Opening the gates

Tags

healing, healing conversations, healing trauma, Trauma, trauma and recovery

As I write this we are on day 30 of Duolingo. At the Portuguese café I said Obrigada so well a man spun around surprised and asked me if I was in fact Portuguese. The reality is I can only say badly pronounced sentences such as ‘the woman eats an apple.’ ‘You need to get close, get a Portuguese boyfriend,’ he said.

We like to keep a low profile; this was shattered when our car alarm went off nine times in the middle of the night; we slept through it and the neighbour over the road banging on the door…

I got temporarily traumatised by some training on my induction training. Not by the huge volume of eLearning I had to work through, a problem that will be familiar to anyone working in health and social care. No, by the Safeguarding Adults training. Tip- if you are of a sensitive disposition, and the trainer says, this video comes with an extreme trigger warning, I cannot stress this enough, and gives you an option of not watching it, then don’t watch it. Anyway.

I used to follow the Buddhist teaching of ‘guarding the gates of your senses.’ I remained resentful, furious even, if people told me things I didn’t want to hear, because in some cases it took me years, over a decade, to forget.

My first thought was, I’m going to be stuck with this now, possibly for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to be alone, I wanted to cuddle all the time, I was extremely sensitive to the slightest raised voice or joke seriousness. I didn’t want to be in the bedroom alone. I didn’t even want to be outside the front door having a cigarette alone. I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts. I went over and over it, in the complete detail. I tried to push it away, it kept coming. In the end I allowed it to come without pushing it away.

I searched for the lesson in it, (beyond, heed trigger warnings- which I did on the next batch of training, protecting myself this time) and concluded that it was my horizons being forcibly expanded. I’ve chosen a job in this field, and that means I’m going to come face to face with things that most people do not want to think about. Maybe it is time to Open the Gates. Perhaps to become stronger and manage more than I realised. Perhaps like Ganesh in Pushkar, who told us he watched the news in India, so that, ‘I know there is everything.’

Shortly after this, I had a Conversation With My Son About The Past. This was set up by my husband on the request of my son, after having done preliminary conversations with us both. I had previously thought I would go to my grave having never had this conversation but on the day I actually initiated it. I felt dizzy only for a moment, then it was tolerable. I moved, and leant on the doorframe. It was like stepping through a portal, or breaking the fourth wall. A few days after that, he called my husband and said he was making two important actions to look after his health. Is that a coincidence? There’s no such thing as coincidences.

The back bedroom, the warmest, sunniest, sweetest room in the house

Of course it can’t stay like that… Because we have stuff, and because of who we are. We wear the house lightly. This messy minimalism, helps me not to take it all too seriously.

Understanding shadow work, at last, as it pertains to me, not as an abstract theory or Instagram saying. I realised that pushing away that aspect of me also pushes away the creative individual. I hold onto some ideal which I’m not, and deny the sparky original aspects of myself into the bargain. I never understood this properly before. By accepting the so called bad you accept the so called good. Instead of blocking, and continually hoping for something else, some impossible wish; instead accepting what is, and then what is comes rushing in, and it isn’t, after all, that bad. I’m constantly tensed against so much, literally twisting and turning away, from what, what is so bad?

Shadow work, all work, is a continual process of waking up, realising, forgetting, learning; like peeling an onion until all that’s left is you, sitting in an empty room, alone.

Thank you very much for reading

12 RULES FOR BEING HUMAN HANDED DOWN FROM ANCIENT SANSKRIT

1. You will receive a body

2. You will learn lessons

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons

4. A lesson will be repeated until it is learned

5. Learning lessons does not end

6. ‘There’ is no better than ‘here’

7. Others are merely mirrors of you

8. What you make of your life is up to you

9. Life is exactly what you think it is

10. Your answers lie inside of you

11. You will forget all of this

12. You can remember it whenever you want

My original spiritual memoir republished as ebook and paperback in most countries on Amazon

Tags

escape the matrix, healing, meditation, spirituality

Using MDMA to treat PTSD

Tags

healing, MDMA for PTSD

I heard about this on the way to work yesterday– using MDMA with talking therapy to process and heal from trauma and thought I’d share my own experience of healing using a do-it-yourself accidentally-created MDMA therapy. The passage below is taken from my spiritual memoir How to find Heaven on Earth: Love, spirituality and everyday life, available on Amazon for £3.72 paperback or £0.99 ebook.

Healing

Blessings from the West, the deep commitments of the lake

(Pagan blessing)

I love that line; it conjures up the near fathomless depths of real proper grown up love, reassuring me and at the same time reminding me, that’s Love: the deep commitment.  Search the waters of your soul.  Dive down into the murky depths, even though you are afraid of the dark, the weeds, scary fish, broken glass or rusty spikes or whatever you could find down there.  It’s hard to believe you can be afraid of yourself, but it’s true.  That’s why Love is scary.  It shines a light, not just a warm golden glow of happiness type of light; it also shines a searchlight deep into your soul, uncovering everything that ever happened to you, everything you were ever afraid of.  Although as the saying goes, there is nothing to fear but fear itself.  Who is scared of fish, after all, or rusty things or broken glass?  It’s beautiful down there, below the surface, in the dark, still waters of the lake.  It’s beautiful down there, you just never realised it.  Don’t be afraid, go, down to the bottom of the lake.  That’s Love, showing you it’s okay.  You being brave enough to go there, that’s Commitment.

