physically, as a woman, I'm over the other side of the menopausal mountain.
A friend stopped to chat in the street on her way to have a smear test, and spoke of the pain of speculums after the oestrogen rush is over...I'm at an age where I knew what she meant!

I was reading David Deida - (live now, love now, we're all meat-bags heading for decay and death).  I was thinking that as a woman there's another D to watch out for - 'dessication' - aah the journey of ageing...Dessication, Decay and Death..hmmm. (Gratitude for natural projesterone/oestrogen creams).

So I wonder about the 'Juice' - yes, heart juice, love juice seems accessible at any age.  I'm at an age where opening to that is becoming ever more important.  The journey of growth and spirit beckon - perhaps women are even programmed for this once fertility ends - hormones change, libido loosens it's grip (well, at least in my case) and allows space for...Spirit?

It would be interesting to know how old people FEEL.  I've read some blogs - people of 40 feeling about 20.  My inner experience of my age is often quite young - 18 maybe (I'm gonna be 50 next year).  I asked my mom who is 75 and she said she felt quite young - about 20.
I know in the therapy room we can journey back to feeling the child again...

During retreat there was an interesting experience of connecting to a part of Self that was not so much older and wiser, but eternal and all-knowing.  Consciousness isn't in time so doesn't age - that's a comfort!

By noticing that i breathe in the air you breathe out and vice versa and that trees make this possible.

I'm a fan and forever-on-going student of Non-violent communication, and the following is wisdom from that source:

Receiving empthically requires 'presence'; being with the other with our whole being; not just listening with our ears and using our intellectual faculties.  As Chuang-Tzu says,
"The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing.  The hearing of the understanding is another.  But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty, to the ear or to the mind.  Hence it demands the emptiness of all the faculties.  And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens.  There is then a direct grasp of what is right there before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind."

Some of the common 'no-no'responses are:
advising (I think you should...),
one-upping (That's nothing compared with what i went through...),
educating (You could learn from this if...) ,
consoling (It wasn't your fault...),
story-telling (That reminds me of when...),
shutting down (Cheerup.  Don't feel so bad...)
sympathising (You poor thing...)
Interrogating (When did this happen...)

They're all part of believing we have to fix the situation to make the other person or ourselves feel better, and prevent us from being present WITH them. 

I agree with Jon that our silent presence and sometimes a touch to connect is often the best way to be with someone overwhelmed by bad news.  (Dogs are brilliant at this; they sit by you when you're sad and sometimes lick your tears!)


As for the second part of the question:

I support the Integral world view that we all evolve through developmental stages
( First Tier:archaic/magic/mythic/rational/pluralistic - 2nd Tier - integral, super-integral and up), and that as a whole our centre of gravity is also evolving upwards.
One of the books in Jon's loo library is about the Pendle Witch Trial in 1615 (i think).  Pendle hill isn't too far from where we live ('though it's in Lancashire and we're still in Yorkshire here so historically the War of the Roses divides us - [white rose Yorkshire, red rose Lancashire]).  Reading the trial notes and the magical worldview that the most educated members of the UK justice system had in the 1600's beggars belief.  Nowadays we would expect most British 5 year olds to have outgrown those belief systems.
Today the greatest majority of humanity (70%) is still at [Traditional/mythic/blue-value-meme/amber] worldview level.  That's pre-rational, so a pretty scary centre of gravity. Only about 2% are purportedly 2nd Tier Integral thinkers - but that will change, and a time will come, maybe even in our life-times because evolution itself is exponentially speeding up, when most 8 year olds will have integral worldviews and beyond.  Then the human family will have a degree of maturity of the compassionate sages at our growing tip, and that will be an incredible time to be alive.
It is also possible that in the chaos that ensues from our continued destruction of this planet and each other, that survival will become paramount, and we may regress down-spiral for a time, or destroy each other and the earth before we fulfill our evolutionary potential.
Let's hope we grow up in time...

Acts of Grace, luck and synchronicity for starters...
In the integral meeting with Terry Patten he went into the 2nd person relationship with God/Spirit/ISness/Whatever-you-want-to- call-it - The 'Thou' of all that. 

