Beyond Spirituality

Tags

reality, spirituality

So simple, so amazing: a journey into awareness

Chapter 12:  Beyond Spirituality

It was only after having an orgasm for the first time in weeks that I realised it wasn’t good for me.  Immediately it brought me down, into my body, into the bed; infusing me with a yearning that I couldn’t shake off.  It clouded my new found awareness so that none of that higher plane existence seemed important.  All I wanted was this world physicality.  Like alcohol, like eating badly, it brought me right back down to earth and I realised I didn’t want to be there.  I’d been to, been in, another place, and that place was better.

Although it wasn’t so much an actual place, as an idea, a state of mind.  The idea was that this world we live in isn’t real.

Others have described it better, or described the theory of it better:  Bill Hicks, The Secret and the Law of Attraction, but it’s one thing reading other’s ideas, thinking about them and even believing them, it’s another thing knowing and seeing for yourself.

Seeing the commuters as my train passed through a station, everyone in grey.  A woman in a grey work outfit but with orangey pink trainers on, perhaps she got changed so she could walk to work like I would, and then she put on some orangey pink sunglasses just to complete the picture.  Meanwhile, a man dressed casually in a grey t shirt and chinos, carrying a full carrier bag, brought out of the bag a grey hoody and put it on, looking totally relaxed.  Matching but different.  I like plain clothes.  I thought, I couldn’t have designed that better.

Arriving at Nottingham train station, all the commuters, almost all in black and white, me thinking, this is all background.  Knowing, really feeling, that they weren’t real.  Creepy, almost, like being in a film.

On a walk, going past dog roses, thinking, I made that.  I even have a tattoo of it.  Maybe I also made guns, and nail polish, and fish, and shells.  Seeing the flowers; the irises, the orange colour that jumps out, peonies, gladioli, lilies, inky purple.  Thinking, some of us went crazy on the flowers, others on the birds and animals.  I like to claim ivy, and maybe twisted roots.

Thinking that the birds are on a loop; when you look up at the sky it’s only so long before a bird or usually two flies over, but how many do you watch before you stop watching?  One, two, three at the most?  So it could easily be on a loop of ten and no one would notice; you’d have to study and remember each one and watch for a long time and who would bother to do that?

I was stuck on (in?) writing about the past, so I went for walk, and all this came, written on my phone.  Standing in the sun, which I shouldn’t have done as I got too much sun the day before and made myself feel ill, but I couldn’t move, I couldn’t even walk to a shady area, I had to write it down there and then, my feet rooted to the ground.

I am focussed on the knowing, the evidence, the feeling that I know, not the intellectualising of it.

I mentioned in an earlier chapter that I had gone off the word ‘spirituality’.  Rather than think of myself as ‘being spiritual’ or not being spiritual, now I think of awareness.  It’s about awareness, losing awareness, maintaining awareness, developing awareness.

And making the darkness conscious- maybe anglers leave their lines lying around on purpose to kill birds because the birds eat the fish.  They maim and kill fish for fun, so why not?

Knowing the truth, this is what I am working on now.  It’s so hard, it’s easier to just go back, to get distracted and sucked back in.  It’s hard to maintain this awareness, it slips away, it’s hard to hold onto and the process is tiring.  I need to look for chinks in the illusionary world, to dismantle it brick by brick.  To unhook itself from me and me from it, by making my surface smooth and slippery so it can’t hook onto me, so I don’t get stuck.  How, by being neutral; I even dress neutral, grey long sleeve top, black vest, plain dark no rips jeans, simple jewellery.  Keep healthy, stay away from politics, don’t get stressed, don’t get over tired.  Live in the Now.  As much as possible stay emotionally neutral.  Remember to remember.

Therapeutic writing

Tags

depression, writing

So simple, so amazing: a journey into awareness

Chapter 9:  Therapeutic writing

Why bother? 

