Image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay 

I had a dream the other night that the swim coach I had back in my teens had come back to visit all those he had worked with who had shown promise and been dedicated to achieving success in their sport.  Dreams being what they are, I did not know anyone else at the table, but suffice to say we were all middle aged and out of kilter with life’s big dreams.

Owen Flanigan was a charismatic and committed coach; I can still picture him tracking me alongside the pool, whistling loudly enough through his teeth to catch my attention over the sounds of my breathing and the water rushing in my ears, and moving his hands in a motion that meant “kick your legs harder!” Although Mr F (as we affectionately called him) died 24 years ago, he is still with me when I take a swim - especially when I’m doing freestyle and allowing my legs to just languish.

In my dream I pictured the group of us he had come to visit dressed in work garb that seemed to signify a degree of career success, one man adorned a pin striped suit. Yet the men had paunches and everyone was more than a little worn down by life. Mr F was taking us back to a time when we were full of youthful exuberance and dreams for our future, less encumbered by voices of self doubt and loathing.

Back in those days the voices were not in my head, of course, they tended to emanate from the mouths of adults (and mean kids) in the world around me. For example, I hit a wall in terms of progress in the pool and listened to others debate why that might be. As I would swim I could feel my body lose energy as I took on the thoughts that I might have plateaued because of growth and teenage hormones; something that felt outside my control.

When I started to become more consciously aware of the voices and judgements in my head a good few years back, it quickly became obvious they were the voices I’d heard in my home, school playground, the pool and other influential places.

I suspect even those people out there who are not consciously aware of the voices and thought patterns in their own head, which seem to form the majority of people at this point, cannot fail to understand this principle when they become parents. Like the many other stories I’ve heard along a similar vein, I have often opened my mouth (especially in frustration) and heard my mother or father’s voice come out.

So this group I saw in my dreams seemed to be encumbered with what those voices had drawn to them in terms of life experience. Chip Conley, in a podcast on the topic of lifelong learning. talks about his observation of the path of life in a similar sense to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in that when we are young it’s all about having our basic survival needs met, then it becomes about accumulating and success and then it becomes about editing and meaning.

Editing means getting rid of the old thought patterns, which Christie Marie Sheldon gives some excellent tips on flushing out in this video. She talks about observing the “I can’t have/do/say/be X” statements in our heads in particular and asking instead “what would it take to make X happen?”

Chip Conley runs a Modern Elder Academy to address this education gap in our midlife, which I thought sounded intriguing, and seeks to address the same awareness gap among other things. He commented that participants tend to notice for the first time how many identities or mindsets they are wearing in their lives.

Coming back to my dream, it was a perfectly timed reminder that – however encumbered I’ve become with unhelpful thought patterns in the intervening years since I trained with Mr F, and however successful or unsuccessful I’ve been at becoming aware of them and integrating the fractured parts of me in my life – I can always start from right here.

I’m grateful to have had people like Mr F in my life; people who believed in me when I was younger gave me strength as an adult when I struggled to believe in myself. If I hadn’t experienced that, I still fervently believe in the words of Belinda Alexander “We are still here, so there is something we have to do”.

The sheer magnificence of our design and that of nature tells me that no single life is an accident; we
each have something we are here to do. In order to do it, there is perhaps the need to become untethered from our worries and doubts and that starts from where you are, now go and be great. And when great feels like too much, just be grate-ful instead.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Be Magnificent: How to Create Something Out of Nothing and Be Thankful, I’d also highly recommend listening to the links in the article. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

What is grabbing my attention this week is the inner struggle between myself and my connectedness to all else. Put in a different way, it’s about my own needs versus my relationship needs.

On the face of it, these two things often feel in opposition. After all, that is what the journey to me has been all about. My starting point, like most, was enmeshed in the expectations placed upon me in my early childhood years. These were the years in which I learned that what I felt, believed or wanted often wasn’t as important as what other people wanted of or for me.

