‘Death’
I was 13 months old when my father died suddenly. I believe our soul comes into this life with a specific set of issues to work through, and our life provides the perfect circumstances for us to face those issues. Our task then, is to work through our resistance to what is, in order to attain ease and presence.
In his book ‘The Presence Process’ Michael Brown asserts that any strong emotion we experience in adult life is an unintegrated childhood experience resurfacing. Until we face it, it will keep reappearing in different guises.
“What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it” Gabor Mate
‘Baby Girl’ (postcard by Roy Lichtenstein)
What If we chose our life to be exactly as it is? What if we’re the one setting the scene, choosing the characters, and writing the script? What if our entire lives are carefully crafted dramas with our soul’s evolution at heart?
‘Left Brain Madness’
By the time I left college I had no idea who I was. A highly functioning box ticker, with an excellent ability to memorise and regurgitate, I was completely disconnected from my heart and myself. The unravelling of this conditioned self has been an ongoing process, a bit like pass the parcel where I keep peeling away more layers.
“Do we really expect education to reinvent itself when it holds more in common with fundamentalism than with the history of ideas and learning in our culture? Is academia stuck in a cycle of creating its own kind of ‘hell’, or place of concealment, by resisting soul and imagination?” Matthew Fox
‘The Hangoer’ (postcard by David Shrigley)
Growing up in Ireland alcohol induced debauchery was the order of play. Suspicious of those who didn’t regularly drink to the point of blacking out, I considered them control freaks. As I grew up and experienced other realities, I learned that this idea of ‘normal’ is nothing more than a narrative.
‘Art Lovers on Coke’ (postcard by Francis Bacon)
“We live in a culture that breeds addictions, for our psychic roots are severed from a deep mythic ground. This mythological dislocation increases the steady hum of anxiety, always just beneath the surface of even our most mindless forms of escape. No one is free of addictions, for addictions are anxiety-management techniques the purpose of which is to lower the level of psychic distress we feel at any given moment, whether we are conscious of it or not. In no person’s life are these anxiety-reduction patterns absent. For one person stress is relieved by a cigarette, for another food, for another a phone call to a friend, for another work, for another some simple repetitive activity such as cleaning the house, for another compulsive prayer” James Hollis
‘The Insomniac’
Scrolling through Pinterest one day I came across a diagram from Science of Essentials illustrating various body ailments and the associated emotions. At the centre was ‘Insomnia – loss of self’ which gave me pause for thought. How do we lose ourselves? And more importantly, how do we find ourselves again? In ‘Women who run with the Wolves’ Clarissa Pinkola Estes states “…to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled by ourselves”
‘Monday Morning’
“From such prophetic artists, from the million voices in the rehab clinics, from the anguished cries of those who are lost, alone, and despairing, from those who are dumbed out in television land, or wandering like lost herds through the malls, or aimlessly preening for acceptance at social galas, we learn how far the luminous soul of each has been driven underground. If we want to begin to address the healing of the soul, we have to be willing to both look within ourselves for clues, and radically look, with spiritually attuned eyes, at the world in which we live” James Hollis
‘Mass’
“Art is our one true global language….It speaks to our need to reveal, heal, and transform. It transcends our ordinary lives and lets us imagine what is possible”
Richard Kampler, Artist & Activist
‘Confession’
“The etymological origin for the word ‘hell’ is helan, an old English word that mean ‘to conceal’. In other words, hell is our place of concealment. But if hell is concealment, then heaven must be creativity itself. Heaven would be the place of revelation, of unveiling, of telling the truth”. Matthew Fox
‘Is this all Madness’ (block letters by Alice Turpin)
“Our current world is a drone-clone experience. We are expected to live as a dependent piece of the overall societal mechanism. Behaviour that appears disconnected from the machinery – behaviour by which we demonstrate nurturing of our individuality – is seldom encouraged” Michael Brown (from ‘The Presence Process’)
‘Trust the Experts’
“Wherever certainty is brandished so vehemently, it is generally in compensation for unconscious doubt, and therefore dishonest. Our anxieties lead us to grasp at certainties. Certainties lead to dogma; dogma leads to rigidity; rigidity leads to idolatry; idolatry always banishes the mystery and thus leads to spiritual narrowing. To bear the anxiety of doubt is to be led to openness; openness leads to revelation; revelation leads to discovery; discovery leads to enlargement” James Hollis
‘Menopause’’
In my one-on-one work I often find the throat to be a common area of constriction, particularly in women. The throat houses our fifth chakra, the energy centre relating to self-expression. Is the epidemic of thyroid issues borne of something deeper, an energy of holding back, a fear of expressing ourselves? I think we have become collectively habituated to not expressing our truth.
‘Not Everyone will Get It’
“Growing up and becoming ‘normal’ citizens of our communities results in a storm raging within us. This is because what’s accepted as normality is a state of quiet desperation in which we exist as a consequence of the denial of our authentic being. As much as we might wish to deny the existence of this controlled and sedated inner storm, it can’t be hidden. It’s the storm of duality, the war between authenticity and inauthenticity, the perceptual divide between Presence and pretence. It’s the vast canyon of fear, anger, and grief that lies between the adult and the child self. By gazing across the planet, we perceive the causes of this charged condition everywhere” Michael Brown (‘The Presence Process’)
‘Menstrual Art’
“As a woman you are coded for power, and the journey to realizing the fullness and beauty of that power lies in the rhythm and change of your menstrual cycle. The energy within your menstrual cycle is a force we call your Wild Power. It’s an animating presence – a holy intelligence that holds the blueprint of who you are and your highest potential”
Alexadra Pope & Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer (from their book ‘Wild Power)
‘Bar Scene’ (quote by Anodea Judith)
“The person who does not feel or express ‘negative’ emotion will be isolated even if surrounded by friends, because the real self is not seen. The sense of hopelessness follows from the chronic inability to be true to oneself on the deepest level. And hopelessness leads to helplessness, since nothing one can do is perceived as making any difference” Gabor Maté
‘Dinner Parties are such Bollox’ (block letters by Alice Turpin)
“In our day of dedication to facts and hard-headed objectivity, we have disparaged imagination…What if imagination and art are not frosting at all but the fountainhead of human experience?” Rollo May
‘At the Art Gallery’
“How did we ever come to be who we are in this world, in this particular way, a way now known to those around us as who we are, or at least who they think we are? And just who do we think we are, we might ask as well. What does the ego know, and what does it not know?” James Hollis
‘Birth’ (postcard by David Shrigley)
“Our ultimate act of creativity is giving birth to who we are” Matthew Fox