head in to the circle and insist that he run the show. There was always something to fight for. I still felt the importance of the work in my heart and I still felt the need to fight for the higher selves in the room and to make very little room for the destructive selves to come in and set up camp. I just didn’t feel the need to work so hard at it. I had some moments of warrior energy where I stepped up with my fierceness and pointed the way. However these moments came out of a place of patience and compassion that allowed things to move on the way they were for a bit longer then I would have in the past. To allow my emotions to settle down some and to step into some of the tools I have learned in the Black Lodge around Emotional Stability. So I hung back in my patience and let the emotions roll through me, keeping an eye on them and then I would go back and grab one and bring it forward,put it into my heart or gut and step out into the battle with the consciousness destructive energies. As I would go out into that energy I felt less like a warrior and more like a medicine man and a grandfather using all of the resources in me and around me to stand patiently in the blast of wind as those destructive energies stormed up and then blew away. I would sit mySelf back down into my elder chair next to my brilliant co-leader Rick Tamlyn and breathe into the next moment. It ended up being a beautiful and loving week with the Chickadees with wings aflutter and beaks chirping as we all headed of for our little migrations around this wonderful world.

Preparing for the Conversation on The Bay

A great example of a quality conversation at the island.

I just finished a delightful meditation and flute playing out on the point enjoying the warmth of the sun for the first time really since I got up here several days ago. It has been unseasonably cold and I have been bundled up in sweats and socks for days. It’s nice to be in my native clothes of shorts and tshirt again and be able to meditate out in the sun and the breeze and not feel like I need a sweater. Tomorrow Karen, Sam, WhiteEagle and Lee come for some interesting conversations and some hanging out together in this beautiful place. While I am really looking forward to the change of pace and the new conversations and introducing two new people to my corner of paradise, I will miss the quality time I have had here with Mom. We have had wonderful discussions on our typical WIDE range of topics. The tradition seems to be building, especially during these cold days, of me getting up first and making some coffee and then sitting down and doing some writing, either here in the blog or doing some Black Lodge homework and then Mom coming in an hour or so later and fixing her coffee and then sitting down at the window together to have our morning chat, which seems to go for a couple of hours. Then one of us gets up and grabs our book or whatever it is we’re working on and we head off into our own worlds until around 5-6 and then we get together for cocktails and then dinner for the next 3 or 4 hours and talk about what ever we have been reading or studying about. Just about when it is getting dark with the dishes done we head off to our rooms to do an hour or more of night time reading, then the whole thing starts over again the next morning. It really is cool and fun to have this incredible place of beauty and such great stimulation at the same time. The only bummer is her smoking and how that causes my eyes to itch and get red and alergies to kick up. But then she is 81 and has been smoking since she was a teenager and I am 56 and everytime I have ever been with her there has been smoke. It is something that is getting so rare in my life though that I am more and more unused to it.

I do wish it were warmer for the folks coming up. The dips in the morning are truly tests of courage and torture and they normally are surprising splashes of complete freshness and aliveness. Ah, but if it stays like it is right now at least it will be glorious to sit out on the deck or the rocks and have some great chat about important things, like how do you both run a successful business and do sacred work that needs to be available to all including those who can’t afford it? How do you not let your business be overtaken by the traditional “needs” of business and stay dedicated to the transformation that you always intended for your business to create? How do you ride these very stormy economic waters and get to the other side without constricting so far that you forget who you are? How do you pay the bills of a business and keep it running when the revenue drops due to less money flowing and keep doing the work that you know that you must do? How do you make the work you do available to everyone and stay in business? These are some of the questions we are going to be having brilliant conversations on. Doesn’t that sound cool?! What will business look like when these questions can be worked out so that everyone is happy? How will education and transformation look when these questions are answered?

So any of you out there who might be reading this between July 15 and 19 send powerful thoughts and prayers towards Georgian Bay for some magical conversation.

