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4 Elements: Audio For Relaxation

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 17:50:36 GMT

The Four Elements

This audio resource is designed to assist with relaxation.

Slow down and listen: Acknowledging the big painful grief

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 17:57:02 GMT

When you lose someone you love,

Your life becomes strange,

The ground beneath you becomes fragile,

Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;

And some dead echo drags your voice down

Where words have no confidence

Your heart has grown heavy with loss;

And though this loss has wounded others too,

No one knows what has been taken from you

When the silence of absence deepens.

Flickers of guilt kindle regret

For all that was left unsaid or undone.

There are days when you wake up happy;

Again inside the fullness of life,

Until the moment breaks

And you are thrown back

Onto the black tide of loss.

Days when you have your heart back,

You are able to function well

Until in the middle of work or encounter,

Suddenly with no warning,

You are ambushed by grief.

It becomes hard to trust yourself.

All you can depend on now is that

Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.

More than you, it knows its way

And will find the right time

To pull and pull the rope of grief

Until that coiled hill of tears

Has reduced to its last drop.

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance

With the invisible form of your departed;

And when the work of grief is done,

The wound of loss will heal

And you will have learned

To wean your eyes

From that gap in the air

And be able to enter the hearth

In your soul where your loved one

Has awaited your return

All the time.

-John O'Donohue

Keep Reading below!

There were all of these wonderful funny stories told to me in the therapy room. There was a constant barrage of teasing between them. She hid his stuff. He called her a name. The energy was intense and they lived in a big beautiful way.

Now he is gone with only a few weeks' notice. She sinks into a deep depression. She sleeps on the couch. She doesn't want to wake up in the morning. There is a fog in her brain. She wakes up thinking maybe it didn't happen and reaches for him. Is she going crazy? She wants to run away. She wants to get away from the pain. Who wouldn’t?

What should I say? Does she need advice on how to live this life? She is ashamed. It feels desperate. People tell her she needs to get himself together for the children. If not, something terrible is going to happen. There is lots of anxiety in the air.

In therapy we bring him into the room. The only way to get through this is to go through the darkness. I ask her about the very worst parts. We sit in my office and do EMDR around the worst parts. Its not fun. We joke about her coming in to get “beat up” but something is shifting. I feel her lightening week over week. As the pain lightens she is better able to do some of the tasks of grieving. She is better able to care for those she loves. I am happy for her.

John O’Donohue describes this situation so well in this poem. Death has changed things but this was a big love and the relationship must continue in a new way. It is hard to let any change happen because on our way we have to deal with this big black hole of pain in loss. In order to be able to handle it the pain has to be faced gradually; titrated. It needs to be taken into another relationship so it can be softened. Then the relationship with this wonderful vibrant person who is gone can gradually change into what it needs to be. The grip can lighten. Reality can be faced. Because pain can now be tolerated Love can be remembered. One foot is placed in front of the other.

Paul , Mar 10, 2023

Where do you feel it in your body?

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 17:47:49 GMT

“When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.”- From Thomas Moore- “Care of the Soul”

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Tell me what you look for and I shall tell you who you are

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 21:57:56 GMT

Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering. -James Hillman

Do you know what you yearn for? Do you have a picture of what you are looking for? I am not talking about a big house or a trip around the world. Let’s go deeper. What fascinates you and draws you towards it? Maybe your picture of the security of a happy home? Maybe some kind of lighter and more playful world? What do your dreams look like? Have you lost touch with them?

He walked into my office very discouraged. Everything had fallen apart. Things had just gotten worse and worse lately. He had believed the “contract.” If he was successful everything would work out. Now everything that he knew that defined success was gone: his girlfriend, his health, his job, and his accomplishments. He had tried hard. The “contract” had been broken. Everything important was lost. Now he felt worthless. He felt like nothing.

Sometimes there are moments where your losses define you. They are all you can see and the melancholy sets in. Ok, you are sad but now what? What’s next? What do we yearn for? Have we forgotten what we yearn for? That still small voice of yearning, the only thing left, may be the most important part of who we are.

