Jennie Marlow

Coaching for intelligent, aware people who want to live deeply fulfilling lives

What a Coyote Taught Me About Growth and Evolution

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It’s been quite a while since my last post. I had intended to keep up a rhythm with posting, but the past few weeks have been incredibly busy ones, and before I knew it, the month had evaporated.

I’ve been working on From Solo to Soulmate, a program I’m launching soon, and wrapping up my book on the subject has been all-consuming.

The amount of work needed to get a project like this one up and running is always surprising, and like all of our labors to build something new, there are no guarantees that it will be successful. For some reason, I haven’t fretted much about failing this time. I guess you could say I’ve grown up a bit during the maelstrom of the last couple of years.

Last night, my husband spotted a coyote very close to our cabin, and we were able to watch him for quite a while as he explored the field behind us. Such encounters are rare here, although we do hear coyotes at night from time to time, especially in summer.

At one point, the coyote stopped and looked me right in the eye for almost half a minute. It was startling enough that I asked one of my guides, Spotted Eagle, about it.

He told me that Coyote represents both the creator and the jokester.

He said the thing to keep in mind about Coyote “medicine” is that it often fails to produce the result we expected. However, in failing, it always serves a much greater purpose. Coyote offers wisdom that is hidden from us, unless we fully accept what didn’t work out the way we expected. Only through acceptance are we granted access to the wisdom available from the apparent failure. He said the keys to coyote medicine are adaptability, simplicity and trust. It is Coyote who reminds us that wisdom and failure are inextricably linked in the sacred paradox that is our fulfillment.

This encounter and the teaching that followed it gave me pause to reconsider how I view all of the so-called failures that punctuate my past.

I was reminded of something Spotted Eagle loves to say: that a good education is expensive, and failure is usually the engine that drives our evolution in the direction of our eventual success.

It’s only human to resist the pain of failure. Perhaps Coyote can teach us to resist a little less so we can mine the wisdom present in all of the many things that did not turn out the way we expected or wanted.

Question Everything You Think During a Setback

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setbackWhen a setback happens suddenly, the shock can reverberate in our thoughts and feelings for extended periods of time. The amount of time it takes to recover corresponds to the degree of loss the setback represents. Loss taps into very deep structures in the brain, and if we do not employ consciousness to navigate the emotional landscape of our loss, it can easily morph into a prolonged melodrama which we act out unconsciously.

How can you cope when your reactions to a setback are chaotic and intense?

Recognize what is happening in your brain.  The brain’s fight-or-flight response is designed to keep you from thinking straight, so don’t let it dictate your words and actions. The brain is also a story-teller who loves to embellish the tale with each telling. So, stick with the facts. Just the facts! Refrain from going into what-if scenarios of how close a call it was, or dwelling on what might have been, if only… What occurred is what happened, and nothing your Mind makes up about it is real.

Bring yourself back to the present moment. The events leading up to a big setback often play like a movie inside our heads. When you catch yourself reliving the events or trying to “rewrite the script” of what happened, bring yourself back to the present moment by breathing deeply. Notice what is happening right now: the chair in which you are sitting, whether or not it is day or night, the sounds you are hearing, etc. You cannot sense these things in any other moment than the one in which you find yourself, but also realize that, at least initially, you might have to do this exercise every few minutes until your emotions calm down.

Delay taking action. Many of us medicate our emotions through action. If we don’t take a breath and try to restore calm before we act, we can expend a lot of energy doing things that are not really constructive and which might even be counterproductive. If you need to evaluate the action you’re contemplating, ask a trusted friend who has no investment in the outcome whether or not it makes sense to take the action you want to take. On the other hand, if you are paralyzed when you know you need to act, breathe your way through it and do the best you can.

Wait out your emotional wave before making any big decisions. After a big setback, the emotional wave can have the force of a tsunami, and its power to distort your reality can be very great indeed. Wait, wait, wait and wait even longer. The dilemmas created by turbulent emotions usually resolve themselves into emotional clarity with the passage of time. Since most of the things you think when you are emotional are not altogether true, wait until your emotional wave has subsided, and don’t fall into the trap of believing that getting the decision behind you will solve anything, especially if that decision is made prematurely.

