Category Archives: Authentic Movement
From Chaos to Clarity
This is my beginning offerings with Points of You® tools and methodology. I am excited to share this amazing way of opening conversations and insights. This is the first in a series of workshops I will be providing, so feel free to come to any of these three dates and subsequent offerings will follow. I look forward to being with each of you in a fluid, depthful and fun method of discovery.
Contact: lizbeth.hamlin@me.com
Points of You®
I’M EXCITED!!!!
POINTS OF YOU ® METHOD
I recently attended a 5-day training with participants from 20 different countries who with great inquiry and intent, dove into the tools that facilitated meaningful discussions. As a seasoned therapist, facilitator, life long learner and healer, I found this method to be clear, imaginative, insightful and intuitive. With the use of images, there is a natural relationship between right-brain and left-brain interactions. When using the photo cards, there is an occurrence of sorting, feeling, insight and integration within the body/mind connection.
I am inviting you to take time to enter this method with me where conversations open to surprising discoveries and insights that may have been hidden just out of view. In the very near future, I will be offering small intimate groups to come and experience this engaging method.
I am currently offering 90 minute 1:1 ‘Threshold Sessions’ allowing for the depth of experience to give insight and perspective that you may be longing to discover. I have found this form to be unpredictable precise.
Feel free to speak with me about this fun, engaging, insightful and creative tool for deepening our connection toward becoming wholly human.
Warmest Regards,
Lizbeth
707 575-8189 or lizbeth.hamlin@me.com
PS: If you have 8-12 people you would love to bring together from your life, work, common interest, please let me know as I would love to offer you the experience of Points of You®.
LOVE IS THICKER THEN SMOKE
I wake again to the glow in the too near hills not far from my home. I have packed and unpacked, each time taking some different and leaving more. I have not written here for a long long time as the day to day took over and now, what matters most is more important then ever! I do not have the words to describe the way we are living now in my beloved Sonoma County. I stopped counting my dearest friends, colleagues, clients, businesses, buildings, wineries, estates, ranches, farms, animals….the list goes on and on for the total losses, the fires leaving nothing but ash.
What is surfacing is community building, those that can help are in droves. Emergency services, food, clothing, animal shelters, evacuations centers and then the amazing FIREFIGHTERS! This I am blessed and for the respite that does come in a power nap, a good night sleep, a comforting word, the kindness of a stranger and the many restaurants that are serving us.
This is what I know: Our stuff doesn’t matter, our connections due. Each of us respond in our own individual way and sometimes outwardly show stress and others do not. This is not a time to be alone, a stranger or heroic. Asked for hugs on a regular basis and everyone, even those far away are connected feel afraid, grief-stricken and helpless.
What matters most right now is to be grateful that you/we are safe and someone knows or many people know where we are. Seek out comfort however you can and if you are really able, volunteer!
I plan on writing right from the heart these days cuz it is all we got now!
We ain’t alone!
I have been MIA for awhile…like many of us, the busyness of life caught me along with the desire to go idle, meaning that sometimes the inner process has to go into the dark. I have had an unusual amount of beloved ones leave this planet and at the same time an ability to feel supported by not just those in my community but by what is unseen, yet felt. Sometimes we call it ancestors and sometimes we call it spirits, but for now, I will name it that which lives in the mystery of our connections. So, I am learning again that all is impermanent, every thought, feeling, and our beloved body too. The moment is always unfolding and this poem is my ‘what matters’ for how we are strung together like beads, straight through the heart.
Where Is God?
It’s as if what is unbreakable –
the very pulse of life – waits for
everything else to be torn away,
and then in the bareness that
only silence and suffering and
great love can expose, it dares
to speak through us and to us.
It seems to say, if you want to last,
hold on to nothing. If you want
to know love, let in everything.
If you want to feel the presence
of everything, stop counting the
things that break along the way.
– Mark Nepo
The Journey of Breast Cancer: How Myth and Archetypes Support Healing in Contemporary Times
In honor of those that have taught me the depth of this journey!
I was recently walking on the beach and chose a route that took me to a seemingly solid sand bar. But when I arrived, I realized that when I stood there the waves were lapping around my ankles and I was sinking! The waves were helping the sand to dissolve underneath me, leaving me suddenly gasping and darting as fast as I could for solid ground.
When a woman hangs up the receiver from a phone call, or is sitting face to face with her medical doctor who conveys her worst fear–a breast cancer diagnosis–her life is no longer on solid ground. When each woman waits for this news, she begins a journey that will take her through a descent and ascent that is deeply personal and life changing.
Our ancestors as well as our cultural icons have lessons for us. Each of us remembers a favorite fairy tale, a…
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How about a gratitude buddy?
