This was one of the assignments from the group coaching course I participated in from September 2018 to March 2019. The course was called ‘Emerging Voices’, hence the title of the article and the references to emerging within the article.
I’ve been reflecting on today’s session and wanted to put words down as I work through the feedback.
I feel like I’ve come full circle. While I have much less thinking about what I write and what I put out into the world, I’m still guarded and there is still more self-indulgent thinking to let go.
Surprisingly there wasn’t a lot that either hadn’t been said to me before, or that I had figured out for myself but hadn’t done anything with.
My partner had said on any number of occasions “if you could see yourself how others see you”. That comment might fit with all of us. We armour up in the false belief that we’re protecting ourselves from being hurt, but all we’re ever doing is holding in place a fragile ego that can never have enough protection, never be fed enough of anything in the quest to feel good, feel safe and protected.
When do you embrace fully who you are, part human part spirit? part masculine, part feminine?
In just the last few days, I’d even asked myself the question,” when do you let the people you work with know about their own Divinity?” once they’ve got the basics or never?
Or maybe it’s more like I thought I’d done something with it, and I was sharing authentically, but deep down I was only playing it lip service. Telling myself I’d made the shift while putting on my armour when the pen comes out.
Emerging in a ‘steady as she goes’, ‘by the numbers’ format, that will ensure no one is too shocked by what comes forth from my pen, my mouth, or in this case, my keyboard.
It may seem like a dichotomy, but I really did love playing Rugby.
If you’re ever had the thrill of putting your head and shoulders into a scrum and combining with 7 other guys from your team to push against the opposing teams’ scrum, you’ll have a sense of what I’m talking about.
It’s not just that battle of strength and of will power.
Of who will give way first.
Or whether I can play as close to the edge of the rules as possible to gain advantage without getting caught.
And turning 8 minds and 8 bodies into one, so when the ball gets fed into the scrum the power come through you, as a unit to dominate the opposition.
But the thing that really hooked me in, was being present. You cannot put yourself in that physical position without being fully present in your body and not risk serious injury. I’m talking about a broken neck here. It’s not happened to me, but it has happened. The worst I’ve come away with is a 5-inch tear in the supraspinatus tendon (the one that goes across the top of your shoulder), which required surgery and still gives me trouble to this day.
I liked being a soldier as well, I just hated the being stuffed around, and the problem with the military, is they’re experts at stuffing people around. For some people it’s a power trip, and other times people just do it to waste time because they have nothing better to do with you.
If you asked me what I most liked it would be easy. The parade ground and shooting.
I love the precision of well executed foot drill. Of moving a body of troops from one place to the other, all in unison, all in step. There is work involved in building that team and ensuring the intricate movements are carried out as one.
But it’s not just the physical movements, but the attention to detail that goes into dress. Pressed uniforms, ensuring the line of the zipper on your trousers is in line with the buttons on your shirt and that the front of your shirt is flat, no creases. The hours spent spit polishing once dull boots into a deep mirror-like gloss, only so you can march around in them, scuff them up and do it all again.
And shooting was just me, the rifle and the target. When I was shooting well, I had little on my mind and found peace in the process. I never fired a shot in anger, but there was something to always challenging myself to improve that drew me in.
Oh, and I like beer too, I just don’t drink as much as I used to these days because I don’t like feeling like crap and I’ve got things to do that don’t involve me sitting around feeling bad while I recover.
Contrast all those ‘masculine’ actions with the deep realisation I had in a moment of insight ‘Before thought is the only perfection. Somewhere before thought, you’re already everything you want to be.’ None of us are broken and none of us need fixing. Even as I write this, I sense that, ‘but for our thinking, we’d feel all the love we’d ever need’. It brings tears to my eyes just to write that.
I just goes to show we’re not fixed in a perpetual state of being one thing or another, masculine or feminine, human or spirit, we’re a melting pot of all, changing moment to moment as thinking waxes and wanes.
I do see a theme emerging. Oneness and the unbroken connection to all that is.
I wrote earlier about being guarded. The irony is the most impactful conversations I have are ones where there is no guard. We go deep, we invite God into the conversation and then let it show up and show us the way forward.
Some people may think we’re just talking rubbish, that we’ve even lost our minds, but for me, the more I’ve looked inwards to the nature of who I am, the quieter my mind has got and the easier it has been for me to navigate through life.
I’m convinced these conversations we all share are always a joint learning session. There may be a coach and the person being coached, but really, God is showing us both the way forward. Closer in our relationship to our humanity and closer in our relationship to source.
I want God to expose himself to me in all his glory so that I know God as God want me to know him, no secrets, no airs and graces, just purity in whatever form that takes.
So where to from here? I could say tongue in cheek, ‘God only knows’, and I’d be right, not because the Allness knows everything, but because if I get out of the hotseat and let the wisdom guide me like I have allowed it to guide other conversations, I might just have a fighting chance of emerging gracefully.
