Like nailing jelly to a wall

Tags

dreams, Getting started, spirituality, Travel, writing

An update on my ‘spiritual position.’

Honestly, working this stuff out is a full time job.  (See previous posts:  The story so far.  Green Mist theory).

If there is a God (and when I say God I am usually referring to a kind of vague yet huge concept that encompasses The Field and The Collective Consciousness; like a kind of golden light or the feeling that you get when looking at a butterfly.  It goes beyond my explorations of different religions and Buddhism and beyond being an omnist (someone who acknowledges the truth of all religions).

What I think right now is this:  If there is a God and God has a plan for me then it’s this:  It’s what I am doing right now.  It’s what I did in the recent lead up (Orientation) and it’s what I intend to do next (go back to the UK, live on a boat for a bit, then go off travelling around the USA*).

Whilst of course being aware that it’s only ever right now, plans change, and that although all this sounds so easy, unless we are going to turn into full time spiritual devotees and only meditate, study spiritual texts, discuss spiritual matters, and eat, sleep and use the bathroom, life as it is distracts us.  As in Journey the East, it is so, so easy to allow oneself to get knocked off the path and for one’s awareness to slip.

* possibly combining it with a DIY book promotion tour with readings at independent bookshops and vegan cafes

My husband and I have been having a lot of talks about the nature of reality, etc etc.  Last Thursday night I couldn’t sleep so I got up and wrote last week’s blog post.  In the morning I finished the blog post and then we talked some more and I came up with my new spiritual position as described above.  I then typed it up and then went to work on the book (can you see where this is going?)  I don’t usually do anything on the book on a Friday, but I thought I had free time as I had got the blog done early (by dint of being awake typing through the night…)

My eyes began to blur and I couldn’t focus.  I tried to push on through but in the end I had to give up.  I laid on the bed and closed my eyes.  All I could see was a bright white, like a blank page on a computer screen, with distorted tool bar icons making a row of triangles across the top.  I took off my t-shirt and put it over my eyes.  I tried to send myself healing and to relax.

It came to me that by overdoing the spiritual talks, not sleeping and overdoing the writing I had triggered some kind of episode in my brain and that my mind was being somehow cleansed and reset.  A feeling of otherworldly peace came over me and for a few moments I thought, I have a choice, mental illness or a higher state of consciousness, I can’t have both.

After a while I got up and felt very strange so I did a load of stuff to ground myself.  I went out onto the balcony and ate a banana ball and a banana.  I counted five things I can see, hear, feel etc.  I stood on one leg.  I went on YouTube to listen to a song my friend told me about (the one at the top of this post).

The ad below came on (‘Sometimes to find your way you have to lose your mind’)

 

My husband came home and gave me a pep talk about how my mind is  really strong and I am totally sane, and reminded me of a line from one of the first books I read on this journey (the spiritual one not the travel one) ‘The last vestige of the ego is to tell yourself you are going mad.’ (The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying)

In hindsight it might have been better to just allow myself to stay in a slightly altered state of consciousness; by trying to get out of it I probably made it feel worse, but I suppose I was scared.

Anyway, as Jung says, this stuff isn’t all about butterflies and rainbows, it’s also about making the darkness conscious.  Last night I also couldn’t sleep, but this time I let myself go down into the things that I am afraid of, my childhood memories, the meaning I extrapolate from them, the effects I have allowed them to have.  And I realised that there was nothing to find…  I have explored the worst case scenarios and survived.

At the risk of looking and sounding like cliché, I bought a chunky silver Om pendant.  It caught my eye and overcame all resistance to shopping and spending and seemed a fitting souvenir for my altered consciousness last week.  I looked up what it actually meant (previously I knew it as the sound of the universe, and the man who sold it said it offers protection but I didn’t really know what each bit meant).

https://goo.gl/images/ARZtQC

It explained to me what I had instinctively felt; when we are in one state we aren’t in the other.  One level of consciousness is the normal level, where we experience the world through the five senses, another is deep sleep, another is dream state, another is a higher state of consciousness which is the aim of spiritual practices.  We move between them and they are separate states.

Travel update

We will be here in Varkala for another month and have been busy planning our trip and getting excited about moving on.

 

Writing update

I have been working hard on Goa Part Two (Anjuna, Arambol, Panaji) this week and hope to have a draft completed on Monday.  From Monday I will be working on Kerala, bringing it up to date, as well as looking at the proposal for Hay House.

Thank you very much for reading

See you next week

Living the Dream

Tags

Feminism, happiness, love, marriage, Netflix

‘I’m doing something for the first time,’ I said to my husband, ‘Guess what it is.’

‘You’re stewing apples,’ he said.

‘It’s not so much what I am actually doing, it’s about what I am doing.’  I said.

It was Friday morning and I was making something from a recipe that I had just read in a post on the internet.  I read it, and I thought, we have apples, we have oats, we have apple juice.  I can do it.  I can do it right now.

I have never done this before.  Funnily enough, a few days ago, I had been thinking that I did want to start doing this.  Lisa Anniesette posts some lovely looking recipes, but I have never once tried making them.  I don’t know what’s stopping me from actually trying to make Lisa’s or anyone else’s recipes.  Am I intimidated because the food looks so lovely, the photographs make everything look so glamorous, so that I somehow think that it isn’t for me?  Am I waiting for some mythical time in the future when I become the kind of person who makes things like that?  Or am I just too lazy to go and shop specially/shop for new things?  This is no one’s issue but my own but I decided that I wanted this to change.

Anyway, on Friday morning after writing the draft of my previous post, I was catching up on Behcets and Borderline posts, having realised that she hadn’t gone quiet, I hadn’t actually been following her, and I came across one with a recipe in.  No photo, just a recipe tacked quietly onto the end of a personal blog, with a little note saying, if you do try it, let me know how you get on.  Those few little words gave me all the encouragement I needed.

Of course food posts look nice, otherwise we wouldn’t want to make whatever it was.  (This isn’t a food post by the way.)  But no one ever puts pictures of themselves sobbing on Facebook (not usually anyway) and they don’t tend to post pictures of their houses looking a mess.

This is what my kitchen actually looked like on Friday morning when I came downstairs and started making the apple oaty breakfast:

See, no shame.  My friend and I used to joke about sending a realistic round robin letter (you know those Christmas letters people send out to everyone that only have the good things), about our kids truanting from school and getting arrested.

A few weeks ago a friend was telling me about a recently separated man she had just met.  He showed her pictures of the inside of his wife’s fridge, to show what a slob she was.  I thought, wow, that’s mean, I’d hate it if someone did that to me.  It seemed so personal.  Isn’t it a kind of slut shaming, but about housekeeping?  But then I thought, why should the woman be ashamed if the fridge is dirty?  Why her and not the man, and why feel ashamed, I mean, it’s only a dirty fridge, you haven’t hit a dog whilst speeding.

I had a day off on Friday and so did my husband.  Breakfast, cold left over Indian takeaway (my favourite) followed by the hot apple oaty breakfast which was very nice, even better cold the next day (today).  My husband played my favourite songs on the ipod.  Then we wrapped up warm and went to Lowestoft, had a walk on the beautiful beach and then went to the lovely new vegan deli VeGee to eat, drink and warm up.  A well dressed, well to do woman customer looked me up and down, looking at my clothes.  I really wanted to say to her, it’s okay, none of that stuff matters.  I didn’t mind at all.  Then home, a bit of yoga, then more quality time with my husband:  we watched (the original) Bladerunner:  The Director’s Cut* followed by BoJack Horseman.  It was one of the nicest days I have ever had.

This is what we listened to in the car, parked up, watching a seagull dancing on the ground and eating worms.  (The seagull, not us, we’re vegans)

* They implanted the replicants (conscious, emotion feeling ‘robots’ that the humans had built and enslaved) with a memory stream containing a history, a family, so that they’d be easier to control.  Spooky, huh?

 

Thank you for reading.

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.