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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.