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transcending

love, loss & longing transcending

Why transcending?

May 14, 2010

So why ‘Transcending’? What does it mean and why is it my focus? How does this word pull so much together for me?

You could ask my yoga teacher from a long time ago how he knew it was my theme, my life focus. Somehow he knew, giving me my spiritual name, ‘Turiyamani’ or ‘transcendental jewel’.

I didn’t think much about it for many years but it was in the background all the time, I guess. A spiritual path, a sense of knowing I didn’t quite connect to.

But then, difficulty and tragedy, one thing after another, testing resilience, a time through which you change radically and nothing is the same again, a turning point that makes you question not only what’s important but everything you do.

Your world arcs into a different sphere entirely. You can remember the day, the hour, people’s faces, how time stood still, how green the leaves were, how all you could do was drink tea and stare into the air. How people said to you, ‘Your life will never be the same again’ and you fought that thought desperately, trying to keep things the same.

You would trade the world to go back to the state before then, but you cannot. It is immutable and your path.

And then later I came across Chris Guillebeau and his site, The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional strategies for life, work and travel

Chris writes about many things: travelling towards his goal of visiting every country in the world, entrepreneurship, personal development. The ‘convergence between highly personal goals and service to others’ is a key theme. He has constantly wonderful thought pieces, challenges to the way you think, work and live. In ‘A Brief Guide to World Domination – How to live a remarkable life in a conventional world’, Chris talks about personal goals, ordinary people pursuing big ideas and also through this, making a difference in the lives of others.

He asks you to consider ‘the two most important questions in the universe’. Here they are and here are my answers:

#1 What do you really want to get out of life?

My answer: transcendence, light out of dark, words lifted high, sweet words out of loss and longing, a way of rising above

#2 What can you offer the world that no-one else can?

My answer: words of loss and longing, receptacles for managing them, a model for resilience and transcendence, structures for managing feelings, lyrical words

Those answers have led me here after a long time of reflecting on them. I am sure I am not the only one who feels these emotions but I am the only one who can connect them in this unique way, offer them shaped and formed just so. So here I am, transcending and working through what this means. I hope that it means something to others at it unfolds.

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love, loss & longing transcending

The extraordinary power of the ordinary self

May 11, 2010

You will see under the blog title that my key theme words are ‘the extraordinary power of the ordinary self…’ These words come from a book by Marcia Westkott, ‘The Feminist Legacy of Karen Horney.’  This is an amazing book and was a life changing perspective for me many years ago, about twenty years ago now. I was given this book as a gift and the gift unfolded in reading this book at that time and still resonates today. The words above come from the last chapter, ‘From feminine type to female hero.’ It’s complex but was and remains something I intuitively understand.

‘The power of the ordinary is an idea of transcendence that is especially appropriate to the feminine type,’ (Westkott, p212) It’s about how women especially create a false personality, are not truly themselves out of a desire for approval, for what others want them to be. How they become divorced from their authentic self, devalued, angry and detached. How the audience keeps shifting and the demands for perfection are therefore without bounds.

In the end, after working through a process of learning and discovery, for me, often through tragedy and in a context of all the shifting of stable supports, there is a sense of realisation of the true power of the ordinary self and what it is capable of. It is a message essentially of self-acceptance and growing into your own skin, but with a real backbone of why this occurs:

‘Neither perfect nor contemptible, she discovers the extraordinary power of her ordinary, unique self and what is truly possible…’

I know it’s a brief summary of a complex theme but do these words resonate with you also? What do they mean to you and how can they give you strength in moving forward?

family history love, loss & longing poetry transcending writing

Welcome to ‘Transcending’

May 2, 2010

‘Transcending’ is an exploration of the ways that we rise, overcome, climb across and pass beyond.

It celebrates the extraordinary power of the ordinary self in creativity, writing, in love, in the workplace and in our family contexts, such as our family history and what it means. It is about  resilience, grief, love, loss, longing and the resonating shapes and forms we make to deal with this and move on and through. It’s about constructive approaches at work – strategies that cut through, synthesise and provide solutions. And it’s about images, structures, texts and ways of thinking that makes this possible.

This theme resonates and connects for me in all spheres of life and I hope connects and resonates with you also.

Join me in this journey as it unfolds. Some of the areas I hope to explore are:

  • writing as a way of transcending and moving through
  • my own creative journey as a writer
  • poetry and the shapes and structures we find to manage our emotions
  • music and images as vehicles for experiencing and managing feelings
  • family history and its stories of how we connect and experience life
  • constructive leadership behaviours and strategies
  • reading and reflections on transcending
  • connections with other writers and thinkers on this theme in all its guises

NOTE: This post is from my first blog Transcending which is intact within Quiet Writing (for now) as a way of showing my progress and path.

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