I'd been having some difficulty with it, having rejected mythic versions (bearded guy in heaven, Hindu Gods and Godesses, Tibetan Devas etc.) and developed some severe rational anti-bodies to the concept. Bowing and praying meet resistance in me, whether it's to Christian crosses or Buddhist statues.

I can appreciate Spirit in other things e.g. Nature Mysticism (3rd person), and i can accept the idea of the Non Dual and that Spirit is in me and i am Spirit, and have had tastes of that in meditation (1st person).

The 2nd person, 'Thou' relationship should be natural for humans as we are social animals and completely wired for relationship, picking up incredibly fast and minute body language signals etc.
I DO feel my perspective is beyond the existential angst of the Modern and Post-Modern world view - I have accepted some form of meaning-making spiritual infusion in life since my early twenties - but faith and devotion still meet those rational anti-bodies when it comes to the 'Thou' relationship.
What's mysterious (and attractive) to me is considering that there is an alive consciousness pervading everything ('an interiority', Terry called it), and that dialogue with it in some form may be possible...(feelings of gratitude and love?).

My guess is 'ISness' has been dialoguing with me all along (through acts of Grace, luck, synchronicity amongst other things) - but I have to learn the language... and currently that's still a mystery to me.

It's like horse trainers completely missed the signicance of a horse turning it's ear towards them or lowering their head or chewing their lips until someone like Monty Roberts (or Native American Indians before him) deciphered it as a body-language and said, 'Guys and Gals, that horse is desperately trying to have a conversation with you...'

I'd like to unravel the mystery of communicating with the 'ISness'.

Freedom is a state of consciousness.

The time i probably felt most free was ironically on a very strict vipassana 10 day silent retreat.  There were lots of rules of containment: [no talking, no eating after midday, sit for 40 mins/slow walk for 40 mins - keep this up for hours, silent work duties, no distractions like watching TV etc., bed by 9.30pm, up by 5am...no straying from the monastery grounds]. 
So, on the physical level i was very constrained.  However, there was method in the apparent madness; i discovered a surpising contradiction: the tighter i was held, the more i could expand in spirit.  When we learn how to slow down and then be still our true nature becomes apparent to us - our true nature is boundless; so apprehending that we realise we ARE free.  And then it's JOY, JOY, JOY!

So, Freedom is a state of consciousness. Or maybe I can take that perspective only because I'm not physically enslaved...('though i did see a DVD on Vipassana meditation in Indian prisons, begun by a radical woman prison governer of Delhi jail who wanted to effect real change, not just contain people, and the experience liberated both the guards and the prisoners on one level...)

Externally to some place of awesome natural beauty - the Niagra Falls sprang to mind.  Angel Falls.  Victoria Falls.  Some stupendous waterfall that makes rainbows in its spray.

Perhaps I'm a bit of a pantheist; nature usually evokes a more 'spiritual' feeling in me than religious edifices and rituals.  My parents are atheists with orange-green meme worldviews, so I never had religion thrust apon me - rather I had to journey out of the flatland of scientific materialism to find my own post-rational version of turquoise+ 'Spirit'.  There was an ex-missionary living in the community i grew up in and i tried Christian Sunday School twice.  Even at 6 I had trouble believing mythic Christianity - and the sun was shining and there were trees to climb and hang upside down in - far more fun.

Travelling with my best friend in Central America in 1991, she went to a Quaker meeting in the Cloud Forest in Costa Rica, and I elected to watch the hummingbirds at a feeder for an hour in the Meeting House garden.

More recently in 2005 I spent the best part of 2 months on retreat in Thailand - great experience, very relaxing and earthing; watching giant yellow and black butterflies flitting in the forest canopy.  Meditation is great, good for me and part of my daily 'spiritual' practice.  Even on a meditation retreat within a Buddhist framework I remember being distracted by dragonflies and the desire to be outside during the pujas and the chanting.

Internally I would like to pilgrimage to Nirvana.

I remember as a child coming across the concept  that 'in a hundred years all the beings you know will be dead, including yourself'.  An early lesson in impermanence; the world of form is constantly changing and the only constant is the flow itself of birth and death.  Notwithstanding egalitarian breakthroughs in human life extension (and even with our current life-spans we're seriously stressing the planet's biosphere), I now have half that time left, and that's the living to 100 years scenario... So, no security there.

One idea that helped pull me out of spiralling financial fears around my recent redundancy after a 20 year period of settled work was Susan Jeffer's phrase of 'I can handle it' ( Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway).  Life will throw us difficulties; our own ageing, sickness (at times) and finally death, and similar sufferings of our loved ones, is a universal given, and all life journeys will  contain additional stressful or heart-breaking scenarios to cope with, learn from, and grow wiser from (hopefully).  Victor Frankl was a holocaust survivor and author of Man's Search for Meaning, and he said that although we cannot control what happens in our lives, we can choose our attitude to what happens - he called this the 'last of the human freedoms'.  So we can choose to be courageous and grateful and kind, no matter what - and I get a sense of security from that choice.

During an 'awakening experience' sustained for 10 days in different depths of state-flow during a silent retreat, i accessed the witness self and radiant ground of being.  There is a part of us that doesn't change; the very awareness that always accompanies our experience of this world of form.  Certainly it is a constant during our lives, and it makes sense that, like energy, it cannot be destroyed...  So I do get a sense of security from that.  As the Buddhists say, 'Take Refuge in the Buddha-Dharma'.  You may not be a Buddhist, but you can still take refuge in that unchanging ground of Being...same thing by another name.

Still full of awe, and always with a growing edge.

That i am good and you are bad.  That kind of thinking. 

Last night i went to see the Coen brothers new film 'No Country for Old Men', because they are wonderful directors, but against the better judgement of part of my being that tries to choose wisely about the images that are seared into my brain...

Great direction, great acting, 'crap' content.  (For those of you who haven't seen it yet it's about a drug deal gone wrong and the assassins on the tail of the guy who finds the money...) Yet again the mean red meme playing itself out for our entertainment.  In terms of content i disliked the film intensely.  i mean i'm trying to have a tropos towards the general direction of being more Bodhisattva like - to rid myself of fears for the survival of my separate self and practice the paramitas of generosity etc.  In that film when a man practiced generosity to stop and help the guy with his car bonnet up, the object of his generosity just happened to be a cold-blooded killer, and he got totalled for his pains - well, is that going to encourage people to help someone whose car has broken down, or are they going to be haunted by the fear of a pressurised air canister?!?

This morning in sitting i decided to do the shadow work 3-2-1 process on the assassin:  When i viewed him as a separate being [3] (albeit archetypal and fictional), i viewed him as a totally heartless individual who took what he wanted without a trace of compassion, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. 
When i engaged in conversation with him [2] i could understand his sense of power and satisfaction at his ruthless strategy to succeed. 
When i became him [1] i felt the joy of annihilating opposition.  Perhaps cyber space is not the place for a fairly private person to admit to having fantasies sometimes of wanting to hurt and obliterate others who infuriate me...the fantasies can be quite graphic but i won't go into them here!...and then i snap myself out of it and spiral up and empathise with my feelings and needs, and try and do the same for 'them', by which time, hopefully, the desire to leave a wake of bodies has dissipated... It's not only in desiring physical annihilation of the other that my shadow assassin operates; it  enjoys defeating others in argument etc ('though more recently I'm coming to see that it's  more satisfying to be happy than right).

Anyway, back to what separates us from others - i guess i'm saying that if we own what we perceive as being 'other' then it reduces the distance.  I am fortunate in this lifetime not to be an assassin (so far), but it doesn't mean that i don't have assassin-like qualities at times.  Because i do, i realise that i'm not totally separate from that archetype with the bad hair and the penchant for tossing coins to decide life or death and the gas cannister and the guns.

However, it's also quite a relief to turn from viewing brutality to what inspires me instead.  A quote from Anne Franks diary:
"It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and so impractical.  Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart."