Trusting Ourselves

I thought it was just me… I've been feeling tired beyond reasonable cause, introverted, lacking in focus and momentum, and I'm eating more than normal.

I thought I had sunk into a 'funk' that I needed to pull myself out of; that I wasn't putting enough effort into life; that I was letting it pass me by...

And then yesterday I read the August 22nd blog on Emerging Earth Angels., which cleared up so much of my confusion. It showed me that I'm actually in the right place - without even trying!

I have been working with a Theta Healer, Lyn Richardson, recently. I have had the strongest sense that I am in the last phases of clearing out the really core issues and blockages that used to tangle me up. I have felt that I am gracefully losing some of my biggest 'buttons' and of becoming more peaceful and present inside.

Additionally, I have had a very strong feeling that life is not meant to be about ploughing in enormous amounts of effort to achieve anything that we may value…that we are moving into a period where being is more important than doing. By Being, we open ourselves up to inspiration, to divine timing... we magically fall into the momentum of the universal slipstream of coincidence, synchronicity and abundance.

Have you ever tried to fly a kite on a windy day? It can take a lot of effort and energy to get it up. And on other occasions, out of nowhere, it suddenly finds the flow, the air current, and it flies effortlessly, supported by the wind. Life is a lot like that kite: more flow and less effort.

The aim at the moment is to relax into acceptance of how you are feeling and what you are dreaming at this moment... The more you can BE, the easier it is for the universe to lift you up into its flow.

I offer this to you: trust yourself. Trust what you are feeling at the moment, trust your daydreams, because they are leading you to your soul purpose. Although you may feel weird, alone and confused, you are not alone. There is a rhyme and reason to what you are currently experiencing.

I seldom link to other sites, but check these out if you feel curious - I found them infinitely inspiring and reassuring. I'm not alone - I'm part of a bigger global phenomenon. And so are you.

Shine your light

"Rather than looking at up and down moments in your life, take a moment to see the whole, to appreciate the massive journey you have travelled. Although you may feel that you are not worthy, in fact, you have so much more to share with others.

Your wisdom has and always will help others, but you have not wished to see it for fear of feeling superior or displacing God. But know this - there is no displacing God. There is only allowing him to shine through your form, so that others may get a glimpse, a touch of what is possible. That is the journey of your soul and the passage that you have made on this planet.

So if you can allow this to be and work with it by which I mean, simply to allow it to flow as it flows through you, withour censorship, you will achieve your soul's calling. There is nothing more to do than be yourself."

This came through when I was writing to a friend earlier; because it seemed to have such a profound resonance I felt it was a message for everyone, so I wanted to share it with you.

Step 1 in Transforming Your Life

Step 1 is easy.

Stop!

Yup, that's it!

However it's sometimes easier said than done...

Most of us spend our lives living unconsciously. We get up. We got to work. We have good times. We have bad times. We fight with our partners. We get annoyed with the children. We have 'good' times. We have 'bad' times.

We are caught up in the joy, the stress, the anger, the laughter ... the sheer intoxicating richness of all life's emotions. Which was the plan. But we are now at a point where we are being called upon to move beyond this level of living.

Many of us are feeling this ... a raw, low-level feeling that there should be 'more'... We're unable to define what 'more' might be, so we fall into the most common, stereotypical ideas of 'more': fame, power, money, attractiveness, success...

But these, even if we attain them, seldom ease that dull background ache. In some cases they make it worse.

We are being nudged to create our lives consciously rather than unconsciously. We are being asked to become aware of ourselves; rather than remain reactive, we are being asked to become reflective so that we can choose how we respond to any given moment rather than blindly reacting.

And the way to move from being reactionary to reflective is simple. Stop. It allows us to pull back and become aware of our world, of what is happening in that moment. It allows us to refocus.

Every moment that we become aware of what we are doing, whether that's mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, fighting over the remote control, helping others heal... is a moment in the process of reawakening to our true selves. It’s a long process (remember Neo in The Matrix?) but it is an evolutionary itch that is guiding us to change long-held beliefs and patterns.

