MY BLOG

I am writing this piece during a “news fast” – an intentional withdrawal from all media sources be they mainstream, alternative, or social. Not being influenced by outside opinions, no matter how relevant or potentially wise, is a relief. It’s just me in here, sifting through all that has arisen or been worked through since I wrote my last essay.

This is a long essay. It will probably take you about a half-hour to read. In it I share what I’ve discovered about myself after writing a weekly blog for a year (and then integrating that for the last year and a half), and how this has deepened my ability to see and speak to the dynamics in current events from a new place.

Science fiction writer Ursuala Le Guin talks about a forest that is bigger on the inside than the outside. I’ve loved that image since I first heard it. It’s mysterious and magical and other-wordly. What could that possibly mean in our everyday lives? My housemate John’s piano playing comes to mind. I always love hearing him play, but if I stop and listen, really listen, I am transported into a much vaster universe.

My friend Julia was visiting this past weekend and we decided to expand our annual year-end review to a decade review instead. We covered all the big events that transpired in both our lives and challenged each other to give it a name. I called mine ‘growing up.’

My first personal development workshop was a Sensitivity Camp organized through the Friendship Centre in Port Alberni. It was held at Pachena Bay, just a few kilometers outside of my childhood home of Bamfield, and I was fifteen years old. We camped on the beach and did Gestalt Therapy exercises. I remember coming home afterward saying, “I’m sorry, Mum, but I have to do what I have to do.” What that looked like, six months later, was quitting high school shortly after my sixteenth birthday.

I’ll be turning sixty-five in just a few short weeks and I’ve been mulling over how to mark the occasion. It will also be the end of my Year of the Child weekly blog-writing initiative. Historically, after a project is complete, I feel drawn to travel. Normally, it would be a work project and the end of a lucrative contract, not an inner-focused endeavour such as my blog. But this is the completion of a significant commitment and I feel the familiar pull to get away and breathe new air.

Part of my coaching training with Integral Coaching Canada involved practices of self-care—our own as well as those we recommended to our coaching clients. The specifics of a practice depends on the individual and whether their system needs more ‘waking up’ or ‘calming down.’ My coach at the time suggested that I incorporate some form of dance into my life, to hopefully help mitigate the acute anxiety I experienced during the previous module.

This past Friday I attended an event at UBC called Women in Psychedelic Sciences. It was a fundraiser for MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, and four talented young women were on the panel. One of them referenced the work of Nadine Burke Harris, a pediatrician who has done extensive research into the area of our young developing brains. Her TED talk How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across A Lifetime has been viewed over six million times since 2014 and is well worth the 15:45-minute watch.

I’m home now in my little ‘womb room’ after a rich and nourishing weekend on Bowen Island. I was there co-facilitating a residential retreat with dear friends Susan Wright and Sharon Halfnight, that was held at our friend Julia’s beautiful Lodge at the Old Dorm. We call the workshop Weaving the Web and it was birthed over dinner many months ago when five of us met to explore the topic of dark nights of the soul—both on an individual level and that of the world at large. The question Susan posed was, “What role might we play in hospicing the death of the old and midwifing the birth of the new?”

Nobody has been a bigger friend to my inner little girl than psychotherapist Andrew Feldmár. Our first introduction was in 2002. I was part of a small group that was assisting another therapist with process-oriented workshops, and our cohort met with Andrew to develop ethical guidelines. I’d never encountered anyone remotely like Andrew before, and I was more than a little awed by his direct and provocative approach.

I turned to the Book of Runes for guidance with my post today. The stone I drew was Sowelu—Wholeness, Life Force, The Sun’s Energy. Sowelu counsels opening yourself up, letting the light into a part of your life that has been secret, shut away. To accomplish this may call for a profound recognition, for admitting to yourself something that you have long denied.

In March 2004, I was back from some travels and broken-hearted over the end of a love affair. My former colleague Angus offered me a suite in his family home and a small UBC contract to get me going again.  It was my beloved nephew, Geoffrey, the son of my brother Marc and his former wife, my dear friend Mo, that moved me into that little suite at Angus’ when I was so sad and disoriented. To Geoff it was a ‘no-brainer’—of course he would help—and I remember how grateful I felt, and proud to have such an amazing nephew, and with a truck!

My resume has always been a bit of an issue for me. Long gaps in my employment history (due to travel or other developmental pursuits), along with a distinct lack of formal education, left me feeling a little ‘less than’ in this realm. Neither of these were a concern to Julia though, when she was recruiting new staff for UBC’s temp agency, Limited Time Only, in 1993. I was nervous (of course) but she was friendly, interested, and impressed with my somewhat eclectic work history. She hired me and a deep and abiding friendship began.

I am fresh from the Spirit Plant Medicine Conference, an annual event held in Vancouver, dedicated to supporting the current psychedelic renaissance. Now in its ninth year, it was another sold-out event. Along with increased attendance there seemed to be a broader mix of people, no doubt due in part to Michael Pollan’s groundbreaking book, How to Change Your Mind.

