Guided by aliveness

  " The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human. " John Naisbitt I am currently in the  Relateful Coaching Training . It feels expanding and nourishing, shedding light on unconscious places and allowing more truth to surface. The focus is to explore the beliefs we have about ourselves and reality. These beliefs shape how we deliberate and choose, impacting our emotional landscape in a profound way. Sometimes the beliefs constitute our identity. If the beliefs are left unexplored they become self-fulfilling in our awareness, reflected back by reality, because in this perspective anything that happens in our experience is a reflection of an inner stance we are holding. Our perspective shapes our perception - we create our own reality, or how we give meaning and relate to what is happening. The work of coaching is to explore our perspective, witnessing the beliefs we hav...

  In some of the eastern traditions an important goal in meditation is to silence the words and quieting the mind, emptying it of thoughts. Presence is seen as something essentially wordless. In this perspective the words are often an expression of automatic or habitual patterns of thought, which easily removes you from experiencing what is really here right now. The words are seen as less true or less fundamental than the wordlessness which is prior to the words. To connect with your true unconditioned self and become more whole, you need to stop identifying with your words and listen to the primordial silence underneath.    In mind-body connecting practices like Rosen method therapy (a one to one touchbased modality) or Relatefullness, which is a group meditation enhancing relational and embodied self-awareness, an important focus is on practicing naming our immediate embodied experience as it is in the present moment. In my experience this implies an expansion of aware...

  Is there an unclear longing in you, a drive towards something unknown, a whispering in your inner world which is hard to comprehend but feels deeply significant? Is there a feeling of something hidden inside of you which wants to become visible? Do you feel you have something you need to express and manifest in the world, but you are not quite sure how yet? In his famous book The Souls code: In search of character and calling the jungian thinker James Hillman describes this as our unique image or pattern, which we are born with and are here to express and give shape. He calls it the acorn-theory: like an oak starts as a potential - an acorn, every person has a uniqueness that asks to be lived, a calling which is already present before it can be lived. And every person has a soul-companion, a daimon, which is reminding you of your calling and helping you to align your life with the calling. The calling and daimon is something transcendent, beyond time and space. So the work o...

  Human beings have a need to understand how we relate to the timeless eternal cosmos. The ordinary everyday life which is happening in time and space is our focus, but we also have one foot in the eternal world, and we need to relate to that dimension as well. This may be seen in light of different perspectives - for example science may understand it as processes in the brain, religion as experiences of divine interventions, and jungian psychology as the human innate need for meaning and wholeness in life.   In meditative traditions, with thousands of years of experience with exploring the inner realms of human being, the timeless dimension is called the eternal now. This eternal dimension may be accessed through activities like meditation, dreamworks, interpreting synchronicities, fasting, yoga, exploring our inner life, looking at significant symbols, rituals and so on. Experiencing the eternal dimension may also arise spontaneously in our lives. One traditional name ...

  In the mystical traditions of the great religions there is an emphasis on the dimensions in reality which are not known to us. Often these are described as nothingness or emptiness, layers in consciousness which are outside of time and space, limitless and eternal. To a mystic there is a possibility in life to  access an immediate awareness of this nothingness.  What does that mean, how may this experience be described? Conceptually it is hard to convey because nothingness points to the layers in consciousness which are unfolding and ungraspable, that which is not yet here, that which is becoming. It is like a space of potential from where the forms of reality are being created in an eternal dance.  Nothingness is the unknown, so the conventional categories of good or bad, normal or not normal, are not operating. Even the stable identity you have, the person you thought all your life you were, falls away. Only nothingness or the infinite remains. Its like an oblivi...

  In the winter of 2021 I got an impuls to get a seven-armed candlestick, a menora. I searched online markets, found a beautiful menora, and purchased it. I still remember the excitement I felt. I usually dont like shopping stuff at all, but this felt different and important somehow. I wanted to light the candlestick and put it in the window so it became visible to everybody. To understand why this felt so significant to me, I started to explore the meaning of the menora. In jewish and christian faith it is interpreted in many different ways - in one perspective the menora is a symbol of the wholeness of everything. This spoke to me. The insight I received is that the menora is a symbol of the living universe, and we are all parts of it. If we hold ourselves back and suppress our expression in the world, we hold back and suppress a part of the universe. We should light our candle and not hide it, but put it in the window so the light is visible and can impact the world. In Kabbalah...