I took Ecstasy for the first time, at the age of forty, with John.  We didn’t go clubbing.  We sat on the sofa and talked.  The drug was like a Search and Destroy missile, cleansing me, going down into the depths, leaving nothing left unburned.  I sat and told him about a really horrible time I had had at school, that I had felt so much shame about that I had barely ever spoken about it.  I didn’t hide my face.  I sat with my head up, making eye contact the whole way through.  It really wasn’t so bad after all.  It was in the past.  I felt the shame and the pain being washed away by Love.     

Later, I meditated, like in The Journey.  I travelled back in time and I looked at that time at school from the point of where I am now, a place of healing and peace and for the first time I saw it in a different way:  

I am a unique individual.  I have strong drives:  sex is important.   I don’t like to be bound by rules, either the rules of 1980s sexist society and the double standards about sexual freedom that still exist today, or the radical feminist doctrine that I was exposed to at the time.  I woke up:  I met someone and we woke up together.  A friend was also doing the same, but I went a bit further.  Boys talk, and the playground, like the office today, thrives on gossip.  It seemed cruel but it was just light entertainment for them really, just like the sexual misconduct and affairs of people I don’t really know are in the office today.

I was only eleven years old though, and had no one to walk alongside me, everyone who knew, even my friend, was unanimous in their condemnation.  You would have to be an exceptional human being to have withstood all that and walked with her head held high.  I walked with my head bowed, through walls of boys chanting taunts, explicitly announcing to all what I had done, or had done to me.  What would anyone have done?  I denied it, I walked in shame for as long as it lasted; weeks, months, years?  I took short cuts and laid low.  I avoided certain places.  I checked everywhere.  I declined invitations on certain routes. The boys would always be waiting.  A wall of shame and humiliation, so unbearable I thought I would surely faint or disappear but I never did; there was no escape from the torture.  It was unbelievable but I had to believe it.  I don’t think many people would have been able to do anything else but just imagine if I had.  If I had somehow believed in myself, in spite of the censorship of everyone around me.  If I was as I am now:  free and accepting of what and who I am. 

I would say, yeah, so what?  You boys, you’re just jealous and curious. You girls, well, you’ll come to it soon enough anyway, so what’s all the fuss about.  It felt good.  Yeah, and I am proud that I didn’t care, that I went further than you, that I followed chance and opportunity and circumstance and  the desires of my body and IT FELT GOOD.  Some women go through their whole lives and don’t experience the pleasures I had standing up in that brick cupboard or sitting on that orange box in the maintenance shed or wherever it was.  It’s my body, it was my body then and it’s my body now and I respect and honour the pleasures that my body requests of me and supplies me with.  

Because if I can’t accept myself, how can I expect anyone else to?  If I’m saying, deep inside there’s something disgusting about me.  I’m dirty, I’m spoiled.  I’m different.  I’m not like other girls.

Although sometimes, once you’ve decided that you’re ready to go down there, sometimes the Universe tosses you yet another bone, and lets you off the hook.  Whatever it was you’d just rolled up your trouser legs and taken a deep breath to face…  has miraculously disappeared, healed of its own accord.  Intention is often all, no action required. I don’t need to go down there.  I don’t even have to take a last look at it. I can cut the line from up here and I never have to think about it again.

It wasn’t always like this.  I used to wonder and wonder:  Would that, coupled with a naturally sensitive nature, be enough to cause me all the problems I’ve had?  Would that explain why I felt normal when I was about five, that I looked normal, felt right in my clothes, went to parties and had friends and then later, from seven or eight or nine, felt dirty, like a leper.  Like I’ve always felt since.  Like I want to cut myself but never do.  Like I deserve to die when I make a mistake.  Like it’s okay for me to suffer.  Like all the good and happiness wasn’t meant for me.   Those feelings run through me like the words in a stick of rock. 

I wanted an explanation but at the same time I wondered if my explanation would be enough.  How bad did things need to be?  Would I be disappointed if I went all the way down there and found there was nothing after all?  Would I really get any satisfaction from uncovering past horrors?  But if I don’t find anything then I don’t have any excuse for how I am.  I tick all the boxes: punky/alternative troubled teen, unconfident, promiscuous, can dissociate sexual feelings easily, poor self esteem, permanently guilty and anxious.  It offers a neat explanation for my personality, which I quite like.  Or am I just a fantasist, looking for that neat explanation that lets me off the hook.   So that I can say, oh, so that’s why… and haven’t I done well, considering, instead of: I am largely a failure, hanging onto life by her fingernails.

In the end, though, I decided to let go of all the imaginings and explanations and just live with myself as I am now. 

Psychologists call it an extinction burst: when you start trying to eradicate an unwanted behaviour, sometimes at first it kicks back harder.  So after you renounce whatever it is you want to be rid of, you need to stand firm, because this backlash against happiness will surely come.  Like when I was first living with John and I was so happy and yet my OCD was the worst it had ever been.  Or like now, the most spiritual I have ever been, the most relaxed, and yet, these dark thoughts return even on the brightest day:  You are useless, you can’t do anything.  I feel awful, I am such a failure, I am all alone, etc. 

I’ve thought a lot about causes and cures.  I’ve talked to psychologists and therapists and people with different religious beliefs and I’ve read books about personal growth and healing and spirituality. I have wondered whether my suicidality and these horrible self sabotaging thoughts really were little demons that had taken up residence in the chambers of my heart.  Or were they the result of old ingrained negative beliefs or unresolved trauma. 

Whether or not these problems need to be banished with cognitive behaviour therapy, whether I needed to be prayed over, have my chakras unblocked, sit on a beach and do a ritual, meditate, do candle magic or just write it out… As always, I tend to get distracted and overcomplicate things.  The answer is usually the simplest possible.  So if I’m tying myself up in knots or thinking too much, I’m probably on the wrong track.