The outcome of this awakening process is nothing short of the recreation of our lives, our worlds and even our planet. But that’s the big picture: the first step is simply to stop.

By stopping we become aware of what we are doing. We are no longer sleep walking. We are stepping into a richer and more extraordinary life than we could ever have imagined while we were asleep in our own lives.

By stopping, we allow a sliver of awareness to open up with us. We give ourselves a moment to breathe, to compose ourselves, to consider what we are about to say ... to really appreciate the joy, the laughter, the smiles and winks of life.

Stopping halts the incessant chatter of the mind for a small moment and replaces it with awareness. Awareness is aligned with our inner wisdom, our creativity, our sense of humour… Indeed, awareness is the pathway to enlightenment. Or so they tell me, I’m not quite at that level yet!

But I do know this – the ability to stop, to become aware, is having a hugely transformational impact on my life. It’s eliminating much of the senseless chatter filling my thoughts and replacing it with insights, wisdom, patience and forgiveness (most frequently for myself, as I think we find it harder to forgive ourselves than we do to forgive others).

Give it go – it may not rock the universe (on the surface at least!) but it will rock your universe.

6 impossible things before breakfast

"There is no use in trying," said Alice, "one can't believe impossible things."
"I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "Why, I believe six impossible things before breakfast!"

(Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland)

How often do we limit our lives by being 'rational’ and 'reasonable'? How often do we limit our dreams by dreaming of what was possible yesterday? When we imagine what is 'possible', we limit our lives to yesterday, to what was, to what the past.

Dreams revolutionise the world, they revolutionise lives. They push our boundaries and extend us from the possible into the ‘impossible’. It is chasing the impossible, the dreams, that puts men on the moon, invents the x-ray, discovers the telephone, the laptop, the lightbulb and fire...

And in a deeper way, it is what allows us to become more beautiful each day, because we gives us the ability to go beyond who we were yesterday.

So I believe we should be gloriously impossible. Let's push the boundaries of what we can imagine. This is what allows us to expand into the very greatest embodiment of who we truly are. Not by atrophying in the past, but by re-imagining a gloriously impossible future.

Quantum physics has shown that what we thought was real is not real. The impossible has become our new reality... so let's play with it! Let's draw forth all that is impossibly splendid for our lives. And then move on to the next 'impossible' experience.

Because it is when we come to understand the impossible as an outdated illusion from the past, we free ourselves to live more vibrantly in the present.

Beyond fear

I was an overweight child, an overweight teenager, an overweight twenty-something and then it dropped off. Over the past decade I've lost about 20-25% of my bodyweight, mostly through changed eating habits during crisis points in my life.

But the legacy of my inner 'fat girl' has never really diminished. She is alive and well in my head, chattering away, feeding my fear of carbs and chocolate.

I've lived a life of denial - either denying what I looked like or what I was avoiding eating. And I've come to the stage where I choose something different for myself. Not the newest diet - I wouldn't stick to it anyway! - but beginning to play with my favourite concept: acceptance.

I spend so much of my life denying reality. Denying what 'is' right here, right now. I think, 'it shouldn't be like this'. When it comes to my body, I'm living through fear, not through acceptance.

This is about more than my body. This is about the dynamic of fear that can creates so much invisible pain.

It's just one step from body-fear to status-fear, age-fear and all the other fears that flow through our society. These are manageable fears - we can hide behind them instead of living with bigger fears - am I 'worthy'? Am I a 'good' person? Do people like me? What happens when I lose all control, when I die? These are the greater fears that hide behind our mini, everyday fear experiences

Something different is needed. Rebelling against anything simply perpetuates that dynamic. It's about moving to a place beyond fear and control, fear and force, those misguided attempts to control something in order to feel safe. The radical action is to accept.

In this case, that doesn’t mean diving straight into the Belgian chocolates, but becoming resolutely gentle with the hundreds of conflicting messages that race through my mind with regard to food and body.

If we could accept one thing that seems scary, what ever that may be... If we could become gentle with a fear... if we could accept that the fear exists without trying to 'cure' it… what would happen? Would we feel safer in the world? Would our tolerance, or even acceptance, of other fears increase?

