Tag: Collective Futures

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Innerscapes

kimberleen

IMG-5738Yup, it’s a new word. Innerscapes. Not sure if I made it up or appropriated it, either way, it was out there in the either and I grabbed it. Several years ago during a conversation with a friend when we were having one of those deep down and dangerous shares about how we really felt. When we cast aside the sunshine and rainbows and where we found our hearts and souls alone in a room. That’s the innerscape. It’s the canvas of emotions on which we build our lives. Let me tell you there are some beautiful interpretations of the human mood board on show for all of us to explore.

What I can say and let me use my own innerscape as en example here is that over the years is that my innerscape has transformed like the outerscape has looking out a train window. That depending on where or how you are sitting, and who you are sharing the journey with can radically alter your experieince. My own innerscape used to be painted with terror, despair, helplessness, sorrow and on better day mild melancholia. Only ten years on I frequently swim in elated, dance with happiness and delight in delightful. You see the words we say emit the feeling and now my innerscape seems to be underplayed by neutrality and curiosity rather than anything slightly more sinister. Of course, hurts rear their head from time to time and the pain and suffering are real. I no longer live there, those feeling are an interesting side trip on my life odyssey that added a little more adventure.

Innerscape to me can be experienced over time. Over a day, a week, a month, a year, decades of even life times. Small units of time are the building block of the innerscape. I know it’s epic. So how you feel on a day to day basis is going to underpin the landscape of your lifetime story.

From tired in the morning to invigorated in the afternoon. If we can write it down maybe we can begin to figure out the arc of the story. What’s draging us down or raising us up? What can be witnessed and changed? Loved into form or even nurtured into beauty. How we respond to the way that we feel tells us all we need to know about our relationship with ourselves. That if we can speak kindly, extend a compassionate outlook then maybe we can learn to accept what is. Extend the concept of gratitude and see where our emotions are guiding us. That sometimes our emotions are guiding us into the darkness and that is ok too.

 

If you want to discover more about your own Innerscape you can buy and download the Innerscapes Worksheet below. It’s $3.



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Your Life Wheel Sign up

kimberleen

IMG-4776From a young age, I have always considered my life to be a circle that I operate from the centre of. This has informed a lot of what I do and how I behave in the world. Even before I became a Life Coach. You can imagine my delight and surprise that when I started out on my coaching journey, that one of the first tools that I came across was something called a coaching wheel. Coaching wheels help people learn and assess what is happening in their life. That by assessing your life as a circle can allow you to get an incredible overview of what was actually going on in your psyche.

If we are able to look outwards we are able to see what we have manifested. We get to decide if the picture we have created for ourselves matches our inward view. If there are things that lie in our hearts and minds that have failed to flow into existence. We need to ask ourselves why? What would it take to change that? Do I want to change that? Am I at the centre of a circle that I like?

It’s at this point we start to journey inwards. We are able to question ourselves. Question our thoughts, our words our actions. We consider what we want to flow. Then think about all those emails that you send. The things that you make tangible though all the communications that you make. You may be reading this and thinking. So what’s your point? That’s obvious. Yes, it’s obvious we make magic every single day by the things we think about, the things we communicate and the things we act on. It’s the winning combination. Why thinking is important. Why the intention setting is powerful. Why action creates change. Learning that we are the centre of that change. That what we create ripples outwards.

Over the years pens and paper have come to fascinate me as I understand that they create their own brand of magic. Whether it’s being able to fluidly channel your thoughts through writing clearing your head and heart to hear the language of your soul. Creating lists of manifestation. Who do I want to be? What do I want to do? What skills do I want to share? It’s a little bit crazy that marks on paper can totally alter the trajectory of your life. That the words we write cast spells that make the wheel of fortune spin in our favour.

So get yourself to the website and sign up for Your Life Wheel.

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Systemic Trauma, Love, Nurturance and Succour

kimberleen

F9614607-8E5A-42AB-AE92-DF6FB8AF6284I keep going on about how the last 2 years have brought forth radical transformation in my life. Without telling you what is going on. Nor am I going to share here and there is a reason for this. Sharing isn’t always safe and it’s a privilege to hear my story, it’s going to be gritty and chewy and eyewatering when we get there, and still, I’m not there. I’m not ready to share and you know what that is totally ok.

In the meantime what I am truly finding out is how hard it is to actually share who you are and that people shouldn’t feel entitled to all of you. Yet they do. Like in my previous blog post when I talked about basically being utilised to do the admin work for community activism when it would have been far more beneficial to be put to work doing what I actually do.  Which is healing trauma.

I can’t even begin to tell you how long it’s taken me to get here to the whole trauma thing. It’s an origin story of note, that probably started ten years ago. That started with a friend of mine called Cait where we sadly concluded that more people were suffering from trauma than we might even be able to identify. That back then we had no idea how we might tackle the epidemic. That we didn’t know what all the answers were. All we knew really was that people were suffering, even ourselves. We knew that symptoms of trauma tended to isolate people and that most people had no clue what to do when their friends and family were in crisis. That we were more likely to ostracise them for their behaviour, rather than include them out of love. That diagnosis was woefully unable to define the true human story behind the tears, the tantrums, the self-medicating, and the withdrawal. That even Eeyore deserved to be invited to the party. Yet what if the symptoms were more pernicious? What if the behaviours were more troublesome and asked people to question everything that we knew and understood? That the school systems was fucked and equated to child abuse. The corporate working world was nothing more than wage slavery, that made us complicit in a planetary tragedy. That governance was built on nothing more the imaginary lines in the sand and maximised on the idea of human separateness. That modern medicine was looking to kill us. That communities were deliberately under threat from the sickness of greed. That it all felt vapid and soulless and no one had the depth of character or will to dive into another’s pain, because they were totally unable to face their own.

Yet here I am tens years on and I’ve garnered some answers, secure attachment, trust, nurturance, time, and the old fashioned idea of succour. Succour, we even have a word for it, long since forgotten. We know how to heal ourselves, it all boils down to human connection, inclusiveness and of course love.

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Emulating The Rainbow Nation

kimberleen

IMG-2450I fucking swear this post is hard to write. When this external landscape becomes an emotional environment. Maybe because I’m about to break through the eco-warrior sound barrier like a fucking boss (who doesn’t actually want any power). For fuck sake, how is exactly you go about proclaiming your non-whiteness when you are in fact white? Whatever the fuck that might that look like? Having thought about that for a bit……The horrific truth of that, is, being Scottish who was surrounded by people growing up that wanted to be tanned. It looks a lot like Trump. That’s given me a chuckle.

Sitting here in the Rainbow Nation that I’m actually trying to figure out if your skin colour should preclude you from contributing to conversations regarding equality? It’s a discussion that has nothing to do with my South African experience of course. It is one that has been presented to me online. Where my main theme over the last few days has been that words matter. Everyone is valuable. Which is deeply embedded in my own personal work.

I’d also really appreciate it if someone could just send me all the quotes about the overriding power of love to be found in The Bible, The Quaran, The Tora or any other religious or spiritual text. So that I no longer have to scramble for the words that unite us.

Social Media algorithms shelter me from the far right, a lot of Muslims and probably even more Christians, as well as a lot of people of colour. Controversially, I choose my friends because I like them, share interests with them, and enjoy their online content. Yup being alive is awkward uncomfortable and at times painful. Should politically correctness dictate how  I live my private life? Should I curate my social group on the basis of being representative. I invited you to the Braii because I really needed someone of your ethnicity to make up the group. Braaing in and of itself is a controversial act with regard to our collective futures, should you want to bring food politics to the party.  I’m personally having a hard time navigating it all. Internally and externally I am doing my best to figure it out. Step in Marie Forleo where everything is figureoutable.

I lose my cool and if I was feeling safer maybe I’d share some of my worst moments and why, or even the very long journey to the conclusion that only love is the answer. I struggle with that too. I struggle with Englishness, the class divide, inequality, The Union Jack, The Union Jack as my flag, austerity, (I’ve managed to get over the Tories and Margaret Thatcher, except when someone is totally ignorant to their motives, that’s something to add) ignorance, my whiteness, bloodline trauma, other people’s trauma, my own divisiveness, my own outbursts. While waiting for Brexit outcomes. All this when I’m doing all the work I can to be tolerant, inclusive, sensitive, aware, responsive (I’m not necessarily a believer in the idea of calm). All emotions are valid, everything can be rationalised.  The deeper truths live in the ever-increasing work of getting to understand ourselves better. Loving ourselves better. Getting deep down in the awkwardness of our own being. You are the cause of your own discomfort. The occasional emotional health novice that thought hurting/killing you would help them feel slightly less terrified. If that doesn’t do it there is always a Cyclone to put things into perspective. Acts of God, Climate Change and all that. If you believe in them.