• To find what is interesting about my life, past and present
• To add interest and purpose to my life via the writing of it
• To see patterns or a purpose via the process of reflection, noticing and writing
• To work out solutions or
• To document solutions/changes/resolutions as they occur and develop
• To overcome depression and anxiety
• To make peace with the past

I am increasing realising that it takes lateral thinking to interpret the signs from the universe.  My mum gave me a children’s book she had found when moving house.  She said, you liked this, I mean you really liked it, that’s why I am asking you if you want it.  So I took it and read it and tried to remember it, but I just couldn’t.  But a year later I realise, it wasn’t about remembering the book, it was the message I needed to remember.  The book was about doing drawings that came to life, drawings that came true…  So it was about me being reminded that the act of writing can influence the future, like magic, writing literally spells for me.

If there’s nothing I want to change and nothing I need help with, or if I’m simply integrating new insights, growth and awareness, then I won’t be writing.  I will go in and out of writing and day to day life.  Like going underneath the water to look at the fish, and up again to breathe and feel the sun on my face.

It’s a science experiment, it’s a memoir, its personal therapy, and for others, maybe it’s at least validating if not actual self help…

…Take a fearless moral inventory, as they say in AA.  I am such a shameless student that I even looked up online to see if there is a template you can download for doing this.*  But all I really need is this, my fingers tapping on my keyboard…

*There is, of course

 Orlando:  The writing, the looking, the process of writing, leads to something else, and it is the something else that it is all about.

The tingly feeling when you feel like you are writing your life into existence, or delving into your subconscious:  It’s all about the present moment- although that is fleeting.  Past, present and future all exist at the same time and the ‘aim’ if there is one, is to integrate them into a whole.  Into the present moment  (I accidentally wrote, integrate them in the present moment, which is also true).

Ok, so this is how the magic happens:  At the end of a piece about the past, I intend to type the word boring but mistype it.  (After all these years I’ve never gotten good at typing and I think too fast for my fingers so that when I pause for breath every paragraph is littered with red lines.)  I click on the misspelt boring and the word ‘bemiring’ comes up.  I didn’t know what it meant so I looked it up on the online dictionary- and it wasn’t there.  Just as had happened before (documented in my previous book).  But just as had happened before, the ‘word of the day’ on the dictionary home page was something significant- sticking out in bright red this time:  Goth*.  Just as I’d been back in the past.  Reminding me that it’s the Fairytale Past.  It has no more relevance than if it had never existed.  I am so far away from someone who sits around thinking about the end of the world and death (not in a gloomy kind of way anyway).  Teaching me that funny spell checks and the word of the day are spells that work for me.  As I write this my fingers are tingling, they are writing by themselves, my eyes are pricking, the inside of my nose is tingling.

And lastly, and most importantly:  if I hadn’t stopped writing, I wouldn’t have been able to write this.

*goth:  a type of rock music that often has words expressing ideas about death or the end of the world

Self help

Tags

mental health, writing

So simple, so amazing: a journey into awareness

Chapter 8:  Self help

There’s a big book by Christopher Booker called The Seven Basic Plots.  I bought it when it came out in hardback, very unusual for me, for £20, but I didn’t actually start reading it until about twenty years later.  Even then (now) I only read enough to get me here before I left it and moved onto something else.  (This is the same way I have treated religions, spiritual practices, etc etc.)  The idea is that there are seven basic types of story that are repeated in all genres and all over the world.  These stories seem to appear even in cultures that have no apparent links with each other, via the collective consciousness or archetype explained by Jung.  Once upon a time there was a…  and then one day, something happened.  A hero, a villain, obstacles, things getting worse to crisis point and then an untangling, a resolution.

It struck me that I could work out which plot I am in and then as a result identify where I want to go and what to do next.  I could look for characters and work out what questions to ask to illuminate my journey.  Maybe my plot is The Quest, or Voyage and Return.  Certain conditions have to be met before any story can come to a fully resolved ending.

I googled therapeutic writing and found a study that found that participants’  mood went up as the agency in their storytelling went up; and they were connected; and the writing came first!  They wrote a story in which the protagonist had more agency in their lives, and then their lives picked up!

Of course, we have free will, so we can choose.  More than likely, we will see several plots or possible plots within our lives.  The expression losing the plot.  Had I lost the plot both metaphorically and literally?  I had stopped writing for a year.  Christopher Booker took 34 years to write plots…  Maybe I was just sharpening my axe?* Which plot am I on?  We’ll see whether or not I finish this book… and what else will I do?  I can decide….

