The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,300 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 38 trips to carry that many people.
Source: The Painful Victory
very feminine experience – (Wanted to save here as a reminder) – So many women go through silently.
All I wanted to say this morning, having got up at 3:30 am because someone couldn’t sleep for the opening of the presents’s too exciting, even though the truth about Santa’s been out for couple of years now, – is that people on the continent, who do unwrap them on Christmas Eve are so much better positioned for remembering the real reason for Christmas. “Or are they?” (you’d smile if The Amazing World of Gumball ring a bell)
Bless everyone and may it be a happy and peaceful time for all!
♥ ♥ ♥
What If I Fall? Oh, but My Darling What If You Fly? – Erin Hanson
Originally Posted by: Lily Daub in All Seeds, Growth, Inspiration August 8, 2015
How many of us are living in fear of taking a leap into flight? A leap into flight out of our comfort zones? Into a new job, a new love, pursuing a passion without a way of knowing the outcome?
This fear, often times, keeps us caged in like birds who are too afraid to fly.
We tell ourselves many lies; convincing ourselves this cage is protecting us from the disappointments, hurts, and of possible failures that may happen if we decide to take that leap. So, we sit as caged birds and daydream of what could be.
What happens if we DO decided to take the leap? What if we DO decide to flap our wings and fly out of that cage?
Some of us will fly, landing safely at our destinations. Some of us will fly, falling short of our destinations. But ALL of us will have conquered the fear of taking the scariest leap of all, deciding to be brave and facing the wind. ALL of us will have experienced flying. Most importantly, ALL of us will have a story about our uncaged journey. What we do with our stories is up to us.
If you are one who has fallen short of your destination, remind yourself that you were at least brave enough to take the risk to fly. Remember, caged birds only daydream. Get back up, flap your wings, and create new adventures you can share.
flickr photo shared by -Delphine – under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license
This article was originally printed at Darouwellness blog:
http://darouwellness.com/what-we-can-learn-from-people-we-dont-like/
By Pamela Bohan, RP, CGT
Projection is one thing that people do that continues to fascinate me in my practice and provides a deep well of information for my patients. In essence it is the act putting something of yourself onto the environment. The environment includes other people, animals, inanimate objects and even our culture. Projection impacts the perception of ourselves and the world around us. As a concept it seems simple enough, however, as a neurosis it is done without awareness and is difficult to spot in ourselves. Often, by way of projection, we are rejecting something we have difficulty accepting in ourselves and it can be painful to acknowledge so the resistance can be strong. If you’ve ever said to yourself or to another person, “I would never act, say or do that” you were projecting. Arrogance, deceit, calculation, aggression and spite are the root of many annoyances and atrocities committed by people. These traits are part of our humanity that every human has the potential to demonstrate given the right conditions.
Before we dive too deep into reclaiming our darkest traits it is important to consider how projection benefits us or, what we would call in the Gestalt Therapy tradition, a health boundary disturbance. First of all, projection is an important part of creativity. Most artists and visionaries are good projectors. You can not create something that you do not already posses yourself. In fact many artists come to understand that they are exploring aspects of themselves through their work even if it is not their intent at the time of their creation.
Projection is also how we are able to empathize. We actually project what we imagine someone is feeling in a situation on to them whether or not it’s true. We put ourselves in their shoes. This goes a long way towards relating with other people. This type of projection has a dark side too, particularly if we are making choices for others or holding ourselves back without checking in first, and can lead to a lot of second guessing or contrived behaviour. Imagine what a first date might be like for someone who neurotically projects in this way. If you have a solid relationship with someone you can gain insight and relief by directly asking to confirm your projections. It’s incredible to find out that something you’re worrying about isn’t even on your friend or family member’s mind.
One of the best opportunities for working with projection is considering people we don’t like. It’s just a reality that some people just rub us the wrong way. Don’t get too hung up on it because there are people who don’t like you either. Some may chalk this up to unresolvable differences but when you take projection into consideration it may boil down to rejected similarities. We often feel dislike for people who embody traits that we don’t like to own up to in ourselves. Projecting is a way to dissociate or keep at distance something we find distasteful that we have rejected because it disrupts our self image. The need to maintain this self image is usually born out of a need to create a sense of stability at a time in our development when the environment wasn’t stable and we were still dependant on that environment. Another unfortunate aspect of unhealthy projection is that it cuts us off from aspects of ourselves that we need to meet our environment. Can you imagine the good use of a so called negative trait like arrogance? Or deceit? Arrogance might be what you need to take a risk or demand your due. Deceit would be helpful in planning a surprise birthday party. Or in a life or death situation to protect an innocent person, such as Jewish children who were placed in gentile homes during the second world war. Despite this we are unlikely to describe ourselves to others as arrogant or deceitful.
A very common thing to do is to project negative traits about our parents on to others. In the moment it is unlikely you will have the knowledge that this is what you are doing, although a sign might be conflict or resentment. It can take some digging around to find out exactly what it is about the non-parent person that is reminding you of your parent. Sometimes it can be the sound of someone’s voice, the style of their hair or something less tangible like their attitude. We also project positive traits onto people that remind us of people we like (including our parents, because they have good traits too!). Of course this means we behave differently around people depending on who we are projecting on to them. Of course there are some people who make good screens for our projections. Authority figures make great projection screens. Ever have a boss you didn’t like? Likely you had some negative projections.
As you can imagine working with projection can get quite layered and can really effect relationships, particularly if you consider that people you are projecting onto are projecting on to you! What this all points to is how strongly our perception of now can be impacted by the past.
Now what you’ve all been waiting for- there is always some truth to projection. Maybe even since you began reading this article you’ve been saying to yourself, “that guy really is a jerk, it has nothing to do with me.” It’s very likely true that he behaves like a jerk sometimes. And isn’t great that he’s giving you the opportunity to explore a shadow aspect of yourself?
Experiment
Think of a person you dislike.
Now identify a few traits about that person that bother you. Are they bossy? Rude? Gregarious? Controlling?
Speak the traits out loud by completing the statement “I am…” For example “I am controlling.”
After you’ve said them out loud it’s likely you felt strongly about one or two of them.
Pick one.
Repeat the statement “I am…”
Now ask yourself when is this true about you? How do avoid being this way? Is there any place in your life that you could use more of this trait but you are fearful of being that way?
Notice what happens with your feeling and your body during this experiment. If you’ve had some strong feelings or resistance you may have touched the surface of a deeply disowned part of yourself and are on your way to reclaiming it.”
This is the kind of exersize we are going to include in iur upcoming course on leaving through your feelings.
The way we present our story directly influences who we are and how we feel. At a discovery session yesterday, a client talked about her feelings of ‘being stuck’, ‘lost’ and ‘moving backwards in life,’ listing all her past trials and ‘failures’. But when I asked what’s happening now, a very different story emerged. She has taken charge of her life on all levels and is going forward however slowly – all in recent weeks. What she did ‘fail’ is to recognise on the emotional level that she has already moved on. And that’s a trick our mind often plays well: it likes to get attached to particular points in our past and dwell on them making us feel the way it was then.
Our mind is a perfect time machine. We don’t need portals and sophisticated technology; it’s all included in our brain. In our minds, we can live in any part of the world and any time past, present or future. The most exciting part: we can feel anything our mind thinks about (that’s what many schools of coaching advise: to dream and visualize your future and attach certain feelings to it in order for the events to happen your way). While this technique really works I don’t advise my clients to use it as there is a price to pay that no one mentioned in ‘The Secret’ book. This is a topic of another blog post on the ecology of success and the answer why the secret works for some and not the others. Back to time travel, I love how this different time dimension is called ‘psychological time’ in ‘The Power of Now’ by Echart Tolle. Our mind can go there any moment and make us live in this alternative reality and feel accordingly.