Watch for new opportunities. When we undergo a setback, opportunities emerge that didn’t exist before the setback occurred. Although we may be unable to see them right away, changing conditions often reveal choices and resources that weren’t obvious under other circumstances. Without making up a fantasy or going into denial, it’s important to have faith that we will eventually be able to change difficult things for the better with time, patience and the wisdom we always gain from meeting our challenges with willingness.

Keep in in mind that big setbacks usually represent our greatest opportunities for transformation. The key to actualizing these opportunities is simple but not easy: be willing to embrace the uncertainties that setbacks invariably magnify. Bottom line: come back to the now-moment, stay here, and wait until your clarity and calm are restored. Then, with a clear head, you can decide what, if anything, to do.

7 Ways to Unstick When You’re Stuck

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When we feel stuck, getting our energy moving can feel like a Herculean challenge. It can even feel as if we are glued to wherever we are, with no hope of a remedy. Here is some practical advice for getting our stagnant energy to start flowing again.

Do something constructive. This can be something as mundane as washing up the dishes, making your bed or clearing a pile of clutter. It can be as simple as drinking a glass of water, eating an apple or talking a walk. It can be as fundamental as taking a deep breath and bringing yourself back to the now-moment from wherever your mind has taken you.

Challenge your thinking. When we are stuck, there is typically something in our now-moment that we are resisting with all our might. It is as if we have dug in our energetic heels and refuse to budge. Usually what we resist is not the thing itself, but what we imagine about it. So, ask yourself, “What am I making up about this?” There are usually a number of ways to look at something, so do yourself a favor and think of another, more constructive way to look at what you’re convinced is true.

Expand your awareness of what is possible. When we are stagnating, we have stopped being curious about possibilities. Expand your awareness of real, tangible potentials that can be actualized with the time, energy and money you have right now. Explore the alternatives to what you’re doing right now, and take care that you don’t prejudge a possibility before you have had a chance to investigate it to learn if it is a practical, achievable and beneficial step forward. If the potential you’re investigating turns out to be too big a stretch, then scale back and look for alternatives within your reach.

Break your pattern! Feeling stuck and stagnant follows a pattern. Find the pattern in your thought process, your behavior and your choices. Target something in your pattern and do one small thing differently to change that pattern.

Identify the source of your anxiety. Stagnation is nearly always a result of anxiety about the uncertain future. So stop that nebulous, anxious thought and ask yourself, “What is the specific uncertainty that is causing me to be afraid?” Once you have identified the uncertainty, it is usually easier to simply accept its presence in your now-moment, just for the time being.

Deal with one thing at a time. If you are feeling overwhelmed it probably means you’re taking on too much at once. You may not be able move a thousand-pound pallet of boxes, but you can probably lift and carry one 25 lb. box. Divide up the task at hand, and do what you can manage right now.

Take care of yourself. Rest when you’re tired. Eat when you’re hungry. Let that after-hours phone call go to voice mail. If you’ve been sitting a long time, get up from your desk and take a walk. Avoid medicating with alcohol, drugs or food. Don’t veg in front of the television or lose yourself in cyber space. The world won’t fall apart if you stop to look at a sunset, read a chapter in a good book, or slip into a hot bath. Taking care of yourself often depends upon learning to make your self-care a priority and in balance with the needs of those close to you.

Here’s the deal. Flow is a product of movement, and it can result from very small, incremental changes in the status quo. So if you’re stuck, move your body, move your mind, move your habits, and move your behavior. Movement is what you’re after. Movement is flow!

Are Your Feelings a Reliable Indicator of Your Truth?

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FeelingsLife is truly a feeling experience, and our quality of life depends utterly upon how we feel about it. But are our feeling states reliable indicators of what is objectively true? The short answer is, probably not.

We tend to fixate on the stimuli for our emotions and attribute our emotional response to the stimulus itself, but emotions are not nearly as straightforward as they might seem.  In the highs of bliss or the lows of despair, it is easy to forget that there is a lot going on in our brains that produces what we think of as our feelings.

