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Jennie Marlow

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

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The Surprising Truth About Stress

March 1, 2014 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

Wants-vs-Needs“I know it’s a big, DUH!” a good friend once said. “There is almost no stress when I am perceiving my own needs clearly and in balance with the needs of others.” It was so well-put, I feel compelled to share it, along with a little commentary on why this is vital to living well during big challenges.

It always amazes me how hard it can be to anchor our attention in the now-moment, even when things are going well. When things go awry, it can seem nothing short of monumental to perceive what is real, without the distortions of past interfering and causing us to go into our stuff. When we’re stressed out, it is such a powerful temptation to feel that others’ problems, wants and desires are more important than meeting our own needs, or conversely, that our own wants and desires matter most. It’s also very confusing sometimes to distinguish between needing to take good care of ourselves and just wanting what we want when we want it.

The truth is, the only basis we have to perceive things in an authentic way is to bring our attention back to the now-moment. When the now-moment contains things we wish weren’t there, our resistance tends to rob us of the clarity and presence to face whatever challenge is before us, and to understand what it means to simply “put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others” without self-absorption or undue sacrifice.

Our issues and conditioning certainly rise up when we resist the present moment. And we can surely choose to be stressed and freaked out. However, if we are to take dominion over our lives, a confrontation with our distortions is inevitable.

Seeing our pattern of distortion is fundamental because without owning our patterns, we will be unable to free ourselves to perceive things in an undistorted way, to behave in a manner consistent with basic self-care and consideration for others, and to choose what we would choose if our thinking were not distorted by fear that we can’t be happy unless life is exactly the way we think we want it.

It’s a tall order, but then again, being a human is not spiritual kindergarten. It’s more like a PhD program in how to live your authentic life, in spite of the material plane’s uncertainties and discrepancies with the mind’s expectations.

Filed Under: Life, Service to Others Tagged With: Authenticity, Present moment, Self-sacrifice

Are Your Feelings a Reliable Indicator of Your Truth?

January 30, 2014 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: Awareness, Emotions, Painful emotions, Present moment

Vision & Intention

July 6, 2013 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

In Part One of this series, Spotted Eagle discusses the Principle of Vision, describing how “vision” is different from a goal and how great visionaries see their world.

In Part Two, he discusses how limitation and uncertainty serve our creative vision.

In this post, he describes how limitation, uncertainty, purpose and essence are vital to any intention that has the potential to deliver a fulfilling outcome.

Vision-IntentionIn any now-moment, the universe lays before us only certain potentials and not others, and it also gives every actualizable potential a set of natural limitations. An experienced potter understands this. She realizes that potential outcomes which can fulfill her intention to create something out of clay are not unlimited. The clay is what it is, nothing more or less. Clay, like any material, has certain characteristics that limit what can be actualized from it. This is not a problem for the artisan potter because her imagination does not resist the clay’s natural limitations. She takes these limitations and her own level of skill into account as she cultivates her vision for the finished piece.

The artisan potter also knows, before she begins her work, what purpose she intends the finished piece to serve. While she may have a very clear goal for the finished piece, she also understands that uncertainty will make its own unique and valuable contribution to what results. She won’t know until the door of the kiln opens after firing whether or not the pot is even still intact.

Unlike the artisan potter, a person who is fixed upon his goal for the future will see uncertainty as his enemy and struggle against it in fear that his desire for the outcome will not materialize the way he had imagined. He may invest a great deal of energy and become rigid, striving to achieve his goal. He may eventually achieve it, but very often he arrives at his destination exhausted, only to find the joyfulness he had hoped to receive is not only absent from the process of achieving his goal; it is also absent from the result.

Intention is integral to vision, and if it is to serve our creativity even in creating our lives, it must necessarily take into account purpose, essence, natural limitations and uncertainty: the unforeseen, unanticipated and unimagined. Only vision honors these mysteries. Only vision can dance with the uncertainty through which the evolution of any creation takes shape.

Intention that is flexible enough to respond to real-world challenges has a realistic potential to succeed and result in a fulfilling outcome. When we hold a vision for our lives, like the artisan potter, we know the purpose we intend our vision to fulfill. We know the essences we want to experience. We have made a realistic accounting of our available resources and whatever natural limitations are actually present in the now moment. When our intention is set in this way, vision serves to free the investment of our energy so that it can deliver into our lives an outcome that is in alignment with our purpose and which carries the potential to deliver an experience of the essence qualities that give the result meaning and make it fulfilling.

Filed Under: Creativity Tagged With: Attachment, Essence, Intention, Present moment, Purpose, Spotted Eagle, Uncertainty, Vision

What is a Vision?

June 24, 2013 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

“An imaginary picture of a future outcome is not a vision; it is a fantasy, an illusion, and a very seductive one. It causes us to believe in the futures we conjure in the imagination. This is not vision. Vision is not about envisioning the future. Vision does not foretell; it does not predict the form the future will take or what the outcome of an endeavor will be. Vision is not a fantasy of an event or circumstances we can picture in our imagination. Vision is none of these things. It is not empowered by what we hope will happen in future time. Vision refers, not to fantasy we make up in the imagination, but instead to the manner in which something is seen.”

— Spotted Eagle

Vision is a very misunderstood concept in Western Culture where it seems to be confused with imagining a future result. There is a visualization method which has received a lot of attention in recent years. This method is based on a premise that, in order to create what we want, we must picture ourselves having that thing “manifested.” We must imagine the form we want the future will take, and this clear picture of the outcome then becomes the basis of a goal for achieving that outcome, often by some arbitrary date made up in the Mind. In some models, absolute belief that the outcome will come about is also required.

Belief has the unfortunate tendency to blind us to uncomfortable truths, especially to the uncertainties which are the part of every now-moment. While it is true that visionaries see potentials that others do not see, their belief is not invested in medicating their insecurities and anxiety. Perhaps this can be understood clearly when we examine what we mean when we call someone a visionary. Think of great artists and inventors, like Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Edison. Consider great thinkers and social reformers, like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Clara Barton, and Sylvia and Emily Pankhurst. Call to mind the great resisters of tyranny, like Harriett Tubman, Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. And finally, reflect upon the great theoretical scientists, like Albert Einstein and Steven Hawking. What can we notice about this small list of visionary thinkers? Were they engaged in fantasies about the future? Not really.

Instead, these visionaries saw their present-time world quite differently than did most people of their time. They possessed extraordinary insight and discernment. They were able to move beyond the frame of reference of their time and access a way of perceiving that propelled their awareness beyond the boundaries of then-current thinking. Through their creative lens, these visionaries saw real and tangible potentials whose actualization created enormous shifts for all of humanity. Their visions had one important thing in common: clarity about the meaning and purpose of their efforts. Their unique perspective allowed them to conceive of something which did not yet exist, and at the same time, they were aware of certain obstacles and limitations in the scope of their vision and what they themselves might be able to achieve by sharing their unique perspective.

In Part Two – Vision, Limitation & Uncertainty Spotted Eagle discusses how limitation and uncertainty serve our creative vision.

Filed Under: Creativity Tagged With: Essence, Present moment, Spotted Eagle, Trust, Vision

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