You gotta roll with it!

I drew a card a couple of weeks ago from my treasured pack of animal 'oracle cards' - I often use them to help me find answers to questions in my life - the answers that are already within me but which are, for whatever reason, eluding me.It was spot on! I had pulled the 'Alligator card'. Now, for me, 'Gator' is all about 'rolling with the punches' (as the boy in this photo is doing, funnily enough, with the baby alligator). And when my period (sorry, guys, but it's a fact of life - and relevant here), a possible meeting with my ex-husband, a co-counselling course I was running and preparation for a talk I was giving on resilience (note the theme of the talk) came all at once, I needed to learn to surrender to the flow, yes. But for me it was a degree deeper than that. As the words of that classic Oasis song go, 'You gotta roll with it'. And that's Gator medicine!I'll read you a bit about what it says about Alligator in my oracle cards book: 'Gator shows us the value of thoroughly digesting both the pleasures and pains of life [...] When Gator rolls under the water with its prey, its message is to roll with the punches when being attacked by life's circumstances.'Choosing to laugh when tangled in your own seriousness can immediately diffuse the stranglehold of anger and judgments, self-importance and inflexibility. Once your rigidity is removed, you are free to again integrate the present set of circumstances, finding what you may have formerly overlooked. Then you can learn Gator's lessons on how to digest the value of any life lesson.'In the first instance we kind of think, 'Ah, that's too much: I can't cope with that!' And it's that kind of kneejerk reaction that we need to challenge. Because if we allow ourselves to 'soften into' our lives more - if we learn to roll with it - then we realise that we have far more gas in our cylinders than we think.It's like the woman who finds she can lift up a car to save her child who's trapped underneath it. And we are, as I'm discovering more and more in the work I'm doing with people on a group and an individual basis, we are enormously resilient beings, capable of much more than we ever dreamed possible. And the moment we start opening to this, the better. At least that's the way I see it!And of course, this is a great time to be opening to the riches and strengths we have inside - not just for me (who was saying just last week, 'If I can just make it through October...' it's been an incredible month for me), but for all of us. Why? Because a lot of things are changing in our world right now. Climate change is becoming more self-evident; financial instability is becoming, far from just a blip, the norm across the world; petrol prices are going up and down (hinting that what the powers that be have been portraying as the 'myth' of peak oil may be a reality...) We need to develop the skills of resilience and embrace all of what we are in order to face the future with confidence. And this, serendipitously (if that's a word) was what my talk was all about.Co-counselling is one tool that can help us develop inner resilience (next course starts in London, Saturday December 3rd - please contact me to claim one of three remaining places). We have a taster day running in Brighton, too, on November 12th.