Dependence, Independence, Interdependence

When at work I use a model for helping people integrate into new roles and new organisations.  This model has three stages; Dependence, Independence and Interdependence.  I first came across it when at Ernst & Young.  At the time I had just been promoted to a new role as part of a small group of partners running a firm wide change programme.  The move involved transferring from the Bristol office to the London office.  Yet despite the excitement of being promoted and in a new large role the first six months were terrible.  I ended up being expected to pay for my travel to London and being on less money than I was on before being promoted and the more I highlighted this the more resistance I got from my boss.  The insightful points I raised a team meetings were argued with and rejected and gradually I began to feel more and more on the outside.  I was definitely in a black hole.  I considered leaving and tried all that I could to try and change things.  In the end, this model of Dependence, Independence and Interdependence came to my aid.  I realised that if I wanted to succeed I first had to be included.  In order to be included I was dependent on others.  I realised that my attitude had been one of "finally they have recognised my brilliance and promoted me" whilst they seemed instead to be excluding me and rejecting my brilliance (strangely I'm not sure they defined it as brilliance!).  I realised that I had stumbled over the issue of how to make transitions.  If I was going to make a contribution, I first had to find a way of being accepted and this brought me up against the issue of modesty.  I decided that even if I just made tea and coffee for everyone at the beginning of the meeting, it was an expression of my modesty and interest in them.  If I wanted them to be interested in me, I was first going to have to be interested in them.  Things began to change quite rapidly.  At the same time, we also had the difficult event of our second child being still born a week after he was due.  This re-inforced my position of vulnerability but it also opened everyone's heart to me tremendously.  Somehow my vulnerability and dependency on others was the key to everyone's heart opening up to me.  I also gave up on asking to make changes to my salary and simply accepted the situation.  What amused me to notice was that within a year my boss was fighting to get my salary raised as high as he could whilst I had genuinely given up and was less concerned.  Once I really felt that I had been accepted (and I had accepted others) they began to really listen to the unique or independent points I was making and to value them.  I found my own independent role and within time a strong sense of teamwork and interdependence was created.  A few years later, when I went on secondment to a new organisation as coach and change manager for a high profile transfer of a local education authority to private ownership, I found myself in a similar position, pushing to show my worth and value and make a contribution yet this time after two weeks I could see that I was stuck in the same black hole and changed my approach to work on modesty.  The difficulty with being included is that we are dependent on others to include us, we cannot make ourselves included.  This is why modesty is the key attitude to a situation of dependency and being included.
A few years later in the midst of another transition, I found myself in a similar black hole, but this time, it only lasted half a day.  In my coaching of others, I have found this model of Dependence, Independence, Interdependence (or Inclusion, Assertion, Co-operation as it is sometimes called) very valuable for helping people understand the black hole they often fall in when joining new organisations or taking on new roles.  The temptation and pressure is very high to prove oneself, so we often go into assertion mode of proving we have a valuable contribution to make and showing we can stand on our own two feet, but this only leads to frustration, competition and conflict.  Once people see that they need to do the modesty or inclusion stage first they are able to adapt and put right their poor start within quite a short space of time.  I have been surprised that this has been the basis for most of my coaching where I have been asked to work with individuals who are on the verge of being rejected by their organisations.