  Birgitta is one of the great woman mystics of the middle ages. She was born in 1302, a daughter of a noble family in Sweden. She married early and got 8 children, living the life of a noble lady. The story is that Birgitta had religious visions at some points during childhood, and when her husband died the visions returned, and transformed her life completely.  In an important vision, God told her that her calling was to be his bride and mouthpiece. Birgitta let go of her comfortable life and her assets, moved into a monastery and started conveying the visions and messages she received from Jesus Christ and Mother Mary. There were messages about how to live a good christian life aligned with the will of God, about international politics and what God wanted the Pope and kings of England and France to do, and about founding a new monastic order. More than 600 visions, which were written down by Birgitta and her helpers, were spread and read widely. She was also an important co...

  The classic mystical traditions of the great religions are diverse and complex, their stories about reality are very different and their perspectives on life are unique. Still, in its core, there seems to be common ground and a universal experience and perception of life. One gateway into this perception of life may be a quality of radical presence - a letting go of attachments and beliefs from the past, opening up and receiving the flow of life in its newness and wonder. Life as a continuous gift, carrying us as grace. Life as a work of art, forms constantly being created and changing. Life as a timeless eternal ground, emptiness and fullness.  In his book  The mystic heart  W. Teasdall points out that for the mystic, human identity is not something we own, but something we receive - we dont own our consciousness, we inhabit it. This implies a concept of consciousness as a community of interconnected being to which we all belong. "Reality, cosmos, life and being a...

 "In our western world, the fixation of the process of separation from our instinctual/archetypal lives has been pronounced, resulting in overly intellectualized, sublimated, and devitalized removal from ourselves and our depths", Stanton Marlan writes in his book C.G.Jung and the alchemical imagination (2021). While the separation of consciousness from instinct is necessary for development of consciousness of the kind we know, the separation may cause dangerous and unbearable alienation if there is no kind of reunion between the individual and the instinctual and archetypal layers of the psyche.   Jung and many jungian analysts have described how encounters with animals in dreams and visions may symbolically represent attempts of the psyche to reestablish a connection between the conscious mind and the unconscious. The animal is a symbol for the part of the psyche which goes down into the subhuman and yet reaches above everyday consciousness, to the animal god. In an ind...

  Alchemy is an ancient and diverse tradition,  its origins dating back to ancient Egypt and the practicing of mumification. It is mystical, complex and ambiguous. Its method of explanation is "the obscure by the more obscure, the unknown by the more unknown". (Jung, C. :  Psychology and alchemy  p. 227 ).  Jung has been central in the rediscovery of alchemy by showing how the alchemists spoke in symbols about the human soul, and were working as much with the imagination as with the literal materials of their art. To Jung the alchemical images and symbols became an objective basis from which to interpret dreams and other unconscious material. Jungs study of alchemy made him realize how the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche can be transformed in a positive way by the contact between the ego and the contents of the unconscious. This development process becomes visible in the dreams and images of the individual, and in the changing symbolic structures o...

Being a parent is a gift, and its hard. I like to think of this picture as showing my children meeting the vastness and possibility of life. I am so grateful for them. Here is a text I have written about parenting:  Your Family (relateful.com)

  The  Post Carbon Institute  has recently published the report  Welcome to the great unraveling. Navigating the polycrisis of environmental and social breakdown.  The concept polycrisis points to a situation where crisis in multiple global systems becomes causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanitys prospects. The different crisis interact in ways which produce more harm than each crisis would have made, had it happened in isolation. The report claims that the current global environmental and social polycrisis is evidence that humanity is entering the  Great Unraveling  - a time of consequences in which human impact are compunding to threaten the very environmental and social systems that support modern human civilization.  The report describes social challenges as poverty, inequality, racism and other forms of discrimination as consequences of environmental challenges and the following scarcity in many areas, and as related sy...

  Form is emptiness, emptiness is form Emptiness is no other than form, form is no other than emptiness All things and phenomena are marked by emptiness they are neither appearing nor disappearing, neither pure nor impure, neither increasing nor decreasing. (...) There is no ignorance and no end of ignorance, there is no aging and death and no end of aging and death, there is no suffering and there is no end of suffering.

  "The eye in which I see God, it is the same eye in which God sees me. My eye and the eye of God, there is one eye and one vision and one realization and one love", the famous christian mystic Meister Eckehart says in one of his sermons. Eckehart (1260-1328) was a german catholic Dominican theologian and philosopher, and an important church leader. Toward the end of his life he was convicted of heresy by the pope, because of his mystical approach to christianity.    Eckehart was one of the first to preach to the congregations in the vernacular language, not in latin, and his message was new and innovative. He was highly learned and a renowned theologian, and he  brought in his mystical experiences and realizations in a very radical way in his preaching. The central theme of his sermons is the presence of God in the soul of man: "Something is given in the soul that is so deeply related to God that it is one, and not united, with Him." God is not something outside of...

