Welcome to a brand new year!! You and the universe have only been this age once. So, I always pick out a word for the new year and my word for this year is Magic. I’m interested in setting up conditions that enable magical possibilites to unfold. I want to be surprised and delighted by my life, I demand nothing less!!

During the holidays, I’ve met with a handful of adult clients zooming in from their original family homes. It’s seldom an easy trip down memory lane. For many, it’s a reminder of the harsh constraints they faced in early years. To a lot of us as children, becoming a "grown-up” looked to be a dismal affair. Many adults just didn’t seem to be having a lot of fun out there.

Last week we talked about facing avoidances. The most important thing to face is your own fear. Once you are comfortable with your own fear, you are able to face anything. Where there is avoidance, there is fear, and where there is fear, there is numbness, or parts of your body that you don’t feel due to the fear. This is because, fear ejects you from the body into thinking, action, or dissociation.

“The master never reaches for the great, thus she achieves greatness. When she runs into a difficulty, she stops and gives herself to it. She doesn’t cling to her own comfort; thus problems are no problem for her.” - Lao Tse, Chapter 63, Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell translation) Never was so much said by so few words!

One of my favorite signs of embodiment and self-connection, or “dropping in” is when the spine and limbs elongate slightly. It is a subtle shift and often the person remains unaware. A person who is seated and telling a juicy story may effortlessly straighten to become an inch taller. When this takes place, the body is signaling to itself and others that it is opening for business.

Have you ever felt inadequate for not having studied a certain teacher or approach? Often we are made to feel that the magic is out there, in a guru, a book, a degree, or an expensive program. That’s why I love the work of Alan Watts so much. I regard him as a self-styled self-stylist; An anti-guru who never had an organization you could join.

I’ve noticed that most of the people who end up on a therapy couch appear to overweight the experience of others. This theme keeps popping up in my sessions. How much do we balance the interests of others (belonging) with the interests of self (authenticity)? Whether nature or nurture, we all seem to have ended up at different weightings.

At some point in life, we’re likely to find ourselves in tactical hell, a place where our potential feels completely collapsed and nothing seems possible. It might feel like we’re cheese-grating our soul in a gray wasteland.

I hear a lot of despair these days. It can feel like the compound karma of our past actions is going to drive us off a collective cliff. It’s clear that you can’t find safety in the social world, particularly not as seen through the lens of media and social media. So where do you find safety?

In sessions, I’m often invited into a dark and dingy mental space where everything appears stuck and hopeless. “There’s just no way out of this”, I’m told as if THE truth has just been delivered. “I’ll never be done with my trauma!” “My relationship will never give me what I need and I will never leave it either!” “I’ll never get the energy to get out of the hole I’m in!” “My chronic pain will never yield to my inner work!” “My career is doomed! I’m painted into a corner!” “I’ll never love myself or believe that I deserve love!” “My brain has been hardwired.” “I’m fated to be unhappy!” All things I’ve heard. So what do we do here?

If you want to improve the quality of your relationships, learn to listen better. Nothing will have a greater effect. Listening is mindfulness in action. It is the most applied and useful form of meditation that exists. When you listen deeply to someone speaking, you begin to hear the musicality and rhythms. You start to pick up the deeper meanings that lie below the literal words.

We tend to think of ourselves as fairly rational and consistent over time but most of us are FAR from it. When we feel tired, stressed, ill, or threatened, not only do we lose our sense of self, or system-wide perspective, but our more sophisticated protectors go offline. We lose things like repression, humor, people pleasing, intellectualization, and sublimation (turning threatening impulses into art forms). Instead, we regress, or fall back, to a younger age exposing both our emotional core and the burdens it still carries, as well as our early protectors like defiance, denial, splitting (black and white thinking) and self-interest.

Once upon a time two frogs fell into a large pail of buttermilk. Frantically thrashing about in fear of dying, the frogs climbed on each other, splashed furiously, and did whatever they could to stay afloat. As they grew tired and weary and their fear of drowning grew, they thrashed about more desperately.

A tricky question often comes up when I work with clients. Is this about you needing to change or the situation needing to change? Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot to be said for being like water, flowing around obstacles, adapting the self, and becoming ever more ingenious. Highly sensitive people and empaths are usually experts at this. And they are usualy rookies at setting boundaries and taking up space.

When you connect to your self deeply, you gain access to your robust biological reality, you become a force of nature. People who are in their heads and disconnected from themselves are flimsy. They crumple easily. They have no window of tolerance. They react and regret it later. People who have their full nervous system switched on, have an emotional and spiritual core that allows them to absorb blows and come back to a regulated state. They can stay in the game. They are less reactive and have more options.

I asked ChatGPT to create a hilarious joke about therapists and this is what it came up with: Why don't therapists ever play hide and seek?Because good luck hiding when they can see right through you, even when you're in the closet!

Not bad ChatGpt.

It got me thinking about several clients that have asked me to (in client’s words), call them out on their bullshit.

Yes, that’s right. Special! From the latin specialis, or belonging to a particular species or kind. You are one-of-a-kind! The cutting edge of nature unfolding. The universe expressing itself to the best of its ability right now. You are literally made of stardust. Despite these facts, our guardians like to minimize how special we are. In keeping us safe, they dim our starlight. They trim us down to size. They tell us we are “too much,” that we have no right to “bigness”.

More than any other technology, the internet is an externalization of the collective imagination. It is a pulsating, electronic coral reef where our collective imagination is becoming more visible and more crystalized each day. It is the human production that most resembles nature.

You can think of imagination as another dimension of reality that we draw upon to shift our material reality. It gives us magical powers. It pulls in information from the wider system that is not available in regular egoic consciousness. You can never predict what we will imagine next. It jumps the box. It always defies expectations.

Today we get to a juicy part of the model, the Creative Genius. First off, there is a damaging myth in our society that some people are born with genius and don’t need to try very hard. Well, the book Talent is Overrated unravels this myth of innate genius and provides abundant data that raw talent is, well, overrated.