Recently I have been experiencing (with Neptune squaring my Mercury) the nature of this relationships in a different respect.  My son at nineteen, is a fully grown male, standing some inch and a half taller than me.  He wants his space now and to be respected as an adult, yet he lives under my roof, supported by me.  In January he went to Tignes in the French Alps to ski for the season.  Having been independent for three months the return to being at home was not easy.  My friend Chrissy told me that I was being a wimp when I was disturbed by this and that I had to explain that since I was head of the family and supporting him, he was going to have to be respectful or he could set up his own household and become independent (for information on this see the following: www.chrissyphilp.com/heart/What_we_need_to_know_%28I_think%29....html).  I explained therefore that I was top dog and expected to treated with respect but that he was free to set up his own household and be free.  Luke being an Aries responded well to this direct approach and has been a quite brilliantly helpful and dutiful son ever since.  He said he found it very helpful to have it clearly spelled out.  I realised in this, the nature of our interdependence.  I was dependent on him to play his role as a son and not make my life untenable and he was dependent on me to still support him and help him make the transition.  As long as we understood this, all was well.  The I-Ching places great emphasis on this in Hexagram 37 The Family it states that "When the family is in order, all the social relationships of mankind will be in order".  This is in many ways what we are struggling with globally at the moment, what is the right relationship between dependence, independence and interdependence.  As the nature of the world through global business marketplaces and the internet become more global we are increasingly recognising our interdependence.  We have made attempts to create a sense of interdependence through structures such as communism but this was flawed because it sort to eradicate independence (individuality).  Europe is struggling with the same issue, if you don't allow countries a degree of independence or ask them to be independent in being able to stand on their own two feet, you create a mess.  Fortunately, getting in a mess is the very thing needed to learn about it and put it right.  Luke and I would not have learnt and put the relationships in their right relation if we had not first got in a nice black hole.  We are in a collective black hole currently with the financial position in the world and also with things like global warming but it is important to understand they are part of a growing process where we are learning about interdependence.  The recent disputes over rivers and dams in China and other countries illustrates this learning stage we are going through.  If a river runs through a number of countries all are dependent on it and the river cannot be said to belong to one country, China's damning of major rivers from their sources in Tibet is causing havoc in Bangladesh and they are not the only ones doing this.  We are getting to a stage where we are being challenged to learn how to get this balance of dependence and independence right so that we can make the transition to genuine interdependence.

I suspect as we begin the process of exploring space further (as is bound to happen now that space exploration has been taken out of government hands and released into the private sector) we will encounter increasing pressure to agree on how we manage interdependence.  If asteroids start to be mined then who owns them?  Who owns the moon?  Who owns Mars when we get there?  We have started to address this with areas like Antarctica but the challenges will increase.  Bodies like the United Nations are likely to become increasingly important.  On the financial side, it might well take a global solution to deal with our financial issues and at the very least we will be much more mindful of our interdependence from now on.  The internet poses similar problems with its virtual nature and the fact that no one country can legislate about it.  Interdependence is intriguing, it seems to me that the key is how the individual and perhaps the most vulnerable individual is treated.  When we can treat the country or person who is most vulnerable with the greatest respect or compassion then everyone can trust us.  In this respect how we are now treating Syria is critical.  I am not sure that we are doing it well.  We must have compassion for everyone and be on everyone's side to get this one right.  I noticed that when I first heard about the recent attacks and killings of families and children it came in the same news bulletin that detailed a family in Afghanistan having been killed by bombing.  I struggle to see the difference between these two.  If we are going to generate the trust to achieve true interdependence then both must be a source of sadness to us and learning so that we work to make sure neither happen again.  Recognising that the west is as culpable as the leaders in Syria would be an act of genuine interdependence because it would recognise our common ground of complicity and need to change and we would not be condemning the leadership of Syria whilst perpetrating the same acts ourselves.  We would instead, recognise it is all us and acknowledge our common humanity.  It would be intriguing to see setting the example of what we want to become and mutual learning being the currency of global influence rather than military might and power.

Personally I love Star Trek and I would love to think that we are taking our first baby steps towards a collective view of earth; a federation of every country and person.

Cleaning our connection

If Pim van Lommel is correct (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOeLJCdHojU) that consciousness is non-local (ie. exists outside time and space) and he is not the only one who is providing evidence that this is the case, then it has some interesting implications for how we learn and become wiser.  Pim van Lommel describes the brain itself as a transceiver or interface to consciousness rather than a generator of consciousness.

As one of Chrissy Philp's students, I learnt to distinguish between my personality and my "owner"; my "owner" being the part of consciousness that could stand back from identifying with my personality and see it more objectively.  I have tended to think of this "owner" as being like a parent for the personality; it's role being to understand, take responsibility for and get the best from our childlike personality.  Ram Dass, from a spiritual perspective, talks about how we become identified with our "space suit" in each incarnation and that part of the goal of enlightenment is to be able to separate our identity from our spacesuit so that we can be both "in the world but not of it".  He describes consciousness as the "witness" and this is common in many spiritual writers such as Ouspensky and Rudolf Steiner.  It is also common in most religions where meditation attempts to still the mind and allow us to step back from the "mind chatter" of our personality in order to connect with the pure consciousness of being.  There are also interesting implications for astrology.  Is the personal horoscope describing the shape of our transceiver or the nature of our connection to consciousness?  Perhaps it is both.  And what of mundane astrology, is this describing the nature of consciousness more generally - the whole frame? Or is it describing the framework or field on which consciousness plays out?  Perhaps, again it is both.

I have long considered that consciousness is separate from the body because of the realisation that consciousness does not age, most people describe the fact that they feel no older despite the years passing and it occurred to me that this was because consciousness itself lies outside the aging process; it is eternal.  Thus our consciousness is no different at seventy than it is at seven.  If our brains are transceivers (and perhaps given recent evidence our whole bodies) then what does this mean for our development?  What I learnt from Chrissy was the importance of keeping my heart and my mind open.  The heart and the mind are, as I have discovered, almost the same thing.  What I mean by that is that they influence each other so symbiotically that it is almost impossible to separate them; when our heart is closed to someone our mind tends to close towards them and when our mind is closed our heart tends to close down too.  To test this, imagine the person you find most difficult to deal with coming down a path towards you, there is no way to escape and you are going to have to interact.  Now notice your thoughts, how long would the conversation be, what chance is there that it would be open and fruitful?  Now imagine someone you really love coming down the path towards you and notice the difference in your thinking and assumptions.

So why is keeping the heart and mind open so important.  Given Pim van Lommel's conclusions, keeping the heart and mind open is critical because it keeps our connection to consciousness as pure as possible.  When our heart and mind close down it is like interference on a radio station.  This echoes Timothy Galwey's concept in the Inner Game where he describes the fact that the role of helping or coaching others is to reduce interference (which is internal not external).  Galwey describes our ability to use our talents as a function of our potential minus interferences.  Our role he posits is not to work on potential but to clear away interferences.  This also fits with Don Juan's idea in the Carlos Castaneda books, where he talks about the tonal and the nagual.  The tonal is everything that exists and is knowable in the material world and the nagual is the creative agent that works through the tonal.  Again, he sees the role of wisdom as being the cleaning of our tonal, in order that we are a perfect receptacle for the nagual.  Pim van Lommel states that the those who have had a near death experience (NDE) are more trusting of their intuition and operate from closer to a position of unconditional love.  This seems to fit with the idea of an open heart and mind.  One of my lessons as a student of Chrissy's was that the intuition cannot be trusted if our heart is not open, that if it is closed our intuition gives us faulty data.

All this brings me to the I-Ching and taoism.  The Tao-Te-Ching states that "the great man does nothing and yet nothing remains undone" which fits with the notion that the role of the brain is not to generate or lead but rather to be an open receptacle for consciousness which has its own purpose.  The I-Ching itself in Work On What Has Been Spoiled (Hexagram 18) talks about our role being to clear up that which has been spoiled or gone wrong - to clean our connection, ie. to open our hearts and minds back up again so that our connection to consciousness is purified again.  The I-Ching also states that "all men are one in their hearts" - that there is only one heart.  If our minds or hearts are closed by interference then all we hear is a fuzzy static rather than beautiful music.  In this context the black holes that we experience are the signs of where there is interference in our connection and also perhaps where new channels can be discovered, that is new areas of consciousness can be opened up to allow us to evolve. Armageddon has long been feared as the end of the world, but perhaps, like all good black holes, it is the catalyst for evolution and new understanding.  Certainly in our individual lives experiences that feel like Armageddon are ones we look back on as having been key periods of learning or experience in our personal growth.  Looking up the origin of the word Armageddon, it is believed to relate to the mountain of Giddon, yet the mountain here is a tel, a jewish word for a man-made mound where each civilization built on the previous ones until a hill or mound was formed.  In the same way, the Armageddon prophesied by Revelation and feared by many in the shape of ecological destruction, nuclear war etc. may be no more than the transition to a new understanding or level of civilisation - a new city built on the old one.  This new understanding of consciousness may be just such a moment in our evolution as a human race, particularly as we are moving from the age of Pisces-Virgo, to Aquarius-Leo.  Surely separating the brain from the mind, or consciousness from the individual must be symbolised by the Aquarius-Leo axis?

Unconditional love

In discussions with a friend recently we have been talking about the nature of happiness.  He has recently been on a meditation retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh where the focus was on being happy.  This happiness was focused on the present moment and on being.  I was also pondering this when listening to Ram Dass a few months ago discussing his experiences with his guru Neem Karoli Baba.  I was further prompted to think about this during a discussion with friends on a journey back from Oxford.  I ought to point out that this experience was an interesting one in this context.  I had just finished four very long days in London running programmes and fitting in some informal coaching in the evenings with people who were stuck and wanted help.  The last day finished at just after five o'clock and I calculated that I might just be able to make the 5.47pm train to my home station of Kemble in Gloucestershire.  I got to Paddington station at 5.42, just in time to catch the train to Kemble.  Rushing through the ticket hall of the Underground I squinted at the screen showing departures and platforms (the world has become noticeably hazier over the last 5-10 years and everything seems to be in smaller and smaller fonts, a fact attested to by everyone of a similar age to me but strangely rebuked by the younger generation) and could not see the train to Cheltenham Spa.  However, on further squinting, I noticed the train to Worcester Shrub Hill (the final destination is always changing over the years as they play with trains going via Cheltenham Spa on to Worcester).  I noted the platform and headed for the train, making it with a few minutes to spare.  Once settled on the train, I requested an upgrade from the ticket inspector who seemed a bit surprised but provided me with one.  After some time reading I looked up to check where we were.  I assumed that we were somewhere between Didcot Parkway and Swindon and looking out at the houses I assumed it must be Swindon, although, as I pondered I began to think that the houses did not look familiar.  A dawning sense of dread came over me as I realised that somehow I had been tricked and I wasn't on the train to Kemble.  I asked the person sitting opposite me where we were to hear that we were just coming into Oxford.  Suddenly my sense of relief at heading home after a tiring week had been replaced with a new adventure.  How on earth was I going to get back home from Oxford?  Fortunately, the guard told me that a train was departing for Didcot Parkway from the opposite platform in 15 mins so I crossed over and began to wait.  At the same time, I began to question why Life might have arranged for me to end up in Oxford.  I was due to meet my friend Mario the next day and it occurred to me that he often works in Oxford so I texted him to ask if by any chance he might be in Oxford and heading home soon (since it was 7pm and Mario works less and less in Oxford, I was dubious that this was likely).  The train to Didcot Parkway was leaving in 5 mins time.  I received a text back from Mario to say that he was indeed in Oxford and was at that very moment just coming out to head home.  On our journey home with another friend of ours we were discussing taking leadership in situations.  Both my friends noticed that they were in positions were they were taking leadership but they were left with a discomfort about the implicit immodesty and power of doing so, who were they to lead?  And yet, the situations they were in demanded leadership and nobody objected to them taking it, indeed they welcomed it.  Our discussion explored what it was in my friends that caused their discomfort and for one of them it was having been bought up in a spiritual tradition where to put oneself forward and to try to lead is seen as egotistical.  I offered the thought that perhaps it is the reverse and not to lead for fear of appearing egotistical is egotistical because one is more concerned with creating the right appearance (of being "good") rather than responding to what the situation demands or others need.  We then went on to discuss what it is in us that causes this and were talking about the pictures we hold and the attachments to being seen in certain ways.  My friend Claudi, suggested that the real issue was resistance - we all agreed with this.
Spiritual disciplines and practices are concerned in many ways with conquering the ego.  Certainly for my friend who had been on retreat with Thich Nhat Hahn, he was engaged in trying to be in the present moment, where, as he points out, there is no worry.  Worry is only generated by thoughts about the past and the future.  Yet, in a review of a book in New Scientist there was reference to someone whose hippocampus had been badly damaged and who had no memories from early childhood onwards and who could not envisage the future.  The individual had lived in a mental institution unable to cope with life, which as the writer concluded, put paid to the notion of "living in the present".  As I reflect on this, it also occurs to me that almost all animate life, lives in the present without an ability to conceive of the future or the past, indeed we often curse our fate as humans and wish we were more like other animals in not having to worry about the future or past.  Yet, do we really want to give up on being human?  I have to admit, that I think there is something special about being human and I do not want to give up this curriculum and become a dog instead.  However, when I look around me, I do not see that life seems to be about happiness, or at least, it seems to be one factor among many.  I remember coaching someone who was going through a difficult stage at work.  She was in a very precarious role, with lots of very powerful figures and in the end was asked to leave.  She had a tricky personality to contend with and various sadnesses including loving children but being unable to have them.  She had explored adoption but for a variety of reasons had been unable to adopt.  She said to me that her focus over the coming year was going to be on being happy.  When I enquired, she admitted that this had been her focus for most of her life yet that she had been far from successful.  The concern I expressed for her was that I wasn't sure that focusing on being happy was a very valuable goal since I wasn't sure that she controlled this.  As I pointed out, what if Life had an agenda next year for her of her husband dying? She was hardly likely to be happy.  My concern for her was that she might be caught, as she had been so far, in setting up an opposition to the way her life actually was to try and control things she could not control.  Her picture was of herself serenely floating through her life untroubled by any difficult emotions.