Or maybe you haven’t even had any big noticeable loss lately but the world still feels pretty “flat and dull.” You start focusing on “functioning” or “surviving” in the world. Like clients that ask me to help them to “cope” with situations. Coping’s ok, it feels better than failure, but “cope” is a sad little limited word to me. It doesn’t give you energy and you can’t build a life on “coping.” What about the “big exciting pictures of life” that you had in your mind at point in your life before “reality” sunk in. This “reality” that was taught to you that you are defined by superficial stuff like what you have, or what you do, or what people say about you. That message starts to feels oppressive. It’s an easy way for others to control you. Instead, what if you could really define your own original authentic self. You don’t want to regret all your “unlived life” someday. You want to do what you were here for. You want to live your own life. OK, welcome to midlife crises energy!

I love Hillman’s question: “Tell me what you yearn for?” We start with that. What pictures do you have of future? What feelings are you looking for? How do you see yourself? There is a “pull” to this. Good questions lead us in our “wandering” and help us to connect with ourselves. One of the main quests in therapy is to get rid of the beliefs that block us in answering these questions. When the blocks are knocked down, we can dig up these mental pictures and move towards them. There is an incredible amount of energy that resides in these pictures waiting to be released. It is so much more powerful than motivating ourselves with fears by beating ourselves up. It is the image that can fuel us, that can “drive our wandering” and help us to define ourselves.

Paul, Connections Psychological

Loneliness to Solitude

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 21:50:24 GMT

Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

It's a bit embarrassing but often I talk to myself out loud when I am walking in the morning. I hope that you see my headphones in and think I am just talking on my phone! �� As I walk and talk I reconnect with myself and ponder my thoughts and feelings. Lately I am trying to get acquainted with that sad and empty, but very familiar feeling that creeps up on me. It happened sitting by myself as a child, staring at the roof of my bedroom as an adolescent, and searching for friends as a young adult. I had always hoped that someone would fill in that feeling of emptiness. When that didn't happen it was discouraging. Sometimes I had a moment where I would feel close to someone but people would leave and then it would hurt. Sometimes even when I was in the middle of that feeling of closeness it would feel inadequate. I had not gotten enough. My bucket was not full. This often left me with the feeling of frustration with myself or with the other person. I wanted to give up and withdraw or to latch on with desperation. I long for a more grounded way to approach this feeling. I would love to be able to live out the Poet Rilke’s quote above to learn to “love my solitude” and this blog is an attempt “to sing out with the pain it causes.”

The reality is we don’t spend much time alone with our thoughts anymore. We say we are busy but in reality we have a hard time tolerating quiet and we run from it. Just try sitting in a room in the quiet for even 10 minutes by yourself without your phone! There is a fear of “that feeling.” But even in our “busy-ness” we still feel loneliness and so it is used as a sales technique. Just watch an ad for practically anything and you’ll see the message about the warmth and connection that thing will provide. They know what we are missing. Pornography is the most extreme example of this selling of intimacy. All the lonely people around us. It's sad!

Henri Nouwen, the old spiritual writer, talks about the journey from what he calls “loneliness to solitude.” The message is that much of our walk through life is about attempting to fill that gap; that feeling of loneliness. Even when we partially fill it with other people we are on tenuous ground. There is always a limit to relationships. They can’t fill us up all the time and we get anxious and angry as we think those close to us should be fixing our loneliness. They are not doing their job. How do we get to the point where we can let this go, enjoy healthy solitude and connect with ourselves?

So in my attempt to solve this problem I walk slowly in the morning and notice what my loneliness feels like. As I said I can see how I have been looking to relationships to soothe it. The relationship works for a while but I realize it's like throwing “a little water on my dry ground” of loneliness. That “happy buzz” disappears eventually and you want some more. People can’t always be close. We have to learn to tolerate that feeling and find something deeper and more solid. It takes slowing down and “singing out with the pain” to see that this is real.

This is what good therapy or a good friend does for us. As long as you are still spinning mentally sitting in the quiet does little. Someone by your side is needed to begin the journey to slow things down so that you can notice the lonely feeling and not be so anxious about it. If you can stop being afraid of that feeling of emptiness the pendulum can swing. If there’s enough courage to be able to explore and appreciate your solitude then you can learn to not depend on others to fill that loneliness gap anymore. You will still need connection with people but now you can welcome people into that space inside that you have made with real hospitality. There will always be some loneliness but in your voyage back-and-forth from painful loneliness to peaceful solitude you can learn some important lessons about yourself.

Good luck on the journey!

Paul

This Amazing Guy!

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 21:47:07 GMT

Awe and Wonder!