In the end though, as always, it all comes back to the beginning.  It’s not me going down into the scary depths, it’s Love, searing through, and all I have to do is sit with it and forgive myself.  All I have to do is sit still and say to myself, over and over again, you are loved.

Thank you very much for reading

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Rebalancing my chakras

Tags

chakra rebalancing, chakras, detoxing, editing, energy healing, healing, Indian matchmakers, spiritual healing, Vyasar Ganesan, writing

The Guru I followed for a few months a few years back told us that ‘all chakras have been removed,’ which I went along with, even though going over people’s chakras, including my own, was one of my own personal favourite ways of giving healing. After almost losing my mind for a few moments over her predicted zombie apocalypse (probably best not to ask) and my husband unsubscribing from the channel- I have since come to think, well, maybe I could go back to thinking about chakras now and again. I mean it’s not like anyone can really prove whether they exist or not and if I think they’re helpful then they are. Giving love to me or others by thinking about specific areas of the body in specific ways even if all in my imagination, what’s the harm?*

So I just had a rather wild weekend, and spent the following week limping along in a queasy state of ravenous gnawing hunger and not feeling at all like myself (zombie apocalypse anyone?) My husband was off too, and we binge watched Indian Matchmakers on Netflix- the only thing we felt able to watch. I got tearful seeing Indian cities and streets and hearing the Astrologer speak about Vyasar ‘He makes everyone laugh, even a crying person is laughing… He feels no shame even when sweeping the floor. He has a golden heart.’ Single ladies, I understand Vyasar is on Twitter.

Towards the end of the week, I restarted a bit of yoga, even though I felt sick bending over, and the day before my husband went back to work we went shopping, to the launderette and for a walk.

But it wasn’t until I was on my own this (Saturday) morning, for the first of three days in a row of time on my own to write, that I was able to bring my own unique understanding to my situation. During party times rules get a bit slack, and a cat sneaked onto the bed before my husband went to work. Then another one.

I’d been ‘going through my chakras’ and been alarmed to find nothing there at my solar plexus, like all my emotions had just been hollowed out. At my sacral chakra an orange shape flipped like the tail of a dying fish or a boat propeller clogged up with weeds. Too much emphasis on pleasure drives, maybe? Onwards #NoSextember! And as for my root chakra- the red seat of all security- I’d spent one afternoon in a frenzy of thinking of buying to let or even just buying and living- I even found a job there- falling in love with solidly built old dear little one bedroom stone cottages in Yorkshire. ‘For security!’ I said.

I am an overthinker, comes free with the imagination, and I’d been debating to myself even as I was doing it about the whole chakra thing, should I be doing it, do they exist, etc etc, when I remembered that at some point over the weekend I had done a healing session for the first time in ages. No boundaries, no protection, and not with a clear head. I focused on areas the person had mentioned, but otherwise announced them to have nothing wrong with them, ‘Everything seems to be whirling away beautifully!’ In popular imagination, chakras are often visualised like little coloured windmills, whirring away if they are healthy. Or vortexes of light, if that’s more your thing. *Ahh, maybe I just gave away all my energy, I thought. That explains a lot.

But maybe, as Alfie the cat gently batted my face so that I lifted up the duvet and let him into the bed, to lay stretched out all along my belly and chakras, all I need to do is cuddle a cat. Our cats don’t have toddlers pulling them about or anything, so they lead life largely on their own terms and remain as I see them perfectly balanced and enlightened in their own way. Therefore, they may come to me for warmth and find it no trouble to rebalance my energies at the same time. As they snuggle in to get warm and settle down for a nap, they may feel a slight whirring or sicky feeling coming off me as I am rebalanced by their calm presence, but they are so calm that it’s not enough to upset their equilibrium, or at least, it’s a fair trade.  And all I have to do is cuddle a cat and go back to sleep for a bit longer…

I did get back to editing yesterday- Friday, a sickly lacklustre session but a session nonetheless, and now today- Saturday begins three days of editing work before I go back to paid work on Tuesday. Maybe I’ll even send something off?

As well as finishing the book, the other thing is to get back to India asap. My aim is for us to go December-March, if the borders open to tourists then of course. I need 1. someone to take in the cats and look after them at their house or 2. someone to live on the boat and take care of the cats on there. Your chakras will be in tip top condition!

Join me if you like for a September of detox, healthy food and frequency raising! See earlier post

PS On checking the spelling of his name I came up with this lovely picture of Vyasar- cuddling a cat- in a beautiful bit of blogging synchronicity! Twitter, ladies, Twitter!

 

Throwback Thursday: The Fairytale Past

Tags

Being a writer, childhood, healing, Memory, Self healing, The 1970s, Trauma, writing

First published in July 2017

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, John 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?

 

Thank you very much for reading

The Island Child by Molly Aitken

Tags

Book review, books, Fairytale, healing, Memory, mother daughter relationships, Parent child relationships, Trauma

Book review

At its heart is the mother daughter relationship, the experience of being  mothered and of mothering.

The book vividly describes a tough rural childhood, the feeling of being confined within the home and to home activities, and the physical experience of childbirth and periods.

As well as this vivid physicality there is a kind of underwater feel to some of the book which matches the obliqueness of memory and the numbing effect of trauma.

The book explores the effects of unresolved trauma on relationships and shows how it’s very difficult to parent in an open and honest way if you haven’t been parented that way yourself.

But ultimately it shows how you don’t have to know what to say or have everything dealt with, you can just tell your story, as honestly as you can, and that can be healing both for yourself and those who have been affected by you.

