Reunions:adventure or Audition

Reunions: Adventure or Audition

Lara Patriquin: Guest Writer

My 30th reunion: adventure or audition?

Last weekend I flew to Montreal for my 30th medical school reunion.

MCGill

On the way there, my mind was busy. Who will remember me? What have I done with these thirty years? What will I say when someone asks?

I caught it on the plane. One phrase helped:

Let it be an adventure, not an audition.

In audition mode, we perform. We scan the room, measure ourselves against everyone in it, and manage how we come across. The chest tightens. The breath gets shallow. This is the narrow, focused attention Iain McGilchrist ties to the left hemisphere. It only sees what it already knows to look for.

In adventure mode, we are curious. Who will I meet? What will unfold? Attention widens. This is the righthemisphere's way of attending: open, relational, taking in the whole room.

Two objections came up for me. Maybe they are yours too.

"If I stop calculating, I'll miss something." The calculating mind is a flashlight pointed at our feet. We won't trip, but we miss the landscape.

"I'm too tired to be present." This one made me laugh. It assumes presence takes energy. But it's the scanning and managing that wear us out. Presence is what is left when we stop. When we are tired and a small child climbs into our lap, we don't need energy to be warm. The warmth is already there.

So I walked into that reception tired, a little rumpled, and curious. And it was lovely. Thirty years fell away. We were the same people who sat in the same lecture hall at twenty-three, just softer. I don't know if my heart has ever felt larger than it did this weekend.

Try this before your next gathering. Say the word audition and feel what your body does. Then say adventure and feel what opens.

Let your body choose.

Lara

"The discovery that peace, happiness and love are ever-present within our own Being, and completely available at every moment of experience, under all conditions, is the most important discovery that anyone can make." — Rupert Spira

Lara Patriquin, MD
Speaker and Coach at Thinking2.0
Associate Professor of Radiology, School of Medicine, University of Utah
Book your complimentary call here.
(505) 269-4097

There's a whole book about this! 

Thrive Mind - An Illustrated Guide to the Subconscious

The bunker is the subject of my book — how we build it, what it quietly costs us, and the glitch in the nervous system that lets it seize the controls: the mechanism that convinces us we’re small and under threat, when our real nature is joyful and brilliant.

It’s in my editor’s hands now, out in the next few months. Here’s an early look at the bunker itself:

What working with me looks like

We go into the bunker together, calmly, and take inventory — questioning the beliefs that keep you defended, and changing your relationship to the emotions you’ve been bracing against. Less a discipline, more like clearing out a room you forgot had a window. Curious what’s in yours?

“The discovery that peace, happiness and love are ever-present within our own Being, and completely available at every moment of experience, under all conditions, is the most important discovery that anyone can make.” 

Rupert Spira

Lara Patriquin, MD

Associate Professor of Radiology

School of Medicine, University of Utah

Speaker and Coach at Thinking2.0

(505) 269-4097

Book your complimentary call here.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Vamping

Vamping

“Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life, bringing peace and abolishing strife.”―Kahlil Gibran.

 Once a week, I played harp duets with a highly talented harpist who tolerated my missed or absent notes and tried to teach an old harpist new tricks and fingering. One year, Pam also taught me an unfamiliar word: vamping. She said, “I will vamp you in.” She plays a brief series of chords before I start my part of the piece. I definitely like the word. Vamping. It means playing a simple chord or beat, usually before someone else begins, and then perhaps continuing to play the background chords quietly as the other player takes the melody.

I think this best describes a meeting with a spiritual friend. I may ask a simple question, such as, “Where did you see God in your life today?” I may then repeat the question if the subject shifts. Often, I keep praying that the Holy Spirit will guide us. These prayers are my chords.

Vamping also describes the ministry as a deacon. Deacons identify needs in the world and share them with others in their congregation. We then support and lead others into that ministry as they become passionate about it as well.

Our job is to stay attuned to the beat as we listen for the rhythm and melody of the Holy Spirit’s presence within us and in those we support. We remain in the background, supporting and undergirding others in ministry. We keep the beat going, listening and praying to hear and feel the Holy Spirit’s presence, who guides and directs both of us.

Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Remembering "The Great War" Again

Remembering “The Great War” Again

“This is a war to end all wars.”—Woodrow Wilson.

I remember when we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, the Great War, the War to End All Wars. The war officially ended in 1918 on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. In 2018, at 11 a.m. on November 11th, or Veterans Day in the morning, bells tolled in churches all over the globe. Special programs about the war were held worldwide, most notably in England, Paris, and France, where the world’s diplomats met to commemorate the peace accord that ended the war.

Both of my grandfathers served in the war and came home. I never heard Grandfather Johnson speak about his experience. The other, Grandfather Whaley, rarely talked about the war itself, but he had much to say about his time in the army. He was born in what is now the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Joining the armed service was his higher education.

When I was in college, my grandfather wrote to me weekly on his old typewriter, whose keys often stuck. The lines of type were uneven. Every letter, however, was full of his army experiences and how he related them to my new life in college. He would remind me that book learning was not the most important part of my new life. He believed the best lessons were found in the people I would meet and the places where I would travel. Almost every sentence ended with etc., etc., etc. 

I kept every one of his letters. The girls on my dorm floor would gather each week to hear about his wisdom from his life experiences in the army during World War I, half a century earlier—and about his present life in small-town Virginia. 

 My latest book, Letters from my Grandfather, is about my grandfather’s letters and my response to him now, more than fifty years later.

Did I forget to mention that my grandfather always included a dollar bill with each letter?

Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/