Author: Justin Wise
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The Ask and the Answer: Distinctions and Dualisms
We can learn a lot by making distinctions between things. When we’re able to name differences – for example, between enlivening and deadening, generous and fickle, ethical and manipulative, truthful and untruthful – we make it possible to observe what would otherwise have been invisible to us, and take action on the basis of our observations. Being…
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Waiting to Know
Waiting until you know for sure what’s going to happen – where people are involved – means waiting for ever. With machines, it’s easy. With sufficient understanding of mechanics you can often predict exactly what’s going to happen. Cause and effect, straightforward to establish. But human situations are nothing like that, even though we pretend to ourselves…
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Three Myths to Give Up on If We Want to Grow Up
At the times when the world has shrunk to its smallest horizons, when I have been most despairing, desperate, or alone, or when I have found myself working and pushing much too hard, it usually turns out that I have been living in thrall to one or more protective myths about life that I have carried…
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Is Anyone Listening?
It’s amazing how often we assume our requests can be heard while ignoring the capacity of others to listen to what we’re asking. Some examples: You made a request by email If your recipient didn’t read it, didn’t see it, or is overwhelmed by emails and messages, as so many people are, you probably don’t have…
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Balancing Judgement and Mercy
Whatever we say we’re most committed to, a great many of us live as if judgement were the primary human value, judging ourselves mercilessly and without respite. And, when we live in the stream of harsh judgement, no effort is enough, no achievement worth much, and our efforts to help seem to us nothing but disguised…
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We Have to Find a Way to Love Our Brokenness
We have to find a way to love our brokenness No, not loving ourselves in spite of our failings But loving the brokenness itself We have to love all the ways we’re late And all the ways we missed the point We have to love that we were scared And that we were ashamed to say it We have to love that…
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Back to the Garden
The myth of the Garden of Eden is so brilliant and powerful because it expresses our sense of having profoundly lost something essential and elemental from our lives, something we need. We long to return to the peace and beauty of the garden. It’s a place we feel we once knew but from which we’ve been exiled, and we…
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Learning Again How to Trust Ourselves
Rene Descartes’ method for discovering what’s true starts with a bold and radical move – distrust everything until it can be proven. It’s not hard to see how powerful a way this is to cut through superstition and confusion. By starting from first principles, and using step-by-step logic, he gives us a way to prove things for ourselves, doing away with…
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A Calendar Like a City
Today I’m in the midst of a new design project to address the inhale-exhale question. I am experimenting with the structure of my 2016 calendar so that it can be an affordance for both exhaling and inhaling. Instead of my more familiar habit of fitting things into my schedule as they arise, I’m pre-designing deep grooves…
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An Autumn Walk
I’m on the way in to central London this morning, a short journey from home to meet someone. I’ve left in good time, and as I step out of the door the autumn sun, reflected from the windows on the other side of the street, catches me with its warmth. I’m already heading for the…
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Not So Sure
It can be incredibly helpful to learn to distinguish between what happens and your assessment of it. What happens: She didn’t return my call Your assessments: I must have done something wrong She’s angry with me She hates me She’ll never forgive me I’m such a loser This relationship is over What happens can be…
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Right-Sizing Yourself
You probably have no idea of the actual scale of your presence in the world. Under-sizing: I’m so small They’ll never take any notice I can’t do anything Who cares what I see and know? Better not to cause any ripples Nobody listens, why would they? Who, little me? Over-sizing: I’m so important It’s all…
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Forgiven
Forgiveness. Among the most healing of all human possibilities. Today, can you start by forgiving yourself? .. for your forgetfulness, your anger, your irritability, your desire to please, your frustration, your resentment, your boredom, your rushing, your waiting, your confusion? Can you forgive yourself, please, for everything you judge so harshly about yourself? And for…
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How To Help
Of course you want to help. Of course you want to relieve other people of their suffering and difficulty where you can. But it’s easy to confuse what’s actually, genuinely of help with what makes you feel better. In other words, it’s easy to do what makes you at ease and then take your ease…
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Story People
As well as living your life, you’re always in the midst of a story about it all, though perhaps it doesn’t often seem this way. Our stories quickly become transparent, invisible, in the living of them. But one evening, reading a book or watching a film, you find yourself deeply touched by the situation of…
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Nothing more whole
Right in the middle of your most profound difficulties, maybe the difficulties you’ve spent your whole life trying to avoid, there can be the birth of something new. Perhaps an illness, a loss, or a disappointment leads to a new kind of strength, intelligence, compassion, or kindness. Perhaps it leads to gratitude for your human…
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Affordances
What’s your understanding of the source of your actions and other people’s actions? Mostly we’ve been taught to think that it’s something within that produces what we do. We talk about motivation, or goals, or drive, or inspiration. We think of ourselves as separate from the world and that our actions and relationship to everything comes…
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Meeting the Shadow
In Ursula Le Guin‘s stunningly beautiful novel ‘A Wizard of Earthsea’, the young wizard Ged unleashes a terrifying shadow into the world by mistake. Stunned by his power, he stands paralysed in shock while the shadow’s claws cut deep lines into his face before disappearing. From then on, he lives a haunted life, forever running from…
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Learning or practice: which is greater?
At the heart of Integral Coaching is the understanding that it’s in the nature of human beings to become who we are through our practices, the purposeful actions we repeat again and again. There are all kinds of grounds for this claim. The extraordinary plasticity of our nervous systems is one. The observations of the…