I know I come across as open. Few defenses. Willing to discuss my bowel habits and my sadness with tens of thousands of strangers. But I’ve had to realise lately that this brazen openness is actually a defense. A boring one. For me, anyway.

by Sarah Hermans

Do you tend to point out your faults loudly when you’re nervous? Because you figure it’s better to get in first, before someone points them out for you? Yeah. Me too. Openess can be like that. It works like this: Before you challenge me on my boundaries, before you hold a mirror up to my intimacy issues, how about I barrage you with my brazeness, then you won’t have a leg to stand on!

Well, this approach has kind of got stale lately. It’s not serving me too well. When I do it now I cringe.

As it happens I read on DailyOm last week a little metaphor about trees shedding their bark. It’s fitting:

Trees grow wider with each passing year. As they do, they shed the bark that served to protect them but now is no longer big enough to contain them. In the same way, we create boundaries and develop defenses to protect ourselves and then, at a certain point, we outgrow them. If we don’t allow ourselves to shed our protective layer, we can’t expand to our full potential.

I’ve been getting a few “signs” lately. I don’t know what you make of signs…

by Asja Binno (via The Beast)

Me, I think that patterns emerge as we go about life and they bank up – get blocked or layer up. A bit like stuff swirling down a drain; the stuff forms a bit of clump and we need to twirl it with a stick – give it our attention – so it can loosen and continue down the drain.

Everything is a sign, some are just louder than others. Some patterns bank up and they tell us we need to pay attention. Turn a different way, gently move along a different path.

I find signs come in threes for me.

Over the next week or two I’ll post some reflections for a fresh start.

This one is from DailyOm about the colour green. I’ll extract it in part.

Green is a combination of the colors yellow and blue, … Blue exudes calm and peace, while yellow radiates liveliness and high levels of energy. As a marriage between these two very different colors, green is a unifier of opposites, offering both the excitement of yellow and the tranquility of blue. It energizes blue‚s passivity and soothes yellow‚s intensity, inspiring us to be both active and peaceful at the same time.

I’ve followed Daily OM for many years now and have chatted to Madisyn Taylor in the past and found her to be the real deal. She meditates each day to come up with her daily advice. And takes Tuesdays off to have a better life.  I like this post for today’s outlook about grounding yourself. It gets us to imagine being a Strong Container for Our Spirit. I think this is important – for ourselves and others.

Grounding ourselves is a way of bringing ourselves literally back to earth. Some of us are more prone than others to essentially leaving our bodies and not being firmly rooted in our bodies. There’s nothing terribly wrong with this, but while we are living on the earth plane it is best to stay grounded in the body.

One of the easiest ways to ground ourselves is to bring our attention to our breath as it enters and leaves our bodies. After about 10 breaths, we will probably find that we feel much more connected to our physical selves …Just a few minutes of this can bring us home to bodies and to the earth, and this is what it means to ground ourselves.

Do you have a soft voice? What I mean is, do you have a secondary voice – not the loud, chattery one that natters away in your head most of the day – but another quieter, gentler voice that pipes up just when you need it to? You hear it when you listen for it.

I do. It gets a bit drowned out most of the time. I’m a very abrupt person – I barge around, mostly, and wonder why there’s so much chaos in my life. And am often too busy to hear my quiet voice. And yet I crave a quieter, stiller way.

The louder, more bombastic voice gets priority because it seems more urgent, more “right”. It’s the voice that’s been rewarded over the years. I’ve fed it with attention. Like laughing at show-offs.

It’s taken years to realise the loud voice really has no idea what it’s on about. It wings it. The quieter voice has the answers. She just doesn’t need to shout.

This week I share how I take Thursdays off. I call it a Clear Day. A day for floating…

If you were to put your ear to the ground and listen carefully, this is what the Zeitgeist would rumble back at you: right now, in 2010, we’re feeling like little canoes thundering down a gorge. Every iota of us wants to paddle over to one of the placid little pools that we glimpse in our flurry downstream. So we can get our breath and check we’re heading down the right river. But we keep getting swooped into the current (nagging emails, to-do detritus), don’t we. Or thrown a series of rapids (late parking fees to pay, kids’ tuba lessons). And so the calm pool of reflection eludes us.

You know, it’s not so much that we yearn less work or less responsibilities. Self-help types often get this wrong. Mostly, if you listen to the hum and drum of the collective, we yearn more space between the work and responsibilities, from which to prioritise and appreciate.