CCC

Sunday, March 4th. 10 AM – 5 PM: All about Boundaries

Photo by Dave Schiefelbein

• Boundaries differentiate between “you” and “I” so that we can become a “we” and have a mutual relationship.
• Without the differentiation we run the risk of enmeshment and the bond might abruptly break for fear of suffocating.

 What’s the role of the horse here?

•  Horses have a huge energy field and they are constantly aware of what is going on around them. They react instantly if something in their energy field is changing. If you watch horses interact with each other but also with us humans, you can observe how they protect their space by setting clear boundaries.

 In this workshop you will

• explore and define your own space;
• work with the wheel of life and boundaries;
• become aware of emotions around boundaries;

With the help of the horses you will

• actively set boundaries by re-creating life events and situations in order to re-learn and re-structure old patterns around boundaries that no longer serve you.

Because only by doing, we can create lasting change and move forward!

visit Chiron’s Facebook site to see the workshops in action:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Chiron-Coaching-and-Consulting/113866881989903

 Photo by Dave Schiefelbein

I overheard a woman in the gym talking to her friend about her daughter’s approaching homecoming. The two women were exchanging ideas about dresses, hair styles, and restaurants to eat and matching bootineers and the corsages.
To the reader, who is part of the American Culture that may all seem very trivial. When fall comes around and the kids go back to school, you just do as everybody else does. You follow the rules of a well established tradition with a given frame within you can craft your own experience. But imagine you moved to this country from a place where homecoming means just what the two words reveal when you translate them: “coming home”!
Adjusting and making a new country your home is a multi facetted endeavor. It moves you along in a spiral. On the journey to the core of the spiral you develop in several ways. It’s a learning process which happens almost like the socialization a child goes through growing up. You learn and you are not even aware of the fact that you are learning. It just becomes part of your world and part of your identity.
If you are new to a culture, a word like “homecoming” doesn’t elicit any pictures, memories. It is just an empty word. The process, you are about to go through, feels like turning a funnel upside down and squishing the letters into the narrow tube. At the beginning there is only room for the word itself, no attachments, no pictures, nothing! But once the word made its way through the narrow tube, it can expand, it can grow into an experience, with pictures, faces, emotions and that’s when you know, that you are one step closer to become integrated, adjusted as you added a new layer to your identity. Homecoming has become a concept, eliciting a thousand little details and nuances.
While you are supporting your daughter in finding that perfect dress, you are sitting in the dressing room, listening to other mom and daughter couples and your mind is traveling to their home, picturing them in their world and imagining how life is for a family for whom Homecoming has always been a recurring event that repeats itself year after year, child after child; a concentric circle in everybody’s life. What defines their identity, their cultural traditions, their daily routine, and all these aspects of life that for you might still be a blank spot?
Watching your child in her long, formal dress makes you realize that you are participating through her, in a cultural tradition, that you will never experience hands on. You will only ever play the role of the mom but you will never be the main character. How ironic is that? In some families all the members have always had the chance to be in the spotlight at least once, aka play every role that is to play in a society – not so in your family. It almost seems like a tradition itself to move away, expand, and integrate just to send off the new generation to start a new circle. It creates surface; but does it create depth? Only by passing on traditions over generations, a concentric circle engraves its circumference, cuts deeper and deeper as time goes on. For us, it was always different. Our traditions overlap in some parts, but they are more to be seen as separate circles, one added to the other, like small separate worlds filled with stories that tend to create a virtual identity in a virtual space.
But as you take pictures of your daughter and her date, you become aware that you can check “homecoming, as this word has become a door to a world of stories. You are moving on, claiming traditions, making them yours and carving your circle. You give them your colors, you are adding your personal twists and you are sculpting your own personal version. You added a new layer to your identity and you enrich the culture you have chosen to be a member of, by adding your “homecoming” to the big pool.

We all carry them inside of our heads in some way or the other – the voices of shaming authority figures of our past. They are like “sleeper cells”, just waiting for the right moment to make us time-travel back to when we picked up the shameful message in the first place. It might have been a teacher, telling us how stupid our question was; a parent uttering the words “shame on you” only because we didn’t behave the way we were expected to behave or a boy in our class that told us that we were fat. It doesn’t really matter, what it was; what matters is, that it can haunt us way into our adult life, dictate our behavior and even prevent us from doing what we would love to do.  