My dear friend Susan offered me an image a year or so ago. It was in relation to my work life, and my ongoing efforts at reinventing myself and what I’m offering to the world. Susan saw an ever-expanding web of connection, but without anything anchoring the strands at the perimeter.

Mostly I’ve relied on current events to inform these blog posts—birthdays, death days, out-of-town trips and inner contemplations. Today is my dear friend John’s birthday, and no Year of the Child would be complete without a deep and appreciative look in his direction.

I’m home from a trip to Kootenays, which included a spectacular week at The Sentinel—a beautiful retreat centre near Kaslo, on the shores of Kootenay Lake. Good friends, Gillian and Richard, founded it three years ago and a group of us have returned every year for a visit. We contribute what we can to support their powerful vision and are nourished in return by the stunning beauty, amazing food, and the camaraderie of the group.

One of my most significant ‘assets’, particularly in the career realm, is my ability to work well in an emergency. It comes online without me even thinking about it, and it’s my ‘ace in the hole’ if the world really does go into the crapper. I call it chaos management. It includes the tangible skill of problem-solving (and the actions required thereof) but it also encompasses a holding capacity that is slightly more amorphous. It’s as if I take ownership of situations energetically until some semblance of coherence is achieved.

There is no question that writing a weekly blog has been an incredible catalyst for me to explore aspects of myself that have long been neglected. Intimate relationships and sexuality are one of the areas I’ve shied away from the most.

Completion seems to be in the air. This past Sunday I helped my housemate, Barry, with the final move-out from his house on Keats Island. This was the last goodbye to a house he had owned with his former wife, Bridget, for 10+ years. Our dear friend Mo came with us. She had some boxes to retrieve from Keats as well—the final few things from a previous relationship that had ended more than a decade earlier.

Camping on my own for eight nights on the west coast took some inner fortitude that I wasn’t sure I had, but I felt guided from the get-go. The idea itself, when it landed in my consciousness, seemed both urgent and right. Thirteen years had passed since I’d spent a summer at our Uncle Johnny’s house, and got into a wrangle with my brother, Marc. He and I had been estranged since then—which I found continually disorienting—and with that estrangement came a long separation from my birthplace, beautiful Bamfield, BC.

I’ve been camping at Pachena Bay, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, since last Thursday. Pachena Bay is one of the terminuses of the West Coast Trail and is located about 5 km outside of Bamfield. I honestly can’t remember how long it’s been since I’ve done something this adventurous, but it feels right in some fundamental and important way. And a little hard at times.

I’ve been thinking about legacy lately, and what that means to me at this point in my life. Merriam Webster defines legacy as “a gift by will especially of money or other personal property,” followed by “something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past.” A financial legacy is not something I’ve focused on so far, but I do long to leave a contribution I can be proud of.

When I was a girl, growing up in Bamfield, we had a dog named Tippy. She appeared one day in the woods behind our house. A group of kids were playing when they came across her with her newly born litter of puppies. She was thin, hungry and decidedly skittish.

I had a therapy session with Andrew Feldmar a few months ago. We hadn’t seen each other for a while but I was a regular client between 2004-2009. I still check in from time to time, and according to his records, we’ve spent about 240 hours together. Not that much in the greater scheme of things, but his words of wisdom are never far from my heart and mind. I call them Feldarisms.

For the last five months I have been diligently following the protocol my naturopath prescribed for Cytomegalovirus, a type of herpes virus that has been present in my body for over forty years. I wish I could say I feel fantastic, but I’m still in the thick of it. That isn’t totally surprising to my logical mind. Shifting the status quo is bound to take some time.

My friend Lindsay and I were having a coffee. She ran the Bamfield General Store at the time and I was leaving shortly for a trip to Port Alberni. The logging road between the two places is gravel and often full of terrible potholes. I mentioned casually that I was worried about getting a flat. She queried me, “Really, why worry about that? You’ll either get a flat or you won’t get a flat. Worrying about it doesn’t make any sense.”

Our mother, Cecile Albertine Phillips (née Vanden Wouwer) took her final breath on July 29th, 1985. She was sixty-six years old. Mum had undergone elective surgery the previous week. The procedure to remove arterial blockages was deemed more complicated than initially expected, but still successful. She was due to be released in the next couple of days.

There is no escaping the passage of time when you’re writing a weekly blog. With this installment I am poised at exactly halfway through my yearlong journey. That in itself is kind of staggering, and I wonder if the rest of the year will seem to move more quickly, like a car ride often does on the way home?

It’s hard to know if caregiving is a gene that some of us come in with or if we learn it in our family of origin. Either way, my natural inclination has always been to look after others, whether it be people, animals, places or things.

If a child grew into adulthood according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses. Goethe

One of my favourite past times as a child was building blanket houses. I would gather sheets, blankets and safety pins, pull together sofas, chairs and side tables, rig up lamps with extension cords, and set myself up in my own cozy little house. I felt safe in there. It was calm, orderly and mine, even if the ownership was temporary. Chaos could be reigning all around me, but if I couldn’t see it then I didn’t need to engage with it.

