Wintering Through – December Ticktock Coaching news

During the run up to the holiday period, it’s easy to get caught up in the crazy, hectic, frantic pace of life. I found myself doing this myself recently when I thinking about all the things I needed to do this month including preparing for the New Year’s Retreat that I’m running at Woodbrooke Quaker Centre.

As I sat in front of the computer, I could feel my mind racing and planning. I felt a familiar ‘must do’ hectic energy. I caught myself and then I did the streamlined centring practice I teach all my clients: 1. Breathe (up and then down) 2.expand (allow my energy to expand to fill the space around me) 3. settle (relax into the space) and 4.invoke my quality (which is ease).

What a relief! I felt more spaciousness, more clarity, and all these tasks didn’t seem so overwhelming.

So, when you are feeling like you are starting to feel the pressure of the season, feeling like the hectic pace is getting too much – just take a minute to breath, expand, settle and invoke your quality (use ease if you don’t have a quality you want to work on). And see how it shifts your perspective on what you are doing AND how you feel!

If you are interested in exploring this more, I’m running two events that you might be interested in.

Over the New Year period, I’m running a retreat entitled ‘Yearning for Wholeness’ at the Woodbrooke Quaker Centre (you don’t have to be a Quaker to attend) from the evening of Friday 30th December noon on Monday 2nd January. To find out more and book your place go to http://www.woodbrooke.org.uk/courses.php?action=course&id=6600

I’m also running a Level One Conscious Embodiment Level One workshop in London on Saturday 3rd March (9 – 5pm) and then Sunday 4th March (9 – 1pm). This workshop is a prerequisite to doing a Level Two workshop or Retreat with Wendy Palmer (Wendy is running a retreat in the UK in May, in Italy in October and in Bhutan at the end of 2012). This March workshop will cost £175 in total (bursary places available for those on lower incomes) To book your place go to: http://consciousembodimentlondon.eventbrite.com/

I’d like to end this post with a thought from my favourite writer Parker Palmer talking about the process of nurturing the dormant seeds with us as we ‘winter through’.

‘The seeds of possibility planted with such hope in the fall must eventually endure winter, when the potentials we carried at birth appear to be dead and gone. As we look out upon the winter landscape of our life, it is clear that whatever was seeded in the fall is now buried deep in the snow, frozen over and winter-killed. Many demoralized people recognise this “dead of winter” metaphor as an all-to-apt description of their bleak inner lives. Yet when we understand winter in the natural world, we realise that what we see out there is not death so much as dormancy. Some life has died, of course. But much of it has gone underground, into hibernation, awaiting a season of renewal and rebirth. So winter invites us to name whatever feels dead in us, to wonder whether it might in fact be dormant – and to ask how we can help it and ourselves, “winter through”.

As in winter itself, there is a certain bleakness in his words and yet at the same time, there is much that is hopeful and warm about the invitation to all of us to identify that which might be dormant in us – and find out how we can help it, nurture it through to the spring. So the question I’d like to offer you all to reflect upon is What is it that is lying dormant in you? How can you help it to winter through to the spring?

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