When shame rises up in us, we want to disappear from the face of the earth. We promise ourselves that we would never ever speak up again!   We’d rather  become mute, invisible,    and   bury a part of our soul deep inside of us.  We are convinced that we are stupid and what we have to say is   of no value and of no interest to anybody.   The thought of being exposed and the possibility of being ridiculed   evoke such an enormous fear in us that we’d rather remain in inertia than taking action.

I remember a coaching trainer telling me about a client who felt hurt because of something he said. “You choose to be hurt”, was his remark. My question is: Can we really choose our feelings?  My answer is no, we cannot, but we can choose our reaction.   

If our “sleeper cell voice” in our head tells us: “Shame on you! Don’t stick your head out that far. You deserve to be ashamed because you just never get it right”, we can choose between two fundamentally different reactions:

• We can crawl back into our cave and remind ourselves that we’d better keep quiet next time because it wasn’t perfect what we said. We will   not expose ourselves to criticism of others again and protect our vulnerable self in a dark hiding place.   By going down this road we deprive   a   part of us from ever seeing the daylight and what we love to do with our life will never happen.

Or

• We can ground ourselves, confront the awakened voices   and ask them    if it is justified to make us feel that way.  Yes, we might have made a mistake. What we said might not have been perfect. It might have even been wrong. But that doesn’t mean that everything we are and do and say   is worthless, stupid, and wrong.  We can compartmentalize what has happened, put it in perspective, acknowledge it or not, and move on. 

In this sense the coaching instructor was right. We have a choice, not in how we feel, but in how we respond to our feelings.

A few weeks ago, I was attending a yoga class and at the end of the class, the instructor read a quote to us. I remember one line which said: “always live on the edge”! Living life on the edge holds the danger of falling but it also symbolizes the thrill, the excitement and the rush of energy. In other words, it is never dull or boring,  but it bears the risk of dying.   In his book “FearLess”, Gavin de Becker talks about “accepting life, for life is risk; life is a venture full of peril and full of promise.” (FearLess, Gavin de Becker, 2002)  

In that sense, the terrorists of 9/11 have not succeeded. They have not turned us into a nation of lifeless individuals who seize to live their lives because they are too afraid to leave the house. We have been shaken up by what happened on 9/11.  But after all,  this is a good thing!  Not that I mean,  it”s  good that it happened, that thousands of people lost their lives, but it is good that a nation has been awaken from complacency, ignorance and hedonism. The change that had been imposed on us made us think what life is all about, made us dig out values that seemed to be long forgotten,  and made us re-connect with others. It made us live in the present because it made us realize that there might be no tomorrow.

The question here is: Did it last? Or did we just fall back into our old “routine”, our old behavior, our old patterns. I leave this question open as it is on everyone  to answer it for himself/herself.

…what defines my box,   and why is anybody assuming that I live in a box at all? 

The fact is that we all live in our very personal and individual box because we all see the world and everything that is happening from our own perspective.   Imagine you are looking at a picture on the wall.  You can easily see that you have a different perspective on the picture than the person who is standing behind you, or   next to you, which means, you automatically have   different aspects of the picture in your focus, just simply because of your position.   And when it comes to interpreting the picture,  it  might even seem that  you are talking about a completely different work of art than  all the viewers.

Why is that?

The messages you receive from the picture, the emotions it is evoking for you, are defined by your   personal history (your upbringing, your cultural background, your values, your personality traits, your prejudices, your emotions, etc.) and your momentary state of mind.

To take this a step further we can replace the picture with life events, relationships or just simply your “reality” that you live in. You act and react in a certain way, again defined by your personal history and the way you feel at the present moment. What you do might work or might not work. If it doesn’t work, you might feel stuck and this is, when you hit the wall of your “box”.  The box is your comfort zone. The place you feel safe and comfortable,   and the easiest thing to do is, just staying within the confinement of your “box”. 

But what is the price we are paying for that? We might never reach our full potential! We might never really live our life! We might never be happy with what we have achieved! And we might never be able to say that we did everything it took to get where we wanted to get! We stay prisoners in our box.  