‘Back to the beginning, with illumination,’ is one of my favourite sayings, and is kind of how the story of the book felt to me.

I thought the scenes involving sex were well done. I liked the way every day things (feet when sleeping) or things which have been covered in stories many times (the peak of a relationship crisis) were described in a new and original way:

‘Sometimes I woke in strange places: at the top of the stairs, my toes caressing the abyss;’

‘…I wished for him to stop driving this long dark road, turn on the light and remake me with his gaze.’

Molly’s Instagram @molly.aitken is a good account to follow if you are interested in reading and writing, she shares details of the writing and publishing process in a very generous way.

Thank you for reading

Throwback Thursday: Everyday Gratitude

Tags

awareness, gratitude, happiness, healing, Law of Attraction, Music, Psychocandy, The Jesus and Mary Chain

I hardly EVER go in record shops but I was with a friend who collects vinyl so we went in one, and there in front of me was a Jesus and Mary Chain Psychocandy poster.  I thought it was an original old one, I didn’t realise it was advertising a 30 year anniversary tour.  If I’d said anything out loud the record shop man or my friend might have realised I was confused and put me right, but I didn’t.

Thirty years ago I was fifteen and so desperate to see them, I was at boarding school and not allowed out.  A boy in my year went, his dad made an excuse so he could go, I was so jealous.  They played for fifteen minutes with their backs to the audience and walked off but still, it had been one of life’s big regrets.

But luckily for me the universe gave me another chance.  A few weeks later a patient asked to go to a concert- this is a fairly unusual request- and I also fairly unusually offered to get involved and look up local gig programmes…  I looked up the UEA programme and there it was, Jesus and Mary Chain Psychocandy 30 year anniversary tour £25.

Oh, thank you, thank you, so much pleasure.  I went on my own to just soak it all up.  A sound bath; the lights red with gun like firing of individual white lights, a wall of dry ice lit white, almost all the stage eclipsed.  Seeing mosh pit kids, a girl with dark hair, her face lit up with happiness.  Images on the screen, a serious, sad looking girl (me, at fifteen, thirty years ago) and then at the end a pair of infrared heat image hands, (me now, healing hands).

I don’t want anything to come between me and this awareness.  The bar tender gives me free sparkling water, a man gives me a token for free car parking.  You don’t need to ask for help to make your path, you have created this life, and it is perfect. 

More Everyday Gratitude:

Swimming pool empty and friendly- two people talked to me.

Car park almost full, spaces looked a bit tight for me but then I find two spaces next to each other and what was more, one also had a space in front of it so I could drive straight through to be facing ready to go.

Two staff at the whole foods shop, astonishingly friendly, talking at length about their cats.

Driving home in the dark, I noticed the pretty pointy silhouette of a chapel; a beautifully illuminated pink neon No Vacancies sign, and a pretty yellow window lit up.

A meeting got postponed so I only have to do one report not two this week.

The secretaries next door offering me biscuits just as I was getting hungry at 4pm.

All falling into place ‘live life as though everything is rigged in your favour.’

Sitting on floor, stapling papers, staples ran out and I remembered I’d found a little chunk of staples the day before and put them by my computer just within arm’s reach.

A member of staff I don’t know being extra nice and friendly, like the staff in the whole foods shop.

Finding some extra pouches of cat food so I don’t need to go shopping today.

Home, stars, little walk.

My stepdaughter saying ‘let’s go home and have hot dogs* and watch Buffy on the sofa with blankets and one cat each, what more  could we want?’ *vegetarian ones

Someone at work introducing me:  ‘this woman is one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, and you can tell by looking at her that she is just like this at home too’.

Someone else saying that I have the happiest team in the hospital.

One of my staff bought me a posh houseplant ‘because you’d been having a hard time recently, I wanted to give you something happy.’

A moment shared with a member of staff on her last day.  ‘As you go up the ranks it can be, ‘Lonely’’, we both said at the same time.

After going to a friend’s party, John saying, that’s the most relaxed I’ve seen you in company, even making jokes!

An old friend asking, are you still writing and me saying yes, he said I’m glad and me asking, are you still drawing and him saying yes, but it’s just a hobby, I’ve accepted that and me saying me too (except I haven’t, not really).

Massage today, didn’t have the surface niggles, so went deeper.

I ‘woke up’ on the massage table, hair everywhere, enlivened, thinking, what if I just arrived here, what would I observe about myself?  I am hungry for good healthy food, I have a nice job, I am a healer in training, I am married, I have an adult son and two step children, I drive around a lot and go away with work no problem, I sleep well, I exist separately to my thoughts.

Postscript 12.11.19

It took a lot of work to get this happy.  I suppose that’s what all the self help books mean when they say you have to ‘do the work.’  If you’re on this path Please keep going: the rewards are worth it!

Thank you very much for reading!

 

Thowback Thursday: The Field

Tags

Albion Fayres, Collective unconscious, Festivals, gong meditation, healing, Law of Attraction, Lynn McTaggart, meditation, Rumi, The Field, The Secret, Yoga

Around the same time as I was in the Hare Krishna phase, Anthony was reading Lynn Mc Taggart’s book The Field. 

The idea is that there is a field around us that holds all the ideas and possibilities that we can connect to and that it connects to us.  Like the collective unconscious, a reciprocal entity like The Secret and the Law of Attraction, the feeling that it’s a two way thing.  Living, alive, a love on both sides.