Like my client’s story was associated with the past few months and years of her life so her current feelings of general unhappiness and dissatisfaction were coming from that period of time. Her mind was disregarding completely what was going on right now right here and prevented her taking it in emotionally. Once we had an inspection of what was actually happening her whole disposition changed in a second, and the shift was palpable even though we were in different continents separated by a mighty ocean conducting our Skype conversation online. She is now free to look forward and create a compelling future for herself starting from today, not from a decade or some months’ old day in the past.
(Claude Monet with ‘The Magpie’ 1868 – 69 and the impressionist who followed suit were the first artists who wanted to have the present moment’ impression and nothing else in their paintings).
So this exercise called Reality Check is almost always the first thing we do when starting coaching. However uncomplicated it sounds, people often have trouble leaving their ‘psychological time’ and starting to recognise the real physical time and their own full presence in it. It took me, like many other people, several years to get out from my own past story-expectation and realize that nothing is real except for the present. The past is mind’s ability to remember and the future is its ability to imagine. And those abilities are always skewed by our current outlook. If we are positive and upbeat, the mind will fetch good memories or even paint bad memories good. And if we feel optimistic in the present, our future will look bright. When we are experiencing a low point, the past will make us depressed or nostalgic, the future prediction often will be doom and gloom and make us feel uncertain and even panicky and incapable to act. The reverse is true, as in my client’s case, when we go over and over the situations in the past, we re-live and feel those situations instead of what’s happening now.
Another way our mind never lets us live right now is that we react from the past experiences and project from our fears of future, we almost never deal with and create from what it is. That’s why we need shocking amusement park experiences, boot camp endurance exercises, or like in one woman’s case, her husband’s mountain climbing ‘addiction’ – to force the mind to pay attention to the here and now. The bliss and happiness associated with those extreme life situations we often attribute to the feeling that we achieved something, when in reality we just had a glimpse of present moment and the emotion of awe and serenity attached to it however briefly.
Failing to organise all those unusual activities, we need a reality check as a daily routine in our life. So we are always grounded in the here and now and get the feeling of it systematically. Once this is in place we can live more or less consciously and have adequate perceptions of the events and interpret them in the way that help and empowers us. This way we can use our mind as a practical instrument for getting useful information we know from the past, planning and assessing current tasks and future goals, and we then can own our feelings of joy and happiness, unhappiness and anger and the whole rest of the emotional pallet of what is happening right here and now. That’s called living, everything else is remembering and imagining.
I hope you are well! I have been meaning to send you some feedback for ages now – so sorry it has taken me so long to getting around to doing it.
I feel so grateful to have met you and to have had the opportunity to experience your wisdom and very special coaching style. I immediately felt at ease with your quiet confidence and warmth, and your careful, intuitive listening. Your passion for women and the woman’s role in the household was very evident, and made me feel affirmed and valued in a way that I hadn’t even realised I needed. You responded to my feedback after a couple of sessions with humility and integrity, and as a result I felt we were able to move to a new level of understanding. I love that you are so transparent and honest about your own issues and experiences. Not only was this helpful in a practical sense, but it allowed me to feel more connected, reminding me that we are all on a journey – there is no ‘final destination’, we are continually learning and growing. I think, as a result, I was able to trust and be open with you in a way I would never have believed possible in just five sessions.
I thought I came to you for help with ‘goal-setting’, to work out what I wanted to ‘achieve’ next in that precious time in the mornings that I’ve carved out for myself . But I actually came away with something completely different, something I hadn’t realised that I needed much, much more; a deeper acceptance of my feelings and emotions and a renewed love for myself and my ‘inner child’.
The day after our last session I happened to come across Elizabeth Gilbert’s description in her book ‘Big Magic’ of the way she deals with fear. She says she accepts it as evolutionarily useful and therefore unextinguishable – and so let’s it sit in the backseat of her ‘car’ but never, ever lets it drive. This has been such a useful analogy for me to adopt and adapt. Every morning now as I start meditating I picture myself in the driving seat of my ‘car’. In the backseat is my ‘inner child’ on one side with her ‘baggage’ – fear, anxiety etc. right next to her. I turn around and give her a big hug and tell her how much I love her, wrap her in blankets, and ask her how she feels today. I listen and acknowledge her – and then remind her that she probably won’t be coming in the front today, that I’m in charge of driving now. I acknowledge her strength and assistance with playfulness and fun and creativity though, and let her know that there will be times I’ll call her into the front to join me, just as long as she leaves all her ‘baggage’ in the back.
