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

Here in Timbuktu, in the dessert, in the trips I take and the people I meet there are such moments of pure beauty. I mean an expansive, gentle open beauty, a peaceful soft presence. Yesterday I spent the day and evening in Aglal region among the Touareg. The kindness of the people, their openness curiosity, generosity and their beauty made me feel terribly grateful for my experience, for the opportunity to be here, for my life, for the friends I have met along my path who eventual supported my presence here.

Today at the hospital another perspective. Long lines of women with children, many sick children. My own inability to do anything, to fix anything, to make any of this better for anyone. I was caught off guard today by my tears, did not know they were coming or where they were coming from but they came anyway without invitation. I sat down with them to follow their source. I spent many years thinking I could do something about the inequality, the suffering, and the people who are lost because they live in poverty or lost because they buried their souls. It is not that I am now pessimistic or that I have given up. I am just aware of the situation in a different way and the real and true fact that I cannot change things, certainly not alone – we need each other to do this. By ‘this’ I mean our relationship to ourselves, to each other, to North - South. Our relationship to abundance and scarcity, our relationship to what and whom is around us.

To sit with this reality and to experience it has the effect of breaking open my heart, stirring a sense of compassion for myself and all beings and a deepening of my capacity to sit with the treasure of life and its complexity and to not move to do something about it, not go into action just yet.

At the moment I suppose I am also waiting to see what will emerge as my task here in Mali, why I am here and what needs to be done. It is easier to move into some action any action at all but I feel that the waiting is necessary to know what is ‘my’ right action, my specific action the movement I need to make. Working with emergent processes is never easy and especially when it is my own. Everyday opens a door in me asks more of me to be present in my experience. Asks me to allow the unfolding and to see what there is as opposed to placing my own will onto it.

Extending from the heart a hand reaches outward
towards something less known
can I touch the world?
will I let it touch me?
with trepidation the soft bed of skin
points to a direction and the
the body follows in anticipation
of what is felt but not yet seen
we are one with the world
and yet so separate
how to mend the chasm?
to touch what is untouchable
to feel the contours of space
to manifest ourselves in this
world one line, one image at a time
the story of  our light being
the imprints of our nature…

It’s February, the cold, short dark days of winter.  I was touched by a coaching client who said, “I understand now why you have ‘poetry’ along with innovation and leadership on your business cards, this process feels like poetry, not clear and tangible but I can sense what it means to me and what I am learning.”

We seem to long for the tangible, the glorious light of summer, strong and bright, hot.  Winter is a time of withdrawal of going inward, of snuggling up to the fireplace (and if you live like I do then close to radiator).  We are covered head to toe in clothing layers, protected and hopefully warmed.  There is a sort of separation from each other that takes place and in this separation we have the possibility of becoming intimate with ourselves, being a little bit more reflective about what we have achieved, who we are, what we are.   We are seeds under the soft layers of snow, the hard layers of ice, deep under the earth – a lot of activity and preparation going on down there but little evidence of it on the surface.

We live in a time where what is going on, on the surface seems to matter so much more.  What we can see, touch, feel, taking preference over the subtler movements of the heart and soul.  What to say?  It is that way.  Yet everyday I meet people who are starting believe that perhaps what is stirring beneath the surface and less evident is just as important. What can be sensed but not yet seen or touched does have a purpose.  I’m not talking about religion or God, I’m not talking about some mystery, I am simply talking about another aspect of life, another aspect of YOU of ME.  We are layered and multi dimensional – different facets of a diamond reflecting all kinds of light.  It’s just that there seems to be a preference in our time for in-your-face and noisy, a certain kind of humming busy-ness   This too must have a purpose but it’s good to realize that that is simply not all there is.

I think some people are relieved to know that there is more than what we see and there is more than what we read in the newspaper – a whole lot more, really.

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.

To order up to 5 copies (prices include shipping):

If you would like to order more than 5 copies of the book, please send me an email.