Bring on your cares and concerns

Posted by Anita Bondi on July 19, 2011 under Anita Bondi | 3 Comments to Read

In InterPlay we say that if we are to have health and well-being we cannot possibly hold everything alone. We propose that we all need help and also that we may actually feel lifted up or gain some relief by sharing our troubles and concerns with others. We call this practice On Behalf Of.

Today, I ask you to hold me and what is resting on my heart right now. I also invite you to share your cares and concerns with me via the comment section of this blog.  We are in this together and I guarantee you will feel better knowing someone is holding it all with you.

card from the Interplay Inspiration Deck w/ purple coneflowers

Meet On Behalf Of and listen to her story:

when you call On Behalf Of there is always time for a cup of tea and a bit of conversation. she will make time to stop and listen. if you are at her house she will offer you special paper and a beautiful amethyst fountain pen to write down everything that is troubling or upsetting you. She places all the papers in a dragonfly jar on her kitchen windowsill. every week she opens the window on a bright sunny day and sends the concerns off to the light. she sees everyone who has shared their pain with her bathed in warmth and love. On Behalf Of knows that health and well-being come more easily when one opens up and shares with a friend.

Don’t be afraid to share with me or someone else who cares about you.

Oh, and be on the lookout for dragonflies!!

Transitioning

Posted by Stan Stewart (Sawyer) on December 10, 2009 under Stan Stewart | Be the First to Comment

It seems to me like life is full of transitions. Each day brings it’s own changes and these changes call on me to adapt or transition. Today: a former roomate’s step-father recently died; my best friend’s dad just got out of the hospital; my dad has a will-not-stop tear duct that may require surgery and my eyes are watering (on behalf of?); it’s my first day back to work after two days out with a cold; and I have unanswered questions about my future always on the back-burner these days. All of these call for me to transition along with them. Seems like my theme for the day is fathering. Step-father, father, dad, fathering myself.

Inner Authority card in The InterPlay Inspiration Deck

I’m not sure that the cold is gone yet. Maybe my self-care is lagging. How well is my transition into self-fathering going, then? Not as well as I’d like.

My dad was a Protestant (Christian Church – Disciples of Christ) minister and I guess he still is in his retirement. To me, it seemed like he was always there for other people. He’s been a great example to me of an open-hearted man. I still strive to open and soften my heart the way I’ve seen him do. And I would say that he’s done some great self-care in retirement: traveling to many places around the globe while continuing to work part time. I would say that both of these pursuits are dear to him and he does well to go after them with gusto — which is exactly what he is doing.

Shuffling The InterPlay Inspiration Deck

But, back to me… I’m looking for some inspiration to make today’s transition or maybe just to determine what this transition looks like. Yes. I’ll be pulling a card from the InterPlay Inspiration Deck to help me gain some direction. I notice that Monday’s selection “Inner Authority” with its yellow sun is still on top, so I shuffle the deck even more than I usually do.

Surprise! It’s “On Behalf Of” with the cool dragonfly symbol. The colors are enticing. The stylized body seated in lotus position frames the green dragonfly.

Okay. I don’t get it. Why would I get this card today? Don’t I just need to take care of myself at the moment? Guess I’d better read the story on the back. Here’s the phrase that most catches my attention:

On Behalf Of round card from the InterPlay Inspiration Deck

“She sees everyone who has shared their pain with her bathed in warmth and love.”  Nice.  That’s the kind of acceptance I observed in my dad and in the literally hundreds of InterPlayers who have done Dances On Behalf Of for me.  Now that’s music to my internal ears.

What if I were to approach myself the way On Behalf Of (from the InterPlay Inspiration Deck) does?  This small, round card has so much to teach me.  Not that the universe hasn’t tried to bring me this noticing before.  My dad modeled it for me.  All those Dancers On Behalf Of showed me the possibility of bringing this “warmth and love” to myself.  I created my mission in the men’s work in 2002 that incorporates this open-heartedness:  “I open my heart to create a world where I and others are enlivened to appreciate and co-create beauty.”  For whatever reason, I waited for this round card to be my real teacher.  I am grateful.  I am inspired.