So if we are not in control of happiness and if we look around life does not seem to be composed of events designed to facilitate our happiness (death, violence, arguments etc., aging) what is it designed for?  As far as I can tell it seems to be designed as a learning experience. Thus I am not sure that trying to control an ephemeral emotion like happiness is likely to be terribly successful.  I think perhaps how we feel is not important per se.  It is only part of the data in the game.  So it does not matter if we are depressed, angry, sad, happy but rather that we are not resisting these emotions or thinking that they should not be there.  Instead, I think perhaps we are learning instead to understand these emotions and not be so identified with them.  Much of time, working with people seems to consist of simply reassuring them that whatever they are feeling is normal and ok.  Particularly when they are having difficult transits - paranoid? - yep Pluto on your Mercury I remember that one, yes paranoia is pretty normal then.  Something about sharing our experiences allows us to step back from identifying with them, we see that everyone else has similar feelings.  We are all in it together, wrestling with these problems and difficulties.  Indeed one of the biggest indicators that it is all ok is that we can laugh together at the absurd experience of life.  I found myself the other day meeting up with a client who asked me how I was.  I thought about it and I told her I was depressed.  She was immediately worried and asking me what was wrong and what she could do to help, I explained why I was depressed; it was cold, my joints were hurting and something else I can't now remember had happened but I told her not to worry it wasn't important it was just how I was feeling and it would probably be gone fairly soon (as it turned out, within a few hours).  I told her that I thought Life was pretty depressing at times so it seemed fairly normal to be depressed about it.  Don Juan says that the only enemy of wisdom is self-importance and indulgence: taking our emotions (and ourselves) too seriously and I think he is right.  The trouble I realised with the pursuit of happiness is that it makes us think that any other emotion we are feeling is somehow wrong and then we have set up an opposition to our life as it is and we are truly stuck.

The pursuit of happiness

In discussions with a friend recently we have been talking about the nature of happiness.  He has recently been on a meditation retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh where the focus was on being happy.  This happiness was focused on the present moment and on being.  I was also pondering this when listening to Ram Dass a few months ago discussing his experiences with his guru Neem Karoli Baba.  I was further prompted to think about this during a discussion with friends on a journey back from Oxford.  I ought to point out that this experience was an interesting one in this context.  I had just finished four very long days in London running programmes and fitting in some informal coaching in the evenings with people who were stuck and wanted help.  The last day finished at just after five o'clock and I calculated that I might just be able to make the 5.47pm train to my home station of Kemble in Gloucestershire.  I got to Paddington station at 5.42, just in time to catch the train to Kemble.  Rushing through the ticket hall of the Underground I squinted at the screen showing departures and platforms (the world has become noticeably hazier over the last 5-10 years and everything seems to be in smaller and smaller fonts, a fact attested to by everyone of a similar age to me but strangely rebuked by the younger generation) and could not see the train to Cheltenham Spa.  However, on further squinting, I noticed the train to Worcester Shrub Hill (the final destination is always changing over the years as they play with trains going via Cheltenham Spa on to Worcester).  I noted the platform and headed for the train, making it with a few minutes to spare.  Once settled on the train, I requested an upgrade from the ticket inspector who seemed a bit surprised but provided me with one.  After some time reading I looked up to check where we were.  I assumed that we were somewhere between Didcot Parkway and Swindon and looking out at the houses I assumed it must be Swindon, although, as I pondered I began to think that the houses did not look familiar.  A dawning sense of dread came over me as I realised that somehow I had been tricked and I wasn't on the train to Kemble.  I asked the person sitting opposite me where we were to hear that we were just coming into Oxford.  Suddenly my sense of relief at heading home after a tiring week had been replaced with a new adventure.  How on earth was I going to get back home from Oxford?  Fortunately, the guard told me that a train was departing for Didcot Parkway from the opposite platform in 15 mins so I crossed over and began to wait.  At the same time, I began to question why Life might have arranged for me to end up in Oxford.  I was due to meet my friend Mario the next day and it occurred to me that he often works in Oxford so I texted him to ask if by any chance he might be in Oxford and heading home soon (since it was 7pm and Mario works less and less in Oxford, I was dubious that this was likely).  The train to Didcot Parkway was leaving in 5 mins time.  I received a text back from Mario to say that he was indeed in Oxford and was at that very moment just coming out to head home.  On our journey home with another friend of ours we were discussing taking leadership in situations.  Both my friends noticed that they were in positions were they were taking leadership but they were left with a discomfort about the implicit immodesty and power of doing so, who were they to lead?  And yet, the situations they were in demanded leadership and nobody objected to them taking it, indeed they welcomed it.  Our discussion explored what it was in my friends that caused their discomfort and for one of them it was having been bought up in a spiritual tradition where to put oneself forward and to try to lead is seen as egotistical.  I offered the thought that perhaps it is the reverse and not to lead for fear of appearing egotistical is egotistical because one is more concerned with creating the right appearance (of being "good") rather than responding to what the situation demands or others need.  We then went on to discuss what it is in us that causes this and were talking about the pictures we hold and the attachments to being seen in certain ways.  My friend Claudi, suggested that the real issue was resistance - we all agreed with this.

