My 1st list of favourite things

1. James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code. It’s very deep and I need small doses of it to digest and it’s full of my favourite thing – wisdom.

2. Mulberry silk-filled comforter – amazing. Just the right temperature, no bunching, no hot or cold spots. Just a wonderful sleep experience.

3. Keeping on the them of a good night’s sleep, my favourite pillow is the Zensation Pillow. We have them in the guest bedroom too and all the guests always ask about the pillow. That says something.

4. My inner child died and went to heaven when Daniel got me The Mermaid’s Treasure as a birthday present. If you love mermaids, this is a fabulous book. I personally think my inner child appreciated it more than I could have as an actual child. Just my opinion though.

5. I’m in love with the stainless steel water bottles (the 750ml – perfect size – not to small, not too big) from EarthLust. I love the size, design and the mouth opening is also the perfect size. They come is classy colours with some really cool nature silhouettes and pictures on them.

6. If you have a dog the FURminator is the best investment. Gentle strokes and you’ll be amazed. If you wanted to knit with the pet hair, this will get you your knitting stash quicker. I don’t personally intend on doing this by the way, but I know that people do.

7. Yummy home-made pizza toppings – try this: pesto on an unbaked thin-ish crust topped with a big handful of coarsely chopped arugula, sauteed mushrooms, crumbled pancetta (bake in the oven for 5-7 minutes for crispy goodness) and finely grated parm cheese. Bake on a 400 degree oven for 10-14 minutes. Sprinkle with some extra chopped up arugula and serve after letting it sit for a few minutes (pizza cutting tip: cut pizzas with scissors – way easier!).

8. Kiehl’s Midnight Recovery Concentrate is a wonderful bedtime ritual. Just 2-3 drops on clean skin before bed. I don’t know what happens overnight, but my skin feels well-hydrated, so soft and it smells so nice (gentle lavender).

9. Le Palais Des Thes makes and incredible tea called the des sables that can be ordered online. It was inspired by a trip to Morocco (a beautiful country with beautiful people if you were every considering a trip) . It is flavoured with the famous Damas rose in addition to the other aromas in the tea which delight my senses.

10. If I were stuck on a desert island and I could have one product with me, I always need a great lip balm on hand. My absolute favourite is from John Master’s Organics and it’s called Lip Calm. Just the right amount of shine (just a hint) and a lovely texture and scent.

The princess of permission

So, there’s an interesting story about Sonnet’s “head gear”. It’s not her tiara, it’s mine.

Last year my mother-in-law (to be one day) – Carole, and I went shopping in downtown Vancouver. So we’re in Dressew and they have everything you need to sew as well as an assortment of discontinued yarn and knitting books. We’re totally engrossed. I think I picked up a couple of Rowan knitting books for a few dollars each – which was a total score. We were paying at the register and the woman at the till was very monotone in her presence which she checked out our items.

Carole suddenly says to me, “Oh Sabrina – look at the tiaras!” Then suddenly the woman with the monotone presence comes to life (I love it when that happens – it’s like someone said the magic words)! She starts telling us how her daughter has a bunch of them and that they give her a new one every few years for her birthday, how great they are to wear when you’re cleaning the house and want to make it fun and how her daughter wears one whenever she’s going to sit down and write a paper for a class at university. Carole and I thought that was a grand idea and started to try on the tiaras. It had never occurred to me to just wear one any ol’ time I felt like it. I thought I needed a reason outside of myself. It never occurred to me before to give myself a reason. I am after all the most influential person in my life. Aren’t we all?

Well, Carole bought one for me as a gift and one for herself also as a gift. I drove home with it on, which just felt fun (my valid reason). I had inklings at the time of writing more habitually as a creative habit, but wasn’t fully committed to the idea. I never knew what a ‘thinking cap’ could look like, but I decided that this was mine. The weird thing was that whenever I thought about writing something (anything at all) and found myself in resistance, I would put the tiara on and write. This tiara was obviously anointed with magical powers. And so it is. Whenever I needed to write, on it went.

The physical object created some space in my mind somehow or perhaps it was a ritual or the inner permission to be okay with whatever I was writing. Sonnet and I practiced with a tea towel on her head for about a week and then she accepted the tiara. I call her my writing dog because of her supportive ear when I’m working through a concept and because of her name! So her wearing the tiara just made a lot of dog-gone sense. I love this photo!

A quote on love

To love a person is to learn the song in someone’s heart and singing it back to them when they forget. – Unknown

Work out of obligation? Or working out of love?

From David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea:

” ‘You must have a place … to which you can go, in your own heart, your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not know what you owe anyone or what anyone owes you. You must have a place you can go to where you do not know what your work is or who you work for, where you do not know who you are married to or who your children are.’ Hearing this, our first reaction is to believe we are being pushed toward a form of self-absorption, but [Joseph] Campbell’s point is that most of us carry responsibility in a very selfish way, as a burden, a weight, something that diminishes us and makes us resentful of those for whom we are responsible. Campbell asks us to look for the part of us that is not beholden, that stands outside our normal structures, particularly the structures of work that can lie on us so heavily, that take so much energy to carry, and that can break the blossoming fragility of anything new and promising.

To find the roots of our responsibilities, we must go to the roots of our abilities, a journey into a core sense of ourselves where we can put together an understanding of how we are made, why we have the responsibilities we have, and, just as important, the images that formed us in our growing.” p. 157

If there were ever words that articulate for me what I help others to do, it is this. Thank you David for writing such a stunning and poetic book about work.

A good reminder of how we can’t do it wrong

May today there be peace within.

May you trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be.

May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith in yourself and others.

May you use the gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you.

May you be content with yourself just the way you are.

Let this knowledge settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each and every one of us.

- Unknown

Conflict to creation

Dance with adversity.

A truth

You are equipped to adapt.

About a Significant Other

A thought I picked up from Rebecca Walker’s “Baby Love” that tickled a very meaningful part of my soul.

“The most significant obstacle I faced to joining the club of the deeply, truly committed was my complete and utter ignorance of the importance of partner choice. I simply did not understand the necessity of intellectual compatibility and, even more important, emotional reciprocity in relationship. I now believe that there should come a time in every young woman’s life when a more experienced loved on explains this absolute key point. It’s not about marrying for love or money, it’s about partnering for sanity, survivability, and the calculable probability that together the two of you will create something more gorgeous and powerful than you ever could alone.” – R. Walker

And in another book I’m reading called “The Four Agreements” the author also writes about partnership saying that we often get into a relationship and desire to change the one we’re with. His advice is to find someone that you don’t want to change, that neither wants to change you. You’re just glad that you are the way you are. What keeps us from doing this is the belief in scarcity. Love is abundance ….

Are we there yet?

The question typically conjures up images of kids in the backseat wearing on the patience of their parents … but I know us grown ups ask this all the time without realizing it. I made a friend one day and instantly knew that we were friends.  But I couldn’t allow myself to acknowledge that she was my friend and so didn’t include her on a birthday guest list for my closest girlfriends nor did she appear on the wedding guest list (for the time that I didn’t get married) … why? Because not enough time had passed by.

I didn’t want to admit that we were “there” … I told myself that because we had so recently met that we couldn’t both possibly feel like “two peas in a pod” in our friendship. In fact, I thought that I was a little on the “crazy” side for this affinity so soon in our relationship. Closeness took time, I told myself. However, I did keep friends on those lists that I had known for “long enough” and some that perhaps I’d known “too long” as our openness had diminished and I couldn’t rationalize in my mind this affection for someone I’d met so close to such significant events in my life. She was nonetheless extremely supportive and good to me throughout the whole thing. Our friendship grew and developed and then …. I met another one! Another person that I couldn’t believe that I had known for so brief a period.

It was at a course. On the last day, we hugged and I just started to cry. I felt that “peas in a pod” thing again for him. Only this time, when that feeling of “are we there yet?” came to mind, I went straight through it and invited this man and his wife to have dinner with my boyfriend, his parents and I. He said yes. And I was thrilled. We were there.

