Mark Nepo's Blog, page 29

National Trauma and Addictive Disorders Conference, with MARK NEPO

Mark will be keynoting and presenting a workshop at this year's National Trauma and Addictive Disorders Conference in Delray, Florida.

What is the Conference on Trauma and Addictive Disorders?

A premier training event, specializing in trauma, mental health and the addictions fields. U.S. Journal Training, Inc. and The Institute for Integral Development present a combination of nationally recognized faculty who can address a wide variety of today's most relevant topics. The result is a highly acclaimed national training event featuring customized training opportunities for developing new treatment strategies and the sharing of research advances for clinicians and counselors.

Register before September 28th to save!

REGISTER BY PHONE:

Toll-free 800-441-5569 or 954-360-0909.

Have your MC/Visa/American Express number ready.

REGISTER BY MAIL:

U.S. Journal Training/Delray Beach

3201 SW 15th Street

Deerfield Beach, FL 33442-8190.

Please make checks payable to: U.S. Journal Training, Inc.

Half the Sky

This weekend I watched a short video of Sheryl WuDunn, who coauthored Half the Sky with Nicholas Kristof, speaking to an audience in England.

WuDunn's bold pronouncement is that the best way to defeat poverty and extremism is to educate and empower women and girls. I believe she's right to say that the prime issue of this twenty-first century is gender inequity.

When you have a moment, take a look at this clip and see if you agree. This seems to be a call to action that women and men can truly answer, collaborating with one another to end atrocious behaviors that our evolving collective conscience cannot condone.

Women are the well and fountain keepers, the community teachers. Women all over the world are leading the consciousness revolution, and evolved men are willingly and enthusiastically partnering with them to bring about compassionate change.

So, I look in the mirror and ask: How can I help? My answers will greatly define the man I become, the human I must be.

Becoming a Life Artist, in-person class with MICHELE McHALL

This is a super charged package for empowering you to become a Life Artist, or intentional creator! In a one-day class, Michele will teach you the nine contexts of Life Artistry and then follow-up with you after the class by giving you a private thirty minute Whole IQ Reading. The nine contexts are access points to strengthening your Whole IQ, or your Spirit, Heart, Mind, and Body intelligences and liberating your creative consciousness from the Con Artist (negative ego/saboteur). You will also learn how to use these nine contexts to generate more embodied trust and faith in your life through a key principle that Michele teaches called the "creative lifecycle." Most of us are attempting to create our lives with a limited access to the range of resources available inside of us and are obstructing the creative flow. This can feel like you're trying to connect to the Internet from your old typewriter. Between this class and the Whole IQ reading, your Life Artist will be ready to connect to your creativity rather than spending so much time struggling with your Con Artist and reactivity.

Contact Michele@wholeiq.com to register.

Not Getting What We Want

We are taught early on that to have an ambition and to work toward it is industrious and admirable; that this is how we contribute to the world and move ahead. In and of itself, this is true. To build toward something is a healthy way to channel our need to be creative and to stay connected. But along the way, we often incubate a self-centeredness that breeds like bacteria in the dark corners of our psyches and something else happens. We begin to associate getting what we want with success and not getting what we want with failure. We begin to see ourselves as little gods who create everything out of nothing. We begin to have an expectation that we can will things to happen, that we have some right to control events. We are deemed skillful if we can steer people without their knowledge. Soon we wake with a sense of entitlement: that we have a right to have things go our way; a right to get what we want; a right to steer people and events toward our will.

Of course, life has other things to say about all this. Some of us may be able through skill and hard work to get what we want for a while. Some of us may even be lucky and get what we want a little while longer. But sooner or later, everyone will face not getting what they want. How we respond to this unavoidable moment determines how much peace or agitation we will have in our life. In truth, this is the moment that opens all others. For it is our acceptance of things as they are and not as we would have them that allows us to find our place in the stream of life. Free of our entitlements, we can discover that we are small fish in the stream and go about our business of finding the current.

This deeper chance to shed our willfulness doesn't preclude our sadness and disappointment that things aren't going the way we had imagined. But when we stay angry and resentful at how life unfolds beyond our will, we refuse the gifts of being a humble part in the inscrutable whole. When we stay angry and resentful that—and you can fill in the blank—the stock market didn't reward our conscientious investing or the hurricane destroyed the truck we were going to inherit or the promotion we earned was given to someone else or the person we love so deeply doesn't care in the same way, we risk getting stuck.

It doesn't matter what you do or who you are—whether you are a world statesman or an auto mechanic or a web designer or a struggling artist—the wonder and resilience of being aligned with the miracle of life waits on the other side of this inevitable disappointment of ego. It is not that we need to be broken to know joy, but that we need to be broken of our willfulness which like a screen keeps the light and wind from filling our face.

When we can stop blaming others or nature or God for not getting what we want and be honest about what this inevitable rearrangement does to us, then humility and compassion are possible. The question waiting beneath all our entitlements and disappointments is: What do we truly need other than to wake and how can we share this treasure? This is not unique to us or our times. It is an archetypal passage. Strangely, harshly, beautifully, life begins when the story we've made up to bridge the unknown falters.

Eventually, we are asked to undo the story we've been told about life—or the story we have told ourselves—so we might drop freshly into life. For under all our attempts to script our lives, life itself cannot be scripted. It's like trying to net the sea. Life will only use our nets up: tangle them, sink them, unravel them, wear them down, embed them in its bottom. Like the sea, the only way to know life is to enter it. How then do we listen below our willfulness?

Regarding Peace

It was pressing like a weight on

my mind and I sought his advice.

He appeared as he does in dream.

I said, "It has all concentrated in

a mass of worry I can't extinguish."

He seemed impatient with me

and chided, "Drown it out—"

I was offended, felt discounted.

He placed his knowing like a

hand over my mouth, "No.

Drown it—out—" and gestured

to the space around me.

I didn't get it.

Suddenly, a basin appeared

with a broken log in the bottom

and a waterfall began to fill it.

He came close and whispered,

"Flood your mind with the pace

of creation and the worry will rise

like this log and float away."

I watched the basin overflow

as the log began to float.

Then he spoke like a bell

in the center of my worry,

"Surround what presses in

with indiscriminant being

and you will drown all

worry out."

Facing the Con Artist: How to Transform Your Reactivity into Creativity, with MICHELE McHALL

This teleclass is on Mondays July 18th and 25th and August 1st and 8th from 5:00-6:15 PST.

This four-week teleclass is for new students of the Soul's Dream or seasoned students who need a tune-up around their Con Artist. The Con Artist is the negative voice inside our heads that generates reactivity and limitation. Reactivity drains our energy, wastes precious time, and encourages the repetition of the same old negative story about ourselves and our lives. Whether your area of reactivity is judgment, overwhelm, procrastination, avoidance, not good enough, perfectionism, or another pattern of trying to control your reality, you are masking your true self. Class size is limited so in this four weeks you'll receive personal support from Michele in creating a new story that helps you move past the Con Artist and expand into the experience and expression of your true self.

COST: $150.00

*Manual for class is $35.00

Register for the class and purchase the manual at www.wholeiq.com.

Michele McHall video

In this clip, Michele talks about the connection between awakening the Whole IQ: Spirit, Heart, Mind, and Body intelligences and the relationship to the four quadrants in our brain. As we develop our awareness and capacity to understand and live from the whole brain, we generate more connections, possibilities and intimacy because we are less likely to be entrenched by strength our dominant intelligence or submerged in the reactivity of our more vulnerable ones.

So You Feel

You are at the bottom of a deep well.

You're tired of breathing dank air,

Fed up with the close, damp walls and the dark

And so out of patience with yourself.

But with the little surge that's left

In your flashlight look down at your bare feet.

Honestly, are there two

More exquisite feet in the wide world?

Close your eyes. Imagine your honey-colored hair

Diving into space like a waterfall in sunlight.

Your long fingers are grace notes. Your arms

And legs embrace and make way through the forest.

Your navel is earth's core, the sky's yearning.

Your throat is the gift of a sacred swan.

And your eyes? They are always casting spells.

Even now, gazing to heaven, an oaken bucket

Appears to gather you up and hold you close

And return you to the bright good day.

Thrown Back

Twenty years ago today, the tumor growing in my skull vanished and I was thrown back in the streets like Lazarus. Today the rain is a fine mist and I open my face for a long time, till I remember again that it is skin receiving water from the sky. After twenty times around the sun, all I can say is perhaps falling in love with the world is the bravest thing we can do. I only know that my heart grows stronger every year, a muscle gaining each time I love. This beautiful rush of life is all we have and still we struggle to get out of it. Like fish we labor to make it to the sand as if that shore were Heaven. And if thrown back, we can grow bitter when we think we've failed but humble when we can accept that waking tomorrow in all of this is being saved.

More of the Same

The tomorrow I'd so looked forward to was like that—more of the same. No door opened, revealing a golden path of light. The person I hoped to hear from remained silent. The mail I've been anticipating for weeks failed yet again to arrive. A contract fell through. The advice I eagerly sought wasn't forthcoming. Support systems seemed fragile, barely existing at all.

Meanwhile, the sun ramped up its activity, more boldly announcing its lion-like, summer self. Come August, just a few short weeks away, the temperature will approach or surpass 100 most days. This past week, we've all felt it coming, and yesterday I noticed the first signs that the green hills will soon be yellow.

The world's windows are always opening despite our assumptions, desires, and disappointments. The magic we're a part of but only tune in to sometimes happens all around us and in us. Even when we don't think so, it's saving us, restoring and encouraging us onward.

This summer I'm often going to be contemplating the slippery balance between closed doors and windows opening. Yes, doors and windows can form the basis of an excellent equanimity practice, reminding us that we are always going. No matter what condition we are in, we are always going.

To where? For what reason? Be open to any and all answers.

May your balance be as supple and as sure as you need it to be.