The other option we have is to know our “box” and to realize when we hit the “wall”. We can then carefully tear down a wall and add a “room” to our box. By adding more space we can expand and we can grow, personally.   But eventually we will hit the “wall” again and the whole process starts all over. 

This brings me to the conclusion that we can never  step out of “our box” but we can add to it. And adding to it is maturing, growing as a person, and   as C.G. Jung called it, our lifelong process of Individuation.

Our daughter is graduating from High School on June 10th. One chapter of her life is closing and a new one is about to open. No doubt a major life transition and because of that a bitter sweet pill; sweet because of the excitement of starting something new, bitter because of the uncertainty that lies ahead.
Uncertainty provokes fear and watching my daughter swing back and forth between the sweet and the bitter side of her upcoming transition, I was wondering, what qualities we need to find in ourselves in order to cope with that fear, in order to calmly and sanely passage between life stages and to eventually just see the bright side of the medal.
I found one important quality that helped me survive many dark moments in my life when I was about 4 years old through a lesson I was taught by my father. I don’t think he was aware of the tremendous impact his “swimming lesson” had on me when he decided it was time for me to learn how to swim.
He must have had the German saying “throwing someone into the cold water” in mind when he decided to just lower me into the water from an anchored boat and told me to swim. Before he let go of his grip, he said: “Just try to stay afloat and if you get really tiered I’ll pull you back up!”
And there I was, kicking, paddling and splashing – keeping myself above water until I was exhausted – and there he was, my father, standing next to me in the shallow water, lifting me high up into the air, laughing: “She can swim”, he shouted, and up and down he jumped with me in his arms, and I was the proudest and happiest 4 year old on the planet.
What I learned in this moment was not only how to swim but something way more important. I learned to trust my own abilities, my strength, and my willpower to succeed. I learned to conquer fear and step out of my comfort zone and I learned to see obstacles as challenges instead of threats. But I also learned that those who love me will never let me down, will catch me when I drown, will be “the wind beneath my wings” when I needed them.
This is, I think, something that helps us see the sweet more than the bitter and I hope that I was able to plant that seed in my daughter’s heart: the seed of trust in herself and others; because if I have achieved that, I know that she will be safe, even when I am not around anymore.

I am sure this sounds familiar to you! Jenny had a horrible day at work and couldn’t wait to get home and tell her husband what had happened to her today. But while she was talking, he began to sort out the mail. There was no eye contact, no question, no remark and Jenny felt as if she was talking to the wall. But not only that, Jenny felt ignored, of no importance. She felt rejected and maybe even humiliated. Her frustration level was rising and eventually she said to her husband: “Are you at all paying attention to what I am trying to say here?” Alarmed by her tone of voice, he looked up from the stack of mail, surprised by the outbreak.
Now we can think of two scenarios. He could either start defending himself, saying that he was listening, blaming her for attacking him and just continuing with what he was doing, or he could check in with himself, be aware of what had just happened, put the mail aside and start really listening to what his wife has to say.
But what does it mean to really listen? It means that we are 100 % present in the moment and with our partner. We are not only paying attention to the words but also to nuances in tone and pitch of the voice, we are aware of body language and facial expression, we keep eye contact and we constantly interpret what we are hearing. We are actively engaged in what our partner is telling us by being empathically in tune. We are like the captain on a sailboat, always adjusting the sails to the wind, ready to react to keep the boat in harmony with the elements!
Active listening requires that we are aware of ourselves and our partner. Only then we are engaged in the situation and connected to each other.

“She lived for 20 years and then her soul slowly died…..”

That was my thought this morning when I talked to my husband who is visiting his parents in Switzerland and on this occasion also went to see my mother who is 82 years old. My mother has dementia and her concept of time is more or less gone. She basically forgets everything the moment she hears them. But there is one thing that she has not forgotten: Her life in Indonesia. This is the only thing she talks about, these are the only memories she still holds. She told my husband all her stories as if they had happened yesterday, and she also mentioned that she always wanted to go back – but she never did, not even for a visit!

My mother was born in Sumatra in 1927 and had lived there for 20 years before moving to Switzerland with her mother and two younger brothers.

The circumstances for my mother in Switzerland were less than fortunate. She, as the oldest, had to work to support her mother and two younger brothers. She was catapulted from a life in “paradise” to a country that she perceived as hostile, cold, grey and narrow minded. The decision, my mother must have made back then, was, to become “the victim”, a role she has taken on unconsciously and has reenacted ever since!

