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A selection of blog posts

Stages of Lockdown Isolation - a relative experience

Posted 7/2/2020

Are you noticing how your reaction to self-quarantine and lockdown restrictions shifts as the weeks roll by?

Perhaps you have had highs and lows but not really understood the reasons for the changes in your endorphin levels? Perhaps you thought other people were being even more difficult than their normally difficult selves?  Some may even have considered getting over-the-counter hormone therapy.

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Non-essential Me

Posted 7/2/2020

My thoughts have focussed quite intently on this word ESSENTIAL over the last while. When lockdown closed in on all of us we were constantly reminded of what is essential and what is non-essential. As countries recover from the alleged waves of the pandemic, the lockdown severity is decreased in accordance with the essential nature of services.
(Some would consider that very debatable but that is another matter.)

Prior to the lockdown in South Africa, I was in hospital for surgery and had first hand experience to remind me of the vital role of medical staff. Whenever I heard about frontline staff I thought about the many traumatic sights and sounds I experienced during those eventful five days in hospital. A week after I was discharged the lockdown began. My admiration for medical service providers during my personal experience was reinforced in the context of the covid-19 pandemic.

There was however a shadow side to all this admiration. I began to feel less and less “essential”. I could not save lives. I could not even cook a pot of food for myself let alone contribute to relief efforts struggling to cope with a hunger crisis resulting “from no, work no pay”. My non-essential existence was reinforced with every message that only essential services are required. Childhood experiences have tuned my psychic antenna to search for messages of worthlessness. These had become vital cues to my survival. Many people share those experiences and for those who don’t, there are sufficient messages from modern society fear-mongering us to question our worth. We spend a lifetime trying to prove that our existence matters. Most of that effort is to prove our worth to ourselves. We hope that our skills, money, status will save us from the doom of being worthless. 

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Surviving Projections from Others

When you become the target of another person’s projection, get out of the way!!! No amount of reason or logic and explanation will stop the bullet.
Very simply explained, a projection is when we blame others for or place on them the things we are unable to accept and deal with in our own lives. We may blame others for the very things we do or resent them for things we secretly consider ourselves to be lacking in. In short, the stuff we can’t deal with is dealt with through another – the target. 

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The stories less told

Telling our stories contains more power than we could ever imagine.  The telling of a story and listening to a story involves more brain functionality than any other method of sharing information.  Story telling requires no charts, no PowerPoint slides or flash cards because it activates the brain’s own capacity to produce the imagery and connections to make sense of the information. Read the article

 

 

 

Making peace with healing

Essentially the journey home is a journey of healing.  In some cases, there are intense traumas and remarkable tales of survival that spark the need for healing.  In other cases, it is the ever so subtle experiences causing hurts that we need to heal from.  For most of us, it is somewhere between these two extremes.  Living our lives inevitably means we are going to get a few scratches and bruises along the bumpy road.  Even the person intoxicated with denial has a few batterings that could do with some recovery.  In their case, the need for healing is usually obvious to everyone else because they are the ones who experience the impact of those unhealed wounds. Read the article

 

 

 

Unto each their own journey

The journey of life is a very unique one indeed.  Our life stories are filled with intricate details, adventures, personalities, circumstances and histories.  The purpose and the meaning of our lives is viewed through all of these to create even more unique flavour to the journey.  There are so many people we can relate to as they share experiences, thoughts and feelings very similar to our own.  Then there are those who we listen to with absolute puzzlement and we wonder how this person operates and where they come from.  Read the article

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seeing myself everywhere

It is incredible how many times I have seen a post on a blog or a website which seems to capture my exact thoughts and feelings on a subject or an experience. Normally, I am elated because it means someone has gone through the trouble of capturing my thoughts and expressing my emotions. . Although not often, there are times when I feel like they stole my words and cheated me out of expressing it myself. Lately, I am seeing it very differently.

Extremely trying times over the last year have led me to do some intense inner work. Financial challenges and a second divorce have wreaked havoc with fibromyalgia flare ups. These are but a few of the challenges which conspired to direct me to a very dark night of the soul. Thomas Moore in his book Dark Nights of the Soul so aptly describes my experience.  In this dark night of my soul I was forced to change my intelligence.  Read the article

 

 

Inspired by being uninspired - uncovering fate

What does the period of non-inspiration look and feel like? For me, there are physical signs like the fact that my writing desk has become a storage area for things I am meaning to pack away. Other physical signs include busyness and focus on the beckoning of the outside world. Psychologically, it means that I am preoccupied with doubt and self-limiting beliefs. Each of us have our own set of self-limiting beliefs that operate during the periods of low or no inspiration. Those beliefs are part of a very complex framework which we cannot delve into here. They include everything from our relationship with our parents (primordial relationships) to the purpose and intention for which we created our blog (conscious choices we make) in the first place. In my case, I enjoy writing and use it as a tool for self development and engaging with my creative, intuitive self. I choose to blog it or make it public because I am a social being who enjoys connection with others. Sharing my writings have proved helpful for others from the feedback I get and this satisfies the teacher and counsellor aspects of my makeup. I am Jung at Heart – meaning that my psyche or soul finds much of its answers through the teaching of Carl G Jung. These teachings reveal that we are often driven to do things and not to do things by forces that we are unaware of. That is a scary thought right. A famous quote by Carl Jung says;

“Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”

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Conscious engagement never lost, never wasted

CONSCIOUS ENGAGEMENT is never ever wasted. I had to prepare a summary of what I do for a brochure of a conference I will be speaking at. I speedily typed it up and then read through for typos. I paused when I read the line “Ms Benson engages extensively with the global community to strengthen the work in South Africa.” In that moment I realised that every effort on this and that meeting enables me to speak. Every message and comment from you flavours my words. All the teleconferences I attend at EST with burning, scratchy eyes informs me of the world work. The connections I have in India and Israel, California and Norway, to name but a few, all come together in an intricate web which supports and informs.  Read the article

 

Discipline and conflict with children - a minefield for the adults

Overhearing a snippet from a documentary on Lady Dianna, as I whisked the dust cloth over the television, I heard one of the contributors make this comment; “why do we pretend that the gap between childhood and adulthood is so big when in fact it is very tiny?”  The comment has plagued my conscious thinking today and no doubt caused a stir in the sub-conscious and shadow so aptly explained by Carl Jung.

And if we were to accept this view that the gap between adult and child is so very tiny it would follow that those pesky little critters we call triggers would have us be back in pigtails and school shirts in an instant.  After some years in the counselling room, on both sides of the couch and just from my everyday life I must agree.  It is not so much that there are many triggers or that triggers have a great mysterious power.  Rather, that this gap between adult and the unresolved child is in fact so tiny or more accurately put, so obscure, that it does not really take much of a potion to conjure up a time warp or dreaded portal that has us back in the past in a flash. Read the article

 

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