Monthly Archives: March 2020

A Fresh New Day

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I am one of the lucky ones.

Out at first light this morning in the crisp autumn air I was surrounded by the sounds of the countryside coming awake. Birds were calling and muttering an swinging on the wires. Horses were calling out for breakfast and cows were lowing to calves. My three dogs were excitedly barking at being outside with their humans again. A morning like any other in a long line of mornings stretching back years.

I am one of the lucky ones.

I love my life of semi isolation. To be surrounded by the absence of human noise and clutter is how I choose to live my life most of the time. I love my friends and family but do not feel the need to constantly see them, touch them, talk face to face. I just need to know they are out there, living their full lives. Isolating is not a burden, it is what I was born for! Well as long as we can eat, the animals can eat, I can collect the mail, we can get a vet when we need one, go to the doctor, use the internet, have the power always available, talk to friends via phone, Facebook and Zoom and so on. I don’t want to be socially isolated but physical isolation is my general modus operandi.

I know that isn’t so for everyone, perhaps for the majority of people. It is certainly not the way many people can even think about living when everything about our modern world requires most people to live in cities and towns. Where most employment is where most people are and most people are when most employment is. For most people this time of “social distancing’ and lockdowns is difficult. Difficult physically and difficult emotionally. We are going to go through tough times. Tempers will fray, waistlines will expand, boredom and hopelessness will take hold. We are going to wonder if we can get through this to when times “return to normal”.

Well the good news is most of us will endure, make it through, I am just not sure we will be “returning to normal” but instead creating a new normal. This time of enforced slowing down for a lot of us (not our essential workers who will be in one of the most pressured times of their lives) where we can go “back to grazing”. A fallow time of regeneration. A time to think creatively about what we want our future to look like. What we can learn from this time that we want to keep.

I leave you with a quote from a magical book about the nature of love and longing. I am looking forward to the time our hearts look back and only remember the good of these times.

“..the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and [that] thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Keeping sane in an insane world

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Pause

Fifteen days since my last post and it feels like a lifetime.

Sitting here on our great big Island we were still feeling a little divorced from the crisis unfolding in the world around us. That big ocean that has kept us safe from “war and pestilence” was going to let us dodge the worst of the bullets again. It was not to be of course. Perhaps if we had sealed our borders, not let our own citizens and residents return, turned back all tourist no matter where they were from, shut down all commerce, we may have not just flattened the curve but got ahead of it. But at what cost? It is hard enough knowing there are still people stuck out there that cannot get home, through no fault of their own; could we have callously left thousands more rely on the “kindness of strangers” to keep them safe. Of course not. Like everyone else, all we can do is try to flatten that dam curve.

So this is our new normal. Markets crashing, millions out of work, our normal modes of social interaction all but shut down, businesses that may never recover. And no end in sight – a proverbial piece of string.

So much that we cannot control, that we have to let go of else it will drive us insane with anxiety. Now is the time to look at what we can control and use that to help us through these insane times.

There are lots of practical things, of which there is a wealth of information out there, but in order to be able to do them, we have to attend to our inner selves. To not “losing our sh*t”,

One of the ways we cope is to just spend time with our horses, but not everyone can do that, but you can learn from their innate animal wisdom, that speaks to our own . The five lessons we can attend to at this time are:

Breath – firstly remembering to do so! Then paying attention to how we are breathing. using the slowing of our breath to calm our bodies and our minds down.

Observe – slow down, use your senses. Give your self time to understand what you are seeing.

Act – when you have clarity from your observation of what action needs to take place, do not get caught up in the stories you tell yourself.

Relax – Allow the pause after action, do not rush on to the next thing without allowing yourself to feel your action is complete.

Back to grazing – this is the fallow period that allows your creativity blossom. Where you are not in an unending stimulus response cycle. This is the going slowly, to go fast. It is where you start the cycle of Breath, Observation, Action, Relaxation again.

Above all we must listen to our bodies, not allow ourselves to be captured by our spinning minds.

Lynn

PS If your want to know more about the Five lessons from the Wisdom of Horses contact us to receive or free document “Getting Unstuck – 5 lessons from the wisdom of horses”. Contact us

Equality or Equity?

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International Women’s Day 2020

We decided to kick off our 2020 workshops to coincide with International Women’s Day. Not because that gave us a bit of a tag to add to our marketing but because we thought this years theme around “Collective Individualism” fitted in so well with our purpose. We are not the ocean, not even a wave, but individual droplets of water that together can be come powerful when we come together to create the wave. We are working towards a better future for all who live on our world; human, animal and plant, all the flora and fauna. And we can only do that through the power of Collective Individualism, each person doing their “thing” towards that future. Our way of contributing is in building self awareness, compassion, deep listening, releasing blocks, helping people get unstuck and allowing the raising of consciousness.

Joined by an amazing group of women we ranged from 19 to mid 60’s so we certainly had age diversity covered. What was quite clear was that in other ways we were not very diverse at all. Very much middle-class privileged white women. Our conversation quickly turned to the differences between Equality and Equity. The theme for 2020 IWD is #EachforEqual and consistently talks about gender equality, which fits really well with such concepts as equal pay for equal work, and equal representation but does not go far enough in looking at the impediments to reaching those goals.

We work a lot with people’s self belief and how our stories, our narratives, that we take as reality, hold us back from achieving the things we want to do and one of the equity issues is how our narratives get in the way of us taking up opportunities of equality. You are not going to go for that promotion, ask for that pay rise, apply for that grant, put in that proposal if the narrative you are running is that you you don’t deserve it, are not ready for it, are not “perfect” enough and won’t be heard/listened to anyway. How much harder is it then if you are marginalized even further by being a woman of colour, having a disability, lacking the educational opportunities that would have worked for you or strong cultural barriers.

And of course it is not our role, as privileged middle-class white women, to “solve” this problem for others, that is just perpetuating the narrative of “savior”, but it is up to us to raise our own level of awareness of how our individual actions can contribute to that better future for all of us (plants and animals included).

And maybe next year the group photo might look a little different.

Lynn

PS. As one of the ancients in the group I was heartened by these younger women and feel that whilst we are only tending the sapling, the tree that will be around long after we are gone will be strong and flourishing.