One winter’s day I went to the beach at Weybourne, North Norfolk.  I stood on my own looking out at the sea, watching the waves come in.  It was a bright day and the waves were lit up silver and shiny, the horizon a dark blue line against the pale blue of the sky.  Me just standing there watching as if rooted to the spot.  Hello Universe, I said, looking at the waves.  Hello Rachel, The Universe said back.

My yoga teacher always said that I was good at being still: when he went around the class dishing out specific praise, Karen is good at boat pose, Sarah is good at head stands, well, I knew I was never the most bendy or fit and so I wasn’t surprised when he paused for a moment when he got to me.  You’re very still in the poses, Rachel, yes, that’s your thing, you’re very still.  I was pleased, I knew what he meant.  I take it very seriously; I concentrate, I try hard, I’m really there.

It’s not just Yoga.  Even when I’m standing looking at the sea, I’m really doing it.  Later in meditation I saw a blue planet, at its edge a line of paler blue against the black of space.  I was focussed on the edges, the place where things meet.  Those words again, Hello Universe, Hello Rachel.  I held onto them, suspending myself in the sweet moment of introduction.  The place we arrive at before thoughts come in.

Like Rumi’s field:  Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.  Or Pulp’s: Oh is this the way they say the future’s meant to feel/Or just 20,000 people standing in a field? 

I also wondered whether the idea of the field could be taken more literally as well; like when I go to the Harlequin Fayre and feel so free, a group of us all go and live in a field for a few days at a festival, with healing areas, yoga, gong meditation, music, cooking and eating together, lying in the sun, sleeping in tents.  I like things to be concrete as well; I get just as excited about the concrete as I do the mystical. (You can read about my previous experiences at Harlequin Fayre HERE and HERE.)

I’ve got this lovely quote that I got, strangely enough, or at least I used to think such things were strange, from an interview in the council magazine they deliver free when they empty your bins.  I tend to read everything and I’m glad that I do:  ‘Life has its own hidden forces, which you can only discover by living.’

In order to gain all the knowledge and insights of the collective consciousness, perhaps I have to let go of the idea of being an individual altogether, at least while I am actually doing it.  I feel my sense of self dissolving.  Like being on a boat bobbing around, uncertain, unsettling at first, because I am letting go of control and allowing myself to feel something of the way the force field operates.  Faster than the speed of light; in fact no sense of speed or time whatsoever.  The dinosaurs were yesterday, a dream, an idea and the past, simultaneously.  You think it, it happens, that’s how fast it can be.

This is the way angels and guides operate, this is why Maya Angelou or Archangel Raphael or anyone else living or dead for that matter could be with me and with any number of other earthlings simultaneously.

So the visions, the planets, the strange experiences we are warned about in meditation, are not inconsequential side effects, but communications from the force field/collective unconscious.  Buddhism is too reductive for me, dismissing such experiences as ‘beginners mind’.  Most religions are too one sided, simply asking for things passively when praying, and only a few lucky or special ones hear messages or get guidance.

We are not passive recipients of force field controller’s whims, we are not passive worshippers asking for things, we are active.  Anyone can commune, receive ideas, insights, that we can choose to select or not.  We can ask for support and choose which answers to act on.  We can tune in and re-power so that we can have the energy to live and do.

More than just a space to work stuff out, the force field is simultaneously an agony aunt, a power source, an oracle and a monk.  Bring your problems to the force field.  Bring your everyday problems, however small, because these are the things that cause dis-ease (worry, fear and over thinking) and get in the way. 

Going for a walk I saw two horses in a field.  I realised, it’s not just dinosaurs, it’s everything.  Horses, cats…  okay maybe some have been ‘made out of’ or followed on from  others ideas-wise, which we link together and see as evolution, but that’s because for us time is linear; in The Field, it isn’t, they all just plonked down fully created.  They/we kept trying until they/we created us. 

Opening yourself up to the field of possibilities can be scary, as in theory it means opening up to all and everything: wars, racism, murder, but of course you aren’t just a passive vessel waiting to be possessed by an idea.  You have what you want to do; you have discernment and you have free will.  It’s just that we scare ourselves, the possibilities scare us.  We look for things to be afraid of, rather than opportunities.  Like when people go mad.

Like how you see lots of whatever car you are looking into buying, not because you create more of them but you see what is already there, the universe holds everything, you just pick it out.  So don’t focus on bad stuff more than necessary, e.g. people get obsessed with crime or fire risk, you need to think about it briefly and just enough to action it i.e. locks to stop burglars, smoke detectors, you install them, but you don’t spend all week looking at burglary or fire tragedy stories.  Nothing new here- same as the old sayings, don’t dwell on it, think positive etc, but this is a more scientific way of presenting it and also provides a way of not doing the ostrich bit which can be a side effect of relentless Pollyanna-ness (I should know), where you refuse to even look at any bad stuff.

What is the one true thing I can rely on:  Anthony, I guess, family, maybe, but even them, even him, will die, even if we stay happily together forever which I hope and intend to.  The only thing I can really be sure will be with me until the end is me, my breath.   I can’t even rely on a body part really, or maybe my heartbeat, okay, my beating heart and my breath, these are the only certainties in life, these are the things that will be with me until the end.   Maybe I should write an anti smoking advert?  Why would you want to poison and disable your only lifelong companions?  

Certainties came up as constraints on the spell check and I thought, yes, our certainties can be our constraints too. 

What would it take for people to believe?  Something on the News at Ten?  Basically, we are telepathic, able to do remote viewing and healing but most of the time the signal is drowned out by all the distractions- activities, media, our unfocussed, haphazard thoughts etc.  What if the ordinary way, of success being about money, career, what you do for a living etc, what if it isn’t about that at all, it’s about being able to connect with the force field and connect with each other e.g. by telepathy, that these are the new skills and values, nothing to do with jobs and money.  Also having empathy would make it hard to hurt others as we’d feel and connect.