It’s truly incredible how much this perspective has helped me – but the fact that I can do this at all is so much down to you – so I really can’t thank you enough!
I realise this is probably not quite the sort of testimonial that’s useful for your website etc – sorry about that, I just found it much easier to write directly to you! But please feel free to change to the third person/ edit or do whatever you need to it if you do want to use it for that purpose.
Very best wishes,
Xxx
‘My boyfriend loves me!’ a realization that came to one of the participants of our relationship coaching – after understanding the nature of feminine and masculine energies and the way they relate and communicate differently. We had another wonderful Hen Party at Chiltern Escapes, our weekend retreat for women, last Saturday.
I’d like to share the scope of feminine and masculine differences we discussed with our “hens” with you. We all agreed that in order to keep our relationships happy we have to give and serve each other. A little joke like ‘divorce is 50/50, marriage is 100%’ went a long way with our conscientious ladies. We took a quiz on three levels of love to see if we are ‘takers’, ‘bargainers’ or ‘givers’ in our relationships. And most of us scored pretty good. But what happens in life – we get frustrated about giving and at the end of it is often a feeling, ‘I gave you all I had and what!?!’
We often give what we think is good for the person or the thing we’d like to receive ourselves. In reality it could be far from what your partner/spouse really needs. Although all of us have universal human needs the meaning of them varies from individual to individual. The most basic divide begins with feminine and masculine fulfilment of those needs. This polarity between the two energies creates challenge in the relationship but at the same time is a spark that ignites passion flames and keeps them going. When familiar with the truth of it it’s easier to navigate the deep and the shallow. E.g. for sex – to quote Tony Robbins – masculine needs only a place, feminine needs a reason. And this is a huge fundamental principle not to laugh about.
Feminine needs to be safe, seen, and understood. Masculine needs to be appreciated for results; accepted as a leader and left alone. If a feminine needs attention 100% of the time, the masculine hates it. So once he said ‘I do’, he thinks it’s enough for the rest of their life. But she will test his love daily if not hourly.
Masculine needs to believe that his actions will and can make feminine happy. This is the bedrock of a happy relationship; if a man doesn’t feel that his actions make his woman happy he cannot function or stay in such relationship or be fulfilled. Because the sole purpose of the masculine is to please feminine, to protect, provide and lead. That is why in our longer relationship coaching course for women we ask them to start a journal of all the very smallest things that their partners do for them that makes them happy. When a woman believes that his actions do/can make her happy her man changes even without verbal expression of appreciation by her.
The next difference is that our analytical brains connect differently to our ability to feel, receive and process sensory information. Masculine has a great disconnect between those two. The masculine will focus on one thing at a time and feel only that thing. It gives a huge advantage on goal setting and achieving but at the expense of feeling all the rest of the world. So when a man is focused on his work e.g. at home at the computer and his woman goes around in a new dress… wait for the trouble. She might feel ignored and unloved while he is just being focused on the task.
Even more so in stress, masculine needs to be alone and quiet in order to process all the thoughts and ‘archive’ them properly in their mind. Well, feminine needs to talk the stress through. So imagine two of them at the end of a stressful day, one needs to be alone and quiet the other needs to talk. So here comes the 20 minute end of the day rule: a man needs to listen to his woman patiently without advising or solving or judging her, but a woman needs to leave him alone to recoup for 20 minutes.
When tired and stressed each women and men tend to behave in a style of the opposite energy. Imagine if naturally a feminine woman is thought to be loving, caring and gentle, when pushed to limits she becomes the opposite: withdrawn, sharp-tongued, disconnected and oh, not so soft at all (chose your own). Such things happen because of our natural hormonal build up. During any kind of harsh times, we cope due to production of stress hormones adrenalin and cortisol by the adrenal glands, but when they become depleted in a situation of prolonged and intense pressure, they start borrowing from our sex hormones.
