Paul J Howell - Wildmind

Presentation followed by Q & A / Discussion
This presentation seeks to engage and educate communities about suicide and to explore what might be happening for a suicidal person beneath the surface of their concealed suffering.
What might bring a person to a place in life where the best choice they perceive is death? And, perhaps more significantly, what might individuals and communities do, not just to reduce or even eliminate the suicide of their precious people but also bu...
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A banned TV Xmas add. Perhaps a naked ape telling the naked truth was more than the shareholders could stomach...?
https://youtu.be/JdpspllWI2o

I'm less active here these days, but still catching the light as it shapeshifts through the seasons here...
https://www.instagram.com/pauljhowell/ -

Finding new places on the river and with them fresh perspectives. The seasons help by redressing familiar scenes, bringing new insight and a desire to learn more about the nature of this beautiful place.

a complex self-organising system in action. Notice everyone has to be in motion (a traffic jam is full of motion) and aware of the context and consequences for it to flow.

I was talking about the upcoming vision quests and what they are for. This seemed coherent enough to share.
There are several realms that we have societies permission to change without too much backwash...the ripples that come back from friends/relatives who feel in some way perturbed by our major transition. Our work realm is perhaps the easiest, primary relationship next, financial/social status next...all have their risks and difficulties.
Often these are externally vali...dated social contracts, ones we have moved into without the necessary long-term insight to make them enduring...and perhaps that is how it's supposed to be.
When someone accepts their core values/needs/desires are driving change from the inside out, that is often less socially acceptable. We all form part of a social system and when one part of a system changes, the rest changes too...
It’s true to say that most people who come to an inner transition have usually tried to change the externals several times in the preceding decade before accepting the need for deeper change. They usually know what that is by the time symptoms start presenting and a feeling of ‘the inevitable’ starts to gather around them.
Naming the change is the moment we start to leave the old identity behind...in vision quest guiding circles we call it ‘severance’, which precedes ‘threshold’ which in turn preceded ‘incorporation’ literally to embody the new aspects of identity. In psychotherapy circles, it's often referred to as 'breaking a whole in denial'. Essentially our old identity isn't large enough to lead us into the next stage of our growth and development.
It’s not really about new skills, although they might come, it’s about a maturation of core values and a foundational shift of identity and with it a new orientation to life itself that transcends role and relationship status...
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Reflections...

Messenger - Mary Oliver.
My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird— equal seekers of sweetness.... Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture. Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.
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The edge of Autumn in Cawdor Great Wood after the first snow fell over The Highlands.

The Pacific Ocean receiving the Sun.

Grief called me out to the river, to the spot we used to camp, under the young oak, by the deep pool on the bend where the salmon leap and we dove in.
Welcomed onto the trail by deer and hawk, each making a brief greeting appearance then gone - into the deep woods and the eternal sky...their trails marking the holy beginning of a sacred story.

Watching the great turning turn...