*One of the psychologists (Beth) at work told me this lovely story:  When she was in the middle of doing her PhD she had got herself exhausted and super stressed and was taking it out on the house, frantically cleaning and about to set about vacuuming.  Her boyfriend, concerned, tried to get her to stop and have a rest.  At first she refused, but then he wrapped his arms around her, walked her to the sofa, got her to sit down, put a blanket over her and said I’m going to tell you a story:  Once upon a time there were two woodcutters.  One chopped wood all day without a break, and even though he began to tire and his axe got blunt and he was hungry and thirsty, he did not stop chopping wood until night fell.  The other wood cutter chopped until it was lunchtime, and then stopped to eat a lunch of bread and cheese, and took time to sharpen his axe and to rest his tired muscles.  After his lunch he returned to his work until night fell.  Which woodcutter do you think ended up chopping the biggest pile of wood?  Beth, her boyfriend said, you need to sharpen your axe.

I am my own obstacles.  I am the villain of my story**.  ‘Normal’ society is too; it constrains us, other people constrain us…  and what makes people like this is the lives we live, what we do to ourselves, everyone individualised, worrying…  It’s not obvious like if we were living under ISIS occupation, rather it’s a quiet suffering that goes on and on.

**The amount of things I do to myself, even now, to knock me off my path, or just to spoil my present moment:  beating myself up for not having painted the entire kitchen this weekend, getting so far into something on YouTube that it completely freaked me out, not eating properly, getting over tired.  (However, I also know how to fix all those things and so today I cooked a super nutritious vegan feast, had a nap in the afternoon, unsubscribed from a YouTube channel, and painted a bit of the ceiling and was happy with that.  And wrote this, of course.)

On Writing

Tags

depression, writing

So simple, so amazing: a journey into awareness

Chapter 7:  On Writing

Named after the really great book by Stephen King On Writing (I can’t actually read any of his books because I don’t like reading anything scary, but I love this book about the writing process.

 

The last time my mood got really low was during a period of stress at work, a minor distance from my husband, and loneliness in my female friendships.  On top of that, I had stopped writing.  At the time, I didn’t care, I didn’t even put it down as a hobby when I filled out an application form.  Instead I put singing!*  I spent the day alone watching Boyhood (real time film about families and growing up that shows just how fast it all goes).  It showed the good bits and the mistakes and got me thinking of all the things I could have done differently.  I called a few friends, they were all busy or unavailable.  I panicked:  should I go back to counselling?  Was I depressed?  Or was I, as I suddenly realised, just a writer who had stopped writing?  My fingers tingled, and I began to write…

*I moved and had to find a new yoga class.  The yoga teacher introduced me to someone who lived in my new town.  That person invited me to join a pop up singing group.  I was blissed out after yoga and agreed.  I thought maybe it was about me getting rid of my inhibitions.  It did do that, but it led onto something much more important.  The singing group woman also invited me to a book club and gave me the names of the two books they were reading.  I went to the library, it was closed, I went to the book shop, it only had one of the two books in- Orlando.  I made my excuses about the book club but I read Orlando.  It was better, much better for me than the singing; seeming to unlock my writing, focus and structure, and if I had to pay my dues in advance by wearing a silly hat and singing out of tune in public then it was a fair price.

The fact that I got so low over a film shows how fragile my state of being was and how sensitive I was that a film could put me in that place, and how this new found neutrality is quite literally a life saver, that now I can run over a baby rabbit on the way to work and barely give it a second thought.**

**If you are like I was, and find even reading that upsetting, let me ease you by saying:  It ran out in front of me as I was driving along a main road, hurtling across the middle.  I put on my brakes- I didn’t slam them, but nor did I check in my rear view mirror either, so that evens out the me-rabbit balance, but I felt it go under the front driver wheel.  I wondered afterwards, would it have been better not to have braked?  If I had been going slightly faster, would I have gone past it, or at least would the front wheels have gone past it?  An old boyfriend of mine told me that animals have better instincts than us and it is best not to brake as they will have judged it.  So are all the dead animals and birds at the side of the roads not as I always thought, due to people driving too fast, or animals and birds walking , running or flying unavoidably out in front of you, but are actually the result of caring drivers slamming on their brakes?  Probably not.  I think he was mainly referring to deer, as he had hit one a few years previously, driving through Thetford Forest.  It had run out, no way to stop it.  He said they made eye contact as it hit the windscreen.  That was my Vietnam, he used to say.  I don’t know if baby rabbits are as capable as grown deer of judging speeds and distances of traffic on main roads.  Apparently they don’t even know what to eat, they just eat anything and everything and it’s just luck or trial and error if they survive.  So it’s not that I didn’t give running over a baby rabbit a second thought, it’s just that I decided not to get upset about it.

The Fairytale Past

Tags

alternative childhood, writing

So simple, so amazing: a journey into awareness

Chapter 6:  The Fairytale Past

Maybe it wasn’t that bad after all.  Maybe I had a lot more agency that I have previously admitted:  because to be honest, a bit of me had realised, realised even at the time, that I did.  I knew I was different, and even in the midst of being humiliated by their I-bet-you-get-all-your-clothes-from-jumble-sales taunts, I felt superior.  I made no effort to fit in.  I remember that time as friendless, and yet it turns out I did have a friend after all:  Miranda, who also went on to become a healer and a yoga person.  I met her again recently at a yoga class, she recognised me and said we used to sit beside the tennis courts and talk, and when we went up to high school and I went to boarding school she was devastated.  I didn’t think I had any friends, I said.  Well you did, she said, you had me.

And then I remembered that at junior school I used to stay in at break times with a boy called Keith and work on our stories that we’d been doing in class because we didn’t want to stop writing.  I used to choose to stay indoors and write, instead of going out to play.  So nothing’s changed then, in forty years.

I lived through all that, experienced it all and so I can travel back there to that 1970’s school play ground and take a fresh look.  No time machine required, because my body was there, wasn’t it?  Its imprints are in my body, passed from cell to cell like batons in a relay race.

And later, now I return to my past, to myself with illumination

 I sometimes wonder if we as we are now make up our pasts- because they don’t really exist do they, except in our minds.  Why is it that we talk about them?  To make ourselves seem more substantial?   Like John telling people he’s been to India, or me telling people I’ve lived in New Zealand for a year- except last time I met new people I didn’t and just presented myself as I am right now.  As my friend Jane said, it is feelings and how you are that are important.

Wouldn’t we look at ourselves as we are now and make up our pasts exactly as they are?  Me with the Albion Fayres, him with the hard drinking family that made him teetotal and the craziness that made him such a survivor.  Do we look at what we are now and make up a back story that explains it, that offers us an explanation?  (Me:  Sexual appetite and promiscuity= sexual abuse.  Social awkwardness= bullied at school)

What if you were brave enough to offer yourself up (to others and to yourself) without explanation or apology?   What if you were brave enough to live with yourself as you are now- no back story, no past, just living right now in this now moment, this now place?

Don’t do it Di

Tags

alternative childhood

So simple, so amazing: a journey into awareness

Chapter 5: Don’t do it Di

Eleven years old.  In the back of my mum’s Morris thousand van on our way to school, via picking up two children my mum got paid to do the school run for.   My school had given out Charles and Diana Royal Wedding bookmarks.  I had written ‘Don’t do it Di’ on all of mine.  My mum and her friends, i.e. all the people I socialised with in my home life as I mainly hung around with adults, all thought Diana was a vulnerable young woman who was being taken as a breeder, and that it was sick, not romantic in any way.  However, this was not a view shared by most of the population of England in 1981 and when the two children my mum took to school were about to get into the car, my mum said ‘don’t let them see those’ (the written on bookmarks).  There was no sense of any shame or it being a dirty little secret of ours; it was simply that these naive, brainwashed children wouldn’t be able to cope.

I inhabited a different world to that of my peers.  At boarding school in 1982, me telling my disbelieving, ridiculing dorm about female circumcision (FGM used to be called that), them saying ‘girls can’t be circumcised Rachel’.  They didn’t even know about nuclear weapons, The Bomb.  ‘What, is there just one bomb Rachel?’  Oblivious, their parents obviously told them nothing, while I was getting out at weekends on false pretences to go on CND demonstrations, getting a coach from Norfolk, eating sandwiches, marching to Hyde Park.  Having surreal calm nightmares of being out in the garden, holding hands in a circle, waiting to be evaporated, hoping the end would be quick.  Thinking of, even though I knew the government advice of the Protect and Survive pamphlet which was delivered to every home was pointless (CND did their own version, Protest and Survive), I still wondered late at night, should we stockpile, should we make a shelter in the cellar? But how long would it last, and what about all our friends?  Wouldn’t it be better to all go together?  We were so close to the American airbases- prime targets.

Thirteen years old.  Walking to Greenham Common as part of the Star March, a women’s march, one of many from all round the country.  In Luton the locals drove round and round in between our tents whilst were in bed inside them.  There’s still a photo on my mum’s wall of me and a young punk woman called Rosie sitting in front of the Greenham Common fence.

At boarding school, lots of RAF children there.  The headmaster used to call us after breakfast if we had any post, one day a fat packet of Animal Aid leaflets came for me.  He said, ‘What’s that confounded girl up to now?!’  I gave out graphic photos of monkey head transplants to my peers.  Nothing’s changed really, I just pretend to fit in, that’s all.

The Process by Which It Happens

Tags

spirituality, writing

So simple, so amazing: a journey into awareness

Chapter 4:  The Process by Which It Happens

 

I am not aiming for balance, or a balanced life, oh no, Elizabeth Gilbert says you cannot do that and I largely concur.  I am aiming for a happy life subject to circumstances and a ‘spiritual’ life whatever the circumstances, indeed friction helps me grow.  I am glad to be developing and all my life is helping me to do that (all my life as in all that’s going on in my life right now and all my life as in past, present and future).  I fully know I may concentrate on one part sometimes and other parts other times and that life will show me what to do next.

Money:  ‘Studying’ (aka obsessively binge watching) Shameless USA, reading about the Buy Nothing movement, hibernating, in order to get my finances under control.  I didn’t set out to watch Shameless in order to do this, but I am sure it helped.  Spend as little as possible.  Who needs money when you’ve got words.  Not being flippant about people who don’t have money for food, I just mean that I can cope with staying in etc because I have this to do.

Work:  I got locked in my pattern again:  I take on too much, get too tired, or in this case, there just was too much happening (lots of people leaving/off sick); me pretending to everyone including myself that it is okay and not accessing support.  I end up feeling burned out, thinking I have to meet the every emotional, professional, advisory and every other need of everyone in my team whilst also doing a good job for my patients, other dept. duties, answering emails, thinking up new stuff, keeping one step ahead, keeping everyone happy… all of which is obviously ludicrously impossible.

The next thing that happens is that I start to get self conscious and paranoid, worrying about what everyone thinks of me, wondering if anything I do is any good, wishing I could start over again and be different- stop being shy, communicate better, stop avoiding the strong senior managers because I’m intimidated.  I avoid criticism, I am scared of it so I avoid people, and that just makes everything worse…

To contradict what I just wrote, I have actually in many ways been more relaxed at work.   I have stopped to chat.  I have worked slowly.  I have left things undone.  I have chosen the fun things and put off the boring ones.  I have cancelled things to make my week manageable.  I have noticed that I usually go around on full pelt (resenting others who stop to chat!) and the busier I get, the more I take on; working up to the last minute so I am always late and stressed, as if I don’t deserve to take it easy and sit calmly in a room waiting for a meeting to start (I have done this at least once recently!).  It’s going to be an adjustment…

So although tonight’s writing mission was mainly about dealing with work stress, and was more about writing as therapy than writing, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to finish this book:  Don’t get distracted by the idea that you should be so ‘spiritual’ as to be above wanting or needing to do anything.  This might be idealised as sitting on top of a mountain meditating but in practice becomes eating oven chips and cold baked beans and watching rubbish on Netflix*.  A creative mind is like a border collie, remember…

(*There is really great stuff on Netflix but it is definitely possible to waste time on it as well.)

So what would a fully integrated self look like anyway?

Tags

happiness, spirituality, writing

So simple, so amazing: a journey into awareness

Chapter 3:  So what would a fully integrated self look like anyway?

So all this work, all this reflection, all this personal development…

I think a lot about integration; about needing to integrate the everyday and the ‘spiritual’*.  To integrate everything I have learned, my past and my present.  But what is it that I am trying to do?  Where am I trying to get to?  So I asked myself, what would my fully integrated self look like?  (And thereby, track backwards and work out how I would get there)

*I have gone off that word, but more on that later.

I have a- I don’t like the word brainstorm and I like the phrase ‘thought shower’ even less.  So let’s say I have a look into the fantasy looking glass, a loose limbed daydream about all the possibilities… 

What would my fully integrated self look like?

An acceptable weight, fit-ish but soft.  (In The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold writes: It was the 1970s, aerobics was barely even a word, women and girls were meant to be soft, not hard.)

Nice hair.  Make an appointment, and remake one for 2-3 months afterwards, instead of being locked into this rather childish habit of putting it off so that it ‘notices’ which actually means letting my hair look rubbish before I have it done.

No makeup.  Or Clinique counter assistant chosen makeup.

Confident at work, doing a good job without being stressed out of my mind.

Ok with money (‘You deserve it’, ‘No, you deserve to be debt free’).

Relaxed about housework and day to day life/chores etc.

Regularly exploring the outer frontiers and having fun with my husband.

Writing or thinking about writing whilst being aware that it is the process not the product, because when I’m thinking about writing, I’m thinking about life.  Or ‘at peace with how I do my writing’ but I don’t know if that’s possible- the tension and the analysis is all part of it, I feel.

A wardrobe I don’t have to think about.  Everything I need- spare track pants, for example, that don’t trail on the floor, aren’t broken, that I like, that fit nicely and that feel nice, because I chose cotton and I tried them on first.

Do it right first time so I don’t have to think about this stuff day to day, so that I can spend my time and energy on:  Being conscious of a ‘spiritual’ dimension to life; to love, to be here, to live, to face everything fully awake.

When nothing’s happening, to have a silent(-ish) mind.

All the above allows the below.  Getting it together enables me, frees me, makes me strong enough, available enough, un-distracted enough and energetic enough to be what I want to be:  A facilitator, a safe harbour, a healer.  A person God would send to someone praying for help.

To the edge of the aeroplane’s wing

Tags

healing, meditation, reality, spirituality

So simple, so amazing: a journey into awareness

Chapter 2:  To the edge of the aeroplane’s wing

 

Sitting meditating:

Feeling roots coming up from the earth and wrapping themselves around me.  At the same time the bones and muscles of my body turning themselves into vines.  My whole body feeling more plant-like than animal-like.

And in my mind, beyond thoughts, I see a bird’s wing, at its edges iridescent rainbow layered feathers.  And out beyond the edges of the bird’s wing, beyond everything, lies the sleek white edge of an aeroplane’s wing.  And beyond that:  nothing.  And then, the why, the what:  There is only the moment, you sitting there in the room- the wing enclosing all of it- and beyond it, nothing.

I had come up through the mind, through and beyond thoughts, not even interested in looking at the thoughts on the way;  the past just a collection of thoughts after all, like a tangled ball of wool.  If you are okay now what does it matter what happened in the past.  Memories just seemed like a clump of thoughts, irrelevant, as I went beyond all that to the clean white surface of the aeroplane’s wing…

We are more than thoughts, and I passed through the complex workings of the mind to:  Nothing.  A bird’s wing closed around the experience, around me, around John, underneath the rainbow feathers a network of bones, complex and strong.  Could fly but chooses not to, chooses to encircle, to be a protector instead.  Bird’s wing chooses not to fly.  Chooses to settle here. 

You are a facilitator.  Wanting to facilitate John for a change (he is usually the one who supports me as I work through stuff in my head).  In life:  you are a facilitator.  Make life easier, and more peaceful.  All I want is to be in touch with this:  my spiritual side.  I don’t need to be or to do anything.  We come here to remind our self who we really are, and then we go back to the day to day.  Neither place is better or worse; it’s cyclical, in and out, like social-alone-together-apart.