Surfing in calm waters

Sinking into the moment

It’s a beautiful calm day on the ocean in front of my house. The sky and the water are a silvery blue. It is my first entire day off in this weekend of 2 days off and I am beside myself with delight and yummyness. Karen and I just had some delicious scrambled eggs with a little salami, cheese and salsa in them and some grapefruit juice which I ate consciously and savored, as did she. We are digesting now as I get ready to head in to town for a swim and she will go for a nice walk. No hurry and as much nothing to do as possible.

Out on the water there are some Saturday surfers sitting on their surfboards on a calm sea, riding the occasional bumps in the water that surge under them, patiently waiting for an actual wave that they can ride for a few seconds before it too fades into froth and then calm. They wait and they wait and go for it on an occasional tiny wave, nothing happens and they wait some more. Although I am not a surfer on the ocean, I do know that sense of sitting on the surfboard, waiting for the wave. I can be on that surfboard in a frustrated way “Will a wave ever come?” “It’s Saturday, God, it’s my only day off for surfing and you give me this calm crap, I want to surf dude not wait.” “Aw come on bring me the wave”. OR I could sit on that surfboard and yield to the silvery blue water and sky and feel mySelf floating for eternity in the arms of Moriella the Goddess of water. Feel mySelf slip into that timeless place of being in the now that is simply blissful. I could stay here in this place forever in deep stillness and contemplation as I feel mySelf rocked occasionally by the little bumps and the small waves passing under me as I sit here on my board. As my awareness moves out to a wider and wider ability to take in this water and it’s movement, I could feel into when the wave that wanted to take me for a ride was coming, maybe even before it started to make itself apparent, I could feel it coming. Without adding any tension, just feeling mySelf in that moment of now, floating on my board, I would know that when it was time my body would know what to do and we would all be doing what was needed to get the board moving with the wave and what was needed to be standing on the board, and being deeply in touch with that wave and the water, gliding along on it’s crest and feeling the world now in motion where it just a moment before was in stillness. The ride ends and I lie down on my board, grateful for the board, my body, the wave, the water and indeed all of life as I paddle back out to the spot where I sink back in and start it all over again.

I know that I have both ways of interacting with the world. I know that sometimes I get frustrated and impatient with the way things are and that they aren’t going the way I want them to. I also know that sometimes I sink into the moment and find that stillness and recognize that it is ok that there is no wave to ride now and that one will come along eventually and I will be ready. I choose to keep moving to that choice and that reality more and more in my life and as I do to let go of expectations and trying to push the world and life into some convenient shape for me. I choose instead to be present and conscious of the world as it is and to feel my dream growing and when the wave comes along be ready to ride it.

Gratitude, Truth, and Hard Truth

This dancer captures it I think
Gratitude, Truth, & Hard Truth

Whew, where to start this morning?

First of all thank you to all who made comments on my last two posts, I have learned so much from you and from my questions and curiosities. I have a greater acceptance of both mySelf and you my readers and for all of humanity as a result. Of course we humans want to witness both the struggle and the overcoming of the struggle. We can only really celebrate when we have something TO celebrate, we can’t just celebrate celebration, that would actually get to be boring and would not ultimately be celebrating anything except in some fake, inauthentic way. We celebrate the completion of a journey or the overcoming of something that wasn’t necessarily easy or comfortable, we can only actually celebrate ease and comfort as something that follows something that wasn’t.

I also understand even more deeply what my intention here in this blog is. I continue to need to tell the truth as to what I am noticing as I dive deeper into my consciousness and stay on track with my intention to fully integrate, love and accept mySelf. This intention is primarily focused on bringing my body into integrity and love with the rest of me at this point, and as I do that noticing what is going on with my spirit, emotions and mind as that integration occurs. I also know that I am engaged in developing my “Leader Within” and that in so doing I will both model and discover how to be a source of that in others. In being aware of that I also need to put that on the back burner as I tell the truth on mySelf, good, bad, ugly, and beautiful.

Some truth – I set out two days ago to do a Dreaming Ceremony that involved fasting, with water, and isolation, turning of all the phones and computers for 48hours. My intention was to drop deeply into the “dreaming state” of consciousness and tune into the unfolding dream of Life and of my life and of how they weave together. This is part of the work I am doing in my Black Lodge training and it is an extension of some powerful dreaming work I did in the last ceremony in March. Well I was somewhat successful in the dreaming and mostly learned a lot about what is needed for a “dreaming ceremony” that I didn’t do. I also powerfully learned this morning as I was writing out my homework for Black Lodge that I have been powerfully dreaming my life for awhile and that my time in Israel, in particular, a few weeks ago was a powerful dreaming ceremony even if I wasn’t fasting and following the protocols of ceremony. I am aware that there is much much deeper I can go if I want to use a formal ceremony and that if I do that I will need to do a lot more preparation. I learned that I am not much of a “preparer” and much more a “seat of the pants kind of guy” and that I really need to learn “preparer” skills.

Some Hard Truth – I came off the fast and got very silly and unconscious about food. I know better and I was acting out my frustrations over “failing” in my ceremony. I did some emotional eating and it crossed the line from soothing some part of me to abusing mySelf. I woke up this morning not feeling very good in my belly or my spirit.
So I felt mySelf aligning with my intention again and came up here to my computer with a cup of tea and started to write out my experience for my Black Lodge, have a healthy breakfast of a poached egg on Rye toast, and then to come up and write this blog entry. I am using this as a way to recover to mySelf and it is working.

Contentment And A Job To Do

Sitting back with my feet up
Looking at the best view in the world
Knowing that sometimes this is all the work there is to do.

You know that feeling in your chest when it is filled up with a sense of contentment, a sense of knowing who I am and why I am here, a sense of not being in a hurry to get to it because you are already in it, and perhaps a sense of both openness and at the same time solidness almost like it is a vast space while at the same time somehow solid and filled with some substance? You know that feeling of being at home, not just the place of home, that place where your bones belong and where your cells sigh with relief, but that place of feeling at home in yourself, of not being lost to yourself one bit and feeling complete love and appreciation for yourself?

Well I woke up in that space this morning.

Oh sure I still am working on stuff, I still had my upsetting tiff with Karen on the phone last night, I still had 4 bites past the moderation threshold last night and didn’t practice 2/3s in a couple of parking lots yesterday, but I feel like I am at home in mySelf. I feel all parts of me clicking along in harmony and getting along terrifically. There are a lot of things and people I could be mad at this morning, there are a lot of things going on in the world that could sadden me or scare me, there are people who are in rough conditions with their health, finances, or psyche all around me, and yet here I sit at home in mySelf and content with life. I am aware of the urgency of the work I do, the need for human consciousness to be awakened and pointed towards life affirming choices, the need for all of us to smile at one another and laugh more, stop killing one another and hate less. I am aware of all these things and know my responsibility in both creating these things and dreaming up new ways of being about them.

And yet this morning I somehow feel like it is all unfolding perfectly. It is an interesting question floating around in the vastness of me; “How can all this be true in this moment?” and yet it is. How can I sit here in this home of contentment while there is so much misery and suffering, so much separation and conflict, so much, so much, so much……? Yet if I don’t sit here this would be missing from life and all would collapse on itself. I am beginning to see how important it is that, as Joseph Campbell said “We need to follow our Bliss”. Part of that journey involves dropping into the pit and fighting the monsters and part of it involves having these moments of appreciation and metaview that allow us to see the space around us and smile at the stumbles and fumbles that are happening around us as folks move towards their bliss. I do think that awakening consciousness involves reminding folks that it is their bliss they are following and not some manufactured BS that is actually part of their pit. So I have a job that I have dedicated mySelf to, and I am doing it right now, with mySelf and maybe with one or two folks that are reading this, a job that I will do today at the dentists office and the drug store, a job that I will do this weekend in front of a classroom of people and that I will do every day for the rest of my life.

