The Heroine's Journey Through Transition: Pia Jones at TEDxWhitehallWomen

my name is Pierre and and I want to explore a particular some ideas around a particular aspect of transformation that interests me both personally and professionally okay and and this is often one of the trickiest and messiest bits of transformation and it's what we call being in transition and it's an interesting concept being in transition this space between when we're not one thing or the other it literally feels like being in a in a birth canal and this is the moment when often we feel the most lost torn confused between conflicting realities different ages different parts of ourselves we literally feel like we're going round and round in circles but if only we dare stand still for a moment and just realize that this time might just be a lot slower this process might be slower than we would like and also it might also be the making of us as well so in myths and literature this transitional space just as in life comes up in pretty much every every story and it comes in as a variety of guises the underworld the wasteland the frozen land limbo it's the part of the story which when everything starts slowing down grinds to a halt the main character starts failing a lot falling a lot or she falls into this deep sleep and she doesn't wait for ages suddenly it looks like there's no hope and equally if we turn to the natural world to look for examples of transition this is the really boring bit that you would skip over in the documentary it's the cocoon it's the glassier it's the snake in process just lying there silently not moving not doing much and yet the biggest eyerene of all is if this is the moment when nothing looks like it's happening on the outside this is the moment where everything is happening on the inside we just can't see it because it's beneath the surface of ordinary life so if we are going to start to engage with these important crossings in our lives I think we need a different perspective the starters I'm not convinced that those super active go getting outside tools are particularly useful in transition you know the ones I mean pull yourself together grab your sword fight it quick get rid of it that's a really important place for these extrovert heroic qualities really important but I'm just not convinced it's now in that really messy moment of transition so what I'm proposing is a different approach that we need heroic tools to take us inside and by inside tools I mean ones that can take us beneath the surface into a descent beneath what we think we know into our internal landscapes to give attention and attend to those mysterious invisible yet natural processes of change that happen deep inside us and the point of going here to let go of the outdated but out warning and to come back with a gift insights hope a dream a new perspective and your attitude and new attitude a stronger connection with our intuition and when you're stuck in the middle of a transition without a rudder any of these can breathe the life - direction right back into you and still to this day one of the best and most trustworthy guides that we have are the arts but because inner travels but when I proposed the idea of arts as a compass I'm not talking about being artistic I'm not talking about being technically proficient I'm not talking about whether you can paint or write or draw I'm not talking about being an expert in your craft I'm talking about those raw fluid natural forms that have been handed down from generation to generation myth metaphor image dreams tools enable everyday people to reflect upon feelings and what's going on and enable the non-rational the nonverbal the things that we can't control to give some of these life and to give some life in the outside world so that we can start to look at them and explore them and whether that output is beautiful or not is completely irrelevant it's the personal meaning of these homemade images that can help us make sense of the unknown when we are literally on our means do you remember when you were a child and used to love making things with your hands that feeling of being lost in the make process of making absorbed in that before time got taken away and responsibilities to the restaurant that real that real feeling of being of loving what you were doing making in your hands absorbed in the process and you didn't give a hoot what it looked like because it was a piece of you it's this quality of art making that I'm talking about this absolute attention to the inner process of making stuff and listening without judgment to what it has to tell you about your deepest self and children can be deadly serious when they play from years of working with ordinary women making extraordinary journeys I have learned that by giving our inner images life that we reclaim the lost the forgotten the neglected the unlived parts of ourselves so that when the glacier has taken its final time a tunnel time to pass over the landscape has been carved up underneath the caterpillar has turned into the butterfly and the snake has a new skin that fits better than the age and the phase before a transformation is complete this is a natural cycle of beginnings of endings of life and death and rebirth and it's the heroines ongoing journey of transition across her seven ages I don't know if the work is ever really done but I would say that this process is probably as heroic as scaling k2 and in the end probably takes as many attempts as well but I think if using arts as a compass can leave us with something it's at the hard-earned inner strength the hard end that's a renewed sense of purpose that you've gained from embarking and doing the work and going on those inner travels is actually very concrete in the end and is ours to keep inside and out thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 12,648

Rating: 4.8911567 out of 5

Keywords: ted x, tedx, ted talk, tedx talk, ted talks, United Kingdom, tedx talks, English, ted, TEDxWhitehallWomen

Id: 9cgaZElnp-4

Length: 8min 37sec (517 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 22 2012