Keeping an Inner Watch

Keep watch over me, oh my Soul. As the night gathers around my Self, in that moonless, Stygian gloom, keep watch over me. When I feel misunderstood and abandoned by friends and loved ones, and the warmth of my Fire no longer gives me comfort or has any meaning; when my Self feels utterly helpless, keep watch over me, oh my Soul.

“Life’s too short,” I often say to myself – and of course it is, when measured against the vast eternity of the Cosmos. Yes, Life goes on, though not my life. When the good things I like in life seem pointless and serve no purpose or selfish enrichment – it is time to reach out to you, oh my Soul. When the pleasures of life and Life grow dim and there is nothing to divert me to the ordinaries and extra-ordinaries of my days, speak into that nothingness, oh my Soul. For then I will hear you above the clamour.

It is then, in those moments of quiet, or when I feel a growing sense of abandonment, that I need to Feel your presence, Hear your voice, See What IS through your eyes. In these moments, when my own Self is losing all will or is bent on destruction, there is only my eternal companion who is there with me – and that is you, oh my Soul. You are always there – if only my Self would know it.

With my Understanding you to be there, and Realisation of your presence, I am complete. There is nothing I cannot achieve, there is no joy kept from me; I can overcome all discomfort and disease and feel no pain; or be visited by any fear, misery or self loathing. I can even be at one with the day of my Passing.

Raise me, oh my Soul, to be with you – reach through my gloom and lift my Self into your light. Show me how simple it is to Understand what is happening to me, and the means by which I can return Home to be at One with you – as it was when I was born. Keep watch over me, oh my Soul.

A Passion for Pi and for Pie

Pi

"Maths Tutors Needed - Want to earn money sharing your passion for Maths?" says the banner ad from time to time on my FB page.

Yes, to be fair I'd love to. I'd love to have some extra dosh to procure some more abaci, or supplement another of my passions - learning.

There’s just one thing wrong, as I see it. My passion for Maths is old school. The way I learned it is outdated. Not the Maths itself, of course, but the way I learned it.
Now here’s the Thing - out of that way of learning came my passion.

Hacking Education

Now I’ve been privileged enough to work in schools for the last eleven years coaching another thing I’m passionate about – cricket.

And I’ve noticed this, as I share the domain and the environment of up and coming young people. Compared to my schooldays there are many things different now, in terms of the subjects taught as compulsory and optional, the facilities and equipment available, and the almost endless range of opportunities. Everywhere there is Knowledge – oodles of it. I am amazed and marvel at how much more Knowledge there is compared to 50 years ago.

Yet Knowledge is rather like money. It can be amassed and put in a bank.
“Look how much I’ve got! I’m rich, I’m clever, I know all these things.”
Now Knowledge we learn and amass in our vaults actually earns no interest at all – until we spend it. When we spend Knowledge we solve problems, arrive at solutions, gather more knowledge, we earn some interest, etc. We make Gains. And the biggest gain of all is ...

Now there are two crucial words missing from the last couple of paragraphs.

Passion

Understanding

No matter who we are, or how clever or intelligent we are, or, how many certificates we might have on our walls that bear witness to how much Knowledge we have in our bank  - none of it proves that we have any Understanding.

Understanding is Non-certificated – and the special ingredient, the catalyst if you like, that turns Knowledge into Understanding is Passion.

“Can’t buy me Love” goes the song – yet “Can’t buy me Passion,” needs to be acknowledged as being right up there too. And we certainly cannot “buy” passion.

What got all of us from our horizontal baby posture, to sitting up, crawling, walking, and running. Did we go to school and learn these things? Did we acquire the Knowledge from a book, or a manual? No – our loved ones showed us and encouraged us over and over again, with a passion. And we gained Understanding. If our parents had shown no interest in our learning how to walk, then we would have never encountered Passion. And we would have got to walk probably much slower and over a longer period of time; and without passion we’d have gained Knowledge but no Understanding.

I’ll just dwell on this idea of “Can’t buy me Passion” for a moment, too, for it comes into Coaching. In terms of performers and coaches and teachers, I know some exceptional and brilliant people – people who have allowed me to stand close enough to them in order for me to catch alight, come alive, as a result of their Passion for their subject, which is (for them) their Life. 

If I was to do a time-line map of my life and populate it with the stand-out, passionate people I have known, then there would be some in my schooldays, very few in my early 20’s to late 40’s and then hundreds upon hundreds in the last twenty odd years. And it is these people, in my latter years that have driven me on, kept me feeling alive, young, vibrant, motivated, and above all - passionate.

