Communities That Work 2012

In addition to my last post, which focused on interiors, here’s a breath of what supports resilient community exteriors:

“Rebuilding local agriculture and food production, localizing energy production, rethinking healthcare, rediscovering local building materials in the context of zero energy building, rethinking how we manage waste, all build resilience and offer the potential of an extraordinary renaissance – economic, cultural and spiritual.” Rob Hopkins – The Transition Handbook

The Queen of Shadow Work

Today a friend called me “The Queen of Shadow Work”.

I didn’t know what to make of that at first, and then I realized, “I could own that. I am that!”

I can see where it’s true that I dedicate my life and energies to shadow work and skills for developing the self-line:

- I have a bullshit meter a mile long that sees when people are operating out of bullshit
- I have a set of skills I practice daily toward cleaning up my own shadow and developing my own self-line – this is my life practice
- given my childhood I needed a ton of healing, shadow work, skill development and practice – so I’ve got a ton of experience doing it
- I’ve been offering my best proven practices to others in my coaching and in my Coach Certification program for over 19 years.

Would you find more freedom or power by doing shadow work?

Self-Line Self-Test

Here are 8 ways to know if you have shadow work to do:

- Is there something you want to experience but think you can’t, or think you can’t talk about?
- Do you have unresolved conflicts in your life, or relationships in your life where you choose to bite your tongue rather than speak your truth?
- Do you have some unresolved childhood or adult trauma?
- Are you keeping some big, dark secret?
- Do you ever argue with yourself or with others?
- Do you have a pain or frustration that recurs in your life?
- Are there any areas of yourself, others, culture or humanity that you avoid or stay away from?
- Do you ever have moments of emotional trigger, judgment, irritation, resistance, defensiveness, or contraction?

We ALL have more shadow work we could do, or we’d all be enlightened beings already walking on water.

If any of the list fits you, and if you want more freedom, more peace of mind, and more power in the we-space of your world, shadow work and skill development can help you.

Let’s face it, no one teaches this in school, and yoga, mindfulness and meditation practices simply are NOT enough.

Mindfulness and Meditation Aren’t Enough

Have you ever met anyone who could go do yoga, meditate at 7am every morning for an hour, and still not work out relationship issues? Have you ever met someone very skilled at mindfulness who still gets irritated and frustrated and caught up in the same issues over and over again?

For those of us who think our mindfulness and meditation will save us, that’s not enough. At best, these ascendant practices are only 1/2 the work.

At worst, they are just Spiritual Bypasses.

Sitting on a cushion isn’t enough. Sweep life under the carpet, and life will keep coming back until we address it. While we don’t practice effective we-space skills and clean up our we-space residues, we continue to carry them.

Mindfully stepping outside our issues and observing them, alone, will not free us. Observation and objectification of life is a great pattern interrupter, but like it or not, we are spirit IN A BODYMIND, so we also need to also integrate practical, daily habits that cultivate the kinds of experience we want.

The spiritual bypass of thinking “thoughts are things”, alone, will not free us. Our ability to manifest experience what we DO want is only as powerful as our practical habits to generate what we want and be free from habits that cultivate what we DON’T want.

The spiritual bypass of sitting as gurus on mountains or well-cultivated practitioners in our isolated communities is not enough and will not free our planet – we are all interconnected. World circumstances increasingly require us to wake up and pay attention to each other. Wars in other countries become our wars. Illnesses in other countries become our illnesses. Economic issues on Wall Street change what happens on Main Street, affect jobs across the nation, and impact economies around the globe.

What Next?

If we’re not doing spiritual bypass, what do we do?

In my work I offer proven practices for shadow work, for developing the self line, and for freeing ourselves from the conscious and unconscious fears that run our lives and impact our relationships.

For more information, call me at 914.882.9667 or send a blank email to gail at integratedcoaches.com with the subject line, “SUBSCRIBE” to get news about events and freebies I offer.

New Post! Who ARE You?

Update! You’ll find a new post on the InstituteForGrace.com site.

Who ARE you, really?

This 7min vid shows how can you live more powerfully and get more effective results with less effort and more fun.

What new perspectives can catapult humanity to greater thriving?

How can we take practical, conventional wisdom to a new level?

Check it out here:
http://is.gd/mO4w

YouTube Introducing Gail

There’s a new Youtube post with me in it, you can read about it here:

http://tiagail.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/prolific-production-begins/

Happy New Year!
Gail

Freedom from Fear

Fear:
The bodymind bracing against some possible future pain.
The thoughts and emotion we experience when the ego/bodymind is trying to protect us from pain.

Worry / seeking reassurance / seeking understanding:
Forms of fear; the bodymind’s attempt to console fear; bracing against the pain of loss of some universal need (security, companionship, deep connection, etc)

Freedom from fear comes
not from reassurance, not from understanding, and not from solution. Freedom from fear doesn’t come from ascending into peak states of meditation.

These things only hide the fear.

Remove the reassurance, understanding, the solution, or the peak state and the fear returns.

Freedom from fear only comes when we confront it or embrace it. when we open to the thing we’re bracing against, when we embrace it, fear evaporates.

Confronting fear / opening to it means to
lean into the emotion of the fear – feel it – and then
a.) connect with the universal need/yearning at the root of it and
b.) release the “ick” of it (grieve the pain of the yearning) until
c.) realization of Infinite Self emerges and the fear naturally evaporates.

Embracing fear means to do this cycle:
a.) invite the thoughts of the ‘worst case scenario’
b.) ask, “ok, so? and then what?”
c.) repeat until realization of Infinite Freedom emerges and the fear naturally evaporates.

Confront fear or embrace it, and what you’re left with is the Face of Spirit – conscious connection to the universal need, free of the emotional charge.

From this place your state is resourceful, grounded, able to take effective action, and able to make powerful requests for Emergence.

Anything else is consoling fear, capitulating to fear, and acting out of being hijacked by fear. All of these are forms of personal slavery to fear.

For many of us the ultimate fear is fear of death, ultimate loss.

While we brace against loss or pain, we are slaves to our fear.

Confront fear. Release the bodymind tension.

Do It!

1. Name one fear you have.
2. Choose explicitly – do you wish to be a slave to your fear, or free of it?
3. Choose which method you’re going to use to free yourself from your fear: to confront it, or to embrace it.
4. Use the appropriate practice above. Get help; it’s hard to both go deep in doing the work AND also holding the process container. Get someone else to hold the process.

For more information, or to receive support to evaporate fear, call Toll-Free 1.877.535.5438 .

For more practical strategies on conscious living, and to receive a free Ebook, click here.

8 Ways to Resolve Conflicts Peacefully

This is taken from a magazine clipping – unfortunately I don’t know the magazine or the author of this clip! Please tell me if you know the source!

Hopefully you’ll find it inspiring anyway!

For more info, check out this page.

Enjoy!
Gail

• Remember that all human beings have the same needs, such as acceptance, support and independence.
• Check your intentions to see if you are as interested in getting their needs met as you are your own.
• Notice if you are making a request or a demand.
• Instead o saying what you DON”T want someone to do, say what you DO want.
• Instead of saying what you want someone to BE, say what action you’d like the person to take.
• Before agreeing or disagreeing, tune in to what the other person is feeling and needing.
• Instead of saying no, say what need prevents you from saying yes.
• When upset, think about which of your needs are not being met, and how to meet them, rather than focus on what’s wrong with other people.

Reduce Stress – Dissolve Fear (FREEbies)

This conversation happened on my Facebook page –

Hopefully you can use these freebies for yourself!
Enjoy!
Gail

FACEBOOK STATUS: Gail feels relieved and liberated, having successfully peeled away yet another layer of fear.

– 2 Comments

Albert Brady at 10:43pm December 3

So, how did you “peel” it off Gail? What was your method? I went though an intense layer lifting off me today as well.
I’m happy to see you are liberated my friend.

Gail Taylor at 6:14pm December 4

Method – The Integrated Approach (my method, of course) 1. Hear the language of the fear 2.) translate to the core need/yearning 3.) do releasework / grieve 4.) check back to the original stimulus and see if it’s resolved. If not, sthing wasn’t done on track during steps 1-4. For more info, here’s a page with freebies: http://www.theintegratedapproach.com/freecontent/healingwork.html

Powerfully Processing Pain

I invited a friend over to my place yesterday.

The homebody-recluse that I am, I rarely invite people over, although I yearn to host guests more often. Instead I get worried about the consequences of people judging my space, and I close down. This time though, instead of refusing the visit, I chose to suspend my discomfort and do my “work”.

This morning I processed it. I asked myself what was stimulating my nervousness about him seeing my place. The answer that surfaced was, “I want him to like it.” I asked myself, “if I got that, what would it get me?” The response I heard was, “if he likes the place, it’ll mean he will still like me.” I again asked myself, “if I got that, what would it get me?” What emerged was, “if he likes me I might have a possible life partner.” Again I asked, “if I get that, what would it get me?” What emerged is, “possibility for home….stability, security, peace…joy.”

As I connected to this core, underlying yearning, this root desire for stability, security, peace and joy, I noticed muscles in my body relaxing. As I exhaled more of the tension, and rooted myself to the fundamental beauty of stability, security, peace and joy, I felt softer and softer. More and more, I shifted to a state of clarity, equanimity, and ease, absolutely free of tension.

My experience this morning got me thinking about the process I live for “Powerfully Processing Pain” – and the freedom and benefit it’s brought me.

And then I got excited about sharing it with you.

• Would you like fewer arguments and more power with others?
• Would you like to finally live a life with full choice and freedom?
• Would you like better, more sustained and more fulfilling relationships?

When we cultivate habits of Powerful Pain Processing, we cultivate the capacity to thrive and to find the freedom and fulfillment beyond our wildest dreams.

Our culture doesn’t teach this core skill, the skill of how to powerfully deal with pain.

No matter what, pain happens. How do we live with it in a way that is most likely to open us and the world around us into greater ease and fulfillment?

For the sake of simplifying the conversation, let’s say that as human beings, there are generally four ways that we tend to respond to pain:

- We can close down around our pain, trying to protect ourselves from it. Ex: I don’t want to be hurt so I will write off the opposite sex. Ex: I don’t want to risk hurting myself to I will never ski again. Ex: I don’t want to stir him/her up, and if I talk about that it’ll blow up, so I won’t talk about that with him/her.

Especially right after a painful experience, this ‘withdrawal’ tactic can give us a short-term shielding to give us time to heal. Long-term, however, this tactice closes down our life energy and limits possibility, reducing our choice in the world. Less choice = less freedom.

- We can recycle our pain - resort to blame, wrong-making, labelling, “shoulds” and “have to”s to close others down to prevent our pain. Ex: I’m a jealous spouse, when I see my partner talking to people of the opposite sex. I won’t do my work about my pain, instead I’ll tell my spouse that they “shouldn’t” act that way and that they “have to” stop. I’ll tell them what they are doing is “wrong” and “bad” for our partnership. Ultimately though, all of my attempts are so that I don’t have to hurt or feel pain. What I may or may not realize, though, is that I’m demanding my my partner close down his or her life energy to suit me. Ex: I broke my leg skiing because of those “bad” snowboarders who “shouldn’t” be in the way. It’s “wrong” to allow snowboarders in normal ski trails. The owners “should” pass rules to ban snowboarders so that people don’t get hurt. What I may or may not realize though, is that I’m attempting to limit someone’s choice and joy in order to accommodate me. Ex: He/she gets stirred up every time I talk about this – what an idiot! Anybody with a little sense would be different. What I may ro may not realize though, is that I’m choosing to close my heart to the humanity of the other being, dropping compassion in favor of me feeling better.

- We can choose not to address it, and let it grow into greater pain. Don’t want to attend to it now? No worries, it’ll get bigger. Don’t want to attend to it later? No worries, it’ll keep getting bigger until it can’t be ignored anymore. Ex: I bite my tongue when my spouse flirts until one day I blow up, or decide I’m fed up and divorce. Ex: I spend years not skiing out of fear of hurting myself. I also do this with other areas of my life, relationships, work, my dreams. Over the years, all of the ways I’ve chosen closure instead of freedom catches up to me. I feel disgusted with myself and how limited my life is. I have lots of stories about why I can’t do the things I most yearn to do with my life. I wind up diagnosed with depression.

- We can work with pain to find a way to metabolize it so that freedom and equanimity emerges rather than closure or more pain. Ex: I want to talk about this, but I’m afraid my partner will get all stirred up about it. Why does this scare me? Because I want peace between us. What would that get me? Hope that our relationship will stay in tact. What would that get me? Security in my home. What would that get me? Peace of mind and joy. Now that I realize my core desire is for peace of mind and joy, I can exhale the tension and fear I was feeling, and root myself in the beauty of my deepest yearning. Connected to this root yearning (this desire for peace of mind and joy), I can 1.) Find 10K strategies to bring me peace of mind and joy without fear of expressing myself. 2.) I can release the frustration around the thing that orginally irritated me, so that I find peace despite it, rather than only finding peace by changing it / solving it. 3.) I can connect to the deepest truth of who I Am, realizing my conscious connection to Infinite Source. Here I discover I have no discomfort to begin with about this. From my connection to Source I find freedom and equanimity.

From this equanimity we can act, or not act. From this released state of peace we can express our concern and our desires, or not. We can find other strategies for our desires, or not.

In any case, we are at choice.

The freedom of choice is far more powerful than the limitations of fear and closure.

Basic Prerequisites

Working with pain powerfully requires a few foundational skills:

a.) the ability to translate our experience to the underlying yearning and needs that are often unconscious within us

b.) the ability to recognize shift in our physical body and shift in our emotional body, so that we can easily see when our work is powerful or not powerful

c.) the ability to recognize when we’re doing closure, contraction, fear, insecurity, or worry – and a desire to work with those moments (either instantly or after-the-fact) as opportunities to increase our freedom and peace of mind.

Huge Benefits

Living with this as a life practice eliminates huge amounts of stress from my life, and brings me huge results in terms of finding peace of mind where it didn’t exist before.

And people say I look younger, too.

Want some?

If you’d like to cultivate greater skill in Powerfully Processing Pain, you can email me at gail at integratedcoaches dot com, or call me for a free consultation. 914.882.9667.

For the record, he said my place is nice. Not that it matters – ironically I no longer feel concerned about his opinion about my space. Isn’t it funny how, in the Infinite Greatness that we most deeply Are, personality / ego still emerges?

Me, I love practicing mastery both in cultivating my connection to Source and cultivating mastery in attending to the personality phenomena that arises.

Join me there?

The Doctrine of Awakening

We can’t keep doing things the way we’re doing them.

While our systems are based in fear, our systems are full of solutions based in hidden agendas, desires for control and the desire to benefit even if the reward comes at the cost of the system at large.

While our systems are based in fear and the symptoms of fear, we’ll keep manifesting the same failures over and over.

While our solutions are not held accountable to the systemic costs, we’ll keep emerging systems that ultimately will create more problems than the fixes the solution was meant to provide.

While we continue to ignore the consequence of creating solution out of fear, and while we continue not to account for the impacts of our solutions on flows across the system, as a species we are destined to fail.

We’re immersed in scads of examples.

In the housing system, banks took advantage of the system in order to profit.  Digital resources were created where actual resources didn’t exist, benefitting the people at the top while the people at the bottom ultimately lose:  if someone can’t afford a mortgage and go into foreclosure, they lose their house, they lose their credit rating, they lose the emotional costs, the employers lose the attention of the worried employees, everyone loses.

Look at the economic system – wall street investors and brokers took advantage of the system.  Like the housing owners and the dot-commers, value was attributed that was far greater than the actual value of the resources within the system, out of a profit agenda.  When the bubbles burst, dot-coms failed, the housing market failed, and now the numbers on wall street are plummeting.

Look at the American political system.  Voters deal with the political dance of negative campaigning and empty sound-bites.  Instead of system transparency and leaders who act congruently and consistently, we get tap dancing leaders who say one thing but do “Who Knows What” because ultimately they’re interested in control and their own agendas.

Look at global warming.  We create solutions based out of profit motives and inattention to the systemic whole and the system starts to fail.

Look at the peak oil crisis.  We’re running out of places to drill, we’re running out of oil stores.  We tapped a finite resource with a profit motive without attention to the greater system and now the greater system is depleted beyond our capacity to restore it.

Look at the disappearing rain forests.  We’re draining the very heart that makes oxygen abundant on our planet, out of profit motives hungry for land and trees.  While we tap the resource with a profit motive without attention the impact on the greater system the greater system suffers, and then we all pay the price.

Look at the emerging water crisis.  Even in the abundance of America, major populations like southern California and the south western states of Nevada, Arizona and Colorado teeter on the precarious edge of a water crisis.  Smaller populations, such as American Indian populations within those areas live daily without running water and sufficient water for sanitation, cooking, or survival.  Our water tables are low and without restoration, increasing numbers of wells are running dry, fresh water is increasingly scarce on the planet, and yet Americans per capita consume (and wastes) two to SIX times the water of other countries.

We’re asleep to the pending doom of this vital resource, and we don’t even know we’re sleeping.

Look at corporate America.  While the Enrons profit the stockholders at the expense of employees, the Enrons are destined to collapse.  While companies lay off thousands to sustain shareholder profit, public trust falters; lack of employment means public resources run dry for investing, resources for purchasing houses run dry, the housing market fails on faulty loans, banks crash and the stock market plummets.  Economies worldwide falter.

When will we learn?

When will we choose another way?

Only by revealing our pandemic of fear, and only by improving our system accountability, will we have hope for survival as a species.

The Silent Pandemic of Fear

Our systems, everyone, operate out of a foundation of fear.  We are a population living with extreme functional capacity, living psychotically on top of a profound undercurrent of fear.  Fear for survival, fear for order, fear for providing for our families, our communities and our countries – these are just a few of the foundational fears we unconsciously live on while choosing our actions.

Look at our survival fear and fears that seek greater profit.  From this fear we have created a system of human animals running out the time of life on hamster wheels, exhausting lifetimes of energy for scraps of hope that we’ll have enough to pay rent and feed our families.  We smother the fear that something will happen to our health, because we don’t have enough to account for that.  we are enslaved to our jobs and our overwork because we fear if we don’t do it, we won’t be able to provide for our needs or the needs of those around us.

This is just one example of how fear-based solutions ultimately and consistently fail.

With fear at our core, we seek profit and control.  As human animals living on top of fear, we seek to manipulate circumstances to our advantage.  From this root of fear we emerge profit motives, personal agendas, desires for personal gain, desires for control, and solutions that deplete the system at large.

No systems that are emerged out of this foundation of fear will work.  It will always come crashing down.

The Solution

What we have to learn, what we have to practice, what we have to develop as a habit, are both spiritual and practical solutions.

Out of our desires for personal gain, we neglect to practice articulate measures of (and accountability to) how our systems are affected by the solutions we create.  We don’t practice proper accounting for the costs of our solutions.

We need:

- solutions emerging only from spiritual equanimity and freedom
- proper accounting for how solutions impact flow systems

We can no longer afford our ignorance of the long-term impacts and system costs.  We can no longer afford the costs of solutions that attend to a narrow margin of profit motives while neglecting the system at large and the impacts to those systems.

While our systems, everyone, operate out of a foundation of fear, our solutions for survival and social order will ultimately and always fail.

Better Solutions – A Two Part Plan

Spiritually we need to shed light on this mostly-unconscious, mostly buried pandemic of fear.  Solutions that emerge out of fear need to be replaced with habits of healing and solutions emerged out of the equanimity and presence of greater knowing.

We need to replace our disconnection from our fear and our disconnection from that which is greater than ourselves with awakening to habits of profound self-connection and habits of continual connection to Source wisdom.

We need to awaken to habits of attending to fear by pairing fear with griefwork and healing, and allowing our knowing of greater truth to emerge – the greater truth that there fundamentally is no such thing as unsafety.  Only from this knowing can we create practical systemic solutions that are less likely to unravel under the weight of abuse rooted in a desire for control, personal gain, or fulfilling hidden agendas.

Practically we need to generate structures to provide tangible minimums that account for the system at large.  Systems for order and survival, including currency systems, need to be conscious of and account for:

- life alienated or life serving – to what degree is this solution directly in service to universal needs across the system, to what degree does this solution interrupt flows and deplete universal needs across the system

- direct service strategy chains vs/ indirect strategy chains = the larger the number of steps in a system, the more likely the system will contort under the weight of human mistakes.  With shorter, more direct strategy chains for serving needs, the more likely the solutions will produce positive outcomes in the long-term and for the system at large.

- flow systems – money (currency) is meant to support flow of products and services across miles, countries, languages, etc.  However there are other flows that are affected by the solutions we create.  If a nuclear power plant dumps waste into water, not only are flows of electricity and energy impacted by the company, but so are the water flows.  What are the various flows we live among, how do we measure them, and how can we hold individuals, organizations, companies, and countries accountable to system-wide flows?

- accounting for upward spirals outside of the main system – solutions can exponentially benefit greater and greater numbers of people and flows, or solutions can benefit one flow while exponentially costing other people and flows.  What kinds of solutions create upward spirals of exponential and increasingly wide benefit?  What kinds of solutions create downward spirals of cost and depletion across flows while benefitting only a small number?

If you want to:

• talk more about this doctrine
• discuss the four items above
• learn more about alternative currency systems
• learn how to integrate new habits that replace fear with equanimity and transpersonal awareness
• see practical ways to emerge solidly-based solutions rather than solutions based in fear

…email me or call me.  Gail at integrated coaches dot com  – my phone number is on the TIA – The Integrated Approach and the Integrated Coaches websites.

With love and light,
Gail Taylor

How To Permanently Free Yourself of Fear

Do you realize that your fear…your contraction…your closure…are all simply by-products of your ungrieved pain?

Find the path to full and complete grief, and you find the path to liberation from fear – permanently.

Ex:
A brother is killed by terrorists. One sibling fears terrorists. If this sibling grieves fully, this sibling finds infinite liberation from the illusion of victimhood, thus freedom from fear. Another sibling acts out of blind vengence couched as “justice”. If fully grieved, this sibling finds action based in powerful equanimity and clarity.

Ex:
A woman decides she hates men. Ask her her story, and you find she experienced painful breakups or painful yearning for what she has not yet found. In the former, her hatred is based in the ungrieved pain about what happened, and fear that the situation will happen again. In the latter, her hatred is based in core heartbreak she has not grieved. If fully grieved, this woman’s hatred will transform to peace, radiance, and effortless magnetism.

To learn a 3-Breath process for completing the grief process fully, email gail at integratedcoaches dot com, or ask for it in a comment, below!