In meditation I saw red curtain fabric, like in Twin Peaks going into the other world, and I got scared.  Twin Peaks was creepy, about spirit possession, and then I got a flier for a conference on spirit possession.  In Twin Peaks, fear opens the door to the bad world, but love opens the door to another, good world.  Healing, is good, feels good.  Energy forces exist, like nature, they are morally neutral.  It is the intention of the person accessing them that determines whether they are good or bad.  We have the power to direct energy, to channel it, and to use it for good or bad.  The power exists, outside of us, it is strong, and it is morally neutral.

Me saying to someone at work, I am so thin skinned, and her saying kindly: ‘It’s the flipside of being caring’.  I’ve almost no protection when I bump into people who aren’t very nice.  Wondering if what we call ‘evil’ is really just a profound lack of empathy for others.  Like how a greyhound needs a coat in winter because they have almost no natural protection from the weather, I have almost no natural protection against people who aren’t very nice.  Or have I?  Last night before bed I meditated.  I thought about this, thought, I have no natural protection against people who aren’t very nice.

‘You do’ the answer came clearly.

‘You have this’.

Today, on the way home from work, Monday, I noticed a rare moment of the absence of worry, I wonder if that’s the goal, the absence of worry, leaving one to revel in the still moment.  But our minds search for problems, and those moments are rare.

This was just one of several times where I’ve felt, this is it, I’ve got it, my unifying theory, my one true thing I can hold onto… and just when I think that, it’s gone.  But when I’m in it, whatever it is, I’m hot, I’m connected, I’m awake.

Photograph: sunrise at Ramsgate during a trip away. We got up very early and the kids and I went to see the sun rise, afterwards we got hot chocolate.

Thank you very much for reading

Throwback Thursday: Therapy Part Two

Tags

CBT, healing, OCD, Self healing, stress, therapy, Work, Work place stress

At the start of every ‘therapy for the therapists’ group there was always a mindfulness exercise and for the first time I understood why we teach this to our patients who have severe emotional and mental distress.  I was nervous, but I focussed on the task:  I am sitting here, in a chair, the table is brown, the window is square.  Just the bare unarguable facts, no suicidal despair, no ‘I can’t cope, I am a leper’.  Just deal with what is in front of me.

A few weeks’ later and a few more weeks of Jaim’s lovely therapy and another therapy group meeting.  This time the mindfulness was not a ‘describing’ exercise like before but a ‘doing’ exercise.  In silence, the group leader handed out photocopies of Valentine’s Day themed Sudoku.  Printed on the bottom of the sheet was the website address: Activities for kids.  Now, when Sudoku first became a thing in England, I did try it and did know how to do it.  But that was a long time ago, and faced with this sheet, in the tense silence of the therapy group, I realised I had absolutely no idea what to do.  I ran through the options in my mind:  stay still, be mindful of the discomfort, and say nothing.  Or ask for help- traditionally we don’t often speak in mindfulness, but mostly the task is relatively simple and clarification isn’t normally needed.  I thought that if it was my turn as facilitator I wouldn’t mind if someone asked- in fact I wouldn’t want them to sit silent and confused.  So I broke the silence and asked the facilitator and my neighbour who both tried to give me brief and hushed advice.  Unfortunately it was no good, maybe because I’d got even more tense at speaking, maybe because the mindfulness section is so short they didn’t spend long explaining it, so I sat, writing anything in the boxes with no clue, feeling hot and uncomfortable but at the same time, a bit of me was laughing, a bit of me was looking forward to telling Jaim about it.  And a whole lot more of me knew that whatever was happening in that moment, underneath and beyond it I was still intact, still me, and would come out unscathed.

Jaim and I laughed long and hard about it.  ‘What, you mean, you, 15 years experience as a therapist, head of department, manager of a team of twenty, don’t know how to do Sudoku, I mean, really, what will everyone think!!!’ Jaim laughed.  He added more seriously: ‘the aim isn’t to avoid ever having a low mood or a bad experience, but to be able to let them go afterwards’.

Eliminate these behaviours and thoughts and I can experience pure happiness at least for a period, until and unless events in life happen as they do but it is true that at present I have no sad events or issues so it would be a shame to waste this opportunity to be perfectly happy.  

Driving home from work, listening to Radio 4, I heard someone say:  ‘Treat it as normal, that will help it to become normal’.  Yes, I thought, that is exactly what I need to do.  That could cure my suicidal thoughts and urges, my workplace anxiety, my body issues, my self consciousness, my OCD and all the rest of my various neuroses.  They were actually talking about Northern Ireland, but that kind of detail doesn’t bother me, I was listening to the radio at the time, so I’m taking it for my own.

But even as counselling is releasing years of blocks and bad habits from my mind, and recently rediscovered yoga and recently discovered deep tissue massage is releasing years of guilt and tensions from my body, a part of me is fighting to undermine this new found happiness.  New OCD behaviours appear and strange new worries spring up.  The mind is fighting back: Well you could be happy, but stuff always happens.  What if he’s just waiting until you are strong enough to manage on your own and then he’ll leave you?  What if he has an affair with your friend?  What if he dies?  What then?  But like in Eat Pray Love (the book, always the book) when she just sits on the beautiful island in silence for days and days while all her guilt and neuroses surface and then subside, I am just going to look kindly and patiently on whilst all this stuff works itself out and is eliminated, out of my mind, out of my body.

