Residential at Galilee Retreat Centre, Arnprior, Ontario.
“I had signed up for the workshop with a vague idea of validating whether or not beekeeping was something I wanted to get back into, so wanted the real experience and ‘instruction’ around hive life. But I also wanted to spend time in the imaginative life of beekeeping – so the poetry, and your story of bees as a significant part of your healing journey was really important. Sensing into your relationship with them - the calm, the respect, the love – was an important part of witnessing how a relationship with bees teaches those very things. I loved how the different activities dove-tailed so well into one another. The ‘energy meditation’ of approaching the hive taught me well about respect for boundaries, and the deep purposefulness of their lives. We can co-exist beautifully as long as I ‘let them bee.’ “
While exploring the topic of pleasure I like to highlight and confront our collective unconscious cultural beliefs or misconceptions about pleasure. Though pleasure drives us we often remain unaware of its full impact on our feelings. Digging into our conscious and unconscious beliefs and feelings about pleasure allows us to be aware of often competing drives working in us that allow us to experience pleasure or not.
One such inner process I want to highlight is the duality between a sense of being good and our right to pleasure. Let me describe this dilemma a bit.
Read more > May 13, 2024I’m always grateful when people from my tribe send me poems, articles, or videos on the topic of pleasure. As I’ve been writing this blog of 10 years I also need inspiration on the topic of Pleasure.
Thank you Natalie, a Pathwork colleague, who sent me this really impactful video by Bessel van der Kolk MD, the eminent Dutch trauma researcher, and best selling author of The Body Keeps the Score.
In this short video he talks about the connection between physical and emotional developmental neglect, and the process of brain development. In particular how the brain/body adjusts to what’s available or not, as a survival strategy.
Our innate human ability to imagine, to conjure up, to create various scenarios with our minds, in our minds, realities that may never exist in our “real concrete world”, is one of our most potent human capacities. We use this skill to imagine or to create in our mind’s eye, frequently, in all aspects of our day to day life. This ability to imagine is the basis of bringing anything into reality – first we imagine it! You may often have heard the phrase “If you can imagine it, you can create it.” While that may be an overly optimistic idea, in its essence, the phrase holds truth.
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