  The archetype of the Self is at the core of jungian psychology. Carl Jung wrote about it in many of his books, and it is a complex and dynamic concept. In the book The Self in Jungian psychology - Theory and clinical practice , Leslie Stein defines it as a preexistent center of the psyche containing the entirety of all that is known and unknown. He says the Self is an organizing principle that brings us home to ourselves in moments when we are confused or disoriented, a guiding pattern of wholeness in the unconscious. It contains within it all the opposites and is also the place to reconcile those opposites. To Jung it is necessary that the ego (the self which is constructed socially and over time), establishes a conscious relationship and communication with the archetypal forces in the unconscious. The living and conscious connection between ego and Self is is to Jung necessary to bring purpose, meaning and feeling into life. Knowing who we really are is to Jung the process of i...

  I started meditating when I was 17 years old. I remember I wanted to explore why I sometimes chose an action which didnt feel aligned with my inner truth. At the time the only form of meditation which was available was a norwegian-based method, ACEM-meditation. It is a non-directive meditation, which allows thoughts to come and go of their own accord, while a meditation sound is effortlessly repeated in the mind.  Nondirective meditation facilitates the stimulus-independent, task-unrelated, spontaneous activity of the mind. Its focus is not to empty the mind of thoughts, but to bring relaxation and cultivate a free mental attitude and the acceptance of mind wandering and spontaneous thoughts. The thoughts, feelings, images, and sensations that pass through the mind of their own accord are not seen as disturbances, but as important resources. Research has shown that during nondirective meditation, the activity of the brain`s default mode network (also known as the resting sta...

  In Rosen Method Bodywork, and in other mind-body connecting practices, the clients/participants sometimes will encounter difficult emotions when being present in body. One possible reason for that is trauma, because trauma often will lead to disconnection from the body: "Trauma, because of the associated nervous system hyperarousal and the resulting systemic dysregulation, keeps us from being present in our bodies. The tendency for traumatized individuals is to disconnect from the body by becoming overly cognitive or by numbing bodily experience, or both." the psychologist Laurence Heller writes in the book Healing developmental trauma. How early trauma affects self-regulation, self-image, and the capacity for relationship ( p. xxvii). The psychologist Peter Levine says something similar in his book In an unspoken voice. How the body releases trauma and restores goodness : "Trauma survivors are so frightened of their bodily sensations that they recoil from feeling them...

  We suffer from perceptual oblivion: We have forgotten how to really notice ourselves and the world. The modern world, with emphasis on the written word, have created a deep rift in our experience, a detachment from bodily perception, our animal senses. And this has led to our current predicament and a world moving towards apocalyptic changes. This, in short, is the diagnosis in the philosopher David Abrams book Becoming animal. An earthly cosmology  (2010).   Abrams medicine in this situation is a fresh perception, a new way of thinking enacted as much by the body as by the mind, an expanding new vision of our planet and ourselves which is animistic and participatory, and which simultaneously includes scientific perspectives on nature. "It is a perception that honors the immeasurable otherness of things, the way any earthborn presence exceeds the calculations we perform upon it - the manner in which each stone, each gust of wind, each termit-ridden log or gliding s...

  The philosopher Charles Taylor writes in his book A secular age (2007) about the disenchantment (from Webers entzauberung ) of the modern western world. To Taylor the disenchanted world is a place where the only locus of thoughts, feelings, spirituality in the cosmos, is in the human mind, while the enchanted world of our ancestors was a place of spirits and demons. The enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross the porous boundary of our selves and shape our lives, psychic and physical.  In the disenchanted world the boundaries around us are experienced and understood as firmer. The sharpe boundaries between inner and outer implies that thought, meaning, purpose, are only in our minds, not out there in the world. Taylor calls this the buffered self. He writes: "The buffered self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it." The buffered self can be autonomous and even disengaged from whatever is outside the boundary, while the ...

  The lyrics to the christmas song Panis angelicus was written by the theologian Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. The first sentence: Panis angelicus fit panis hominum , means 'may the bread of angels become the bread of mankind'. In the original context this was about the eucharist. To me today however it points to something deeper: a longing for nourishment for the soul. There is a tenderness and vulnerability in this longing. And in a way its not hard to find sources of nourishment - connecting with others, being in nature, creating, enjoying the beauty of art. But to me the  longing also points to something less obvious, something to do with the parts of us which traditionally have been expressed in religious and spiritual practices.  How to understand this longing now, when most people reject organized traditional religion and find it irrelevant? In his book The darkening spirit. Jung, spirituality, religion.  David Tacey argues that we have a postsecular so...