And then, in meditation, the thought came:  what if this feeling that I am interpreting as stress, anxiety, tension, confusion, OCD, what if it’s just a pregnant transition and is just me, teeming with energy?  It isn’t mental illness; it’s me, teeming with energy, coming into my powers.  And the power, the energy is just waiting to be told what to do, or for me to put them into action.

I’ve still got a fear of madness when I open doors in my mind.  Just like I have a fear of getting fat, stiff and unfit if I stop exercising and let myself off for a few days.  A fear of being totally lazy and losing all my drive if I sleep in or rest up or do nothing.  A fear of losing control at work or being sacked if I don’t work 100% all the time.  What if all these fears are equally unfounded? 

Like how anorexics, with devastating consequences, absorb the public health messages about food whilst obese people ignore them; I absorbed the ‘take responsibility’ and ‘accept guilt’ messages when I didn’t always need to.  Could it be possible that I am not guilty of everything that I accused myself of?

… Each moment is both unique and yet also the result of the previous moment and all previous moments, like beads being threaded on a string.  Is that that what heaven or enlightenment is, simply the result of day after day of right living? 

What if the happy, positive me, like when I am all chatty and cheerful and friendly at work, is the real me, and the dark, miserable one is not, is just a shadow trying to drag me back down, yet I used to think that was the real me, and the cheerful one was false, a front.

I went on facebook for the first time in weeks, and Elizabeth Gilbert had posted that having a creative mind is like having a border collie for a pet: if you don’t give it work to do, it will find itself something to do, and you may not like what it chooses.  This aligned with what the man on a work wellbeing course said: worry is a misuse of the imagination, give your mind something better to do.

It made me think of worry and also OCD.  Is it as simple as that?  Forget all the exposure exercises and behaviour charts; just give myself something big and all consuming to do- fall in love, write a book, etc.  I remember someone on a creative writing course writing about OCD, maybe she would be able to cure herself by writing more?

I didn’t tell Jaim about the OCD:  I didn’t want to be like one of those patients that goes to a ten minute appointment and adds loads of other issues on at the end of the appointment and anyway I was prioritising the most dangerous.  I also thought that maybe it would recede as all the other stuff got sorted.  And that if it didn’t, well, I’d got help once, I could always get help for the OCD later.  Or just employ same method: awareness.

One night late, on my own, before I went to bed I looked up some OCD self help information.  It was reassuring, very reassuring, as long as I can fully absorb it:

• Intrusive thoughts are common and are an OCD symptom, i.e. they are not me.  Sad, to think of all those people persecuted by thoughts, that they can’t share, and that get worse and worse until they are totally taken over.
• Worrying about them, blocking them, or taking them seriously are all things that make them worse.
• Laughing at them can help, as can reminding yourself that everyone has them and they don’t mean anything.

I thought about all the other healing I have done and realised that I can easily cure myself of my OCD, simply by using the method I have thus far employed for everything else I have done:

• Let go of it.  Un-hook my attention and my interest, hook by hook, until it disappears.  It is my attention and interest that make it a thing, that give it form, without that, it is nothing.
• And realise that even when I do have it, it doesn’t bother me, I am still intact underneath.

It’s like healthy eating:  in the moment of deciding and then starting you can feel totally healthy and transformed even whilst accepting that the body and health you have is the result of years of poor eating and will take a while to change/catch up.  Perhaps this is a secular version of the nature of forgiveness?

Postscript:

Gratitude on top of gratitude:  In January the man I had had all the difficulties with before Christmas was moved to another job and I never had to see him again.

Thank you very much for reading

‘It’s broken here:’* Nha Trang, Vietnam Part Two

Tags

Connection, depression, despair, Guilt, healing, Nha Trang, self awareness, spiritual memoir, suicidal thoughts, Travel fatigue, Travel memoir, Travel writing, waking up

WARNING This post discusses a period where I experienced suicidal urges, thoughts and feelings. It explores suicidal ‘logic’ and mentions thinking about methods.

I’m now okay now, these feelings come and go over the years, I keep myself safe and it passes.

If you are experiencing similar feelings PLEASE SEEK HELP. Here is a page I have found very useful in the past 

DRAFT extract from book chapter

The day of the beach walk, when we walked to the Incense Tower the wrong way… I wanted to stand and look. Anthony walked off, thinking I wanted to be alone. Being left behind is a trigger for me. A misunderstanding; over sensitivity, a bad atmosphere, the atmosphere between us deteriorated and my mood plummeted.

Thinking, ‘It would have been better if I hadn’t woken up.’ Thinking about the past, imagining going back and preventing things with my son turning out as they did. Thinking, ‘Better to be an asleep person, who could take pride in having had a successful family.’ Decisions, my responsibility. But what did I actually do that was so bad?

And on and on, thoughts spiralling down and down. ‘I left my children for you.’ Anthony said to me once. Oh God, and I’d painted myself as so good, getting their room ready, buying things, cooking. It wasn’t only my kid I messed up. Lots do it, women break up families, but they’d already been separated for years. But he did move to me not vice versa.

The ultimate destination of these thoughts for me is suicide. So many reasons to die: As a punishment. As a I don’t know how to live with myself. As a solution to every other worry or concern. To take responsibility. All I do is harm. I do no good. My son is doing well without me. Wow, the matrix/me really did a number on me. Such dangerous thoughts: If he’s done this well when I stepped back, and done even better when I went away for a year, then how much better would he do if I wasn’t here at all?

I remembered in Kerala, Sea Win, lying on the floor. Me: ‘Why do I feel so bad?’  The answer seemed to come from the light above me: ‘It’s your programming.’