The tragedy behind my mother’s life is, that she basically lived to be 20 years old and then her soul slowly died. In stories that she told me when I was a child, I picture my mother as a “butterfly”, a dazzling, joyful free spirit, adventurous and open to everything that life brings along. But that was never the woman I knew. I most of the time saw a mother who was unhappy in her marriage, hated the country she had to live, and regretted not having and education that would have made her equal in the eyes of others.

My mother belongs to a generation of women who were still caught in gender role stereotypes and societal norms that made it impossible or at least very hard to pack up and leave and start all over again. And maybe all the years she had to work in factories to provide for her mother and brothers just simply broke her spirit.

When I think of my mother today, I feel enormous sadness and hopelessness and I wished I could just simply rewind time in order for her to get a second chance. A chance that would enable her to find the strength to develop the aspects of her personality that are so vivid in her stories and that would help her create the life she would have wanted and deserved. The benefits would not only lie on her side, but also on mine. I strongly feel that I have to take on in my life, what my mother never completed. This is her legacy that she has unconsciously passed on to me.

If we face the challenge to grow personally, we are increasing our self awareness. We then know where we are headed and why. We are attuned to what feels right to us and we have a propensity for self reflection and thoughtfulness. We think things over rather than react impulsively. Only if we are aware of who we are and what we want in our life, we can make conscious decisions and choices and take responsibility for our own actions, thoughts, beliefs and behaviors. We are not, like my mother, just victims of people and circumstances in our life.

…And the benefit for our children is obvious – they don’t have to complete our lives before they can start living their own!

Our personal development is a journey that begins when we are born and ends when we die. Throughout our childhood and adolescence we begin to develop an identity that consists of different components. First of all we come into this world with a set of genetic dispositions. Then we have our own personality,  we are born into a  family with their own values and traditions and, last but not least, we live in a certain  culture. 

Through interaction with our parents and the extended social environment, certain aspects of our personality and our genetic disposition is welcomed, praised and supported, others, though are ignored and even activly suppressed. If your parents, for example, love playing the piano, they will show you how pleased they are, every time you show interest in playing the piano. If, on the other hand, they think that playing the piano is a waste of time, they will actively try to sabotage your desire to play the piano or they will ignore it. Your  ”musical self” will therefore hide in the unconscious and will not develop. However, this does not mean, that it is gone forever. It is just dormant and it will show up in dreams or in projections onto others.

Most often around mid-life these “orphaned” parts of our “self” start to become active. We feel the need to become authentic, to live our life the way we want it to live. Then it is time to integrate all these aspects of our self and give them a voice.

Now what is the role of the horses in all this? Horses are social beings with distinct personalities. Therefore,  when we watch them interacting with each other, we might see our own family dynamic and our own role within this dynamic. We might also detect traits in a certain horse that remind us of ourselves or of one of our family members. Sometimes we bond strongly with one particular horse or even ”fall in love” with him/her at first sight. We then might most likely project an unconscious part of our “self” that needs to be integrated  onto the horse. Therefore horses act as mirrors. Mirrors of our projections, behaviors and social dynamics. They push our buttons and show us what has dwelled in the dark. They help us re-live situations and practice behavior that we never were allowed to show: for example, saying “no” or setting boundaries.

In our workshops or individual sessions you will interact with the horses in specially designed acitivities that will help you

• to grow as a person
• recognize projections and transferrences onto others
• integrate parts of your “self” that have been suppressed
• free yourself from behavioral patterns that are limiting your possibilities in life
• move forward and create the life you want to live!

Contact us for more information or to set an appointment!

Our Programs help individuals, teams, organizations, and families optimize their potential in all aspects of life. We assist in finding answers to personal questions, building trust in your interactions with others, and guiding you onto the path of integrity and authentic leadership.

The individually designed intensive study programs cover areas such as nonverbal intelligence, leadership and teambuilding, managing life transitions, marriage- and family dynamics. We offer Intensives for small groups, individuals, couples and families. The duration is between 2 – 6 hours or two day weekend Intensives.

Our individual sessions are completely geared to the client’s needs. The duration of one session is 90 Minutes.

Have a look at all our programms