‘It’s not about clothes, except that it could be, if I find that helpful. We do, as human beings in society have to wear clothes, so why not occasionally wear something that makes me feel great and supports my emergence.’
Wow, the patterns are really sparking for me right now! (At the time of scheduling this three weeks ago) I said this same thing just a few days ago, then went shopping. India for me involved dressing like a nun, Haad Rin, Ko Phangan, not so much…
I don’t use the words ‘higher self’ any more though. As Diane says in Bojack Horseman, ‘I’m not sure that there is a deep down, there’s just what you do.’ I wrote that down the other day too.
P.S. Watch Bojack Horseman
Create the Conditions (first published August 2014)
Gong therapy is my favourite discovery of the past year. Its proper name is gong meditation or sound healing. You just lie down and listen to sounds being played on huge gongs and on didgeridoos, on singing bowls and shakers. You don’t have to do anything. You can’t help but listen. It doesn’t really matter what happens to your thoughts. The sounds go through you anyway, working their magic no matter what you do. And did I mention you are lying down? It’s like meditation for lazy people. Except, the effects can be intense. I first tried it a festival a year ago. This year, I did it again:
That feeling of ‘what’s next’, of striving, isn’t about what I am doing at work, or whether I should change jobs, or about where I live and whether or not to move to a different area. I just thought it was about that because that’s what I see immediately around me when I look at my life.
What it actually is about is my higher self or the real me emerging. Maybe my higher self is just next year’s me… maybe at last year’s festival today’s me was looking on, watching me do gong therapy for the first time.
That sense of pregnancy, of emergence, is my higher self waiting to emerge. How do I get it to emerge? DO NOTHING. Just don’t do anything that hinders the emergence of my higher self. Avoid worry, fear, anxiety and over thinking. As I went through each of these, I felt and was feeling them too.
The sound was evoking those states. I felt my chest crushed with fear, my heart palpating with anxiety. A bit later, when I realised I was thinking thinking thinking; a shaker sounded like waves breaking on a stony beach, a singing bowl rang out, and I came back to where I was, to my new found awareness:
My higher self is just waiting to emerge, all I have to do is CREATE THE CONDITIONS.
The man leading the gong meditation talked about the higher self and about rising like a phoenix. As I lay there I imagined… lose two stone, buy an elegant white dress. It’s not about clothes, except that it could be, if I find that helpful. We do, as human beings in society have to wear clothes, so why not occasionally wear something that makes me feel great and supports my emergence.
Stumbling out of the meditation tent afterwards, wobbly and shaky, I found a quiet place to sit and with a hot chocolate beside me, I wrote down everything I could remember.
Rachel 
That last line ties up this piece so well. It gives context to everything you wrote before it. Loved it
Thank you so much! Thank you very much for reading.