Awaken the Diamond of Consciousness in all of us.

And what I realize today that is new and different in this contented home of mySelf is that there doesn’t need to be lots of struggle, effort, trying, and stress in doing that job. I just need to follow my Bliss, sit patiently in my contentment and act based on what and who is in front of me. What a cool job.

A Poll about Bliss

Nailing It Down On Retreat

It’s Tuesday Morning, Day 1 of a six day Retreat 5. It is my intention to break through in my ability to maintain my practices while working in a Leadership Retreat. I began this process with the Wild Boars R4 a couple of months ago. In that retreat I got up early and sometimes wrote in my Journal/Blog and sometimes meditated and once or twice slept in, this in itself was a breakthrough for me at maintaining practices while leading a program. My main focus during that program, though, was maintaining my Moderation 1/3 2/3s program with meals, and I was very successful in that. I will continue to focus on 1/3 2/3s during this retreat and I really intend to meditate and journal/blog daily as a priority. When I am able to do this as a practice or even a habit I will have been successful at shifting the focus of my consciousness work onto mySelf and off of people pleasing and sacrificing mySelf to some self diminishing actions and habits that do not support this conscious self that I am building. This morning I woke up with enough time to meditate and write and shower and get ready for the day and I intend to do that every day I am here as a grounding and preparation for mySelf.

Yesterday was a good day around food. I practiced both restraint and moderation and most importantly consciousness while eating with other people at both breakfast and lunch and during my little nosh at supper with Karen. Restraint was applied at the breakfast buffet and some thing were left on the plate while having a conversation with Karen. We had lunch with Abi and Yosi, who are our CTI partners in Israel, at this lovely little restaurant in Zichron Ya’aqov, which is where the retreat center is for the Retreat 5. The food was wonderful and plentiful and it was actually easy and natural to see this large plate of food come to my table and know immediately that I wasn’t going to be able to finish it, to stay in relationship and conversation with everyone at the table and to stay conscious of what I was eating and to stop when I was done. Then to ask for a doggie bag, which for some silly reason has always been difficult for me, and take some food home for my supper later that night. Yay me.

Karen and I had a wonderful meeting with a hundred or more CTI coaches, leaders and friends last night in this beautiful spot. The energy was great and the conversation moved easily from the practical to the visionary and back and forth with what appeared to be engagement, listening and keen interest. I met all sorts of wonderful and committed people. People who have intention to have transformational impacts on organizations, education, and human beings in all walks of life. It is such a thrill to sit in front of a room full of people committed to investing themselves in a world that works, to feel their own personal struggle with the tensions and forces that pull them away from that commitment and then to feel them land squarely back in it again, whew that is great.

Karen and I are headed into leading this R5 with folks from Israel, Europe and North America and from just having finished the Leadership Program to being course leaders for CTI for 10 years or so. This retreat is made all the more exciting by the diversity and range of experience and the surprises that show up for people in what they know and what they thought they knew. It is a blast to bust things up and transform them and create an even more powerful leadership dream with these wonderful leaders. It is also great to be back in the saddle leading with Karen. Because we don’t get to lead together as often as we would like the growth we have had as leaders always surprises the other and it has us always recognizing and learning more about each other, just when we think we really know that person there they go and change again. It is a trip and a half to be me.