The trick is that women and men produce the male hormone testosterone, the confidence hormone, when engaging in goal-oriented activities. In a male body the hormone production becomes a rechargeable circuit. In a female body it’s a one way street because the adrenal glands borrow from female hormones such as progesterone and estrogen. And these female hormones, unlike testosterone, are produced in a quiet and peaceful atmosphere, during such ‘female’ activities as girly get togethers, pampering at the spa, napping on your own bed, knitting, sewing, embroidering, nature walking, hobbies and crafts. In other words, anything that is process and love oriented rather than deadline and results achieving.
We also discussed stages of marriage that every couple is likely to go through and a secrets of a long happy one. It’s a topic for another blog post. For younger participants of our coaching session it probably sounded like a touristic itinerary whereas older women who had experience of long-term relationship resonated with it very much.
All this was a huge revelation full of ‘aha’ moments for our ‘hen’ ladies, as I heard from them at our afternoon one-on-one consultations (during which we also laughed, hugged and even cried a bit). It seemed that each of these women took home their own discovery however big or small.
© Dana Johnson 2015
Ashley Rose, Psychotherapist, Washington DC, 31 July 2015 Dana is a compassionate, intuitive coach whose awareness feels spiritual. I was working on opening my heart back up to emotions and relationship and her openness helped me to do so. She was very present, truly was a person with love and guidance. I will not forget how touched I was and more ready I felt for connection with others. Dana has amazing awareness… read more here…
Dyann Heward-Mills, Partner at Baker&McKenzy, Founder of ‘ChilternEscapes’, June 2015 My coaching sessions with Dana are always insightful. Dana’s extensive wisdom and experience has helped me enormously to cut through the fog of fear. With Dana’s support, I have been empowered to pursue my callings. Dana has coached me to establish a successful well woman retreat. In addition, Dana’s tools and insights have helped me to catapult my legal career whilst maintaining a happy, balanced, family life. Dana coaches with a powerful blend of razor-sharp perception, authenticity, warmth and empathy. Dana’s coaching is invaluable. Be prepared to uncover new truths buried deep within and to be taken to new heights of fulfilment… read more here…
Sonja M Zglobicka, Fashion Design Grad, London, July 2015 I contacted Dana because I felt stuck. I was confused, depressed and I was spinning in circles with my career and personal life. I had a lot of self-doubt and although I had a vision of where I want to be, I had no belief I can actually achieve it one day. During the first session with Dana I was challenged to say out loud that ‘I’m enough’ and ‘I’m ready’. I’ve never realized that my self-confidence about my skills and abilities is so low that just saying those words to another person was a huge struggle. It made me realize that I really needed help to overcome those boundaries within me, and with Dana’s support I really felt it’s possible.
We started to unfold my limiting believes and Dana inspired me to look at the world from a different perspective. One of the revelations that came to me during our sessions is related to my brother. Our relationship was one of the main reasons for my low self-esteem, which for so many years had made me believe I’m not capable to be successful in life. Through discussion with Dana I was able to understand the source of the problem and overcome it, which was a great liberation. I felt like a new chapter has opened for me in this moment of awakening and finally I started believing in change.
During 6 weeks of my coaching program I have started to… read more here…
Dana Johnson
Dana is a life coach for women and leads seminars, workshops and one on one coaching sessions on ”Work/Life balance”, “Relationship Highs and Lows” and “Emotional Mastery” – implementing strategies from the Robbins-Madanes Training Centre for coaches.
Dana began her professional career as a human rights lawyer and academic. She has had a long journey towards coaching from a very personal place to the point where she is sharing and applying her experience, coaching and training to great effect. Dana has a strong admiration of “women’s spirit”. Her coaching techniques have been cultivated through her life experience of finding her own heart through achieving, failing and coming back in all spheres of life.
Introductory offer – For a complementary coaching session contact: Dana by phone 07917376004
Website: http://www.myinnerpowercoach.com
https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=11456705
Email: myinnerpowercoach@gmail.com