Not all stimuli for our feelings are external or about the now-moment. If you want evidence of this, recall a bad memory and watch the impact it has on your feeling state. Now, consider how often the feeling states of past experience occur when you are interpreting new challenging experiences. If you catch yourself thinking, “I’ve felt this way for as long as I can remember,” then it’s a good bet the feeling is not coming from your current circumstances, but rather from your memories and how you interpret them. This is a big red flag that your interpretation of the present is being seen through the lens of a distortion from your past.

In every moment, your brain is influencing the way you feel and respond to what is happening. It may surprise you to learn that when you recall something, your brain actually reproduces the neurochemicals that were secreted when the memory was created. This is a revelation, especially when you consider the fact that this process can occur even when you are not actually recalling the event consciously. This means your brain can recreate the feeling state from past experience and tie it to the present circumstances, without your direct awareness.

Memory has an enormous influence on the way you respond emotionally in the now-moment. A study conducted by Cornell University concluded that our memories of events change over time. They also proved that entirely false memories, introduced by the researchers during their experiments, were believed and trusted by subjects as if they had actually happened.

So the next time someone tells you to trust your feelings, you might want to consider this advice carefully before you take action on what you feel. Whatever you do, never confuse your feelings with your truth.

6 Ideas You Should Borrow From Hostage Negotiators

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HostageI often marvel at the way a gifted hostage negotiator can diffuse a crisis and bring it to a close, even when circumstances have reached the extreme. The techniques these negotiators use can be really helpful to us too, especially when an emotional upset sends us into orbit.

Most of the time—when we’re that upset—it is as if our awareness has been taken hostage. Who is the culprit? Our Stone Age brain.

Your brain evolved in a landscape full of threats to your physical safety, so evolution kindly gave your brain very reliable mechanisms for getting you out of harm’s way. Your Stone Age brain does this by shutting down anything that would cause you to stop and consider what you are doing. This works really well when you are evading hungry lions on the ancient savannah. It’s completely counterproductive when the threat is emotional.

When you are emotionally triggered, your brain can’t distinguish between a threat to your physical survival and an emotional upset. It responds to both in precisely the same way, as a matter of life or death. This triggers the fight-or-flight response. Your brain in full blown fight-or-flight believes that fleeing or fighting (some psychologists would add “freezing” to that list) are its only options.

When your negative emotions surge, you do have recourse. That recourse is to enter into a negotiation with the freaked out part of your brain by consciously activating the part of your brain that can evaluate what is happening to you.

The first step in any hostage negotiation is to try and establish communication with the hostage-taker. When it’s the primitive part of your brain you’re talking to, this communication is established by slowing down, listening to your mind’s uproar, and observing your body’s stress response.

You see, the part of your brain that can rationally assess the situation and consider what is in your long term best interest has the power to shut down your fight-or-flight response. Just the simple act of noticing you are in fight-or-flight has a very real physiological effect that actually starts to calm you down.

The next thing a good negotiator does is to establish rapport through compassion. Self-compassion has an incredibly powerful influence on the psyche by allowing your brain an opportunity to feel emotionally safe. Once your higher awareness has established rapport with your upset primitive brain, then your self-negotiation can enter the fourth phase, which is to introduce options other than fighting, fleeing or freezing.

When the mind launches into fear or outrage, its projection of a disastrous outcome is invariably overblown. When a negotiation enters the options phase, a hostage negotiator knows exactly how to frame the distinction between what is unattainable, possible but highly unlikely, or probable if the hostage taker doesn’t shift his demands. This allows the hostage-taker to enter a more rational state and begin to see that his original goal is not in his best interest.

If the negotiator has the time to get through all of the phases, the negotiation eventually shifts to emotional equilibrium and  the hostage-taker, more objective now, is able to surrender peacefully.

When you’re negotiating with your survival brain, remember that a successful negotiation takes time and patience. Quite honestly, most of our upsets can pass quietly if we take time to process our emotions and succeed in restraining our out-of-power words and actions until we achieve calm. So, next time you find yourself in emotional orbit, stop and observe what is happening, and then take a page from the hostage negotiator’s handbook.