We don’t and we can’t learn about passion – it just RUBS OFF on us from others, and then it gets into us. And it got onto and then into them by the same process. I have been, and still am, exceptionally fortunate – not lucky, just fortunate – in associating myself with people who don’t just LOVE what they do, they are PASSIONATE about what they do.

Pie

Another of MY passions is music, as any of you who know me well will attest to. Now, long, long time ago I can still remember how that music used to make me smile. And I knew if I had that chance that I could make those people dance and maybe they’d be happy for a while.

Of course there will be some of you, dear readers, who recognise those words as being more than a little familiar! And I’d like to finish on this particular note.

Whether it is about Pi or about Pie or anything in between, I would entreat you to bring passion into every part of your Life. Give yourself the chance to make others dance – even if only for a while. For when others see your passion setting alight everything that YOU do, they will want some of that – they will want to stand close enough to catch some of YOUR flame, let some of THAT rub off onto them. Passion is infectious!

And it stops the music – our music - from dying.

Intro to "The Spiritual Coach"

What is a Spiritual Coach?

 It could be said that I am a "coach of many colours" - working, as I do, across a wide range of coaching disciplines.The question above, therefore, is a rather important one, particularly for me, as I have been asked to explain it a number of times since I nailed these particular colours to my mast!
What is it ALL about?

Well I believe it starts with an Understanding about ourselves at a spiritual level - or that place where we might say our Soul dwells. This spiritual place, that I might also describe as "The Cosmic Domain," is the domain of Universal Mind or where everyone, all of us, is united in the grand scheme of things. I've also heard it described as The Collective Unconscious.

So there's a lot of titles for this formless place that has, seemingly, been around for ever - and has certainly been in the Minds of Men since mankind began contemplating the beyondness of all things.
There's a wonderful, eternal or spiritual perspective taken by the French philosopher, theologian and cosmologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), which is encapsulated in this, his most famous quote:-

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience
We are spiritual beings having a human experience."

There are two other fundamentals that are with us every step of this journey. One is the power of Thought as a never ending and formless energy, and the other is Consciousness. Consciousness, through our sentience, gives us the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively.
This, essentially, is the human experience that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is talking about - it is our relationship with our thinking and our level of Consciousness at any moment in our lives.

So how does this translate into "Real Life" you might ask?

Inside Out

We are born as spiritual beings and we set out upon a journey of distinctly human experience. We learn about all the things that occupy our small corner of the world, and we also learn how to navigate ourselves within that world. Most of all we learn how to express ourselves within that world through the power of verbal language.
We discover, very quickly, that this verbal language is the coded way we can communicate with everyone within that world - including our Self. We now have the means of turning things we can only feel with our senses - via sensual language - into words. we can now make sense of what everyone else is trying to say to us, and also we can now communicate with ourselves beyond our Inner Language of Self.

Round about now with our developing selves, we also start to establish our relationship with the power of Thought, that shows up in the form of our thinking. When our thinking becomes enmeshed and entwined with our verbal language, we then become almost seduced by the nature of Outside In. And with Outside In we set out on the road of believing our thinking to be a reflection of what is Real in the moment. Since it seems WE are the centre of our 'universe' then what we feel is happening to us is caused by things on the Outside of Us. This is what I mean by Outside In.
Our modern, material world, is full of the simplest illustrations of things outside of us being the main cause of things happening inside of us.
Take the power of the Now, that pivotal moment in our experience where EVERYTHING only ever happens.

We have the capacity to only ever be ONE thing at a time in every NOW moment.

So why would we not be happy, as a choice? Makes sense, doesn't it!
Yet - we put off our happiness Right Now by saying to ourselves "I'll be happy when I've got ... the house, the car, the relationship, the job, the money, the right amount of money, the clothes, the degree, the ability, the perfect whatever."
This choice that we have is something of a divine gift. Yet if we don't know we have the choice then how can we exercise that choice? Instead we merely shrug our shoulders and whisper to ourselves, "Because, at the end of the day, I'm only human, after all."
We affirm to ourselves that we are Human Beings and this is a Human Experience.

So, in terms of our Spiritual Being having a Human Experience, you can certainly see how Outside In takes us further and further into the Human Experience and further and further away from the Spiritual Experience.

Of course there are people for whom the Human Experience is a totally adequate way of living their entire life. Yet there's more to Life than THAT - and we all know this and feel this somewhere deep down inside. There are moments in our lives when we come face to face with our Spiritual Selves - we make an Inner connection - and for some of us we keep that connection going, and we become aligned with our TRUE Selves.

The Human Experience persists

The thing is - we may regain the Understanding we were born with and reconnect with the Inside Out nature of reality - however, the Human Experience persists. And it persists mainly because we are LIVING it! It is there every day, every moment of our Consciousness, in every thought we have.
And this is why we will always have moments of frailty as well as moments of clarity. When our Understanding is out of equilibrium, or off centre, or out of kilter, then our clarity will diminish and our frailty will increase. When our frailty increases we lose our sense of wellbeing and security. When our clarity returns we realign with our sense of wellbeing and security.
It is a simple though not always easy equation.

And with easy and hard - like that - here I'm reminded of Robert M Pirsig's quote in his book
Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance ...
"Is it hard?"
"Not if you have the right attitude. It's having the right attitude that's hard."

The Video

In this video from December 2016, I talk about "demons of wayward thinking" that beset me in the midst of a dark, dark night. These are the times in our lives when we are either very much alone with our thoughts in Mind - or FAST ASLEEP! And it is very easy to endlessly plough the fields of our thinking at 4am, especially when that thinking is Wayward.
In the commentary I point at the awful nature of the demons, and the surest way to clarity.

That, in essence, is the nature of my conversations with clients when I am working as a Spiritual Coach. To point people towards their relationship with the power of Thought as made into the form of their thinking - and to realign them with the Inside Out nature of reality that we were all born with as Spiritual Beings.

The Space Walk

On Saturday 8th October I joined my good friend Liz Scott on one of her Dartmoor walks. These walks are centred around locating certain crosses, of which there are many dotted in and around the Moor - and she takes along her sound recording equipment in order to interview conversations she has along the way with her companions.
This day I was delighted to be one of those companions and we shared our thoughts on a topic that, for me, is very much central to all coaching and particularly to transformative coaching - Insights.

Insights

Insights emerge from our innate place of wisdom, and as they present themselves in our consciousness, they assume a rather similar identity to our thinking, the trains of our thoughts, the products of our harnessing the power of thought. However, whilst our thinking has emerged from our intellect, our insights have emerged from a much deeper place - the inner mind, you might say, or the deeper energy that is linked to our soul. This is the spiritual plane, which I tend to refer to as the Cosmic Domain - a universal place where everything just IS.

Needless to say, this is a very far-out view and might actually beg the question - am I, as a human being, really connected to all this, even something way out at the far reaches of the universe? Am I, as a very ordinary person surrounded by the very ordinary trappings of everyday life with all my trials and tribulations, am I really connected to all that out there?

Cosmic Domain

Well for me the answer is a resounding YES, and there's a very interesting link between the vastness of the Cosmic Domain and ourselves that involves ... space. They say nature abhors a vacuum - and in a similar way it could be said that our conscious intellect, our Ego if you like, abhors space.
In our busy lives we are beset with endless boatloads of thoughts, and if there is any space around we tend to want to fill that space. Of course, in the very act of filling the space we ask masking our insights!
One of the joyous spin-offs from such a walk as ours on that day, was the fact that we were surrounded AND in the midst of, a huge amount of physical space. Some of the views were almost as astounding as gazing up at the heavens on a very starry night, where it is easy to get a sense of staring into the infinite. Yet - out there in the infinite - is a sense of Home, where we connect with our inner, our spiritual self. And it is as if our insights are a message from Home perhaps saying "here is the way back," "here is the answer," "you have everything you need," or "don't worry - be happy," even.

Space

Another aspect of the vastness of space is our Inner Space. This is a space where, at a molecular level, we know from science that there is more space than substance. In our psyche, also, there are enormous areas of space, that - even if we just consider them, imagine them - can have an extraordinary calming and beneficial effect.

The thing about all this is that it is so very easy to ignore it all, to let it pass us by because we have to attend to what is going on right now, to prepare for what is coming tomorrow, and to remind ourselves about all the yesterdays.
Yet there is so very much more going on out there, and in there, in the vastness of our spiritual places.

Anyway - enough of a preamble!
Here is the recording of some musings on our actual AMBLE, our walk or, as I called it ...
Our Journey Into Space!

Be Well!