I do love the wonderful wide range of speakers, presenters and facilitators that we have at ConsciousCafe. It is always exciting to be presented with new ideas and unexpected ways of seeing the world.

Last night at ConsciousCafe in London Liz Rivers, an experienced mediator and personal development coach, opened up new ways of thinking about the seasons at a much deeper level than I could possibly have imagined beforehand.  Liz reminded us of the unconscious power that the seasons of the year have to impact on our lives.  When we are so busy and distracted that we lose touch and sense of where we are in the week, month or year, then we become distracted from nature and from life itself. Awareness of the seasons gives us a sense of rhythm and connection to something much greater than ourselves.

Some aspects of our lives are fixed and reliable – day and night, moon and sun, the days in the year.  Other aspects of the year are more flexible, flowing, inducing different kinds of feelings in us as we move from one part of the year to the next.

The individual season we are experiencing affects every area of our life.  Business might want us to be in Spring and Summer all the time – feeling creative and with renewed energy and hope in our steps – but Autumn is a time for harvesting the experience of the past few months and Winter enables us to lie dormant for a while, to rest and regain our energy for the coming year.

We also reflected that climate change is playing havoc with the seasons. When flowers bloom too early and rain, sun, wind and snow affect us in unexpected months, it is no wonder that it becomes harder to find our balance and feel centred in these times. 

Liz gave us the chance to write and reflect on what the seasons mean to us and we shared some of our insights.

I woke up this morning and looked at the beautiful trees outside my window as if with new eyes. Something unexpected had shifted in me. I shall be much more conscious of how the seasons affect me now and I feel confident that I will achieve greater peace of mind.

Thank you Liz for a very special evening and for opening all our minds to unexpected new worlds.

JP

What Will You do with Your One Wild and Precious Life?*

All of us are creative. At every moment we are creating the lives we want to live, the space we inhabit, the way we accomplish our work, how we relate to others. 

These are some of the conclusions reached at our wonderful discussion on the topic of creativity at ConsciousCafe London this week.  It was very special because when we came together and shared our thoughts we were able to access a deeper than usual part of ourselves and share it with others in what turned out to be a very rich and inspiring conscious dialogue.

Creativity

For some people their passion for creativity is enjoyment of the actual process of creating, whether they do it collaboratively or alone.  Some of us need people to witness our creativity for it to exist.  Others are happy simply to create for their own pleasure.  We may create material objects - art, sculpture, batik, rune stones – for the sheer joy of the experience and for others to enjoy.  Or we might write our journals for our pleasure alone. Some people create conceptually - planning lessons, growing businesses, developing relationships. Not all creativity results in anything tangible.

Blocks

All kinds of things may block our creativity – time for ourselves, space in which to create, willpower, responsibilities. Yet everything we do is an act of creativity – whether we think we are channelling our inspiration and ideas from some higher source or simply using the talents and skills that we were born with.

Our conversation seemed to leave all of us on a high. We had probed so deeply and shared from our hearts. The event had turned out to be one of the most exciting of ConsciousCafe conversations (and there have been hundreds of very good ones).

Thank you everyone for taking part. See you again soon.

JP

 

*The title of this piece is inspired by a line from the poem One Summer Day by Mary Oliver

ConsciousCafe is here to stay. Its our 6^th Anniversary year and we have had amazing expansion in the last 12 months. New groups have opened in Canterbury, Dorchester, Geneva, Skipton and Bristol to add to the ones we already had in Oundle, New Forest, Bath and London. Now we are poised for more launches this autumn in Plymouth, Liverpool and SW London.

There was a lot to celebrate and our party was held in the main room with bar at The Lib-rary, a social club in St Martins Lane, near Charing Cross. There was a great atmosphere as people arrived and greeted old friends and were introduced to new people who they hadn’t met before.

True to ConsciousCafe style, we wanted to spend part of the evening in reflection. Thought-leader, author and international speaker Jude Jennison, who works with executive boards and leadership teams, is writing a book on coping with uncertainty and she presented us with several themes to reflect on in groups. What are the challenges of living and working with uncertainty? How do you remain grounded when you live with uncertainty? What strategies can you use to help?

Jude gave examples from her own life. It is important to be open to uncertainty as we never know what the future will hold for us. Six years ago she was afraid of horses. Now she partners with them daily and coaches teams of leaders to learn new skills. Horses give clear feedback and have no agenda and can therefore help people to gain more self-awareness and understanding as they see their own behaviour mirrored by the horses.

There was fantastic energy in the room as we shared our fears and our hopes. Uncertainly has always formed part of the human journey. It will always be with us. But it does seem magnified at the moment. Some people cope by enhancing their deep connections with the people they love; others want to spend more time in nature; some people turn to their spiritual practice. Gratitude also featured for when we appreciate all that we have been given, it can be easier to live in uncertain times.

The evening ended with more food and drink – we had an open bar which was included in the ticket price – so the drink kept flowing until the end of the evening when the tab ran out and it was time to leave the party. It gave us all a lovely feeling of abundance as we enjoyed the deep sense of connection with one another that ConsciousCafe offers.

Here’s to another year of success for ConsciousCafe as we all work together to raise awareness of the human need for love, connection and understanding both for ourselves and for our beautiful planet.

Judy Piatkus with grateful help from Dr Phyllis SantaMaria’s notes

3 July 2017

 

 

 

 

It was a beautiful English summer day when our eclectic ConsciousCafe group set off from Hampstead tube station for our first ‘Walk and Talk’ event on Hampstead Heath.

The Heath terrain is steep in parts and passes through ancient woodland areas with natural paths and wide green open spaces. Only a few of us had met before and we chatted with each other as we experienced the diverse natural pleasures of the Heath. We were on our way to Kenwood House, an elegant  former stately home surrounded by a large estate with landscaped gardens. Its a great favourite with local people as well as with tourists.

There’s something especially relaxing about meeting new people when you are out for a walk. Thoughtful enjoyable conversations were taking place between all of us and it didn’t feel as though we had only met each other just a short while before.

We wandered round the Kenwood grounds, admiring the lake and the views, before relaxing with a drink at the open-air café. It was such a fabulous day that most of us were not in the mood for exploring inside the house, preferring to save that pleasure for a second visit in a colder season.

Our route home took us past The Creamery, a small white building on a little hill near the main House which used to be the dairy for the estate. You can still see the equipment that was used at the time. The views from The Creamery of the fields, trees and estate are as natural now as they would have been two hundred years ago. No wonder it is such a popular location for film-makers of dramas, both historical and contemporary. Notting Hill had a scene shot here as did Belle and the new film, Hampstead, coming out soon, has some fantastic shots of the heath, Kenwood and surrounding area as it is based on a true story set in Hampstead.

We ended our visit with a look at Whitestone Pond, which some say is the highest point in London, before wending our way back down the hill towards Hampstead village. All of us agreed it had been an ideal day for the walk and we will have a lovely shared memory of the first ConsciousCafe event in nature.

 

Judy

ConsciousCafe Founder

ConsciousCafe’s London group were treated to a very inspiring evening at the end of January when Deborah Henley demonstrated how we can inspire ourselves and others by using our emotional intelligence and a variety of other techniques.

In a concise two hour presentation and interactive session Deborah offered so many inspiring ideas that soon all of us were firing on different cylinders. Each of us was invited to share a time when we had unexpectedly been inspired. Our combined experiences showed that a challenging event could often become the catalyst for a change in our lives that could inspire us to make our best decisions. I especially liked Margaret’s story of how she was inspired to change direction in her career when she found herself driving the wrong way round a one-way system.

Our emotional intelligence skills come into play when we consider ourselves in relation to others. We need to have an awareness of our own emotions and how we respond to different situations and we need the skills of self-managing our emotional state.

At the same time we need to be aware of other people’s emotions and to be able to tune into to how they are feeling or to what the atmosphere is in the culture we are working in e.g. if there are a lot of politics in a particular organisation. In relation to others our skills can be seen in the way we communicate our message, manage conflict and above all, in how we show up to inspire others with our presence.

Deborah shared a wide range of ideas and the group contributed thoughts and experiences. My favourite exercise was when we had the opportunity to imagine a future hypothetical personal dream had taken place. (Apparently this exercise is often used by hypnotherapists). I was inspired by a vision of the opening of a building, dedicated solely to ConsciousCafe where we could all meet up. I had a clear vision of what it would look like, how it would feel and how it would be used and I was able to communicate my enthusiasm and inspiration very easily to my partner. Now we just have to make it happen!

Many thanks once again to Deborah Henley for giving so generously of her time to present this event for us at ConsciousCafe. Deborah’s new website is under construction but you can find and follow her on @Deborahhenley

On behalf of ConsciousCafe Judy facilitated a discussion group on the topic of Beyond Mindfulness at Editorial Intelligence’s NNN Festival in London in June.  Here is the story of how Judy became interested in mindfulness:

 

I have been re-visiting my ideas about mindfulness in the last few days in preparation for an event which I am facilitating.

 I first came across the term ‘mindfulness’ many years ago when I was sent an early copy of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book, Wherever You go, There You Are, with a view to my being the UK publisher for it.  Jon Kabat-Zinn had taken ideas from ancient Buddhist practices and explored how to make them accessible to the mainstream.  He believed that Western society had lost touch with the universal human qualities of paying attention and living with awareness.

This was 1994 and the thinking behind the book was all completely new to us at Piatkus. We had published books on meditation but this was so much more.

In the introduction the author explains that ‘wherever you go, there you are.  Whatever you are thinking right now, that’s what’s on your mind.’  It looks at first like a simple observation but in fact it requires much practice and self-awareness to observe your thoughts in this way. The important question we must each ask ourselves is how best to respond to any given situation in which we find ourselves and the answer to that question lies in responding with your full awareness to whatever is going on for you right there in that moment.

Whatever has happened has already happened. The future is unknown.  When we can truly learn to live in the present, to ‘be in touch with where we already are’, then we are in a situation where we have the most to gain for we can understand more of ‘the truth’ of what we are really experiencing and ideally respond with wisdom and heartfelt understanding.

I took the book to the editorial meeting and we were all keen to go ahead. But the ideas were so new at the time, that we thought we would need to change the title of the book or we would have difficulty in selling it into the bookshops (this was long before the days of amazon).   Accordingly we retitled it Mindfulness Meditation for Everyday Life.  We printed an initial edition of 3000 copies. The Daily Mail wrote a piece about it which resonated so profoundly that the book sold out within a week.  It nevertheless took many years before it was taken up by psychotherapists as a tool to help their patients and subsequently the concept of mindfulness found its way into the NHS and after that became mainstream.

Now mindfulness has become an industry.   People know that practising mindfulness is good for them but they are not sure why.  It takes time to become mindful of who we are as individuals, how we respond to different situations in the way that we do, whether we are truly living our lives the way we want to, whether we are living from our hearts.

Mindfulness has been an extraordinary gift to the world. and the gifts it offers are available to each and every one one of us every day of our lives – as long as we are aware when we are truly ‘there’.

For those interested you can click here to purchase or review Jon Kabat - Zinn's book: Wherever You Go, There You Are.