The Power to Act

Archive for June, 2010

Spending time in nature enriches and renews me! When I spend time away from the business and the busyness of life, I come home to my own natural rhythms. This vacation I’ll be richly fed by the green mountains of Vermont, and the tranquility of the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Bruce and I will spend time alone and held in the loving embraced of our families. So consider me leisurely meandering through the verdant mountains, babbling brooks, clear cold water lakes, and quaint rural town villages of New England for the next two weeks. I’ll be back refreshed and renewed and with a new blog post the third week in July.  Till then…..

I’m in such a lovely place today. Life is peachy; I’m centered, grounded, focused and extremely happy.  My heart is filled with joy.  I know deep within the recesses of my being that all is well in my world. During balanced times I’m grounded in the richness of the moment and at the same time, moving forward in the world with equanimity. There is no push or pull; I’m in the middle of a calm but moving river, finding comfort in the buoyancy of my body and the inner tube that supports me as I move down the river of life. It’s a terrific way to start the week, and it’s a raging river’s expanse from where I was last Friday.

Friday’s are usually a privately productive day. I don’t see clients. I use my time to start a new blog post and to wrap-up unfinished projects, so that I can go into the weekend organized and refreshed. I was half way through the day before I realized that  I just couldn’t get engaged in anything productive.  What was going on? Read the rest of this entry »

It is June 3rd, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and its 75 degrees outside with very low humidity. No, I don’t live in Anchorage, Alaska; I live in Houston, Texas. Like the tumbleweed in west Texas, when June rolls across the parched prairie, visits from family and friends dry up and blow away. Who is silly enough to come to Houston in the summer heat and humidity? For the past 20-odd days, temperatures have been in the mid-90s with humidity running above 90%. That’s pretty much a natural experience. Yet, in the 20 years that I’ve lived here, I’ve never experienced mid-day temperatures of 75 degree during the summer months. I won’t go into a conversation about global warming. Instead I’d rather ponder this change in temperatures as an example of one of those moments in life when things change on a dime. One moment, things are quietly the same and the next instant, life delivers an opportunity for a new life lesson. That is, if you are open to looking for it!

I grew up understanding God as a deity in the sky that both watched over and judged me, depending on my actions. He was fashioned from my Catholic and parochial school years, and my personal experience of my father. I didn’t experience a shaming or a punishing God, but still he was male and distant. Over the years, I’ve fashioned another experience of God, one that is more Read the rest of this entry »

Why did this 62-year-old woman decide to do Tae Kwon Do? I can’t tell you the number of people who, when they hear I am a second-level brown belt, look at me wryly and ask, “Why?” It’s no little decision, not something I did on a whim or because others were doing it. I didn’t do it to learn to defend myself, although that is a great reason to do it. I wanted to know what it felt like to feel powerful all the time, and to create a container that would protect my nascent voice. I did it because I was sick of feeling contained and small, and forgetting that I had power. It was the natural next step of my personal and spiritual development. And, like most major change, it was preceded by a hard life lesson.

Two years ago, I was hired to coach a VP of Exploration whose team was in revolt to turn his working environment around. To clear the air, we were to hold an off-site meeting where the team members had an opportunity to tell Dave what they wanted and why they were unhappy. It was expected to be contentious. My contract was expanded to facilitate this meeting. Because the team was large with about 15 Type A personalities, Read the rest of this entry »

Writing the ‘Bright Spot’ blog was both difficult and illuminating. Like other moments of growth, growth came when I finally realized that, once again, I was struggling. You would think that it would be easy to see, name and claim the moments of struggle, but that’s not my experience. Working hard and pushing through to the goal are bred into our Western strive/drive culture of achievement; struggle has become synonymous with breathing and life. Besides, struggle is counterproductive; it provides the illusion of progress but is a waste of my energies. More importantly, I began to understand the internal struggle between my head and my heart for dominance in my writing. Rather than my head, a salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die, I choose to live the life of my heart, on an inner tube being carried by life down the Brazos River. The life of my heart does have currents, and learning to identify them and ride them is part of creating a centered and powerful life.

The word struggle is code  for the fact that my heart has been overpowered by my thinking mind. When I was in my 40s, I began counting the times in a day I used the word ‘struggle’; I couldn’t go for 20 minutes without hearing that horrid word spill out of my mouth or echo in the caverns of my mind. By my mid-50s, I learned to cultivate Read the rest of this entry »