Evolution and Coffee

Evolving all of us to be leaders
That hold this sense of relationship
To the world

Well Karen and I have spent 2 1/2 days here in a lovely hotel on the beach here in Tel Aviv. Karen’s body has gone through the interesting jet lag journey of a body getting used to functioning 10 time zones away from where it spends most of its time. It is an interesting journey of calibration and adjustments as the energy finds its way to circulate, regenerate and do whatever else it needs to do to keep this body fully alive and brilliantly functioning. Today we take our fully functioning and energized bodies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem where we will become tourists in earnest and explore many levels of spiritual and secular history with walks, museum visits and conversations. Sounds good huh? After our immersion into all these layers of stories then we head off to a retreat center north of Tel Aviv where we will meet up with 25 graduates of our Leadership Program from all over the world and open up the new stories that are unfolding in front of us right now. How do we find the way to open up our beings and adjust our systems, just like we did with jet lag, to the energy of these new stories that are wanting to grow in energy and aliveness in us? What is the new ground of being that we need to find below our feet that will provide the solid platform for our evolution into these newly powerful and responsible leaders that we are? What is new in the air we breathe deeply into our lungs and our selves that fills our awareness with a sense of what is truly needed both in ourselves and in our worlds?

These are some of the questions that I am carrying as I walk through the historical wonder that is Jerusalem and as I prepare to meet with these evolving leaders. In this place that fostered such profound evolutionary steps so long ago in our history, yet so recently in the history of life, what is available for us to tap into and draw from to support our own evolution of spirit, mind, body and emotions?

Well how about mySelf, my mind, body, emotion and spirit? All seem calm and at peace and all seem open and filled with abundant expectancy. I feel ready for anything to happen and for nothing to happen. I am looking forward to growing my understanding and experience in all areas of mySelf as I step into this next part of this journey.

No More Coffee

This morning I learned, definitively after some successful experimentation, that coffee is not good for me and that I am officially OFF coffee. I know that it isn’t about caffeine at all because my body seems to love Yerba Mate and tea’s, so it must be about the acids in coffee that make my stomach have an unhappy reaction and my sinuses go into some sort of expelling mode. So I am sad to say, because I do like the taste of coffee, goodbye to coffee. It now joins wheat, which I am increasing my consciousness around and is leaving my diet more and more somewhat more difficultly then coffee will, and white sugar which is only problematic in the forms where it is buried inside like deserts, ice cream and the like. I haven’t put sugar in anything for over 6 months now and this is a good thing. So bye bye coffee, wheat and sugar. Bye bye Starbucks.

Yesterday Karen and I took a 3 mile walk up and down the beach and sat in the sun by the rooftop pool of our hotel and the 2/3s part of my program is feeling like it is in motion again as we prepare for our historical walks around Jerusalem.

Catching mySelf Sleeping

I went to bed with a bit of a stuffed belly last night and realized that in the midst of all my spirals, treks and magic wands I had gone unconscious with my eating. Not like a binge or an out of control unconscious, not an acting out or emotional-comfort-food type of unconscious. More like a switch got thrown somewhere in my system that just forgot to pay attention. It’s the biggest challenge that I face in this program of moderation 1/3 2/3s, it’s the dragon I wrote about in an earlier post and my greatest fear as I step into integrating all parts of mySelf, that I will be cruising along and into realizing incredible things about mySelf and what I am up to in the world, I will find mySelf pointed powerfully in some direction or another, and mind you these are good directions, these are transformative and world changing directions, and I will totally forget what I am committed to for mySelf within mySelf.

There is my computer right next to my breakfast An invitation to unconsciousness

In fact I have to laugh, because even as I was writing the above paragraph I had a room service cart beside my desk and I was eating my bowl of cereal and fruit while I was typing this. That is the kind of slipperiness there is in this puppy. Once that switch gets thrown it’s like I never knew it, like it’s gone from my being in some way and never was there and I am just coasting unconsciously along multi tasking and shoveling food in my mouth and not paying attention to anything fully. My mind is usually 2 turns down the road instead of being right here and right now.

So after I wrote that first paragraph I stopped and pulled the cart away from the desk and took a deep breath of gratitude and ate some of my fruit and cereal and drank my grapefruit juice and listened into my belly for when it was feeling satisfied. I put the remaining cereal and fruit under the cover and moved the cart over to the door and sat back down here at the computer to put my full attention here. The truth is it didn’t take that much longer and I didn’t spill anything on myself or the computer so I saved myself the extra time that it would usually take to clean up. I think of the last 4 or 5 meals I have eaten, all of them in very different circumstances and all of them eaten with less then 50% consciousness, some of them I don’t even remember I was so unconscious. How did that happen? When and where and why did that happen? I am on a $^@$&^ QUEST here! I am supposed to be conscious of when I go UNconscious while it’s happening and be able to adjust. Even if I do slip into a steep downward spiral and I am aware of that, there is no reason that I can’t also stay aware of what I have promised mySelf to stay aware of NO MATTER WHAT. So I get to Dubai and I face the buffets and the challenges and I stay conscious and I think that I have faced the challenges that I knew were coming and I relax and feel good about transitioning well and then I wake up 3 or 4 days later wondering what the heck happened. The buffets aren’t the challenge, the socializing isn’t the challenge, the cocktails aren’t the challenge, moderation and restraint aren’t even the challenges. Those are all things I can see, touch, taste and plan for. This challenge is to become conscious of the point where I am about to flip the switch and go into UNconsciousness. I have to somehow catch myself about to flip that switch because once it is flipped it is too late, I am asleep. The other side of it is I need to discover I am asleep sooner. That is happening. I need to be more awake to when I am asleep. MMMM this is a juicy meal to chew on.

Listening to my Body

This is a weird picture I took of my body in a mirror in Dubai
I am putting it here to remind mySelf to listen to and honor
My Body

Last night I returned from my day leading the workshop with the leadership team at Emirates Bank and was sitting in the hotel lounge with my lovely co-leader Gonan and our wonderful assistant Michelle debriefing the day and getting set up for the next day when this wave of exhaustion came over me. It felt like the combination of Jet Lag and adrenalin outflow working together. It was about 6pm and we were just finishing our meeting and I went up to my room and sat down on the bed and tried to watch some TV and found my eyes closing. No dinner was being served until 7pm and I had to stay awake in order to eat dinner. As I was sitting there watching some stupid movie, trying to stay awake so that I could eat dinner and then come back to the room to stay awake a little longer so that when I woke up it would be the right time to wake up to start my day. I all of a sudden realized what a load of crap that thinking was. And I do that kind of thinking about what I should do around my body needs a lot. So I stopped and tuned into my body and what it needed and didn’t need. It clearly needed sleep and it didn’t really need food. My body wanted a “little something” and it didn’t want dinner or even a meal. What my body was crying out for was some sleep. My brain was all convinced that if I went to sleep this early though it would mess me up for the rest of the day and maybe the week. My brain also was being very right about the need for dinner. One had to have dinner. So I pried my eyes open and got ready for bed and I opened a bag of potato chips from the mini bar and had my little something and I crawled into bed at 7:30, I called the front desk for a 5 am wakeup call optimistically hoping that I would be able to sleep until then, but not really caring when I woke up, because I was just going to do my best to honor my bodies needs. At 3:30 I woke up and lay in bed, at first trying to go back to sleep and then I worked on some of my dreaming and meditation practices from my Black Lodge training. I came up with some good imagery and then I began to think of Karen and tried to Skype her and she had her Skype turned off. So I sent her an email hoping she might be able to give me a call. The universe being what it is, she happened to be checking her email at that moment and a couple minutes later my computer jingled and there was Karen on video on my computer screen. She was sitting at her computer in our wonderful beach house and I was in the hotel room in Dubai and we had a wonderful video call. Boy is this Skype thing cool and it doesn’t cost a penny, how is that possible? So here I am at 6:40 and my body is saying it is a tad hungry and would love some breakfast, the buffet is calling and I am off to have a great day doing what I do and listening to and honoring what my body wants and needs to the best of my ability at the same time. This is a good thing.