This little guy sits on the side of my driveway and stares at me every morning as I set out for my walk. I’m pretty sure he thinks he is blending in perfectly. He wonders what I am up to. He’s torn about whether he should run or just sit there. In a month or two he will turn white and hide in the snow. We hold eye contact for 30 seconds. He wakes something up in me as I stare into these eyes. He has his own rich life. Something mysterious about that. I’m sure you have felt it.

Imagine a world without animals. What an empty feeling. Here we are in the middle of this incredible diversity and complexity in birds and bugs and seasons. Incredible! Why do I let myself lose this “wow” and move inside my little thought world every day? Why do I let my mind bounce around so much trying to fix that negative feeling? I’m given the gift of this little guy and he catches my imagination. That feeling of the incredible beauty and generosity of all this diversity. Whoa what a rush this amazing world is! I am grateful for it and I know as I draw my last breath, these moments will be what come up. Thanks for the reminder little guy!

Paul

Primed to Grow: Inspiration vs Scarcity

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 21:37:19 GMT

Primed to Grow: Inspiration vs Scarcity

If you have read any of my blogs lately you know that I have gone through a change lately. Two years ago I was feeling numb and only wanting to “survive” my last year of retirement. I planned to relax and withdraw and something about that really appealed to me except for that empty feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Something changed because it had to. Something opened up deep inside of me. I now paid closer attention to that quiet little yearning that I had been ignoring. The little discomfort that had been annoying me now drove me on.

I have thought much about that feeling as clients come in lately. Some clients come in feeling lost, confused, and longing for something. That discomfort makes them open to new things. They want to feel again, to get away from pain, for a feeling of closeness. Sometimes you can feel the healing energy kicking in.

Other clients come in stuck in their fear. I feel the wall already up. They may have decided that what they already need. They have put up a wall of ego before they start. It is a battle between openness and fear, light and darkness.

It is worse for us because we have bought into a strange philosophy in our society. We believe that the only way we can really control our bad behaviour is by manipulating ourselves with fear. We use fear or rewards to trick ourselves or others in doing the things we judge as worthwhile. We have been told it is the only effective way of getting things done. The problem with using fear to motivate is that it leads to a gradual loss of energy until we feel it as pain. We get so tired we have to withdraw. Driving with the threat of the stick and leading with the stick leads us to the lowest level of moral development.

There has always been a battle in human nature between fear and love. There has always been a battle between clinging to the security of power and giving into openness and growth. We almost always opt for power in our anxiety. Appearing weak makes us anxious so we chose the more concrete thoughts over feelings. We close down and put on our emotional armour to protect ourselves.

There is a better way. I remember hearing people say they were motivated by “inspiration” or “passion.” The theory was that they were drawn by some deep feeling of attraction toward their goal. This feeling of getting pulled is a whole different kind of motivation. As you go through the activity it gives you increasingly more energy because you have tapped into the source and the meaning of the activity becomes more intense.

Try to remember a time when you have fallen in love and try to define this in words. That is impossible but it is a feeling that sticks It is a feeling of being alive that the middle aged want to get back as they fall asleep. When you get that numb feeling you want to wake up. Can you imagine that feeling of being completely loved, valued engaged in a meaningful activity and belonging fully to a group of people?

Whatever that powerful force is it has always driven great people into something greater. That feeling of Joy is the opposite of fear and scarcity. It pulls you out instead of driving you inside to conserve your energy. But it does not start with a feeling of security.

So what to do? In a society built on fear and scarcity we need to practice inspiration and passion everyday. When you feel that intense Joy don't distract yourself. Don't let it scare you. Be with it and notice it. It is the sourse of everything good. Along with that you are going to have to get comfortable with being vulnerable and revealing you fear and shame. It is not easy because you have been practicing hiding for so long. It requires a leap of faith but it is so worth it.

Ok so for you sceptics out there. You say the world is an ugly scary place. That is not real life. You can get hurt in the world living too open. But I keep going back to my questions. Why about beauty in the world? Why is there light? Why do we look for meaning? I believe we are given gifts that could be enjoyed and fill up our life but we are a hard group of people in 2019. We are offered things that would give us life, that would give us energy but we get scared and hide from these gifts.

So in my mind there is this epic battle between scarcity, fear and darkness and inspiration, and love and light. Scarcity and fear are easy to get going. Inspiration, beauty, trust, light are much more fragile and need nurturing. What will you choose?

Paul Berg is a Psychologist at Connections Psychological Services, a new Psychology Practice in south central Edmonton. Watch the website at www.connectionspsychologicalservices.com for more blogs.