Spiritual disciplines and practices are concerned in many ways with conquering the ego.  Certainly for my friend who had been on retreat with Thich Nhat Hahn, he was engaged in trying to be in the present moment, where, as he points out, there is no worry.  Worry is only generated by thoughts about the past and the future.  Yet, in a review of a book in New Scientist there was reference to someone whose hippocampus had been badly damaged and who had no memories from early childhood onwards and who could not envisage the future.  The individual had lived in a mental institution unable to cope with life, which as the writer concluded, put paid to the notion of "living in the present".  As I reflect on this, it also occurs to me that almost all animate life, lives in the present without an ability to conceive of the future or the past, indeed we often curse our fate as humans and wish we were more like other animals in not having to worry about the future or past.  Yet, do we really want to give up on being human?  I have to admit, that I think there is something special about being human and I do not want to give up this curriculum and become a dog instead.  However, when I look around me, I do not see that life seems to be about happiness, or at least, it seems to be one factor among many.  I remember coaching someone who was going through a difficult stage at work.  She was in a very precarious role, with lots of very powerful figures and in the end was asked to leave.  She had a tricky personality to contend with and various sadnesses including loving children but being unable to have them.  She had explored adoption but for a variety of reasons had been unable to adopt.  She said to me that her focus over the coming year was going to be on being happy.  When I enquired, she admitted that this had been her focus for most of her life yet that she had been far from successful.  The concern I expressed for her was that I wasn't sure that focusing on being happy was a very valuable goal since I wasn't sure that she controlled this.  As I pointed out, what if Life had an agenda next year for her of her husband dying? She was hardly likely to be happy.  My concern for her was that she might be caught, as she had been so far, in setting up an opposition to the way her life actually was to try and control things she could not control.  Her picture was of herself serenely floating through her life untroubled by any difficult emotions.

So if we are not in control of happiness and if we look around life does not seem to be composed of events designed to facilitate our happiness (death, violence, arguments etc., aging) what is it designed for?  As far as I can tell it seems to be designed as a learning experience. Thus I am not sure that trying to control an ephemeral emotion like happiness is likely to be terribly successful.  I think perhaps how we feel is not important per se.  It is only part of the data in the game.  So it does not matter if we are depressed, angry, sad, happy but rather that we are not resisting these emotions or thinking that they should not be there.  Instead, I think perhaps we are learning instead to understand these emotions and not be so identified with them.  Much of time, working with people seems to consist of simply reassuring them that whatever they are feeling is normal and ok.  Particularly when they are having difficult transits - paranoid? - yep Pluto on your Mercury I remember that one, yes paranoia is pretty normal then.  Something about sharing our experiences allows us to step back from identifying with them, we see that everyone else has similar feelings.  We are all in it together, wrestling with these problems and difficulties.  Indeed one of the biggest indicators that it is all ok is that we can laugh together at the absurd experience of life.  I found myself the other day meeting up with a client who asked me how I was.  I thought about it and I told her I was depressed.  She was immediately worried and asking me what was wrong and what she could do to help, I explained why I was depressed; it was cold, my joints were hurting and something else I can't now remember had happened but I told her not to worry it wasn't important it was just how I was feeling and it would probably be gone fairly soon (as it turned out, within a few hours).  I told her that I thought Life was pretty depressing at times so it seemed fairly normal to be depressed about it.  Don Juan says that the only enemy of wisdom is self-importance and indulgence: taking our emotions (and ourselves) too seriously and I think he is right.  The trouble I realised with the pursuit of happiness is that it makes us think that any other emotion we are feeling is somehow wrong and then we have set up an opposition to our life as it is and we are truly stuck.

Notes to a friend

Following a request to help a friend of mine whom I having been coaching and who felt well and truly stuck, we met up to discuss his situation and to do the I-Ching.  He asked me to summarise in a email what I had been saying to him about his situation so I thought I would share these:

Don't count on the harvest while ploughing.  That is, do everything for it's own sake because it is the right thing to do, not with an eye to where it will lead.

The people on your agenda are there not to get in your way but for you to learn from and work with.  They will often reflect your own shadow and so working with and aiming to help them (without being attached to the idea that they will change) is worthwhile because you will learn from it and you will transform them in your own mind from obstacles to challenges.

When you are stuck the mind isn't to be trusted in saying that if you provide me with all the data I will provide a solution.  Often it just chatters and analyses us deeper into a black hole.  Distracting it onto worthwhile activities is often a better route (as the I-Ching says - the best way to develop is to make energetic progress in the good).  I notice that my obsessively analytical mind works better thinking about other people and helping them with their black holes and this has the advantage of using up all the energy so there isn't much left to obsess about myself.

The value of the Astrology is that it helps us realise that we cannot escape our fate by changing our external environment.  Our personalities are our fate in that sense, we cannot escape them.  At the same time they are not "soluble" as such.  All we can do is learn to develop our owner (the conscious part of us that is less identified with them).  The astrology also shows us that everything is perfect, our personality and all that we are currently experiencing as part of a transit - there is nothing wrong.  You are coming to terms with your fate and realising that you can't escape it, any more than you can escape yourself.

Accept and expect that you will "lose it" (your current clarity) but just recognising this means that you will not get stuck and attached to keeping your clarity which means that it will come back again.


I have had a lot of people talking to me with difficult Pluto transits recently.  In each of their cases, they are struggling with a battle within themselves, almost as if their own personality is at war within them, engaged in a power battle to the death.  Any attempts to gain peace simply fuel the battle.  How do you cope with this - it can be very distressing and debilitating?  My own experience (and it is only that, others may have better ideas) is to expect to get stuck and to go with it.  That is, if you are awake for 2-3 hours in the night, then instead of fighting, be awake and do something else with your time - write or do some activity.  Most of all, expect to be awake and consider that "normal".  The second thing I find helps is distraction, each person I've worked with has noticed that they are stuck or getting into a negative spiral, only when they have time to, so getting the mind involved in something else prevents it from focusing on trying to "solve the emotion".  My own experience was that I realised that my mind was a liar when it said that if I thought about the problem it could review everything and provide a solution.  Instead, thinking about and analysing it simply heightened the emotion, which made me think there was a bigger problem which my mind really had to solve and so on ad infinitum.  The only way out was to take my mind off the situation until my emotions calmed down again.  Now, I tend to just notice that I am stuck and assume that I have a few days or weeks of a bumpy ride without thinking that I am going to solve it, but rather just, like a plane ride, to let the turbulence come and go again.  Once I have let it pass, I find whatever realisations were important tend to arise naturally of their own accord.  The illusion is that if our mind can just find the magic bullet the emotions will be dispelled in one fell swoop.

Don't mention the war...!

Recently I was running a programme in Frankfurt and over lunch on the second day I was chatting to one of the participants and asked them where they had learned their English since it was particularly good.  She replied that she had been an au pair in her late teens in Ireland.  I asked her about this experience and how she found Ireland.  She said that she had very much enjoyed it.  I commented that the Irish had a reputation for being very friendly and she agreed with this, but added a proviso that sometimes she had encountered people who reacted very strongly against her because she was German.  In one instance, she and her young German friends had been refused entry to a pub and suffered some pretty strong verbal abuse on the grounds of being German.  Following this theme, I asked her if this was common and how people in Germany felt about this.  She replied that young German people were fed up with constantly being blamed and stigmatised for something they had not been involved in or responsible for (the war).  I recognise that many people say we must not forget the holocaust.  Yet, I have always felt uncomfortable with the constant focus on Germany's role in the war and the continuing emphasis on the holocaust.  I do think that recognising our capacity for appalling treatment of each other is valuable to remind us all of how terrible we can be, but I am wary of the implicit assumption that it is not us but others (the Germans) who are capable of this.  It smacks of dividing the world in a very black and white way into us and them.  It seems to me that it was this type of thinking that caused events like the holocaust.  I also feel that looking on the war in such a black and white way fails to really take responsibility for events.  Our story in Britain is that the Germans were evil and we were the brave good guys along with our gallant allies yet I wonder how much the crippling and inhuman reparations that were imposed on Germany by the allied forces following the first world war contributed to the seeds of the second world war?

