In Front of A New Scenery

It’s been an intense and interesting year, this 2013. I started to write my blog at the end of January. On my About page I told that I will ponder the question: Who am I really.

And indeed it has been a year of explorations. Towards the end the year has become even more intense.

In general it is simply about still wanting to do something meaningful in my life. I have matured slowly, and I have had to spend a lot of time trying to understand myself better. I started my life with a heavy baggage, but I bless the lessons it has given me. Life has become better and better by the years.There is more stability and inner harmony, and more trust in life and in myself. I do have my ups and downs and some days are grey and dull, or gloomy and distressed, but in general I nowadays return like a pendulum to its equilibrium position.

So I truly feel grateful as the year closes. It has been a year of great discoveries and realizations. It has been a year of making new friends and finding new connections. It has been a year of studying and learning new skills.

I have so much enjoyed the fact that I can connect with people in other countries and even on the other side of the globe. It has been great to realize that “family” is so much larger than just our biological family – which is also important – but that there are friends and like-minded souls everywhere, and thanks to new technology it is possible to stay in contact with them.

It has been a year of opening windows to new vistas, and a year of looking behind doors that I thought were permanently locked. A year of shaking hands with strangers who turned out to be friends. A year of finding sudden support and encouragement from people who I had never met before.

It has been a year when I have felt that life is carrying me. I just need to allow the flow of life to take me to the next place, to the next moment, in front of a new door, to a junction of two roads, to new encounters.

So I end the year thanking life for everything it has brought in front of me. I also thank you, my dear reader, for visiting and reading the blog. I wish that the new year will bring you moments of deep realizations, important discoveries and a lot of patience and acceptance in front of life’s surprises and mysteries.

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The Beauty of Northern Lights

Photo: Pekka Sammallahti

This photo was taken yesterday by Pekka. The place is in Lapland near the border of Norway.

I want to share the photo with you because it captures the beauty and the power of northern nature in winter. It is in nature that our small “selves” often give way to something bigger, and we get a chance to change our limited perspectives to something wider and larger.

Beauty is one of soul’s values, and it needs to be nourished. Look at the photo and let the words of the Navajo poem carry you to a place of beauty inside yourself:

IN BEAUTY MAY I WALK

In beauty
may I walk
All day long
may I walk
Through the returning seasons
may I walk
Beautifully will I possess again
Beautifully birds
Beautifully joyful birds
On the trail marked with pollen
may I walk
With grasshoppers about my feet
may I walk
With dew about my feet
may I walk
With beauty may I walk
With beauty before me
may I walk
With beauty behind me
may I walk
With beauty above me
may I walk
With beauty all around me
may I walk
In old age, wandering on a trail of
beauty, lively,
may I walk
In old age, wandering on a trail of
beauty, living again,
may I walk
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.

What Wishes to Come to Being through You?

There is something really nice about aging. Whether others like me or not is less important to me than what it used to be when I was young. I just want to live my truth.

What I’m saying is: of course it is nice if you like me, but I do not need you to like me.

Can you see the difference?

As I have been thinking of issues of aging and my need to live my truth, I remembered some thoughts of a Jungian analyst James Hollis in his book Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life. (I spoke about his book already in one of my earlier blogs.)

Hollis divides life into two halves. The task of the first half of our life he describes like this:

“One has to have separated from the parents long enough to be in the world, to make choices to see what works, what does not, and to experience the collapse, or at least erosion, of one’s projections. By this age, the ego strength necessary for self-examination may have reached a level where it can reflect upon itself, critique itself, and risk altering choices, and thereby values as well.”

The second half of the life may begin as early as at the age of thirty-something, or much later. It has two major tasks: 1) the recovery of personal authority and 2) discovering a personal spirituality.

What fascinates me about this distinction and what I want to share with you is the way Hollis defines personal authority.

“What constitutes personal authority? Stated most simply it means, to find what is true for oneself and to live it in the world. If it is not lived, it is not yet real for us, and we abide in what Sartre called ”bad faith”, the theologian calls ”sin”, the  therapist calls “neurosis”, and the existential philosopher calls ”inauthentic being”. Respectful of the rights and perspectives of others, personal authority is neither narcissistic nor imperialistic. It is a humble acknowledgement of what wishes to come to being through us.”

And how about discovering a personal spirituality? According to Hollis this is closely allied with the task of recovering personal authority.

“It is of paramount importance that our spirituality be validated or confirmed by fidelity to our personal experience. A spiritual tradition that is only received from history or from family makes no real difference in a person’s life, for he or she is living by conditioned reflexive response. Only what is experientally true is worthy of a mature spirituality… A mature spirituality will seldom provide us with answers,  and necessarily so, but will instead ask ever-larger questions of us. Larger questions will lead to larger life.”

What wishes to come to being through you? What is your answer to that question?

Techno Granny “Turns Her Mind to The Unborn”

 

Now forget the dead, forget even the living, turn your mind to the unborn.

Wole Soyinka

Recently my daughter jokingly called me “techno granny”. By that she meant that despite my almost sixty years of age I have been interested in learning how to use Facebook, how to write a blog, how to navigate in the Internet. I participate in tele seminars and webinars and meet clients on Skype. Many of my friends of the same age know nothing about the worlds where I shuttle daily.

Well, I have to admit I still feel baffled by the mysteries of new technology, and sometimes I panic when something goes wrong. But I definitely have opened the door to something new.

As I thought about the theme of this blog, I remembered a quote from Nigerian author Wole Soyinka. It is really the “unborn” that my mind has been turned to during the past weeks when I have not been writing this blog.

I finished my nearly year-long training in Zen coaching. Actually it is a lifetime process, but nevertheless, I finished one part of the journey. And now I have gradually started to work as a life coach – or, as I also call myself: a coach in personal development, a mindfulness trainer, or Zen coach. 

Turning the mind to the unborn… For me it means giving space to the new, to something that is just unfolding. The “unborn” also means not knowing and being perfectly ok with not-knowing.

So my daughter is right. Granny is giving an expression to what life has taught her, and she is sharing that with others.

My website is under construction. Please, bear with me still for a while. In the meantime you can follow me also on Twitter: @Maarit_Suokas