Cold Situations

I saw another hand go up. Is it really going to taste that different? Oh, my love, yes it is. We don't mean to say that whatever you save by not drinking, go spend it all on these new fetishized food products. But a jar of dandelion honey from New Zealand will cost the same as a vodka-and-soda, and will last a longer and sweeter time. There's a poem by Emily Dickinson with a line that goes like this: To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee / One clover and a bee / And revery. The poet sees a trinity, this miracle of flower and insect and revery, and we want to see it too. Honey is the only food that never rots--how supernatural is that? If you add the word raw into the description of a honey, our ears perk up. And then if you add whipped--my darling, you're speaking our language. What is it about honey that makes it so transcendent? Rent a crane with a wrecking ball! In her keynote speaking and team training, Kieran often talks about the `6 R's of Resilience': We need to be more mentally agile in: Resilience -- turning adversity into something useful -- also requires creating a more helpful meaning for what reality decides to hand us. While we cannot always control what happens, we can become more agile in how we respond and move forward when life throws us grenades. This is perhaps the most critical use of mental agility. It's something people who survive great trauma often talk about. Recently, we met an inspiring young man who had just launched a charity raising money for childhood victims of burns, and he wanted to sell us a calendar. Fuelled with another skill critical to creativity, curiosity, we got talking about why he was doing what he was doing.

He explained that he was the victim of a violent sexual assault that he barely made it through. If you're new to breathwork and it feels scary, that is okay. Start with just a minute or two. If you feel your temperature rise or the sensation of feeling heavier in your body, this is normal and is a sign that you are becoming more grounded. This is a great practice to do in the morning to start your day. It can be done alone or as the beginning to a longer practice session, which is how I often recommend it to clients after they have practiced it by itself for a couple of weeks. No need to practice longer than ten minutes. The Grounding Breath can also be done at your desk at work for a needed break to plug in to yourself, or at the end of the day as a way to reset and transition to the evening. One of the most intimate acts of connection we can practice is breathing with our partners. When we show up fully and sit with each other in our realness, we create a container of safety and love, which allows us to become vulnerable. Over the years, I have had the honor of working with many couples in my practice. What's your phone number? The disciple turned on his heel and hastened toward his Thunderbird. My last visitor (and it has been a long time) was a pleasant-looking elderly lady who came not to the side door, as most people do, but to the front. A car waited for her beyond the mailbox on the county road, where cars travel infrequently but swiftly, and a driver heading south cannot see the driveway from beyond the rise. She wished me a nice day. We're visiting people who might not know about the love the Lord has for them, she said sweetly. I know about it, I answered. By the way, you might not want to park your car on that road. The pickups fly pretty fast over those hills.

With all the problems in the world today, she persisted, we want to show people a way to change it. I almost fist-pumped the air. My first distributor had also shown up. Bouncing in my chair, thrilled that the snow hadn't stopped him either, I waved. A huge smile lit up my whole face. He waved back from the last row on the other side of the enormous room. The speaker finished, I'm sorry, but this is a closed meeting. You will have to leave. All the color drained from my face. I was stunned. Then it flamed a hot red. It's the taste of it, the nourishment, certainly, and the feel of it--the sticky slow dripping of it--but its allure goes beyond the culinary. In some ways, honey seems made from light itself, like a resin from the sun. To take part in the process is another dimension to the phenomenon. One year, Amanda bought her husband a Groupon for a beekeeping class. After the class, Amanda's husband and son invested in full-body bee suits, head veils, a bee smoker, wooden frames, and 30,000 bees. Despite a harrowing pickup, a hive was installed in Amanda's backyard. The bees are docile and fascinating. Two years later, there was a celebration after discovering the bees had filled a frame with honey. But apparently, you can't gorge on the bee's first honey.

That's the stuff they keep for survival. He was subsequently harassed and bullied, and anonymously encouraged that the world would be better without him. We discovered that what had got him through was a capacity to turn this trauma into something useful, to see this brutal crime as a chance to leave his current circumstance and re-create his life. So he decided to do something to help others. Creativity isn't just about creating things, it is also the ability to create a new mindset or reframe a world view in a way that is helpful rather than a hindrance. Agility is far more than a physical or cognitive function; Chris Helder is a very wise (and ridiculously high-energy) friend of ours. Chris has often talked with us about a powerful concept outlined in his article, Useful Belief: I don't teach positive, I teach useful. I don't think truth matters as much as we think it really does. You'll find truth is very much a perception anyway; What I often see at the beginning is a lack of connection around intimacy. They might be exceptional communicators, highly successful in business, great friends, amazing parents, or brilliant creatives, but something feels off to them in their connection. I created the Intimacy Breath as a first step to support these couples in building connection with each other. Intimacy is a by-product of vulnerability, and vulnerability is the foundation for safe, loving, and meaningful relationships. By setting the content of their relationships aside and using the breath as their guide, I have seen couples reignite their passion, joy, and tenderness for each other in just a few practice sessions. As I discuss in the section entitled Breath: The Foundational Tool, our breath is inextricably linked to our emotions. When couples practice the Intimacy Breath, often what surfaces is a series of revelations about the behaviors, beliefs, and family-of-origin experiences that are impacting their present relationship. These awakenings lead them to deeper inquiry about their personal growth, allowing them to see the next steps they need to take as individuals and as couples to cultivate the connection they are seeking. The Intimacy Breath is an updated version of an ancient eye-gazing practice I learned years ago in a yoga teacher training.

I took the eye-gazing practice and added touch and synchronized breath to bring this practice out of the mental realm and drop it fully into the body. I like the world well enough the way it is, I replied. I wish people would stop trying to change it. The poor woman looked troubled. I'm a pantheist, I explained, trying to save her time. I honor solstices and equinoxes, sunrises and sunsets, the phases of the moon. Everything is God. Looking perplexed, she told me her name and headed toward the car where her companion waited. As they drove northward, I felt downcast that I had disappointed yet another would-be missionary. Then I realized why these people inspire in me a feeling verging on resentment: they are not interested in me but in themselves; If some itinerant, leather-clad John the Baptist walked from the coast bringing news of conservation easements or John Chapman emerged from the woods teaching the philosophy of Swedenborg, I think I might listen. A mixture of anger, frustration, and embarrassment flooded my body. Shaking so hard my notearticle fell, along with all of my pens, I dived down trying to hide myself under the chair. I couldn't see. Tears blinded me. As I tried to reach two of my pens, the man behind me kicked them at me. Ink marks stained my mother's light grey suit. I was mortified. How could this family company just dismiss us this way? I felt the entire room staring at me, waiting.