I don’t even know what my current transition looks like.  And already it seems less intimidating just knowing that I can bring the open heart I long to bring to others to myself.  How cool is that?

May I bless myself with this kind of ease around my current transitions and adaptations to the changes around and within me.  I bless myself.

Creative blessings to you all.

On Behalf Of

Posted by Anita Bondi on October 23, 2009 under Anita Bondi | Read the First Comment

Dawali is a huge festival in India. Atul, my Indian boyfriend (that is the joke my girlfriends and I share about him) has just informed me that they will be on holiday for the next 5 days and that is why he is trying to get the Inspiration Deck to Fedex before the end of the workday. Atul has been in my life since August. I do not know what he looks like, or what his family life is like. I do know what his voice sounds like though. He called me one night in September at about 9:30pm. I was getting ready for a big performance piece I was doing that weekend and had to run to Kmart for batteries. He was shocked that I was out so late and wanted to know why I was not at home? I decided it was because it must not be proper in India for women to be out so late. Plus, how do you describe Kmart to someone in India? I simply said I was at the grocery store. It was a funny five minutes or so with me trying to answer questions about my whereabouts at that time of the night with a man who works for the card printing company that is manufacturing my Inspiration Deck. Most of our e-mails were about paper weight, CMYK, telescopic vs. tuck boxes, and a host of other things unknown to me prior to this past summer. Now, here we were finally speaking to each other, and it was as if he was a relative concerned with my safety or someone intimate to my life and world. E-mail relationships can become that way, can’t they? When you share with someone (even just a few lines) several times a day for several weeks, you begin to get, well, comfortable, i guess would be the word. That is why my girlfriends began to call him my “Indian boyfriend.” I talked about him all the time.

“Atul said.” or “Atul recommended.” or,( and I think this was probably the clincher), ” Atul really made me angry today.”

Before the e-mail about the Dawali holiday it had been weeks since I had heard from Atul. The cards were suppose to have shipped two weeks prior and I was a bit worried about what had happened. His e-mail said that there was a delay because the 42 page, 2.75 inch booklet was sticking out a millimeter over the 3.85 inch circle cards, and that was making it hard to shrink wrap them. These numbers are important because they were the bane of my existence for weeks, as we went back and forth trying to convince the printers that we had the sizes exactly right to fit into our 4 inch packaging tins.

We, would be Marci (my friend and designer,) and myself. She has also worked tirelessly for months on this project with me! There would be no deck without her!

I began to panic! Why was the booklet sticking out? I had paid $1000.00 to have a special die cut for the circles to make sure everything would fit perfectly. Now, they were about to ship and they were not perfect? And, they were only at 50% heat for the shrink wrapping! ( Not that I had any idea what that meant.) All I knew was that it threw me into an immediate stress response that had me shaking. I just sat at the computer wide-eyed, vibrating and spewing a long litany of the details of a process that no one really wants to hear about; a process that has been too much of my world for too many months! Stan just stood there saying, “It will be fine.” He clearly did not understand. Finally, I calmed down enough to hear the voice of a much higher Self saying, “Pick a card. That is what you made them for.”

On Behalf Of is what I picked. At first I hemmed and hawed, still stuck in my victimization. Then I turned the card over and read the story:

“When you call On Behalf Of there is always time for a cup of tea and a bit of conversation. She will make time to stop and listen. If you are at her house, she will offer you special paper and a beautiful amethyst fountain pen to write down everything that is troubling or upsetting you. She places all the papers in a dragonfly jar on her kitchen windowsill. Every week she opens the window on a bright sunny day and sends the concerns off to the light…”

no more concerns!

There is more to the story, but that is the part that made me stop and exhale. I got up and found a beautiful piece of paper and wrote down everything that was troubling and upsetting and scary (okay, just about the card project!). I put the paper in one of the tins and set it on the windowsill. Yesterday, the sun was shining and it was 75 degrees! I opened the tin and put it outside on the deck. That is where I found it this morning. It is empty now and I trust that the beautiful paper with all of my concerns written on it, has been carried off to the Light!