How can you invite your Inner Self to communicate with your Daily Self?
Would gathering some objects of specific qualities, a ‘Wishes Basket’, help to create a tangible ‘anchor’ to keep your Inner Self feeling welcomed?
Expressing the Self through objects
How would you introduce yourself through objects with no words?
If you are to create a symbolic container for your Self what would it hold?
What kind of feeling the container would need to convey?
Which objects represent support, inspiration, direction, reassurance for you?
How would the container look on the outside?
Imagine that the container is your Wishes Basket:
- which 5 wishes you would like to put to your Wishes Basket right now?
Wishes basket becomes a Travel Basket for your Journeys
Travel basket contains things currently important to you, things that support and represent you; your talismans.
Journeying through timeline it may also extend to include objects representing your past making it also a Personal History Basket and into your Future making it your Wishes for the Future Basket, a lighthouse, a vision board and point in SatNav, a North Star.
Wishes Basket reminds you who you are and what you wish for. It anchors your wishes through objects carefully chosen by you to evoke joy, support, comfort, reassurance, inspiration, hope, energy, whatever warm fuzzies feeds your Soul.
On a practical side it contains a Post It notes with wishes.
It is a fine selection of familiar things on uncharted territory, a source to go to in time of difficulty.
Cultivating the Self
Cultivating the Self is a program for Personal Development and sustainable Natural Health which consists entirely of Quality Questions.
If you are interested and intrigued by your life experience and also like the idea of ‘making sense’ of events and people in your life this is a program for you.
In Cultivating the Self we also map out the outlines of your Inner Self as reflected through the prism of your life experience.
In the very beginning of this journey we create a Wishes Basket.
It represents you at the start of a Journey and will see you through. As you cultivate your Self on the journey it would be interesting to see how your Wishes Basket, your ’container of Self’ will transform.
The ‘Container’
The idea of a Wishes Basket comes from a concept of a container. A container is some physical, tangible – or virtual, abstract – home for something.
A container which holds water is a good example.
Containers share energy they are holding and serve everybody in need of this energy.
A thoughtfully created container immediately starts to gather energy of what it represents and with time becomes a source of this energy, the support in itself.
If you are doing a project for example, before you collect things for this project together, they are random not connected objects scattered everywhere with no particular aim or use. Once collected within some chosen space they suddenly become parts of the project in the making.
Sometimes we don’t realise what is important to us and what supports us before we consciously gather things together, physically or virtually.
Looked at as a unit, these previously unrelated things form a ‘company’ and start to have their own life: with a name and energy signature they interact, enhance each other and evolve.
Containers you already created
Your photo album is a container of your family history in pictures.
A vision board is a container of your dreams and goals.
Your website or a Social Media profile is a container of you – or business you created.
Your business premises are a container.
Your garden is.
And your house!
These are places dedicated to a particular something. Containers define, gather and increase certain energy.
A container exercise: look around and list containers you already created. Next to each entry put an energy signature, a feeling which this particular container evokes.
My Clinic as a container
This was an unintended exercise for creating a container. I only recently realised that it served as such.
Some years ago I was going through some particularly challenging times, seemingly with no hope and no end in sight. It was a real ‘collection’ of various family related struggles going on at the same time. It caused a sustained overwhelm and spilled out to other areas of my life.
I felt as a hopeless juggler who puts massive efforts into the art and yet drops the balls one by one at every round.
My focus was scattered and my energy was low.
After doing therapies for years and being good at it I wanted to just drop my practice.
I was nearing a summit of hopelessness which felt as if dressed into seriously grey clouds when one of my former patients who later became a friend said: ‘You did so much for me. You changed my life. You saved my marriage and family.
I truly feel sorry for people who are not experiencing your treatments and not getting your help’.
She suggests for me to create a dedicated room for my Clinic at home and build a new practice altogether.
Largely out of sense of duty than out of enthusiasm I did what she suggested.
I didn’t do any marketing. I had no desire or strength for it.
But I dedicated a small room in our house to a Clinic and created a simple but warm and nurturing space where I put pictures and other beautiful objects given to me by my patients and students over the years.
Before that, I would do home visits. My husband and me would work from other people’s Clinics. We would see patients in our living room and the whole family had to go for a walk while we worked.
Very soon, after we created a new Clinic room new patients started to come seemingly out of nowhere.
When I say ‘out of nowhere’ I mean out of nowhere. They came from different parts of the country and when asked how they found out about me they cited some obscure sources.
These people have been a foundation of my Clinic.
Since, we moved the Clinic to a different room in the house specifically remodelled with the Clinic in mind. It took years but this new space brought a lot of joy and relief from suffering to many people.
It was in that room that one of my patients mentioned the idea of the container to me first. He literally said ‘this room is a great container’ for a therapy I practiced.
Hmmm….I was intrigued. I remembered his words but it didn’t occur to me that part of the success was because I
- dedicated the space for it and
- gathered particular objects in one place.
We moved house since and our Clinic room in the new house still holds – and acquires! – things given to us by our patients over the years.
We have a soft blanket gifted some 12 years ago and a souvenir from last year.
What’s in your basket?
Back to our Wishes Basket though.
Close your eyes, take a nice deep breath and visualise your Wishes Basket.
- Give a brief description for every item: what does it symbolise, why is it important?
- What is your basket on the outside? An old suitcase? A woven basket? A practical bag? A rucksack?
- If the items in your basket could talk what would they communicate to each other?
- As a collective, what the ‘community’ of items in the basket want to communicate to you?
- Is your basket a ‘real’, tangible container? Or is it a sum of qualities? People? Or is it something that surrounds you or with you at all times?
A Basket test
I gave this exercise to different people on Cultivating the Self Journey and asked: what is in your Wishes Basket? The answers were varied and surprising. The Basket content was interesting and eclectic.
- ‘I don’t need to gather anything! It’s all around me in my house’. This person lives in her basket. Her beautiful house is a container for her Self.
- ‘I have inspiration, courage, integrity’. This person lives on an abstract plane altogether mentally. In reality she lives in between continents and operates online.
- ‘I have myself, my family and my dream profession’.
- ‘Half of my items are ‘real’ (like books) and half are wishes of activities’.
- ‘Wishes for the Future’
- The objects of my Basket are all tangible; but what they symbolise is warmth, softness and light; clarity and writing.
Assembling the Wishes Basket
To start just gather things somehow important to you without asking the ‘why’.
Again, this is a container for your Self, at least for a start.
Keep your Basket in plain sight or in your mental focus.
Edit it, refresh it, add to it, clutter clear it and keep it handy.
Play with your Basket when Sheltering in.
- What would you like your Wishes Basket to hold?
- What One Thing is the most precious piece?
Have fun creating your Wishes Basket 🙂
And if you are ready for asking yourself Quality Questions, Join us for Cultivating the Self!
