Category Archives: parenting

gratitude, parenting, philosophy, spirituality, thanksgiving, writing

Everyday Gratitude

The Attack of the Turkeys.  I’m not kidding.

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Tennessee Valley is one of my favorite places to walk; a two mile valley that runs east/west to the beach just north of San Francisco.   There’s a side path that goes through a horse pasture to an overgrown pond where I like to go looking for things to photograph.  On this occasion a few months ago, as I was passing the horses, five very large, very angry turkeys blocked my way.

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Ignorant of the ways of turkeys, I charged on through them thinking, mistakenly, that they’d back down, instead they surrounded me and with wildly, and incredibly strong beating wings, proceeded to beat me up.  With nothing but the jacket I carried, I swung at them.  However, I was also intend on documenting the event and continued to take photographs.

 

 

 

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Above is some unknown part of the turkey as it was beating me with its wings which are incredibly hard and strong.

Since they were intend on blocking my path and would certainly do me harm, I was ready to give up and turn for home, when a ranger came and drove them off.  They were guarding a nest of babies.

Tomorrow millions of people will eat turkey, myself included.  A delicious bird that has come to symbolize our gratitude for the abundance in our lives.  After more than 200 years of being prey on this day, it’s no wonder the creature is feisty.

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I’m glad that there is a day assigned for giving thanks.  I really do appreciate the gesture, however, each day we’re alive to experience the unfolding of life on this gorgeous, fragile, powerful, multi-faceted planet, is a day to celebrate.  No matter what one believes about life after death, once dead, wherever we go from here, we will no longer be a part of life on this planet.

So I thank the turkeys for showing me something of their power and their willingness to put themselves at risk for the sake of their off spring; to remind me that

all life is moved to protect new life.  It is how the creation assures it’s survival.  It is a life force, not unlike gravity or time or space.  It is called Love.

 

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inspiration, parenting, psychology, spirituality, writing

everest21.jpgFirst it’s about Human Rights.

The first step on the long climb is to recognize that if you are unable to allow freedom to others, you’ll never have it yourself.  If my individual freedom encroaches on yours, that is not it.  That is bullying.  If I think freedom is doing as I please, I haven’t taken the first step but remain in a childlike mentality.  It has taken us several thousand years to arrive at base camp; the oxygen hasn’t even begun to thin.

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Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Ring any bells?  That was 2000 years ago.  How high have we climbed since then? It took the western world another 1800 years to take that first step and acknowledge the rights of others.  And in many parts of the world today, there has been little or no progress in that regard.

When I acknowledge your need for freedom is as important as mine, I have begun to climb.  It is not easy. Our brains are hardwired to be selfish; unless our early lives teach us to care for others, we won’t.  Research on brain development is clear on this point; we are not naturally empathic, in fact it’s hard work to teach a child that the toy his friend has should not be taken from him.  There will be tantrums, sulks, and continual efforts to get what they want, no matter what mommy and daddy say.  Until months, and sometimes years later, the child learns that sharing is good.  It has payback.  The parents are happy with their child and the friend might even give the child what they want once the power struggle is over.

When we teach our children that they are the only ones, but are not the only ones who are the only ones, we help them take that first important step toward a free world.

Freedom is an attitude not a given.

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It is a willingness to keep going up; to strive harder when it feels your lungs will burst;  Paris bombing, Beirut bombing, Malta bombing . . . The second step requires us to be patient, be kind, be empathic, not just for our own but for those who’ve hurt us.  When we want to strike back, as Gandhi said, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.  

Until we’re all free, none of us are.  The age of terrorism is showing those of us who’ve lived in countries that profess freedom for their citizens that the illusion can be wrested from us.  It isn’t even very hard.  Just shoot a few people in a country that believes it’s free and suddenly, no one in that country can live with the illusion any longer.  The borders close, the army comes in, and individuals are restricted in their movements.  All gone freedom.

Freedom is not something one can have while another does not.  Freedom is an attitude of inclusion, lacking that, the word is incorrect.

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We must be still; stop our animal brain, breath and grieve.  Trauma research among animals has shown that when an animal is hurt or shocked they sit still for awhile.  Psychologists have integrated this information when working with people who’ve experienced a trauma and have found that by being still, even just for a few minutes, the individual is able to process the crises and move on.

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Understanding those who’ve violated our freedom.

Moving on up the mountain to the freedom promised at the top, means understanding those who’ve threatened that freedom; to bring our intelligence to bare on what is outside of our reality.  Like the problem of the child who wants someone else’s toy, some people have never learned the first step, so are handicapped and trapped in the reptilian brain of pain and selfishness, they take freedom from others.   Ignorance is not an excuse but it is a reality.

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For those of us still climbing toward the goal, meeting and sharing with others of like mind is a relief and a support.  To sit in the crisp clear air and share our stories, our challenges, and our failures, gives courage to continue.

Humanity need not go the way of the dinosaurs and other species who failed to adapt. We are, however, awfully close to the brink of our own extinction.  We must wake up, keep climbing, and prove we are worthy of living on this glorious planet.  But for that to happen, we must learn to cooperate.

As the Buddhists say: No single person gets enlightened.  Until we all go, no one goes.  We are One.

 

 

 

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childhood, health, life, parenting, psychology, spirituality, story, writing

How Stories Can Facilitate Psychological Health

greece13Many years ago, when I’d been working as a therapist for several years,  I came upon an ancient Greek tradition where people suffering from an illness (whether physical or mental) went to healing caves for a cure.  At the site there were caves where the patient slept and then healers aided their patients in interpreting their dreams.  A healing dream is a story that speaks in the language of symbol to directly impact the conscious mind. The key to the cure is that it is the unconscious that heals.

The greater part of my work with clients was working with their dreams, so this ancient process had great appeal for me.  Excited to learn more, I literally went in search of the places where this had occurred and found the best example on Crete where the Minoans had once lived from 4000 to 1500 BC.

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Thus began my 20 year fascination with a culture that appeared to have been amazingly balanced between the masculine and feminine principles.  The Minoans are considered matriarchal but my research has shown me otherwise.  Most scientists who’ve come across them have automatically classed them matriarchal because most cultures in that time period were.  They hadn’t the vision to realize that everything in their art spoke to a highly developed consciousness.  It was not one-sided.

I once heard that if we haven’t seen something before, we can’t see it at all.  An example given was that when the first ships arrived on the east coast of the United States from Europe, the indigenous population couldn’t see the ships; they were invisible to them.  It was the shaman who revealed these odd new forms to the people, which he could do since he traveled in the unconscious on a regular basis.

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I knew by then that simply telling someone something goes in one ear and out the other; it has no real impact on the psyche, but stories do. Many great and small teachers over the years, realizing the powerful impact for change in parables, myths, fairytales and stories of all kinds, have used these tools to create a change in the point of view of the listener.  There is no erase button in the psyche but there is an add button.

Keeping in mind that a story is a waking dream, I set out to tell the story of how a young girl was healed by her encounter with this culture that was based on feminine values; love, nurturance, connection, play, art, and beauty.  I created a situation where a young person with a ‘bad’ mother was renewed and given hope for her life through her exposure to the ‘good’ mother.  Her mother’s dark world was all she’d known, now she could see what had previously been invisible.

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As a healer my job is to show people what they haven’t seen before.  My favorite method for doing that is to tell them stories.

My novels, Echo the Ancients, and The Jaguar’s House, A Mayan Tale, were written with this in mind,.

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childhood, health, life, parenting, psychology, story, writing

What parents need to know about growing a healthy child.

There has been a monumental change in human evolution.  A new balance has emerged over the past decadeHippyPollard family 1970 which sees father’s more and more involved in the raising of their children from infancy.   With this newly found balance, children born today have a greater chance of psychological health than ever before.

As has been said before me, It takes a village.  However, most of us in the modern western world don’t have a village.  At most what we have is a mother and a father, and hopefully, a grandparent or two or four.  But the core is, a mother and a father.

In conversation with my sister recently we were remarking on how involved her son in law is with the raising of his son; a story I hear regularly about new parents. Father’s today are changing diapers, getting up at night for the feeding of the infant.  At the very least, they’re supporting their wives in the daunting task of caring for an infant.  This was not the case when we were raising our children.  Father’s at that time followed the example of their father’s before them; they went out in the world and left the raising of children to their wives. No matter how good a mother is, their child also needs a father.

CO profile2Whatever the gender of a child is, to be balanced, the feminine and the masculine principles need nurturing, and sooner works better than later since the first three years form the core of identity.

Most of my work as a therapist is reparenting; simply put, the problems an individual faces as an adult usually arise from some aspect of early development that is missing.  Though it’s true that abuses in childhood cause problems, what is more often the case, is that one or more areas of development got skipped.  When both parents are involved in raising the child, there’s a better chance that one of them will be able to compensate for the limitations of the other, raising the possibility that the child’s needs will be attended to. IG Mime9It’s has also been said that it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.  I would be out of a job if that wasn’t the case.  But it’s so much easier to do it right from the start and do away with my job.

As parents today are taking more responsibility for the health of their child; as they’re taking their jobs seriously, I’d be glad to see the end of the need for so much reparenting.  But that time has not yet arrived since there’s so much cleanup to do for the failures of the last generation.

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