If we look at the situation in relationship terms, how might any of us feel about a friend who continually brings up past mistakes and parades them in front of us and everyone on a regular basis?  If the past were germain to someone current argument or discussion we might accept it but if it were for no other reason than to parade it in front of us we might wonder about the friendship - particularly if it were the mistakes of our grandparents for which we were being held accountable?  In friendships and relationships, I have found it valuable to cultivate a poor memory for hurts on the basis that the relationship is not then weighed down by the baggage of the past and I am able to keep my heart open.  I wonder if perhaps it is time to forgive and forget?  Certainly it would be very hard to find any people who had not been guilty of past atrocities - most European countries held colonies which treated indigenous people appallingly.  All countries have their past of violent tribal or conflict between ethnic groups and how far back should we go in apportioning blame (the Celts drove the indigenous British to the edges of Britain and were then driven themselves to the fringes of Britain by the Anglo-Saxons, who were conquered and oppressed by the Normans).  Indeed the history of man is riddled with violence.  The danger is that we use past hurts as justifications for current violence and oppression (as in Israel currently).  Perhaps it would be more valuable if we wish to commemorate past events for us to be sad for everyone who has died or suffered and remind ourselves collectively that the capacity to hurt and kill resides in all of us.  I remember being struck a few years ago by a young woman in an Amish community who was raped and killed by a man who then killed himself.  The parents of the young woman invited the parents of the man who had killed her to the funeral of their daughter, for, as they pointed out, they had lost a son as well and were in grieving.  It struck me that if we could evolve to this level of common humanity the world would truly be a compassionate and enlightened place.

A short tale of synchronicity

Whilst in Prague recently I was talking to the managing partner for one of the european regions at one of my main clients.  She was interested in being coached by me and I had agreed to send her a document that we had been discussing on the five drivers from Transactional Analysis (Be Strong, Be Perfect, Try Hard, Hurry Up and Please).  Yesterday evening I sent this through to her.  At the same time, I sent a document on how to consult the I-Ching to another client whom I had been working with the day before.  In general, whilst I use astrology and the I-Ching regularly with my clients I am very careful about how open I am in terms of my approach.  I recognise that such things as Astrology and I-Ching are taboo in society and in business.  Whilst I receive little opposition to them, indeed most people are very receptive, I am careful to wait and see if the conditions are right to be open in using them with my coachees.  Some I use them openly with, others are completely unaware that I use them.  I also like to give the I-Ching space to decide who it wants to work with.  It was with something of a slight gut wrenching shock that I received an email from this managing partner to say that she had opened up the document that I sent but it seemed to be the wrong one.  I was bemused, I could not remember attaching anything in my email late last night, so I assumed it must have been that my logo had come across as an attachment.  When I checked, I realised that on automatic pilot and without the awareness of my conscious mind, I had sent her the guide to using the I Ching as well as sending it to my other client.  I hurriedly sent her the right attachment and hoped that the guide to the I-Ching had made little sense and she had not thought much of it.  I was therefore intrigued to find a second email from her telling me that she had consulted the I-Ching when a teenager about her decision to apply to University and that her sister had been involved with eastern religions for some forty years and it had had a very formative impact on her teenage years.  I realised that everything was being arranged beautifully with the complete lack of awareness of my conscious mind.  Indeed, it was interesting that I had been particularly careful not to disclose my use of the I-Ching with coaching clients in this managing partner's region so that my cover would not be blown.  This experience was particularly apposite for me, as my work seemed to have been hitting a point where a number of things were falling away.  Instead of becoming fearful and panicking, I had been practicing waiting to see where Life was going to direct me next and holding back from fear and the temptation to push.  As usual, it came from a place I was not expecting and where I had been avoiding disclosing my approach.