At this site, you will find many ideas you can incorporate into your daily living. Some are broad concepts. Some are very specific suggestions to help solve immediate health problems. Like how you can save the cost of going to a doctor to get a prescription. Simple things you can do to avoid going to the dentist. A natural antibiotic you can take without fear of side effects.Not everything you see on the pages will apply to you. But my hope is you will be able to take away knowledge that will not only make you smarter and better informed, but which will also make you healthier.
When we hear the phrase “embodying our values,”
many people’s minds twist and turn themselves
into
a Gordian knot of conceptual confusion. We try immediately to “figure out” our values. This is like eating dry toast or drinking lukewarm tea ---unsatisfying! Values are much deeper than our thoughts and feelings.
Personal values are sparks of divinity. They are expressed through, and within, the landscape of the body. Our soul speaks most clearly through our bodies. The language of the soul expressed through the body is: impulse, sound, image, sensation and feeling. Not feelings, feeling.
If you must think about this, think about values as felt cognition which illuminates. We don’t get our deepest values from our work, church, schools or our families and friends. These social structures and relationships can affirm our values, but more often than not they tend to dictate a way of living that suppresses our core values.
People dear to us may embody distinct values we admire and want to develop. If you admire a value in another, it is in you! That is a spiritual law. We definitely cannot trust our society to inform us of our values. The norm is rarely natural. And our deepest values come from what is most natural, most important to us.
There are ends values and means values. Means values like marriage, relationship, money, family, health, security and so on, are often mistaken as ends values. End values are determined by asking the question: What will that get you? After you have asked the first question: What is most important to you? You can’t take the first answer that comes up. You need to mine for your values in the diamond quarry of your soul. You may not be understood, or loved, by people when you live your values. In fact when we live from our own individual values: we rock the boat!
The history of civilizations, points to the fact that we tend to punish, and even kill people with high values: Socrates, Gandhi, Jesus, Martin Luther King, The Kennedy brothers, Shams of
Tabriz
, Joan of Arc. We cannot find values by thinking. We can by remembering and inquiring.
Remember a time when you were unstoppable, highly energized, jazzed, flowing and allowing life to happen smoothly and easily like you were in sync with the greater the powers of the universe. Or think of a time when you were challenged and struggling and yet still kept taking the next right action knowing, absolutely knowing, you were living on purpose. It does not have to be winning a gold medal at the Olympics.
Anytime you can feel the body and its sensations, you are living your values. Examples include, that first certain kiss, watching your garden grow on a quiet morning, barefoot in the black earth, playing tennis, pushing stone down the ice-curling rink, running as child in a flower meadow, giving a great presentation in front of clients, to name just a few.
But be particular and remember the actual moment. Remember how you felt in your body. What clothes were you wearing? What shoes did you have on? How your skin felt? Was there a particular smell? How you organized the shape of that time and that experience lives in your body, your bones and blood and muscles.
You can access that empowering experience simply by coming in contact with your body and it’s muscle memory. Our bodies are a self-organizing system designed to do extraordinary things. Your body’s intelligence will inform you what value you were honoring. Values are who you are. They are the beams of divinity that shape our form. I have four primary values. It took me two years of disciplined inquiry to access and open to my own four core values.
Freedom, presence, honor and creativity are my values. Words are tricky and personal, so I will explain. Freedom means choosing and being willing to face the consequences. You can always tell when I am embodying the value of freedom, I walk like water---easy to slip into---but you would not want to stand in my way when I am moving toward the next right action in my life.
Presence means listening without any thought about my self. All the focus is on what is being said to me. I am not thinking while you are talking, just listening. I actually get paid to be present. Presence is going up in value. I experience Presence in my chest region and legs— a sensation of warmth and opening and an availability to be with another person, or a river, a rock, or a tulip opening in the early morning heat.
Honor means doing what I say I will do. Not what
you want me to do. What I say; I will do (Allowing for human imperfection). I feel honor in my face, the softness of temples and a clear feeling in my eyes.
Creativity for me means creating from nothing. Starting over every day anew. The value of creativity rises up from my pelvic floor, along the spine, with a charged, churning sensation in my groin and belly region, like a fountain.
I used to have goodness as a value, but I kept not living up to it; so I inquired within some more, and realized I had chosen goodness as a value because I wanted to be liked and thought I should. I know when I am living, embodying my values and living life on purpose; and I also know when I am not, by paying attention to the intuitive intelligence of my body. This cultivates what can be called neuromuscular mindfulness.
Finding your core values can be achieved using a combination of the Co-Active Coaching approach, somatic (body-centered) inquiry and yoga philosophy/practice. The work is engaging, safe and fun. The power is granted to the relationship as opposed to granting authority to the coach. We shape our selves through our bodies.
We access how the body speaks its mind. We contact a pattern in the body and this contacting changes everything. This process is much deeper than thinking. (I feel that thinking is overrated in our culture.) We work with the inner landscape of the body: impulse, image, sensation, and sound and feeling. I teach folks how to recognize and use these “somatic cues” or what we call “structures” in more traditional intellectually based coaching.
It took me a long time to recognize, and affectively use the feelings/emotional energy in my body to shape my life. I like to think of this body sensing work and somatic coaching approach, as going to a foreign country I have always wanted to visit.
Coming in contact with a contracted muscle for the first time is like meeting a new friend, or, as with going to a new country, exploring new territory. My tailbone- the mysterious shapes of
India
and
Bhutan
; my legs- the graceful movements of Balinese bamboo; my chest- the rock hard mountains of the Canadian Rockies; and my lungs- a Brazilian rainforest. In my case, the metaphor of lungs as Brazilian rainforest, speaks of loss; a loss I am currently weathering.
In my chest and under the ridge of my collarbone I am experiencing deep grief in my body, and in my life, as a relationship ends. Because I am willing to bring the value of presence to this experience, I am able to receive the learning the situation has to offer, and shape my life anew.
I am not sure whether Life Coaching will stand the test of time as a profession. It is too early to tell. We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy, and its validity and usefulness is certainly questionable. But I do know this: The high value we have placed on progress, performance and profitability have affected all of us to the point that we may be living in the first disembodied culture—millions of people who no longer live in their bodies. And, nowhere is this more evident than in business, millions of individuals interfacing, engaging and staring at pulsating screens for hours on end without ever changing the shape of their bodies.
We deal with our messy and turbulent minds, through the body, in order to uncover our values and our true identity or Self. I assert that “what’s next” is not nearly as important as “what’s first” and that the “I should’s” get in the way far too often in our daily lives. Should’s are a big clue that you are not living your values. When you hear yourself using the word, should, you can rest assured you are suppressing an innate life-affirming value and doing what you think is right for some surface oriented or ego-based reason.
You must surrender—sink into the inquiry—into the body, allowing the answer to arise of itself, from your Being. What do you embody?