That early entanglement is undeniably still with me, though to a much lesser extent than when I started the journey to figure out who the real me is. Instead of being completely identified with the encumbered version, I now observe with interest what things trigger me and use the information to unwrap yet another layer of something false.

This week I read some words that took me back to that early inner tussle with life as I emerged into adulthood. Then, as now, my biggest lessons were always to be found in those closet relationships I had.

You may know I’ve been drinking in several novels by Belinda Alexandra lately, and what a joy it has been to find such kindred spirits in the fictional characters. The latest one was no exception, it was like the very echoes of my own struggles within old relationships:

“If you are lonely with me now, neither marriage nor children will help. You are asking me to fix something only you can solve.”

“Perhaps I didn’t believe anyone would be faithful to me unless they were tied to me in some way.”

“Although our beautiful life together came to an unanticipated end, you have left me with an invaluable gift; the gift to be myself...Without this heartbreak between us I may never have discovered that desire.”

“I need more time, I’m just starting to grow into the real me, and I like her. I want to fill her empty spaces myself. I want to be free of shackles and insecurities.”

“I had yearned to belong to someone then because I hadn’t known how to belong to myself.”

As I wrote about a couple of years ago in Great Relationships Happen When You Put You First  I have come a long way since those early, needy relationships. Nowadays I look upon any issues as a chance for me to get to know myself even better and a chance to look at where I’m still buying into early conditioning.

But putting myself first doesn’t mean I win and you lose, it means I’m looking for the win win. For example, right now I’m in the midst of an extended period of social time. With kids at home over the long summer holidays, and family visiting, instead of my usual regular spaces of solitude I’m rarely on my own.

Today, after driving some distance to bring my youngest child home from a stay with her grandparents, I would have liked to have taken a nap. I could have, but it was my dad’s birthday, and spending some time with him also felt important. So I opted for the win win in that, and we went to the beach for a walk. I allowed nature to sooth my weary nervous system while we chatted and wandered along the ocean, the waves working their usual magic.

It’s always an interesting and testing time of year for me. I am finding that, as each year passes, I am coming to know myself better and be more comfortable in dropping the vestiges of that angry, defensive, insecure person I once was in favour of embracing a new way of being.

I think perhaps there was a point, early in the journey to recover a sense of my authenticity, that I had a strong desire and need to withdraw from my relationships and be utterly covetous of my own company in order to gain some perspective and clarity. However, now I’m able to function much more comfortably within my relationships without losing sight of who I am.

There are still times when I drop into the me versus you mode, but I quickly become the observer and start to notice instead what there is for me to learn when I’m getting triggered. In Belinda Alexander’s terms, I’ve come a long was in learning how to belong to myself and – in doing so – am now valuing my connection to everything else in an entirely different way.

Instead of that needy, insecure person, I am now seeing that your needs and mine must be a perfect match or life would not bring us together in this moment. That does not mean that our needs are necessarily harmonious, they may in fact be mutually unharmonious in order to push each of us to resolve our inner struggles.

Versus can mean against, or in opposition, and that is how I used to view my relationships when there were conflicting needs. But now I have come to see that a different definition of the word versus, meaning in contrast to, is much more helpful in order to gain a valuable perspective on my connection to everything and everyone else.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How Can I Create a Better World?, Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary), Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear, and Let Anger Be Your Teacher While Learning to Become Its Master. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog. 

A friend of mine shared a post this week from an Iran-born American human rights activist who had been asked to comment on the assassination of General Qasem Solemani. Given that I don’t watch a lot of media, the news about the assassination had reached me earlier in the week when some family members were discussing it.

It was fabulous to see the comments on the post from others who had been open to exploring an alternative view, outside of what gets reported through mainstream media (or, for that matter, just continuing with the any bias they may have grown up with).

As I said in Each to Their Own – Finding Your True North:

No one else has my DNA, my heritage, ancestry or experiences, nor the lenses through which I see the world; we are each unique. And so our truths are similarly so, speaking to us in different ways.

Thus, in my experience, there is never any one truth, only opinion and perspective, and I was thrilled to see other people willing to explore and form their own. This is something I would encourage everyone to do, and to do it from a point of discovering their own authentic self.

I thought about the lady who had made the video stating her opinion, and the oppressive culture she had described in Iran; it made me think of the stories I had been reading recently about Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy and Hilter’s Germany. It also made me ponder on worthy causes on the Earth today.

This also led me to reflect on the things we are all drawn to, or rebel against. While no one said life was meant to be fair, it seems to me the desire for freedom to make our own personal choices, and equal opportunities to pursue what is important to us, is universal. The thing I keep coming back to time and again is the sovereignty of our being.

I thought about my own part in all of this and realised I still have biases. For example, when I hear Trump described as an egotistical, chauvinistic buffoon, I admit there is some resonance. The same could be said of many political leaders, or the systems I have come to distrust, or even the many people in my life whose opinions and actions have created a sense of dissonance.

It’s not that I feel wrong in having a bias; it’s more that it seems foolish to disregard something or someone entirely because of it. It seems more sensible to look for commonalities that exist, since nothing and no one is actually separate from who I am; it is all just showing me aspects of myself.

I am no expert on the Middle East, so it was easier in many ways to be open to a fresh perspective. However, other topics that are closer to my heart - like parenting, education or healthcare for example –undoubtedly prove more contentious. It was a good reminder for me to remain open, knowing that my own opinions constantly evolve and shift.

I know why I’m generally closed on topics close to my heart. As a child (like most people brought up by even the most well meaning parents) my opinions were undoubtedly shaped and influenced by those around me. Space, time and deliberate inquiry have brought me to an understanding of my authentic self and the many ways my view of the world differs to those opinions.

I’ve gone through the years of trying to persuade others to the views I have formed, and came to the realization – as I said earlier – that everyone has their own truth and some are more open than others to exploring alternative views.

It’s a hot button, I think, for many of us whose early experiences quashed our inner views; it certainly made me less movable and more determined to retain my own. Yet it is a big world out there that can accommodate all the collective individual perspectives, it already does.

The question is what you or I want that collective, prevailing global culture, to look like? Should it remain as one which is intolerant and scared of differences, or do I start to take responsibility for the collective by taking responsibility for re-parenting myself?

As I said in We Can Live in Harmony  “in the world today you can see whatever you want to see; from what would appear to be the prevalent, more insular and selfish behaviours of many – which I like to think of as a crazy death dance of a desperate egoic state that knows its number’s up – to the more conscious behaviours of those who are aware of their connectedness to everything.”

Harmony out there begins with inner harmony in here, and the only person who can create that for me, is me. Each time I see a disharmony, I look within to see where that is reflected within me, and seek to learn from its lesson.

There is no need to feel powerless in the face of the state of the world today, there is much to be done from right where each of us stand, in our own shoes. We can end the cycles of feuds and wars when we each take responsibility for our own inner harmony; this will reflect out into the world in a way not before seen in our history.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How Can I Create a Better World?, Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary), Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear, and Let Anger Be Your Teacher While Learning to Become Its Master. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

This is a question I ask myself often, especially since drawing the conclusion that we each have our own unique answers within. Yet there seem some glaringly obvious areas in which we humans appear to have been conditioned by governments and unwitting families to the detriment of our own personal power and, therefore, universal abundance and harmony.

This point in history is still marked by a lot of fear, hate and judgment. When I left the UK fourteen years ago I was starting to see and hear a rise in racist and nationalist sentiment, then I saw a post from someone in the UK last week who’d taken multiple photos of an area on the same day that has sadly been tagged in such a way that tells me those feelings are very much alive.

I will confess I haven’t taken a huge interest in Trump’s time in power, given that I watch very little media, but I can tell from the things many others have quoted or said in passing that there does not appear to be a lot of evolved thought or action talking place.

I recently heard someone say “Hate and judgment turn human beings into idiots, but they never seem able to learn that and behave differently.” I couldn’t agree more, along with pride, greed and jealousy.

As I say in Evolve Our World:

“This is now a world where mostly everything is at our fingertips. In theory it's a world where connection, transparency and finding your passion should be easier than it has ever been. Yet in a collective we seem to act on autopilot for much of the time we are together, with old cultures, hierarchies, organisational constructs and societal systems still in play.

I advocate for people following their passion and I advocate for more evolved and enlightened businesses, governments, education, health care; all the traditional constructs in our society that shape who we become. I'm a proponent of self leadership and transparent communication.” 

But how I advocate, that’s the real conundrum for me. At first, when I began to discover just how conditioned we are, I was furious. I read and listened to a lot of alternative media and research on many of today’s constructs and drew my own conclusions, and still do; it drives me insane when I come across people who have vociferous opinions based on nothing but popular media or their parents’ opinion alone.

I have also come to recognise that the key to evolving our world is through a large enough collective of each of us questioning who we really are from the inside out and evolving ourselves first. I have written nearly three hundred articles and it is for good reason most of them are categorised under Personal Power, because that is where my real learning has been.

I was heavily criticised, controlled and judged as a youngster, there has been and still is a lot of anger and defence in me, something I’m always working on. I work so hard on it because I really want others to become aware of their true potential and the alternative ways of living that would naturally arise if more people had the wherewithal, courage and determination to step into their authentic selves.

I know if I am being angry and defensive all that is happening is a drawing of battle lines on both sides. Instead I have to learn a new way. A story I was reading recently about the civil rights movement points to this. One of the main characters is a black man who looked white men in the eye rather than averting his gaze as was customary. When asked about this he said:

“I look him straight in the eye, not to intimidate, but to say I believe you are a good man and I’m a good man too, we should respect each other. I believe each white man I encounter goes away thinking a little differently about coloured men because of the way I act. Mama says you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.”

Time and again I resonate with stories that demonstrate this old adage well. And I also understand the truth of another well known proverb “a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still”.  As Teal Swan says “showing someone their resistance is a greater gift than persuasion.”

If I were teaching someone else I’d say “don’t expect to get this down pat the first time you are at a family gathering (or even the second, third or one hundredth) and Uncle Bob starts spouting off his usual racist remarks again; or your mother looks at you in horror because you’ve decided not to vaccinate your children or everyone rolls their eyes and gets frustrated because you’ve adopted a vegan diet.”

You can be sure I don’t cut myself the same slack and beat myself up for getting defensive when I feel my parenting or life choices are being attacked. However, I do obviously recognise on some level that this is a process. Vinegar doesn’t turn into honey – ever. I have to evaporate the vinegar and go collect the pollen (to create the honey) one flower at a time.

As I quoted in an earlier article, all honourable causes eventually succeed even if at first they fail. This applies as much to my desire to show people their own resistance and paint inspiring visions of alternative paths, as it does to the evolutionary causes I support.

So how can I create a better world?

• Recognise and heal my own hurts and create new, more authentic, ways to live my life that are unique to me.
• Learn and practice (in less triggering situations) how to ask questions of others in order to reveal their resistance to something; and – most importantly – always remaining open to the idea that I could be wrong.
• The (not) small matter of learning how to paint inspiring visions, which is an entire mindset shift from defence.

All of this takes its own time, and requires patience, but I will get there. I have to because, as another character in the civil rights story said, “People are depending on us. If we give up now, the world my child will inherit will be no better and no fairer than this one.”

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary), Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear, and Let Anger Be Your Teacher While Learning to Become Its Master, or some of my favourite subjects for change Evolving Education, What Is the Deal with Conspiracies? and Wake Up to the Truth About Healthcare and Healing. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog