There is a lot of talk and criticism about the idea of real change, or global change, starting with YOU. Navel-gazers you say go nowhere, do nothing spend their time rapt up in themselves, never accomplishing a great deal. This is one safe way of looking at it, judging it and actually avoiding facing up to what and who you are.

We live in our own stories it’s a fact. You create the world you are living in with the ideas you carry around in your brain – you project these stories onto the people, the places and the interactions around you. When we speak about developing and connecting too, a better understanding of yourself it’s to support you to think about this story you’ve created and whether it’s the one you want to be living in. We create stories as individuals and we create stories as organisations and societies – are the ones you are creating life affirming?

Your thoughts do become actions and together OUR thoughts, guiding OUR actions have become OUR society and OUR world. So WE together, not apart, and not those people over there, have created this world we see and experience right now, right at this moment. Whether that world is your home, your working environment, the natural environment, your non-profit, or your country – whether you like it or not.

If you, your company, your non profit, your government want to make connections, want to make a change from fragmentation and disconnection into a wholistic, connected, profit making, people supporting, socially and environmentally sustainable entity then do it. If you don’t know how, find the people who can support you. Some of us can assist you ourselves or help you to find the right people.

As to the navel, I believe most of have one – it supported the manifestation of you, kept you alive in the womb and serves as a reminder that without that connection you wouldn’t even be here. It’s worth a little gazing now and then.

Definition of NAVEL

1 : a depression in the middle of the abdomen that marks the point of former attachment of the umbilical cord or yolk stalk

2 : the central point : middle

Up against a wall

Something there is that does not love a wall

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. Robert Frost

We build walls, make, break, and remake. We build walls insides of ourselves, outside of ourselves. I sometimes wonder if technology is a wall between the soft skin of meeting each other on the train, on the sidewalk, sitting waiting for a plane.

Relationship with our phones, our computers, twittering, mailing, blogging away to others far from the immediacy of where we are in any given moment. The walls we build against the fragility of human interaction as if deeply aware that we can be cut, bruised, scrapped from the openness of interaction, dialogue and conversation skin to skin.

There is something in us, as Robert Frost wrote, that does not love a wall and the weight of our walls crumbles under a smile, a wink, a brushing against laughter.

Someone told me a story of taking her daughter to work one day. She stayed with her at the office the whole day. At the end of the day she said ‘Mommy when I grow up I want to have a REAL job, not like yours’. She wanted to be nurse or a cab driver. Something where she was not interacting with machines the whole daylong.

I was walking to the train station and on my right hand side someone had build four walls from wood in the middle of the grass with a peep whole in one of the walls. Too curious to keep walking I looked inside, through the hole; there was nothing to be seen except the grass, the trees and an empty bench. I laughed, it was simple but my expectation has been much more.

Maybe we build these walls around us and in us because we are afraid of what we would expose behind the wall. Or afraid of all those expectations to be something, to be special, to be successful, to be something to impress we feel that under all those bricks what we are is simply not enough.

Coaching and facilitating as well as my own path has taught me that just ‘being’ is difficult, difficult to dig through our erected walls to discover the simplicity of ourselves in its beauty and in its ugliness, in it its relationship with every things around us.
Walls keep things out but also prevent us from living expansively. Coaching is chipping away the wall to let some light and air in. Here we begin to live, to have real relationship with others and ourselves and we learn that the goal is not the doing, the getting, the buying, the striving, we are the goal as we are, whatever we are.