This was an exciting week for me—I celebrated my birthday! My husband took me on a romantic outing to the Manchester Art Gallery to view some of their Pre-Raphaelite paintings (I’ve always loved the Pre-Raphs)...
Manchester has a strong feminist vibe (remember I told you about the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst?), and their Pre-Raphaelite gallery was all over the news a couple of years back. They hosted an Art Event where the Waterhouse painting (below) which has been hanging in their gallery for many years was removed from view, sparking a huge debate.
According to a news report, “Hylas and the Nymphs,” painted by John William Waterhouse in 1896 is an iconic Victorian painting, but its erotic content—combined with the rise of the #Metoo movement and the recent exposé of the President's Club—has prompted curators to take the artwork down.”
It was later restored (obviously!), but I appreciated the forthright questions they were asking about how women are portrayed in art.
Later on in the day my husband served me a slice of fresh strawberry cheesecake from the Wong Wong Bakery in Manchester’s Chinatown. (Manchester contains the second largest Chinatown in the UK.)
I don’t think I’ve ever had a birthday cake made with rice flour before, so this was a strange and unusual treat—a nice harbinger for my next trip around the sun.
Saturday we were back to church crawling as we visited Wakefield Cathedral in Leeds. Its quire features some lovely and quirky medieval carvings and misericords, and they possess the most complete collection of stained glass by Charles Kempe in the world.
This remarkable owl really spoke to me. He asked me a powerful question: “Whooo are youuuu?” It threw me into an existential frenzy as I pondered my life purpose (again).
Coaching is on my mind this week. I worked with a client and helped her see that she is “typologically unfit” for the health issues she is facing, but she has to forgive herself and face them anyway. What I mean by that is that health concerns demand a consciousness that she’s unaccustomed to accessing—it’s not her zone of genius.
Our conversation went a long way toward helping her forgive herself for having the problems she’s suffering with at the moment, and the resistance she’s confronting to do something about it. That information doesn’t fix anything, but it shifts her perspective so that she doesn’t have to feel bad about being who she is, which only exacerbates matters.
This is the gift of coaching: to help individuals accept themselves just as they are AND muster the strength to confront challenges that are outside their zone of genius.
Would you like some coaching about your zone of genius, or to discover what forms of consciousness are difficult for you? Contact me right away, and let’s get you some support. All of my services are listed at DrVickyJo.com, and I’d love to help you too.
warmly, -Dr. Vicky Jo