I suspect it would.

Simple words. Living them may take a tad longer…

The secret to life?

I'm not sure what to write today. I've written a few posts, deleted them and then started again! So it's not flowing so well! So I'm embracing the hiatus!

What I'm doing at the moment is pursuing my fascination with the subject of conscious creation. For me, as much as finding the secret to eternal wealth, I really want to know how we can create rich lives.

It seems to me that so much of the angst and pain in life is caused by our own thoughts. It is our reactions, our thoughts, on any issue that create our emotional poverty. How do we move beyond our pre-programmed thoughts and reactions? How can we become more conscious? How can we make life more graceful, so that we can cope with life’s ups and downs?

While I don't have the answers yet(!), I'm getting pretty excited by the fact that all the great writers on this issue focus on acceptance over resistance. It really does give me hope that they are universally focusing on just one concept. I may just be able to implement one simple idea!

Underneath words

What … A photo for a blog? Have I given up!

Not really. Underneath words is meaning. But sometimes we get so hung up on the words that we loose the meaning. We race through the words, but loose the story.

I decided to leave a simple photograph to by-pass the words. I wondered if the lack of words would create a moment of curiosity, a space ... where a new thought could inspire, where a new meaning could unfold.

I know that, for myself, I fill my mind with thoughts. Or rather, thoughts flood my mind continuously; but they are far from helpful. They are like incessant chatter that blocks a deeper wisdom.

It is not surprising that so many spiritual traditions recommend some form of stillness, because it allows us a brief window through which we can see beyond the narrow confines of our self-imposed busy-ness. It is a space that offers us the possibility of gaining a little glimpse into what truly matters, into the actions and behaviours that not only serve our highest good but also enrich our lives.

As a society, it seems to me that we are addicted to being busy. We gain legitimacy by saying that we are 'stressed out' and 'too busy'. Rather than medals of honour, these hint at the madness we have convinced ourselves is normality. Where is the difference between our so-busy lifestyles and my nephews' hamster running around his exercise wheel?

We too are constantly chasing, and yet we are often curiously unclear what exactly it is we are chasing. At least the hamster is getting exercise, the rest of us are simply wearing ourselves out. We reach for different prizes, but they seldom satisfy us for long. I’m increasingly aware that what I’ve been chasing isn’t ‘out there’, it’s ‘in here’. Locating that sense of peace and connection inside was either genius or outrageously funny, because it was the last place I wanted to look.

Less is more. Less thoughts, more inspiration. Less clutter, more spaciousness. Less words, more meaning.

Acceptance

Your magic lights

Every morning the sun gets up. It's just doing its thing. It's not pretending to be the moon, or the stars or the sea. It's simply being the sun, revolving in space.

And yet, each morning the colours the radiate from it announce its arrival like a chorus of trumpets.

Each day, its light transforms our lives.

And each evening, as it retires, still just being itself, we honour its passing, admiring its beauty.

What would happen if we were to apply this principle to our lives? What would happen if we simply embraced all of who we are? If we stopped pretending we were something or even someone else?

Perhaps we won't have the trumpet chorus each morning (thank goodness, I prefer my Earl Grey in silence!), but we will definitely discover that the honest truth of who we really are is as wondrous as the sun, and as we touch others we too leave a trail of iridescent lights in our wake…

New thoughts create new lives

Consider this: our thinking is the result of old thoughts and past experiences. The result? The same old, same old.

So how do we revolutionise thinking?

How do you create new thoughts? ... New ideas? … New responses to old problems?

There are many ways, but here's one I'm playing with at the moment: think from the future.

We - ops, that should be I! - spend so much time reacting to situations and people through the lens of my past. That limits my feelings, my thoughts and my actions to the past.

What if I consider what I want in the future?

What if I respond, not as the woman I was, but as the woman I choose to be in ten years time?

The same old situations may transform. My response may be different. New possibilities may open up.

The walls that I have unconsciously erected may dissolve.

I may create an entirely new reality for myself; one that is not limited to old pains, but that springs from the best of who I want to be.