I’ve gone through several major purges at different times in my life and I’m always surprised by how quickly I accumulate things once I’m settled again. It’s like a gravitational force, not dissimilar to Parkinson’s law that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. Stuff expands so as to fill the space available.

One of the topics we returned to regularly in the nine-month Money Course I took in 2015 was the idea of integrity. Lynn Twist, one of the instructors and author of The Soul of Money, worked for many years with Werner Erhard (founder of EST, which then morphed into Landmark). Integrity is one of the central ideas that much of Erhard’s work revolves around. This six-page article, Integrity: Without It Nothing Works, is well worth the read. In it, Harvard Professor Emeritus Michael Jensen clarifies that by integrity he means wholeness, distinct from the moral conations it’s often associated with.

One of the things I find fascinating about money is how taboo it is to talk about. It’s right up there with talking about death, perhaps even more so. Maybe it’s because they are so closely linked. Our survival depends on our ability to provide for ourselves and when we feel unable to do that, for whatever reason, it threatens our very existence.

I wasn’t a brilliant student. I had to work hard to achieve my C average and struggled especially with exams. No matter how much I studied, the stress of test time took my memory off line.

This phrase was one of the predominant messages I took away from the Asset Based Community Development conference I attended last week.  It was reassuring to spend three days with over 200 people who believe that our individual and collective assets are the essential components of community life, but the biggest thrill by far was meeting John McKnight. I only learned of him recently and I haven’t read his and Peter Block’s book The Abundant Community, but I was moved to tears when he shared stories of what is possible when we focus our intentions in support of one another.

I’ve lived my life on a very short leash. What was acceptable and not acceptable was all well defined—at least in my mind. I liken it to the plight of circus elephants that are tethered to a post at a very young age. They might struggle to get free but they are too little and the tether is too strong. As they grow to adolescence they might keep trying, but eventually they give up. By the time they are adults they are so used to the constraint that they don’t realize they could easily break free.

We’ve all kept a close eye on my sister Abby since her husband Stefan’s death, which was three months ago yesterday. She is one of the fortunate ones who have a loving posse around her, although many of us live farther away from her home on the Sunshine Coast than we’d like.

I’ve known for a while now that re-engaging in some kind of intimate relationship is my next developmental step. Psychologist John Welwood claims in this article that “real awakening only happens in the charnel ground where we acknowledge and work with our wounds, fears, and illusions.”

I remember being in my 30s and looking down at my body, saying, “There’s got to be more to me than this.”  I’ve been working away at this project of ‘me’ for a long time now, and with this year of blogging (in public!) I have upped the ante.

Publishing this weekly blog brings back memories of my Integral Coaching training. The method they teach is a blend of ‘rigor and intuition,’ an elegant but demanding combo that had me regularly feeling anxious, especially when writing assignments were due. As each deadline drew closer my fear as being seen as subpar would start rising, taking with it any access to my intuition or help from the cosmos or beyond. It felt like a toxic entity had permeated my body, with intermittent jolts of hot, sickening shame. The training was higher stakes than this blog (it was school, after all…) but the felt sense is familiar and clearly started long ago.

I’m with a group of eight women at Rivendell, a serene and slightly rustic retreat centre set high above Snug Cove on Bowen Island. It’s a relief to be out of the city, even though I’m always a little homesick when I’m away from the cats and the familiarity of life on Ringwood Avenue.

My housemates and I watched Bohemian Rhapsody the other night. It’s a beautiful film, portraying the rock band Queen. It culminates in their participation in the Live Aid concert in 1985, and I sobbed through a good chunk of the final scene.

Last summer I wanted to shift my life somehow—up-level it—so I could experience more joy, vitality and purpose. I enrolled in a Landmark program called TEAM, where part of the curriculum included formulating and delivering on an individual initiative, called our “Game in the World.” Mine was (and remains) “Community to Live and Die In.” I knew that collaborating with others was essential, and I believed this program would help me shift from my lone wolf persona (often the fate of consultants) into the world of teams and teamwork.

My interest in Advance Care Planning came alive in the spring of 2016. It started with a frantic phone call from my beloved Sarah. Her dad, David, a dear friend and former partner of mine, was being helicoptered to Lions Gate Hospital. He’d been having a happy dinner party with friends on the Sunshine Coast when a terrible pain took over his head. They rushed him to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with a brain bleed and immediately hooked up to full-on life support.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. This could be my byline. I keep thinking about the astrology reading I had last fall with Eric Myers. He used the word ‘productive’ to describe the predominant behaviour I adopted when I deemed my own needs, wants, and overall self-expression unacceptable.

I was reflecting last night that Phase 1 of my blog/vlog launch is now pretty much complete. I’m not ahead of the game with posts written and waiting in the wings (something I aspire to, for the good of my own nervous system) but I’m getting used to the rhythm and have most of the technical aspects worked out. So what is Phase 2, I ask myself?

Time is a funny thing. A friend sent me the Beatles song “When I’m 64” on my birthday. It brought me back to the young girl I was when that song was in its heyday. I remember vowing I would never let a generation gap grow between the next generation and me. I’ve been...