Last fall, when life seemed to be deep in pressures of all kind and I seemed to be lost in others suffering, I reached out to a dear friend to inquire about being a gratitude buddy? We have known each other through studying spiritual disciplines together over the years, share a common thread of our work and raising children about the same age. I said, ‘what the heck’ she can say no. But that is not what turned out to be the case. This daily practice of sending an email to one another to say just what we are grateful for and about has proven to be a bedrock practice that reminds both of us to see to good in our lives and that of others.
It really is simple, I heard the suggestion on a pod cast of one of my favorite Buddhist teachers, Tara Brach and it hit home or my heart. It is rather simple, just say yes to someone, write as often as you can (cuz life happens). It takes about five minutes really, just say one or two things that you are grateful about, even if it seems like nothing…find one little thing. And send it off!
Here is a favorite poem of mine that I believe inspired me to just keep going, to find just one thing, one good thing, one thing to be grateful about, to say ‘Thank you’ and mean it!
Arms Full of Wildflowers
Gratitude means showing up on life’s doorstep,
love’s threshold, dressed in a clown suit,
rubber-nosed, gunboat shoes flapping.
Gratitude shows up with arms full of wildflowers,
reciting McKuen or the worst of Neruda.
To talk of gratitude is to be
the fool in a cynic’s world.
Gratitude is pride’s nightmare,
the admission of humility before something
given without expectation or attachment.
Gratitude tears open the shirt
of self importance, scatters buttons
across the polished floors of feigned indifference,
ignores the obvious and laughs out loud.
Even more, gratitude bares her breasts, rips open
her ribs to show the naked heart, the holy heart.
What if that sacred heart is not, after all, about sacrifice?
Imagine it is about joy, barefoot and foolhardy,
something unasked for, something unearned.
What if the beat we hear, when we are finally quiet
is simply this:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
– Rebecca del Rio
Threads of Connection
‘To be the change we seek’ Gandhi
While this has been a week of many losses, family members of friends, a cancer patient of mine, Nelson Mandela, those that are suddenly ill….I will not tire of being present to what it takes to be human. I recently heard a question on a dharma talk…
‘What stands in the way of love, unconditional love?’
I come to that answer with two things, fear and unprocessed grief. Life does not afford us the leisure to grieve or feel things in an ongoing way it seems. My meditation practice is what keeps me at least in my body to feel and stay awake to naming what does come to the surface or even sit undigested.
‘What stands in your way of love?’
During these days of watching, listening, reading of Nelson’s contributions and great suffering, I was reminded of how we truly are all connected. I felt for awhile the world stood still in silence for more then a few moments. Have you taken a few yourself?
‘There is an endless net of threads throughout the universe. The horizontal threads are in space. The vertical threads are in time. At every crossing of the threads, there is an individual, and every individual is a crystal bead. And every crystal bead reflects not only the light from every other crystal in the net, but also every other reflection throughout the entire universe.’
Rig Veda
Acceptance, Just As It Is!
“Inside yourself or outside, you never have to change what you see, only the way you see it…”
—Thaddeus Golas
We live in a world of opposites: good/bad, happy/sad, day/night, up/down, left/right. Carl G. Jung speaks about maturity being born out of the ability to endure the tension of these opposites. As I have aged, I have settled into an acceptance of this truth. Our ability to shift between extremes must be developed to manage skillfully this terrain of the truth. In the face of bad luck or adversity I strive to see any hidden potential for good that may lie within.
Have you ever felt trapped by events allowing you no way out? We may feel this when we are on the cusp of something new or are moving from one stage in life to another. I have often found that even when good things happen to someone, their next thought may be one of doubt or uncertainty, as if matters should not be as they are. I notice in both others and myself this human tendency to resist change, whether it is bad or good.
It is our attitude toward these episodes that makes all the difference. I use the image of two wings to work with this: one wing holds what is true, just as it is; the other wing, compassion and acceptance for this truth, regardless of what it may be. Working with this image allows me to grapple with my feelings so as to move towards understanding. Can a bird fly with only one wing? No. Both wings, interconnected, allow space for this tension of opposites to be held, endured and brought to resolution.
Can you sit for a moment and just be? Can you focus on what is without wanting to change it? Can you say yes to what is here right now, regardless of your desires? This practice of accepting truth, regardless of the situation, holds the potential for freedom and liberation.
Take a moment to sit with something with which you may be struggling. Breathe in, still your mind the best you can, focus on your chest rising and falling. Accept the present just how it is, nothing more, nothing less. Visualize these two interconnected wings. What is the truth of the situation right now? Name it, say it to yourself. Then feel the other wing, the one of compassion and humility. See if you can feel acceptance for just what is without judgment, blame for your perceived shortcomings or engagement of the inner critic.
I have found that with a little practice, acceptance may be found when slowing down long enough to reconnect with ourselves. Fly with the wings of truth and compassion to discover the gratitude and grace born from this acceptance of the moment. As a Spanish proverb so wisely puts it, “Dance to the tune that is played.”
what matters most 