jeni starfish

The happiness miracle has no boundaries

I laughed and cried more than I've done in a long time yesterday and I did it in a rather crumbling and somehow still splendid art deco library in a forgotten corner of Leeds. That was the first miracle, since my associations with libraries are mainly centred around hushed silence. These days, it seems, no one minds too much if you speak above a whisper. Go figure.  And there are computers now, great banks of them whirring away in companionable virtual activity. I've stayed away too long, clearly.

I was there to give a 45 minute talk on life coaching as part of Hunslet Library's Reading for Wellbeing initiative, organised by Lyn Bambury, a trailblazing angel of determination who had quietly and charmingly talked a collection of lifestyle professionals into giving up their afternoon and their skills for a good cause. No one knew quite what to expect - the turn out could have been 1 or 100 - so it was with some trepidation that I stood at my flip chart waiting for the first members of the audience to drift in and take their seats. I wasn't at all prepared for what actually happened... 

The wisdom of the body

Just back from another wonderful, exhausting, energising weekend of NLP Mastery with PPD Learning. It is proving to be a very good choice of training provider. What PPD does very well is collect together some of the true luminaries of the NLP world and encourage a learning environment that is stimulating, experiential and just plain good fun.

This weekend we had the honour of witnessing the elegance and warmth of Judith DeLozier, one of the original co-founders of the field, and perhaps the nicest person on the planet. Her intention was to open our minds to something beyond the mind - the wisdom of the body. Since we all tend to spend most of our lives racing around in furious circles in our heads, it was a refreshing change to slow right down and experience that other system, the one that we actually live in. It was a joy to simply notice that the body has a whole different way of making decisions, and one that, on the whole, leads to pretty good choices, often right first time, where the mind tends so often towards the old joke that it used to be indecisive but now it's not so sure.   

Still, as I said, it wasn't all serious and cutting edge and ever so grown up. There was that fit of giggles Margaret and I fell into during the body sculpting exercise for starters....

The balance that's right now

A big thing for me at the moment is being in the moment. It all started a few years ago with the revelation that is Eckhart Tolle's life changing book The Power of Now and it just escalated from there. Being present, living from right Here and Now (and not in the done and dusty past or the uncertain future) has become so important to me that it is now an essential part of my value of authenticity. I only really tune into the real and genuine me when I am fully focused on the glory, pain and general wondrous messiness of the present moment. Things are more sharply focused; the lessons of the past seem clearer and the goals of the future more compelling. So it's much more than carpe diem - it's how I get a sense of being rooted in the dynamic of my whole life, as with a familiar movie that remains endlessly fascinitating and reveals itself anew with each viewing. And it's the key thing that helps me get balance in my life, because as sure as eggs is eggs, balance changes its meaning for me more often than I changed outfits the other day on my frenzied shopping jamboree.