What is it to care about or to be caring? I’m looking at how people understand their behaviour as care when they are focused on fixing instead of honouring and wondering how to have that conversation. Let’s try this…

There is a kind of therapy called Gestalt. It’s not really a therapy but more of an experience. Officially you might refer to it as an experimental phenomenology because it encourages you to try new behaviours so you can get a clearer picture of how you operate. You clarify what you are experiencing and how you are doing it.

I like Gestalt because unlike other methods, it doesn’t attempt to analyse your subconscious, unseen or hidden aspects. Gestalt is all about the here and now.

For me, the present is a unique and significant indication of who you are. That means that there’s no holding you to the past, not even five minutes ago because that experience can only be understood as an expression in this moment. Gestalt agrees with me, isn’t that cool?

It’s a complex and compelling therapy that deals with what bubbles to the surface as you become aware of this moment as filtered through your perceptual and cultural biases. It does not attempt to change or fix you. The Gestalt therapist has been described as ‘a creative agent of change, an inventor, and a compassionate and caring human being’*. Did you notice me bring it back to caring there? Seamless people, just brilliant 

So, here’s my thing about caring.

When you want to do something for someone that they will not do for themselves or when you tell someone something they have not asked to hear, especially when it ‘helps’ them, this is not caring.

Now, I’m not talking about making dinner for children or washing someone who happens to be in a coma. I’m referring to situations where you desperately feel the need to fix something or to help someone fix something. This is not caring when it diminishes their sovereignty.

If you step in to do it for them, they can’t figure out how to do it for themselves. For example, if you tied a child’s shoe laces until the day they left home, they would go out into the world minus that skill. How is that caring?

Of course they could buy slip-ons and never have to face the fact that they don’t know how to tie up there own shoes and no-one would be the wiser except when they have kids of their own or if they really, really, really want that job with a dress code… you get the picture.

When you take responsibility for other people’s self-discovery – who they are, what they need, how they find meaning and purpose – you rob them of the opportunity to have that experience. Even in therapy I stick to asking the questions that allow you to recognise how to bring all of your aspects home and how to give them all a room in your house so that you can make every inherent idiosyncrasy work for you. Rarely will I ever tell you anything, except maybe that you are fabulous, and whatever your guides are screaming at me to say out loud. But apart from that, it’s all you.

So, if it pains you to see someone in need or ‘suffering’ and they have not asked you to intervene or they have not indicated any desire to change, then perhaps this situation has been sent to you for a reason. Ask yourself:

What is really going on for you? How can you stay with your experience of discomfort to understand it more intimately?

Discomfort is enlightening. It speaks to you about what you can and can’t live with. Sometimes it is so loud you try to drown out the noise by changing the station. What would happen if you sat with it’s annoying frequency just long enough to hear what it has to say?

Whenever you take the focus off of your own experience – for even someone else’s suffering is filtered through your sensory perception and cultural sensibilities – there is martyrdom or control in play. Chances are you will ‘go out of your way’ (that’s code for martyrdom) to be a hero, or you are ‘doing what needs to be done because you know best’ (and that’s control) to quiet the noise.

Whatever the angle, it is rarely caring.

To care is to stand with someone as they have their experience, it’s having the respect to grant them sovereignty over their actions and meaning, and it’s taking responsibility for your own…

*Zinker (1978) Creative Processes in Gestalt Therapy

I open my emails this morning to one guy who wants to teach me a simple 3 step process to discover and share your talents and gifts to the world and to leave a legacy on this planet (which also happens to make me lots of cash); while someone else is offering me the blueprint for your best year ever (also enticingly capable of making me rich); yet another email points out a scientific study showing that most people would rather continue to do something that ISN’T working, rather than try something new that MIGHT work, and risk failing as a taunt to book a session with their rockstar coaching team (who will show me how to make more money); and lastly, a special Guidebook gift to help me get the most out of brand-new, free online seminar event about my transformation!

Whether it’s love, money or time people seem to be selling all manner of methods to acquire more. Except when I reach the Shift Network’s email about Gangaji – Natural Realization: Peacefully Resolving the Tension Between Freedom and Daily Responsibility. Gangaji will guide listeners into the deepest possibility for their lives as they walk the razor’s edge of their divinity and humanity, revealing how to:

> Resist nothing and fully open to all that is arising
> Find refuge in the silence, even in the midst of conflict and miscommunication
> Invite your whole being to surrender at a deeper level than the mind

Freedom is not found outside of commitments and responsibilities but through profound surrender. Non-resistance to life allows us to realize that there is nothing to get and nowhere to go. Everything we are is already here.