 

Since then my mind has been much quieter.  Cracks let the light in.  A certain amount of friction, strife, variety and challenge creates learning, and keeps me ‘spiritual’.  I am a safe harbour.

I have moved away from throwing myself too much into being something to make up for being me not being enough.  I don’t need to go around ‘being a healer’ although I do healing and I like doing it, but I have a tendency to over schedule.  And I feel there is something more than me just rushing around being me at work.  There’s Me.

Rather than being a collection of labels or skills, being very open and flexible is nice.  A facilitator.  A safe harbour.  Can do healing.  Enjoys exploring the mind and ‘spirituality’.  Tries to eat a mainly vegan diet.  Complex and strong.  Like nailing jelly to a wall, but describing self in an open way is nice…

The story so far

Tags

dreams, gratitude, Law of Attraction, meditation, reality, religion, spirit, spirituality, therapy, writing

So simple, so amazing: a journey into awareness

Chapter 1:  The story so far

 

A book should be an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.  Franz Kafka   

For Book, you can substitute Love.  This is my story:

 

In 2009 I drove to work in the morning and watched the pink and gold sky split open.  Driving home in the evening I passed outrageously lit up lorries that looked like fun fair rides.  Somehow I managed to keep one foot in the visible and one foot in the invisible.  For the next six years, I followed the trail.  I always joke that it was like Eat Pray Love but without the travel.

I meditated and felt as if my skin was being bathed in soap and soft water.  I saw situations worked out from behind my closed eyelids.  I had the most amazing physical sensations.  I took up Yoga.  I had deep tissue massage and experienced profound physical and emotional release as she worked my knots out until her fingers got down to my bones.

I practiced Paganism and Wicca, I went for walks and stared at leaves, gathered foliage, wrote spells and held rituals every full moon for almost a year.  I was invited to a women and Islam open day.  I bought books and began praying five times a day.  For a few weeks my life was illuminated.

I chanted the Hare Krishna Mantra every morning for three months.  Things led on from each other.  I felt purified, and wanted to feel even better.  I had trouble with someone at work.  In meditation I said, I have no protection against this person.  The answer came: oh yes you do, you have this.

I did an evening class in Buddhism.  Stepping out onto the top floor of the car park after class, the sky filled with birds, the breeze cool and warm at the same time.  Listening to The Stone Roses on the way home:  This is the one, this is the one she’s waited for, yes, I thought, yes, this is it.  But no sooner had I filled the house with Buddhas than I woke up one day and realised I had burned through that as well.  Or it had burned through me, whatever.

I read The Secret and practiced The Law of Attraction.  Not to get cheques in the post or to get parking spaces, but just because it made life easy and more beautiful.  Simple things like walking up to a crossing and it turns green just as I get there.  To the sublime:  Arriving home one night I pulled into the car park, and in the second before I turned into the parking space the headlights lit up the hedge in front of me and I saw a mouse on a branch.   A mouse on a branch!   Almost immediately, the thought came into my head:  I hope you enjoyed that, because it won’t happen again.  I thought straight back, yeah, I did enjoy it, and no, I don’t expect it to happen again, who would.  And I don’t need it to happen again, because I saw it the first time.

As well as experiencing anything and everything I was also searching for a spiritual or scientific explanation that made sense to me.   A unifying theory, if you like.   After about six years of searching it arrived in my mind fully realised in a dream:  we’re all green mist, we created these bodies because without bodies we can’t pick up a pen and write poetry or kiss each other.  But the kissing and the poetry are so distracting that we forgot that we’re green mist come down for a human experience…  but maybe that’s the point.  You can’t enjoy a party if you stand at the door with your coat on and maybe spiritual beings can’t enjoy a human experience on earth unless they fall in feet first and forget their previous incarnation….

I woke up on the massage table as if I had just arrived there and looked at this new person in the mirror:  hair everywhere, skin glowing, mind wiped clean of all previous concerns.  But you wake up again every moment, and in this moment I can’t imagine anywhere else I’d rather be than right here.