Allowing Transformation

The old joke isn't far from from truth: How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change.

How many times this week have you thought about the changes you wish you'd make in the habits that you know are sabotaging your professional goals or your health? What dysfunctional habits have you organized your life around? I have a whole collection of comfortable, familiar, sabotaging, dysfunctional habits, and I bet you do, too.

Change, though, can be simply trading one unproductive way of being for another. This is what some alcoholics do when they trade liquor for coffee and cigarettes and compulsive participation in their 12-Step programs. Substituting addictions is why AA---one of the more successful self-help programs---has only a 20% long term effectiveness rate. Likewise, changing from coffee to green tea as my morning ritual beverage doesn't help me start the day any differently, let alone any earlier.

Change is not the same as true transformation. Transformation is moving from electric lights to solar powered illuimation, whether by way of living purely by the natural rhythm of the sun, or by a more high tech solarized method. It's choosing to take a walk instead of settling cozily into my chair mug in hand, as my morning ritual.

Transformation starts with examining the role and the pay offs of the distraction of addictions, and finding ways to allow what those detouring habits serve to pervent. Transformation is allowing the power of the Now. Change is waiting for the ducks to line up. Transformation can be in the smallest of things, starting with is acting "as if" --- "as if" we can experiment with a different choice today, "as if" there were no obstacles, "as if" we had no fear, "as if" we live like we've said we really want to be living, "as if"….."as if"….."as if"…..

Gandhi said, be the change you wish to see in the world. I would add to that, allow the transformation opportunities that present themselves every day.

Dr Deah's Musings
Copyright 2005-2006 by Liminal Realities
a personal growth education venture
Deah Curry PhD, publisher

Approaches to Healing: Practical and Numinous

It's not news that health care in America is in crisis. Budget meisters tout financial solutions, while complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners of all sorts continue to show these systems of healing to be more cost effective and often more able to successfully treat a wide range of chronic illnesses. Two thirds of Americans use the services of some form of CAM clinician.

Everyone is seeking practical answers. And being practical is smart, certainly. There's lots we can do to in terms of practical preventive approaches, and lifestyle choices, and good selection of well trained clinicians of all types.

But by itself, the practical is never the whole answer. And we risk missing other catalysts to healing when we neglect to also seek a numinous approach.

What is the numinous and how can it be an approach to healing? The numinous is the sense of the presence of --- or of being in contact or connection with --- the magical sacred, the mysterious source, that which inspires awe and ecstacy and reverence by its very nature.

As an approach healing, the numinous simply calls for us to suspend our disbelief, and by doing so, to allow for transformation. Healing comes in many forms, some of which may be disguised to fool us into thinking that nothing has been cured at all.

But cure is not the same things as healing, or transformation. Cure without healing is a bandaid. Transformation without healing, I dare to suggest, is never possible.

If this is true, I know the evidence-based empiricists will be asking: how can we operationalize the numinous into a systematic approach? First, by not trying to shoehorn it into the model of the practical.

But mostly, by becoming ever more conscious of the sensory qualities we feel when having experiences of awe, ecstacy and reverence. By being as open as possible, as often as we can, to the mysterious magical sacredness all around us. By being willing to be touched by the numinous forces that are present in every moment if we can learn to become conscious of them.

Dr Deah's Musings
Copyright 2005-2006 by Liminal Realities
a personal growth education venture
Deah Curry PhD, publisher
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Wisdom Waits

Award winning poet and author, Linda Hogan, who shares my dual Chickasaw-EuroAmerican heritage, has written: "It's not that we have lost the old ways and intelligences, but that we are lost from them. They are always there, patient, waiting for our return to their beauty, their integrity, their reverence for life"(from The Woman Who Watches Over the World, 2001, New York: Norton). I've printed this thought on the back of my business cards.

Wisdom – found in keeping the old ways and being conversant with the indigenous intelligences -- waits for us. This is an incredible thought. It means that wisdom is not something that can be achieved or possessed. It's not a high score on the SATs or the MCATs. Wisdom is a path, and a way of walking through life.

We, the postmodern positivist-empirical evidence-based societies, have indeed gotten lost----seduced, really, by a strange consortium of our senseless fears and our mindless fascination with bright shiny high tech toys. But, all is well, for wisdom waits for us with patience, and has given us a map for the return trip. And here it is:

1. Create and respond to beauty, in all its imperfect, chaotic, natural and genius-produced forms as well as its precise, everyday, human-made versions. Creating and responding to beauty lifts the spirit and connects people in shared awe-full experience.

2. Practice and demand integrity, even to the extent of being vulnerable enough to admit mistakes, or to be visible in not knowing everything, and in extending what used to be common courtesies, and keeping commitments to ourselves and each other. Maintaining personal integrity establishes the self-trust that allows us to be open to the subtle intelligences nested in non-human sentience.

3. Demonstrate reverence for all life, by right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, and by understanding fully what it means to abide by a do no harm ethic.

Wisdom waits. Are you on your way back home?

Dr Deah's Musings

Copyright 2005-2006 by Liminal Realities

a personal growth education venture

Deah Curry PhD, publisher

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Finding Our Mission in Life

Reading autobiographies of successful or sainted people, I get the impression they always knew what their mission in life was, or that they discovered it at a very young age. This is annoying to many of us --- myself included --- who have long had the deep intuitive sense that we have a mission to perform, but we just haven't been able to bring it into focus, so we keep waiting for one of Dumbledore's owls to deliver the instruction book.

Finding the mission seems to be the quest that many people around me, friends and clients both, are on these days. It keeps coming up in unexpected ways, from surprising quarters, so I've decided to write about it often over the next month or so. (Let me know if you get bored with the topic.)

Two words in the thesaurus help me respond to questions about finding one's mission: calling, and lifework. To me, a calling is something quite sacred, and it has a unique bodily felt sensation when I'm on the path of mine. (More about that in later posts.) Lifework, or one's life's work, or one's Work in the world, are the skills, talents, and achievements that are used and created in responding to one's sacred calling.

I think we risk getting off track when we expect our mission to be some crystal clear, hugely important Something that will make a difference to humanity at large. It might, but it's just as possible, as Caroline Myss has said, that one's mission is to bloom where you're planted --- that is, to simply be the best you can be in every given moment while still allowing yourself to be humanly imperfect.

A starting point is to think of a calling as if it were a magnet. To what do you feel magnetically pulled? And as you think about that, try to be aware of the sensation of that pull in your body --- where is the pull located, and what are the sensory qualities of the feeling of the pulling?

Dr Deah's Musings

Copyright 2005-2006 by Liminal Realities

a personal growth education venture

Deah Curry PhD, publisher

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED