Befriending Grief in Midlife

There are obvious fascinations attendant in midlife, such as becoming experts in our careers, surrendering to gravity, getting “new leases on life,” and becoming more comfortable (and yes, sometimes more uncomfortable) with ourselves in general. Another among these, midlife is a time we are typically immersed in and experience grief beyond imagination.

Our grandparents and parents naturally pass away when we are in midlife. Friends too close to our own age begin to die from natural causes rather than accidents and bizarre circumstances. Our children leave home and launch their own adult lives. Or perhaps our kids struggle with their adolescence and come dangerously close to self harm. Our physical youthfulness ages as we get emotionally, mentally and spiritually bolder: and things we held as important suddenly don’t seem that important anymore. We begin to search the horizon for a newer and brighter beacon of light to guide us into a safe harbor, only to find a longing to journey out into the open ocean again. Perhaps we are looking for the adventure we held back from earlier in our lives.

Our marriages, if they survived, are now called “long term marriages” and we are not the same people we were when we entered them. That may suit us well or not, depending on who it is we have grown to be as older adults. Maybe our marriages did not survive the chaos inherent in intimate relationships and we find ourselves alone when our dream was to be otherwise. For many of us the fact that dreams change or simply fade away was not in our awareness 20 years ago. In midlife we relax, and sometimes even release, our tenacious grasp on principles, values and desires. Letting go and releasing can be very challenging. Sometimes our long held dreams may seem like sand sifting through our fingers.

And the thing is, at least in my experience, the reasons I grieve seem to be piling up in midlife before I get “over it”. To me it feels like I sink below the surface and become submerged in grief after I get too tired to tread water. Just as I think I may pop above the surface, the next loss occurs and I slowly sink under again.

I remember the moment it felt like in order to survive I had to conjure the courage to inhale “water.” It happened after my father died. It occurred to me that grief may be part of midlife naturally and the “getting over it” part was over. Grief just may become a familiar and regular presence in my life now that I am in the middle of midlife. It occurred to me that living in a state of exuberance with a willingness to let go of the past while being a person who grieves is my task; that at the bottom of this deep well of grief is the love I seek. What do you think?

Lightening Strikes

I wish I could have shown you the lightening storm we were blessed with late last night. It was stunning, awe-inspiring, humbling, magical…and musical. To the west the thunder rumbled on forever and echoed for longer than that. At the same time the sky directly above me was filled with bright stars that looked as if they were dancing to a ceremonial drum. I made wishes for Peace and Love and surprises.
After I pinched myself to make sure I was awake, I got my husband out of bed to see it. He got up willingly and without complaint. He was as amazed by the beauty and power of nature as I was. I was my awe-struck- little- girl- self in love with the mystery of the universe. I couldn't’t go back to sleep until the storm passed.

Know Your Enemies

I often hear about our terrorist enemies even though I don’t get my news from the radio or television; occasionally I will read our local newspaper. Even so, it seems the fear of terrorism surrounds us and infiltrates our peace and solitude with threats to our wellbeing. I hear of extremists to the east, drug cartels to the south, nuclear weapons to the west and global warming to the north. These things may all truly exist. I am not disputing that.
I believe that we are distracted from the enemies that are a threat, not only to our ability to survive, but to our innate drive to thrive. By survive I mean secure food, shelter, and clothing. By thrive I mean create and appreciate beauty, give and receive love, laugh and find joy in ordinary living with fond memories of the past and crystal clear vision of a wholesome future.
In my mind the real enemies we face are cynicism, hatred, complacency, and intolerance, not the people in the Middle East trying to fight for what they believe in; nor the apparent earth changes that are a result of our greedy and selfish environmental choices; nor the way we disrespect the power of the natural elements causing us to build neighborhoods where they don’t belong, believing that we are mightier than the spring floods, the hurricane winds or the harnessed atomic energy of the sun.
In my view, the true threat to our security comes from neglected children, demolished health care, ineffective education, suffering mothers and fathers, drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and spiritual starvation. Our ignored and dismissed elders hold our wisdom and we negate them as well. We are disconnected from the people we love and the land that sustains us and we find ourselves adrift on a stormy sea of hopelessness, fear and self hatred. Our financial markets reflect our faltering self esteem.
It is time to wake up and face the sun with gratitude and allow the renewal of our spirits and souls. We must rage against the dimming of the light. It is time to stand up and stand firmly in what we want and know as good.
We must begin with healing ourselves. We must learn to be kind to ourselves and others, appreciate beauty, give and receive love, forgive and not forget, nurture solitude, nourish wisdom, and connect with the natural world.
We must learn to relax our shoulders, our expectations, and our fears. We must be willing to be vulnerable physically, emotionally, and spiritually as a way to grow and deepen our love of self and others. We must celebrate life and witness its mystery.
If we are to thrive we must first ask ourselves some pointed questions. For example:

• What do I love?
• Why do I love it?
• What can I do as an act of kindness today?
• What is one thing I can do right now to change the way I withhold love from myself or others?
• How do I define beauty?
• How do I create beauty?
• How can I express beauty?
• What am I willing to do to honor what I know to be good?
• How can I be with the natural world today?

Health, peace, and love are the given. The gift of life is to choose them. Our enemies offer us an opportunity to create a space for peace, love, and healing to reside.
May these prevail on earth.

Floating Down the Stream of Consciousness.

I love books. I love to own books. I love the look, smell and feel of books. I love to read and I really love to disappear into a book as I read it. I call it a “good book” when it captures my imagination and as I fall into the pages I am swept away like a leaf from the cottonwood tree falls into the river and is swept away on the current of the river I call life. I can feel it as I write this. I love being swept away by life.
I am passionate about witnessing the mystery of life and I am fascinated by the language we use to attempt to capture the essence of the experience we call life. Few authors can do that for me in a manner that enfolds me in my imagination. I love it when it happens. I aspire to perfecting that skill for myself.
My spiritual practice is to relax into the talent of connecting with the mystery of life and skillfully expressing myself from that place. There must be a Chinese symbol for what I am talking about, a Myers-Briggs type, an ennegram assigned to it, an astrological phenomena, a cultural behavior ingrained in me, a genetic code, a parental mistake, a sibling placement, a goddess archetype, a spirit guide, patron saint or an animal totem. There must be a way to explain why I am like this.
I am not sure why I want to write a book myself. There are plenty of them already out there. And now there are e books “on line”. Magazines are on line too. Newspapers are on line. I am on line, for Heaven’s sake. I can be googled, twittered, xinged and chatted up.
But you know there is a comfort I get from propping a good book up on my knees while I read. I especially like doing it during the day. And I absolutely love falling asleep that way. I love to fall asleep reading during the day. Now that I mention it, reading is my most powerful “sleep-aid” at night too. And when I awaken in the middle of the night, guess what I do…I read myself back to sleep.
But I do. I do want to write a book. There are a lot of things I want to do in fact. Some of them I have done once already and want to do again. I want to understand the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. I want to build a row boat. I want to see a bear again. I want to find an eagle’s feather. I want to take a sleigh ride on a packed trail in deep snow in the mountains while I am covered with buffalo robes and blankets. I want to be a princess. I want to make a lot of money. I want to taste fine wine and eat at an exquisite restaurant. I want to sit on the ground and pray. I want to go to a Buddhist temple in Thailand. I want to understand the creative spark I felt when Rio was conceived.
I want to love myself. I realized today that if I continue to believe that the people I love will hurt me and betray me, (because that is my story and my experience) I will never allow myself to love myself because if I do betrayal and pain are inevitable. Isn’t it natural for me to also want to avoid pain to this magnitude at all cost? I want to release that belief and forgive those that have harmed me and open to self love and relinquish my tenacious grasp on my heart. I really want that. If I can do that, why, I can write a book.

Journey Around The Circle Of Life

The journey around the Circle of Life:

On the Circle of Life we gather information, transform it into knowledge,
create beauty and give it away.

We have been blessed with an enormous surge of information over
the past many years. A lot of information. The information spans
all aspects of life: science, health care, healing, earth and
space technology, relationships, and ecology.

Many of us are overwhelmed by all the information and we seem to
get stuck there.The gathering of information is important on
the Circle of Life.
However, it is our life experience that allows us, supports us
and enables us to transform the information into knowledge.

In my opinion it is the critical next step on our journey because
from knowledge we create beauty. We create beauty from the
gut feelings we have, the intuition, our insights, dreams,
goals and desires. We create beauty in our work, in our families
and all of our relationships. We create beauty when we feel grateful,
generous, imaginative, and vulnerable. We engage possibility
when we are surrounded by beauty and we open to the health
and healing that is naturally a part of it.

Now is a perfect time to join together on the Circle of Life
to heal the beauty in, around and between us.
It is a perfect time to remember to learn and to develop wisdom
from our life’s experience. The moment we create beauty we are
free to release it, to give it away, to the world as self expression,
as love, as joy, as generosity, and it is in giving that we receive.

Rainbows Say It All

I was traveling along a remote country road and was stopped in my tracks when a full, horizon-to-horizon rainbow bloomed across the sky.This is what bloomed in my mind as a reflection of this wondrous vision and I wrote:
May the rainbow bless us today with the full spectrum of possibility:
May we be blessed with forgiveness and the inherent release of forgiveness.
May we be blessed with the relaxation inherent in release.
May we be blessed with the release inherent in ease.
May we be blessed with the ease inherent in self love.
May we be blessed with the love inherent in awe.
May we be blessed with awe when we witness the mystery of life
May we be blessed with the mystsery inherent in possibility.
May we be blessed with the full spectrum of the Rainbow.

Remember The Fire?

In the summer of 2002 there was a wild fire near our home that burned thousands of acres for 37 days and forced evacuation of 2300 homes. The experience of that fire is seared into my body mind and spirit. When I close my eyes I can still see the flames and smell the smoke. Large is one memory in particular. In every circle, it seemed, people were having the conversation about what we would escape with if we were the ones being emergently evacuated. What was most precious? What could we carry? What could we leave behind? What loss would devistate us? What was not that important afterall?. What about the horses, and other animals we live with? Where do they go? Where would we live if not in our "homes"? Those were deeply soul searching conversations full of insight surprise and delight. They were freeing conversations when we really felt what was important. We discovered what and who we truly loved.
I am reminded of those conversations as I live with the economic wildfire we are experiencing now. It touches me body mind and spirt. What is most important to me? What do I truly love? What can I live without? What is most precious to me? When I keep my mind on those things I feel free.

It's Time To Listen With Your Heart

I can hear it now: “What? Listen with your heart?”… “That’s easy for YOU to say”…”What does she mean by THAT?” I am listening…these are great questions.

Since I am truly a life coach let’s explore the possible answers with more questions.
Have you ever paraphrased what someone has said and gotten it all wrong?
Or have you been certain you are quoting someone word for word only to find out you missed the most important word? Have you ever felt misunderstood, utterly unheard or ignored? How about this one; have you ever received a gift from a companion or friend that turned out to be the very thing you told him or her you DID NOT WANT? Have you ever forgotten important directions, dates or other information?
Have you ever had a twinge of pain somewhere in your thoughts or emotions that you ignored? And it didn’t go away rather it turned into a bigger pain lodged somewhere in your body? Have you ever pretended you could eat chocolate “this time” and not get a headache? Have you ever been mindlessly brushing your teeth too hard and whack yourself in the gums? I am sure there are fascinating psychological and neurological explanations for why this happens to many of us in one way or another. Perhaps the simple answer is that these communications were only heard rather than deeply listened to from the heart.
My Grandmother told me a long time ago that listening and hearing are different. She even scolded me once because I forgot something important about life. I forgot, she said, because I failed to listen with my heart. I am beginning to understand what she was trying to teach me. We hear with our ears and listen with our hearts. We hear sounds of nature, voices, and music, traffic and ring tones. We listen to creativity, vulnerability, harmony, possibility, love and intuition with our hearts. Listening from a place of stillness is a key to truly listening. When we listen for the unspoken message beneath the words, the potential for healing, the expression of love, the possibility for forgiveness, the humor, and the tension or pain within us we are connected to our vulnerability and our willingness to be alive in the present moment.
Listening with our hearts takes a willingness to create space, be receptive and connect because when we listen with our hearts connection is inevitable. Listening in this way is done with focus, intention and practice.

How do we focus?
Meditation or contemplation is a practice as ancient as life itself. When we meditate or contemplate regularly we learn to quiet the mind, calm the emotions and relax the body. In a sense we clarify our attention by allowing unwanted or unimportant thoughts to fall away from our inner vision, thus allowing us to focus on what is wanted and is important to us. We create space within ourselves to listen. We prepare our minds and our bodies to deeply connect. We can practice this mindfulness as we sit quietly, walk, and do housework.

How do we set intention?
Intentions are centered in the present moment when we recognize what we value and when we decide how we want to bring that into our lives. When we value connection and set an intention to listen with our hearts, we open ourselves to possibility, creativity and compassion. Setting Intention is a way to create a space for inspiration, support and empowerment.


How do we practice?
This is the fun part. We get to play a spiritual game of Telephone!
We practice by waking up each day and heading into our lives full tilt. Sometimes this calls for courage and that’s ok. Begin listening from the quiet, calm and relaxed place within. Begin listening to nature, music, a person, or your thoughts. When you listen ask yourself: When I listen with my mind what do I hear? When I listen with my heart what do I hear?
Where do I feel it in my body?
What makes me smile? Fearful?
How connected to this person, place, thought or Love do I feel?
Where is love expressing itself here?
How do I want to live in this moment?
What am I curious about?
What am I grateful for in this moment?
Consider writing your insights and gratitude in a journal. Share some with a close friend. If nothing emerges, practice some more later. Always remember, it is your choice.

Now what?
Recently I read about an interview with the physicist who is credited with discovering the subatomic particle called a quark, Murray Gell-Mann. He said something like (I am not quoting on purpose) discovering the quark was relatively easy, what to do with the discovery was the mystery. Learning to listen with your heart will be relatively easy. Becoming comfortable with deepening your connection to all of life may be a challenge. It is a challenge for many of us as we progress into the technology and reality of the 21st century. This is where we also get to practice compassion, asking for help and being available and vulnerable to those we care about. It is about connection really. Connection and love. A wise man once told me that the secret to a life well lived is Love.
I encourage you to listen with your heart to his words. Go now and listen for the love. May you enjoy a life well lived.

The true spirit of my work invites women of all ages
to The Circle of Life and into the power of Gentle Medicine.
Here they will experience the love, gratitude and relaxed personal power
that comes from gently accepting their humanity, realizing that all is as it is
simply because we choose to be alive.
By allowing the calmness that ensues to penetrate their resistance and fear they will open to the healing inherent in the mystery of life. Love will prevail.

To learn more contact Martha at www.CircleofLifeCoach.com

The Metro Man

I was fortunate to be able to spend 2 days in Washington, DC recently with my daughter, my sister and her daughter. Anyone who has been there understands when I say it is challenging to capture all the stories about a trip to "DC"...and there were many after only 2 days. The extremes of any city can be overwhelming. Washington, DC was no exception.
We saw foreign dignitary's homes, The White House, the Capital building, servants, maids, street people, and young snappy professionals hurrying somewhere obviously important. We heard languages spoken I couldn't begin to guess where the people speaking them came from, and tourists from everywhere and anywhere. We witnessed a young man propose to his sweetheart at the Lincoln Memorial on Valentine's day. We saw banners joyfully proclaiming an electoral victory and protesters protesting silently yet sincerely. Their issues expressed a myriad of opinions.
We had men in uniform hold doors for us and women on the go ignore us. We ate seafood every chance we got . We even went to the familiar bookstore on the corner, just to be somewhere familiar. We danced to the hip-hop music being played in the huge municipal truck parked at the corner after hours as men repaired the street nearby (well, I did the dancing and embarrassed my daughter "into next week").
But, listen to me now, there was the metro man...allow me to try to tell you about the metro man. He was old and disheveled. He was dirty and bent over. He was there with us underneath the fabulous Union train station. The train station the presidents of the United States used to arrive in "the city" long before they started using Air Force One. No one else was there besides me, my daughter, my niece, my sister and the metro man. The metro is the city's subway system. There is a bank of automated ticketing machines theoretically self explanatory. To us a confusion of right choices and wrong choices. We felt stupid and vulnerable as we waved our money around the underground metro station looking for the right choice. My sister and I spread out in front of the ticketing machines as if that would better our chances of figuring it out. The two girls were in between us. My sister and I were like crows with one eye on a machine and one eye on our daughters. (Moms are like that). The dirty, bent over metro man started walking towards the girls and my sister and I closed in. "Can I help you?" he asked in a quiet voice. "Ummmm... yes please" one of us said. "You do it like this". He showed us how to insert the dollar bills and a ticket popped out of the wall. I gave him $2 for a ticket that cost $1.65 and said "Thank you, Sir". Dirty and bent over,he taught us all that we don't always need to be afraid of strangers. Don't get me wrong, this old man was strange. But he wasn't bad or mean or hurtful. He was kind and respectful. He was helpful and trusted us to be kind in return. And yes, he also got a return on his investment. That was ok with me. May your good will also return to you in a way you can receive.

Why Coaching? Why Now?

Why Coaching?
I don’t need to remind anyone who is remotely engaged with today’s current world events that we live in a turbulent time in our history. For many of us these are times of crisis, loss, grief, fear and stress beyond imagination. For others, it is just more of the same: hunger, poverty, illness, lack. And still others, pride, hope, creativity, possibility.
How can a person make sense of the rapid changes affecting us all; negative and positive? Where do we go for help and support?

I have recently been told that somewhere around 70,000 people search “life coaching” every day. I imagine that this number changes with the challenges people face;
and by the way, these challenges change every day as well.
The challenges we face today are unprecedented in recent history.

Life coaching is a collaborative relationship in which the client develops a personal or professional intention with the support of the coach. Together they determine steps to support that intention with goals and action steps focused on that intention. This strategy has proven powerfully effective in facilitating positive change and transition in a person’s life. The style of coaching we offer at Circle of Life Coaching is:

¨ Simple: We gather and distill all the information that comes to us down to what we love, value and what brings us joy
¨ Intentional: We transform that information into knowledge by committing to meaningful and purposeful life choices and experiences
¨ Focused: We create beauty when we focus on finding the places where emotional fear may be blocking our ability to act on our dreams for physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual and environmental wellbeing.
¨ Generous: We release or give away the beauty we create with what we learn, what we experience and choose as our values and share ourselves in relationship to others and our world.

With a Circle of Life coach we gain insight, gather tools and learn skills to continue our journey around the Circle of Life with beauty, dignity and grace.


Why now?
Because we are not only teetering on economic depression, (setback, readjustment, repurposing, call it whatever you like), we now seem to have social, environmental, spiritual, and health, challenges the earth’s people have never faced.
We are “peaking out” on resources, patience, reasons to fight, purity, kindness, good grammar, neat handwriting and graciousness. Too many of our children are wayward; too many of our elders are sad and defensive. There is too much abuse, too much neglect, too much fear and not enough calm. Too many of our marriages are unsound; too many of our rhythms interrupted; too many of our seasons and cycles are rushed. Too many of our neighbors are unknown to us; too much of our food is grown too far away. Too many cultural and spiritual practices are obscure or extinct. There are too many droughts, too much rain, not enough jobs and too many drop outs. We live with too many extremes and feel disconnected too often.

This is our life right now. It is our crisis, if you choose to see it that way. It is also our opportunity if you choose to see it that way. This is our opportunity to center ourselves on the circle of life; to be peaceful, kind, creative, resourceful and willing to be in relationship with our earth and our universe rather than at odds.

To risk making too broad a generalization, it seems to me that everywhere I turn someone else is being called to change the way they thought life should be. We are all being called to ask for help, dust off our dreams, help someone else, and see with new eyes. We are asked to be bold, brave and beautiful. We are asked to recommit to love, kindness, honesty and peace. It is time to make a choice: ask your self, “Will I choose to see crisis or opportunity?” Either way you choose the stream of life flows towards healing making healing always possible. It is time to heal; ourselves, our families, our communities. It is time to heal the beauty between us.

What is one way you can reconnect to your dream right now?
Because now is the time. It really is that simple.

To learn more about how you can begin coaching one on one with Martha or in a group with others with Martha’s support visit our web sites at
http://www.circleoflifecoach.com/
and
www.MyLifeCompass.com/Martha
Please share this article with others. If you want to learn more subscribe to The Pasternack letter on my Circle of Life Coach web site.
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