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Category: interesting links
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First, Know Thyself
Versions of this aphorism have been credited to numerous men of stature through the ages. Women, not so much.
It seems to me that even now, almost 20 years into the 21st century, women are still rarely encouraged to truly get to know themselves. Our knowledge of ourselves is, more often than not, received and viewed through the filter of those around us, rather than via our own perceptions and exploration based self knowledge. This results in us receiving skewed data from sources that are working from their own agenda. This agenda isn’t necessarily bad, though often it can be, regardless though, if we put more store in someone else’s ideas of who we are, the shit is going to hit the fan eventually.
This is the same principle that I talked about at length in this post about having your feelings denied, and this one where I talk about how Reiki can turn your life upside down.
I’m slowly uncovering the ways in which I’ve ingested other people’s opinions about who this person called Techla is. What I’m discovering is that pretty much every belief I’ve ever held about myself, has been founded on someone else’s
bullshitmisunderstandingprojections.I think this is pretty normal for most women – I can’t comment for men because a. I’m not one, and b. finding men who are willing to talk about these sorts of things is rather like finding rocking horse shit.
Before I started to write this post I did a google search of the title, it brought up an interesting article that suggested that the premise of the saying is not just silly, but actually dangerous. My curiosity was obviously piqued, given that my experience has been that NOT knowing myself has been dangerous!
What the author of the article (a professor of philosophy no less) was saying makes sense, in some ways, but only in so far as we accept that who we are is a static creature of habit. Their argument was that, by knowing ourselves, we will become dogmatic in our choices, limiting our freedom to grow and change over time. I can see their point here, but I would argue that by knowing ourselves, we become much more capable of growth, and where appropriate, change.
We all change over time, and we all also remain the same in some ways too. I suspect just how much we change (or not), depends rather heavily on how prepared we are (or aren’t) to …. get to know ourselves!
I suppose that if you have a life that you define as successful (however that looks to you), then the impetus to get to know yourself is unlikely to be as strong as if you’re unhappy or dissatisfied with your lot.
If, on the other hand, your life is a stinking great shit show of despair, then getting to know yourself on a deep (not superficial) level could just be your ticket out of that awful place. It’ll take a tonne of courage, there’s no two ways about it, but the potential pay off has to be worth any discomfort along the way.
What’s perhaps even more important here is this: when you get to know yourself through your own filters, you’ll be much less likely to perpetuate the cycle of judgement. That’s one of the ways in which we can heal the legacy of inter-generational trauma, and THAT is world changing.
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Poetic Problem Solving with Collage
Back in 2014 a friend reintroduced me to the joys of collage via the medium of vision pages. The premise is along the lines of a dreamboard,but using cut out words, not just images.
This was an enlightening moment for me because, even though I’m a very visual thinker, vision boards had always left me cold. But now I could shift words around on a page, and add pictures if I wanted to? Woah! And then a remembering whisked me back through the mists of time to 1987.
I had done this very thing, almost 30 years before, on the notice board of my 5th form, boarding school prison cell.
I also remembered all the scrap books I’d loved making – how had I forgotten about something that brought me so much joy?
Over the past 5 years I’ve utilised this process more and more. It’s become a kind of meditation for me. It’s helped me to home in on recurring themes, which is a big part of what lead me to the creation of The Sensory Coach.
I tend to create new pages around the time of the full and new moons each month. Sometimes I’ll just feel the urge to create a page outside of those times, if there’s something niggling away at me that I need to get out. Like journalling I suppose, except…. not!
This afternoon, as I was creating a page, I was pondering how the process works. This was connected to a question a friend had asked me a couple of days before:
‘Tell me how your idea creation process works.’
(She’s a coach, and these are the sorts of deep diving questions us coaching types love to ask.)
My response?
‘Erm… I dunno, it just sort of happens!’
Which is sort of true, but given she said she would keep me in mind as an Ideas Consultant, I figured that I should probably give this process a bit more thought. And I do love me some thinking!
Ready for a bit of Hansel and Gretel breadcrumb trail following?
I started the 100 days project at the beginning of April, having chosen the loose theme of Sensory Soul Art. It sounds a bit pretentious given I’m not an artist, but the container gave me scope to explore, and it’s been another enlightening process.
Last week I watched a documentary on Netflix called The Creative Brain, which gave me inspiration for this piece of art play.
When I was writing up the caption for it on instagram I said:
‘…The ways in which seemingly disparate input can form connections over time seems, to me, a bit like Ready, Steady, Cook! (Anyone remember that programme?) You start off with a bag of random items and have to create a dish or two that brings them all together.’
This afternoon, as I was cutting out appealing words and phrases from magazines – keeping the left brain occupied so that the right brain was able to come online to free associate (or as Daniel Pink puts it: ‘The left hemisphere analyses the details; the right hemisphere synthesises the big picture.’) – these rememberings were sifted to the front of my awareness:
- Me and my dear friend, Lisa, playing with magnetic poetry whilst waiting for an appointment with The Emergency Poet.
- Playing on the CSI game and using the lab assembly table to piece bits of evidence together.
- The book A Discovery of Witches in which the main character, Diana, problem solves by imagining all the elements of the problem as puzzle pieces on a white table. She waits for them to rearrange themselves so that she can see the whole picture – she later discovers that this is one form her magic (as a witch) takes.
- References from the book Refuse to Choose about ‘scanners’ – a term the author uses to describe people like me who love learning more than knowing.
- The knowledge that movement helps to promote mental activity, leading to faster cognitive processing.
Me and Lisa, 2 years ago, playing with magnetic poetry These recollections prompted me to consider some things about myself:
- I’m a collector (some might use the term hoarder) of things, ideas, experiences, memories, information, random junk!
- I thrive in visually busy spaces – not busy with movement or sound though, that’s exhausting.
- I have a ridiculously retentive memory.
- I’m a voracious reader.
- I’m a listener.
I appreciate that there are a lot of words here. This is one of the things that puts me off blogging, because all of that up there, took moments to whizz across my brain and form into the completed puzzle. Trying to type it up into a piece of writing that makes sense however…. hours!
But the way my brain works has value. A value I’ve really not appreciated for most of my life, which has been a shocking waste of my abilities frankly. It’s about time I started to vocalise my strengths, and demonstrate the level of background work that goes into this ‘just sort of happens’ process.
The collection of cuttings I started with 
The finished piece
My friend Kate told me that marketing is like painting and decorating: there’s an awful lot of preparation work involved that you don’t see. It’s the same with my idea generating process. It’s a culmination of every sight, sound, smell, taste, touch I’ve experienced in my life, colliding with the information that you’re giving me, when you’re asking for my input. As was said in the netflix documentary:
‘Creativity doesn’t mean inventing something out of nothing, instead it’s about refashioning what already exists.’
David EaglemanThe creation of a vision page is a tangible demonstration of how my idea generation process happens.
The words and images that stir your senses will be particular to you, how you arrange them will be a result of your very personal thought processes and associations. That’s why moving pieces of cut out paper around is a worthwhile use of time. It’s how you create poetry like this piece I came up with earlier today:
everyone deserves a
wild love
held in softness
adorned in perfumeThat’s how you can solve problems, work out what your underlying passions are, and just have a bit of fun with glue and paper, like you did when you were a child.
Give it a go and let me know how you get on. If you want some guidance, then might I point you in the direction of my friend Angela? She’s running a programme on Patreon called Resonance, where she’ll be teaching her process.
I must apologise for the dreadful formatting, I just can’t get to grips with the new wordpress block system.
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The Power of Story
What is the power of story? Let me take you on a little journey to explore some of the ways it shows itself.
Who doesn’t love a good story? Our world is built on them; countless billions have been poured into creating stories on screen, with actors as the modern day bards, casting a spell over us as we watch, enthralled as their weave their tales in this modern medium.
The bards of old were magicians of the mind. Through the tools of their trade they could take their audiences out of time and space, just as modern day films do. But, the action happened in our minds eye, not across a giant screen. Each member of their captive audience would have seen, heard, smelt, felt and perhaps even tasted, a slightly different scenario as the tales unfolded, everyone adding their own unique spin.
Storytelling is in the midst of a renaissance as evidenced by festivals such as Settle Stories (my much loved, local, award winning treasure trove of stories). Not only are there festivals, all over the country storytelling clubs are popping up – social gatherings where you can go to listen to stories and share your own carefully crafted tales, honing your skills in front of a live audience.
We each have our own stories: what else is life if not a collection of tales bound together in the bindings of our flesh? Our stories are written in our bodies; often visible on our skin, hidden in the depths of our DNA. We carry our family stories with us there too: strange, mysterious, hidden stories, ones that we’re not necessarily aware of on a conscious level, but which form part of our psyche, and our genetic inheritance,nonetheless.
When we reach a certain age, these ancestral stories take on a greater importance. Sadly, we tend not to develop this desire to learn more until after the story keepers have shuffled off this mortal coil. We’re left to leaf through dusty old documents, and if we’re lucky, annotated photos, hoping to gather a sense of the lives they lived before we knew them as Mum, Dad, Grandma, Grandad, Aunty, Uncle.
Of course nowadays we have access to geneaology websites, which is a far less sneeze inducing way of going through old documents! They can be frustrating though as trails can end thanks to a typo, or worse, due to lost or none existent documents which could have given you a greater insight into aspects of an ancestor’s life. We’re left to fill in the imagined details; joining dots that may create an idea of a life that looks quite different from the one that was really lived.
But does it matter? Isn’t the beauty of a story what we ourselves take from it?
I’m an avider reader. Last year, having come late to the Outlander series, I ate the entire collection of books. As gloriously satisfying to the eyes as Jamie …. I mean, the series… is, the books, as they so often do, took the stories to a whole other level. It was one of the characters , Mr Willoughby, who inspired this post in the form of this quote:
‘A story told is a life lived. Once I tell it I have to let it go.’
Just sit with that for a little while, see what it brings up for you.
Once we share our own stories they start to lose their power over us. The act of speaking, or writing them, transfers them to another dimension. A dimension in which they gain another kind of power: the power to heal, not only ourselves, but others.
Until really quite recently, our individual stories have been kept locked within us. We rarely heard tales of the ordinary man, and less so the ordinary woman. Only the great and the (not necessarily) good were on offer to us in the form of memoirs and autobiographies. No wonder, as Plato said:
Those who tell the stories rule society.
Perhaps this is one reason why so many ‘ordinary’ people believe that their own stories hold no value.
Each person’s story has value! None of us have lived someone else’s life – we may have had similar experiences on the face of it, but we all bring our own perspective to bear on what happens to us.
To bring this back to a sensory perspective for a moment, we each have our own unique take on the world – we very literally see things differently to the person standing next to us, no matter that we may be looking at the same scene. We see, hear, smell, taste and feel our experiences through our own unique filters of perception. These are then all woven through the collection of memories we have stored in our minds and our cells, adding a splash of colour, or an underlying darkness to our life tapestry. Our stories are held in our DNA, waiting to be passed on to the next generation, or tied off if the thread ends with us.
Collectively there might be an overarching consensus, but that just means that the people who could shout loudest got to tell it their way. Other voices are often drowned out; their stories go untold or unheard. But what if the perspectives the quiet ones bring to the mix tell an entirely different story? One that has the power to change minds, to heal and make lives better?
One of the greatest gifts stories can offer is in their power to humanise the other. Our world is in flux right now, and stories are helping to create much needed change. The #metoo campaign took what was the story of many (most?) women, and refused to allow it to be drowned out by the overarching consensus. The collective ‘ME TOO!’ made people sit up and listen to stories that were shocking, but unfortunately oh so very ordinary. Stories help us to develop empathy. This, to me, is the super power of story.
As Umberto Eco so perfectly summed up:
The person who doesn’t read lives only one life. The reader lives 5000. Reading is immortality backwards.
I believe that goes for those who listen to stories too.
Every business guru worth their salt is trying to get across the power of story to businesses big and small. They understand the power of story to connect us. Story can enchant the mundane, and in the hands of a master wordsmith, can cast a glamour that draws us in, parting us from our hard earned cash, often ending in dashed hopes, and a reduced bank balance! Story requires then that we become discerning.
When we learn to listen carefully to story, we develop an ear for the subtext, the underlying rhythm. We learn to spot if we’re been taken down a path that isn’t quite what it seems. With experience we can learn to identify the wolf dressed up as granny, the beast who is really a prince. Some of the time at least for there are always plot twists that none of us saw coming! There will always be the beguiling tale that tricks us, leaving us feeling foolish for having fallen for such pretty deceptions. Stories can be tricksters.
More and more I’m noticing a trend for what are described as immersive experiences. It seems that our modern mind wants bigger and better ways of being taken out of ourselves. Whilst these sorts of experiences look very exciting, and are something I too seek to offer, be that through the Halloween parties I used to hold, my chocolate, drumming workshops or sensory work, you don’t need all the bells and whistles for a truly immersive experience, you just need a good story teller –though a crackling fire and darkness help enormously!
Stories are magical – they teleport us to places beyond time and space – I’m all about the magic! But that’s a story for another time.
Stories always come to an end. That ending may leave us feeling deeply satisfied or heartbreakingly bereft. We might hold off from reading the final book in a series because we don’t want it to end. We might beg a storyteller for ‘just one more’.
Stories keep us curious, they teach us about the world, but more importantly, they teach us about ourselves.
Stories can give us hope when we thought it had deserted us. They can give us a reason to go on, to live another day.
Stories save lives.
As the semi colon project says:
A semi colon is used when an author could’ve chosen to end their sentence, but chose not to. The author is you and the sentence is your life.
A story cut short is a tragedy for us all.
The world needs more stories, please tell yours, you don’t know who needs to hear it.
That is the power of story.
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If you would like to have this post read to you, just click play on the video below – I couldn’t fathom out how to edit just audio without paying a load of money for an editing app, so you’ve got a video of the shadows on my gong to accompany it! Also… yes, I said geneology not genealogy – red face!
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Hundred Year Old Squirrel Medicine
Squirrel medicine wasn’t even remotely on my radar, but life has a funny way of spiraling around to make sure you’ve got the message. Take this weekend as a for instance…
It was the 100th anniversary of my Grandad’s birth, sadly he died nearly 32 years ago, but the anniversary felt important to me nonetheless.
In all honesty, it wasn’t until the theme of ancestors started playing in the background of my mind, and coming out in my collage work, that the anniversary entered my consciousness.
I’d promised a newly discovered American cousin that I’d send photos of the gravestone of my Great- Grandfather, to help her with her genealogy research. My Grandma was an Irish immigrant, and when her father died whilst working over here, she and my Grandad bought a triple decker burial plot. When I took the promised photo, I noticed the approaching anniversary; it unleashed lots of memories – my Grandad was my favourite person in the whole world – he was my childhood champion and I knew I had to do something to mark that.
As it happened, I couldn’t get to the grave on the actual date, so I visited at the weekend. I took a very simple spray of rosemary (for remembrance) with a piece of Yorkshire lavender (to celebrate our proud Yorkshire roots). It smelled amazing!
The plot that my grandparents are buried in sits beneath a beautiful copper beech tree. I’ve long loved the idea of a woodland burial myself – the idea that the substance of my body could feed a tree, well it gives me a deep sense of comfort. At some point I’d heard the story of Roger Williams, the man who was ‘eaten by a tree’! Rather than being appalled, I was completely enthralled by the thought of this beautiful circle of life. I’d planted my youngest daughter’s placenta under an apple tree so to be buried under a tree feels like part of the same life giving ritual.
With all of these thoughts running through my mind, hugging the tree – bloody hippy that I am – suddenly took on a whole new meaning.
Well, it’s a good job it was typical bank holiday weather – persistently precipitating (aka pissing it down) and no one else was visiting the cemetery, because I stood on ‘my’ roots, hugged that tree, and cried my eyes out! If you’ve never really, truly hugged a tree, give it a go – don’t do it half heartedly, really go for it. Feel the bark against your cheek, the solidness of the trunk against your body, be quiet and listen in – to what’s going on around and within you. You’ll walk away feeling amazing (ok, you might feel a bit daft too, but so what?).
As I leaned into the tree I knew I was alone, but a sudden rustling brought me back into awareness of my surroundings.
No, there was definitely no one else around.
There it was again.
I looked up, just in time to spot two squirrels, who I’d obviously disturbed from their beech nut collecting, leaping across to the next tree.
I watched, as they ran down the trunk, freezing, one on either side, checking out their surroundings – I’m not going to lie, I had the mission impossible music playing in my head at this point! I whipped out my phone and grabbed a quick video before they ran off across the gravestones. It really lightened the mood!
I was meeting my friend for a brew after I’d seen the grandparents, and of course I told her about the squirrels. Her immediate question was:
‘Have you looked to see what squirrel medicine is about?’
No, I hadn’t. Once we were settled in the cafe, she had a google. Low and behold squirrels are telling you to bring more play into your life. This was really rather appropriate as life has been quite heavy of late, plus, one of the things that my grandad had impressed upon me, was to make sure I enjoyed life and had fun. It was a bit of a goosebumpy moment, but y’know, not massively so. Except that it didn’t end there.
This friend of mine does a weekly oracle card reading for her facebook tribe, that day she did it live from the cafe. She pulled me a card. No, it wasn’t a squirrel, but it was an angel card with the instruction to play. Uh huh. Time to listen then Tech.
One of the things that made my Grandad really special was his ditty writing – he’d write little verses, often in Yorkshire dialect. Way back in the 80s after Prince William was born, we sent a copy of one of his masterpieces to ‘Buck House’, others were written out on beautiful calligraphy scrolls by my cousin and sold at craft fairs. He used them to express his political views, to thank people, to send birthday wishes, and to poke fun – often at his own expense. He was crippled with rheumatoid arthritis and very limited in his movement, so his writing gave him something to occupy his time and keep his mind active.
Last year my dad gave me a CD filled with photos of grandad’s ditties. Unfortunately many of them are indecipherable as, ironically, they were written before the arthritis had turned his hands to claws. As the disease progressed, he resorted to using marker pens and writing in capital letters, thus making reading his writing a doddle! As I was going through all the images I came across one that really stood out, as it was written in bright green script.
I was looking at them on the laptop and had to turn my head on its side to read the first part, which had my children looking at me like I’d lost the plot, more so when I started laughing. When I read the ditty out loud my son said:
‘Your Grandad was a bit crackers wasn’t he?’
Yep, he absolutely was, and I bloody love him for it.
What was the ditty? For your delight and delectation here it is….
One day when walking through the woods, a squirrel scurried by.
It scampered up a great big tree and looked at me from high.
It threw a conker down at me and hit me on the head.
Thank god it was no coconut, I could have been quite dead.
Instead the conker split in half, the kernel was laid bare.
The squirrel scampered down and cried: “thank you for standing there!!
I would have had to toil and sweat to get into the nut.
In fact I could have gnawed all day to get a nasty cut
and could have cracked my two front teeth to make all eating tough.
So please! Come walking every day for I’ll watch out for you,
but don’t forget, and take a tip – bring your tin helmet too!”
GBC – or as I like to think of him: The Yorkshire Bard
And there you have it, a funny old spiraling around of squirrels and playfulness. I couldn’t think of a more appropriate way to mark the 100th anniversary of the life of the man I got to call Grandad, than with a bit of nutty squirrel medicine!