That’s rare.

To find someone willing to talk about our experience as already perfect. Not in the comparative way, perfect for your purpose. When the expansion of that idea leads to labels of ‘miscommunication’ and ‘conflict’ I wonder if it is the same kind of perfect that I espouse. With a ‘deeper level’ to be discovered and a sense of ‘resistance’ the appeal of perfection is all but lost.

I get that it’s hard to see life beyond oppositions and better outcomes.

I see that life is presented in a way you can’t help but judge as right and wrong.

What I’m excited about is the fact that no-one else is taking you through the eyes of Spirit – so it must be my job! If no-one else on the planet is talking about Oneness as no polarities, non judgement, no pathology, no control and no separation – then it must be up to me to introduce this crazy new idea.

Think about it for a moment. If Oneness is about no separation, then how can you have an ‘effect’ on someone else? How can you have unconditional love for your fellow beings if you separate the world into right-wrong, enlightened-ignorant, good-bad et cetera?

I like what Gangaji is saying about surrender and the idea that we are seeking a way to peacefully resolve the tension between freedom and daily responsibility. Divided priorities will always lead us into a space of uncertainty where we question our purpose. I know this because I also know there’s something else going on.

Because I Am not capable of seeing anything outside of the perfection of the Divine, I Am exactly where I need to be at all times (even when I don’t know why). For me, there is no ‘waiting’ or ‘better outcome’ because I can see what Spirit tells me – life is happening for me.

Even all the things you believe to be ‘obstacles’ of ‘evil’ are still manifestations of the Divine. We are coming into an age where more and more people want to feel their connection to the Divine directly. People want to see the world through Spirit’s eyes so they can make sense of life from a place of Inner Peace. It’s your Divine Identity that allows you to experience each moment on Earth directly through Spirit.

That’s what I’m called to do. Speak the words, sing the sounds and hear the messages that allow you to see yourself as directly connected. Once you know yourself as an aspect of the Divine, it’s up to you how to proceed – as a separate human being or in Oneness. Either way you are always on purpose, always an aspect of the Divine, and perfectly designed for your mission.

If you decide to experience life as a point of Oneness, then I will stand with you in that too. Whatever you decide is perfect. Life is a unique and sacred experience. If you’re looking for something that doesn’t make you wrong; if you’re open to new ideas about how we operate on this planet, then trust your intuitive guidance and make a connection…

Melanie Brockwell – Living Master of Heart Alchemy

Connect Here 

Symbols of wellness are not quite the same as wellness itself. I think we used to look for symbols of what we want and managed to manifest these believing they would somehow bring about a new way of being on the planet. If we brought in a community living in harmony this would spread a virus of peace and cooperation beyond the bounds of our commune, and yet to INTEND such and INFLUENCE or to FOCUS on the EFFECT is to abandon the experience itself.

Symbols of love as consequences are not quite the same as love itself. When you seek to bring about the conditions of love by manifesting a relationship you give the relationship more life than the experience of love. It’s called reification in some circles, the idea of a living ‘thing’ you place outside of yourself as a separate entity to your embodied experience.

This reification is either an ideal or a picture of what usually happens. It keeps you from being in the actual relationship with a person who changes from millisecond to millisecond, just as everything else in the universe does. It feeds some strange cloud of illusion about what is going on and what is meant to be going on, and it takes responsibility away from the individual having the experience.

I say this because of a conversation I had yesterday about RESPONSIBILITY and being in the experience of All That Is (rather than reifying this experience as a relationship with something or someone outside yourself). It’s interesting it comes up today as I sit and ponder the nature of HEALING and what it is I’m here to do. It’s interesting firstly because I believe that life is not an exchange and we are all energy, and secondly because a recording came to me from an energy worker who uses Sacred Geometry to heal water that subsequently heals the body and I’m tuned to the possibility of truth for all things knowing simultaneously that life is not an exchange and we are all energy.

How do you know all things to be true even when they appear to conflict? When you ascribe to the four truths.

I’m not sure if I’ve written about it before and Louise is rushing me off the computer so we can have an early morning meeting with the beautiful Ann White from CCN (where we broadcast our TV show) so perhaps I’m going to stop there and leave this to percolate…