After that moment of overcoming “are we there yet” for the first time, I told my first friend what would have felt like the right thing to do when we had first met. I wanted her to be at my birthday and my wedding list and I explained what I was thinking that prevented me from doing what I knew I wanted to. She was gracious and kind and loving about the whole thing. It wasn’t the same as having her presence at these events past, but it felt pretty darn close to tell her this and to let her know how much she means to me.

It then kind of clicked that this doesn’t happen for me with everyone that I meet, so I’ll just trust this feeling of affinity. It seems to know something that I don’t. It seems to be more intelligent than my brains alone. Thank goodness.

My Element …

Ten days of simply being in my element has given me cause to pause. The ‘element’, as Sir Ken Robinson describes it,  is a  space unique to you where the concept of time disappears and where you are essentially fed energy through what you are doing. I have met many who know what this space is, and watched the prevention of their gifts and talents through social conditioning which is then perpetuated by self conditioning. It seems to carry the social stigma of not looking very serious or important.

I entered into the certification process for the Implicit Career Search (ICS) eleven days ago now. For ten days, I trained with Steve Miller and three other career mavens – all so unique and perfectly suited to their purpose in their own right. The days were long … I woke up at 6 o’clock in the morning and returned home after the training at about 7.30 in the evening with energy to spare. I wasn’t quite sure where the time had gone. When I went to bed, it was to arise with a feeling that my sleep was replenishing and I would awake feeling refreshed and ready for more. I’ve had moments of this or even experienced a day of this. Ten days felt like a long time to experience this feeling and this freedom. It took me by surprise.

The days were full of activity … no breaks that were separate to the work that we were doing and no conversation had nothing to do with what we were working on as a team. The morning coaching sessions were an hour, then we would grapple with the material to prepare for presentations of the modules in the afternoon to deepen our understanding. All of us had taken this program at the North Shore Compass prior, but even so, it was the group synergy and level of “vulner-ability” (the ability to be vulnerable courtesy of Trevor from the group) that made the instructor learning feel brand new. The amazing thing about this program is that the coaches and trainers have been in the emotional and spiritual “places” that we ask clients to delve.

I felt inspired to be there, which is good because when I first took the Implicit Career Search as a participant, I made a promise to myself that I felt was really important to me. That promise was: no more school for me. I’m very much a part of the community in higher education and I often felt “pressure” – from myself and from the questions of peers and colleagues about furthering my own education. And believe me, I LOVE learning and being in a constant state of learning – but for very particular things and for very particular reasons . I could not find or think of something that interested me enough, that was collaborative enough, that was engaging enough for me to pursue more education for and the only “good reason” that came to mind was to be eligible for certain jobs that I “sensed” weren’t going to mean that that investment was worth my while (translation: I knew that I wasn’t going to be happy).

I previously felt unaccepted because the higher education community makes up a large portion of my personal community and I am clearly an anomaly. And I would constantly engage with clients in previous roles that felt this way, but who had bought into the idea that this was there only way – accumulate debt and credentials without a real sense of purpose. And then there were the precious few that I worked with that were clearly experiencing their element in academia. They value all forms of life and intelligences. They were the ones looking like they were having fun, challenging the status quo and being heard, offering up unique ideas that were appreciated by the whole. What a gift to witness that.

So it came down to fun … and to being a physical channel, a vessel, a conduit for a message – a way of being that feels in total congruence with who you are. To borrow a line from the online movie, Celebrate What’s Right in the World by National Geographic Photographer, Dewitt Jones: “It’s not about being the best in the world. It’s about being the best FOR the world.” The Implicit Career Search is about creating the conditions for this to happen. It facilitates this process and I’m in my element when I get to coach and facilitate and teach and talk about this. It’s my element.

So for 10 days, the creator of Canada’s most successsful career exploration program shared his journey, his learnings and his modules. The process is poignant, self-illuminating and ICS is Steve Miller’s gift. The most amazing part of this work too is to be both a student and a teacher of this way of being as I embark on coaching people through their own journey in answering a question posed by Mary Oliver: Tell me what it is that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”