It’s the mother of all battles undoing this. Do I want to? Or do I want to die? All this talk between us re The Future and getting older; who am I kidding? One day I’m going to kill myself and this is why. I’ve not yet got the method planned. Maybe I haven’t reached the end of my tether yet. Maybe I don’t want to enough. Maybe when I do, I will.

Walking along the beach, going into late afternoon, grey light, me thinking of methods of committing suicide, thinking about drowning myself, getting up early or coming back late.

On the sand there were big chunks of mosaic. I remembered there was mosaic on the stairs at the hotel too. (mosaic is kind of a thing for me). A grey bicycle was chained up on top of a ridge of sand so that its background was the cloudy sunset sky. Then, a shiny apple lying on the sand with only a few bites out. Then, some beautiful driftwood. Then a sparrow pecking at a discarded corn on the cob on the sand. Another sparrow, another corn on the cob. A light koru, the Maori symbol of new life. ‘It’s no good showing me all that,’ (good stuff I’d usually like, things of beauty I’d normally connect with) I said grimly, in my head. But then I realised, ‘All that stuff is always there.’

An old Vietnamese lady walked past selling buns, bags of tiny sponge cakes. She smiled and was friendly. I smiled at her, was friendly, and bought some. I felt bad about being so sad, as if she could catch it.

On the beach, mountains one side on a spit, partly concealed by high rise blocks of hotels ranged in front of the mountains, the juxtaposition was shocking.

In Kerala at the beach cafe, at the place where we’d been in a film, I’d read a tatty newspaper pull out/magazine. In it there’d been an article by a food/travel writer. In the wake of two recent celebrity suicides he’d written about how he’d travelled to all these amazing countries, stayed in great hotels and eaten all this wonderful food, that was his job, but at that the same time, ‘For two years I wanted to die,’ he said. I thought it would have been better if he’d written about that too. Like the social media thing of people tending to only put up the good stuff. ‘No one posts photos of themselves sobbing on Facebook.’ I often say. I know there are sites of self harm etc, but are they another extreme, all bad, would it be healthier if we all put everything, or at least a balance, out there?

The trigger to all this was another news interview raking over the past of twelve years ago when my son was a teenager and out of control, and a few cross words between me and Anthony.

Once awake, awake. ‘Enlightenment’ is accepting all of it, somehow, and somehow making peace with it.

As Anthony and I have discussed previously, being conscious doesn’t mean you’re nice. Some heads of big businesses that destroy the environment and people’s health for money to fuel their pleasure lifestyle may well be conscious. They may have decided it’s all an illusion so just do what you want it doesn’t matter. But like I’ve said before, even if it is only a game, I will still recycle, I still won’t hurt animals. And being conscious definitely doesn’t mean its fun. Sometimes you’ll wish you were still asleep.

But I made all the mistakes before. Before I woke up, whilst I was still asleep. So was that all my script? My back story like in Blade Runner to make me less likely to wake up? In Blade Runner they gave the robots memories, even a family, ‘To make them easier to control.’ Or if we don’t believe in some malignant power, that it just made it more of a challenge for me to wake up. Like George Harrison Isn’t it a pity. Or some people say the sadness triggers you waking up; the cracks let the light in, etc. And Now provides the chance to go off script and deprogramme myself, should I choose.

Back in the room, thinking about how just a short time of silence and awkward atmosphere will plummet my mood. One to two hours of it and I’m at suicide methods and my mind is dangerously out of control. ‘No,’ I said to myself, ‘I may not be in control of my thoughts but I can control my actions.’ I hugged myself and thought of the suicide prevention workbook (that I wrote!) ‘Curl up into a ball, you can’t hurt yourself then.’

In bed something in the room screamed method: the curtain pole. Compared to Dong Hoi, where I had admired the curtain pole’s glittery beauty, here, the pole was a suicide option. I was scared of it. Would I just do it, like I slapped myself the other day, involuntarily? That night, so depressed… ‘Just get through the night,’ I said to myself.

Later, talking myself out of it… You think committing suicide will wipe out (or atone for) all the bad you did; but of course it doesn’t, and actually makes it worse. It’s another bad thing. A really terrible thing. It ADDS to the sum of the harm you’ve done. If you were to ask them if that’s what they wanted, of course they wouldn’t say they wanted that. But of course even to ask would be an awful thing to do… The ‘logic’ of a suicidal mood state can be terrifyingly dangerous. In the past I’ve even thought people would WANT me to do it and agree with me that it made sense and that it was a good idea if I were to ask them. One particular time, after a particularly awful Mother’s Day, when my son had stolen something and run up a one hundred pound phone bill, I decided to go to bed, sleep on it, and if I still felt definitely that it was, I’d run it by my friend M, ask her if she thought it made sense, and if she did, I’d do it. Of course I woke up and thought there’s no way she would, and crisis averted.

That night in Nha Trang, I woke later, realised it was no threat- the method I’d been scared of, the curtain pole. And the next morning, I saw that the curtain pole had a screw loose, it wouldn’t have held, it was not dangerous, and me, feeling better, noticed glitter on my leg which reminded me to include the nice Dong Hoi curtain pole in the story.

Nha Trang abounded with patterns and metaphors, the trapped huge variety of beautiful/fascinating animals dead/alive; the non communication, we spoke to other people only twice. The longing to connect… I wished we could all speak the same language or that I knew another language but to really connect you’d need to be absolutely fluent and how long would that take and which language to choose… And how few people I can absolutely connect with even in our first language… Even Anthony and I lost each other for a while…

*One day halfway down our street, on the other side to our hotel, I passed a young Vietnamese woman wearing a red t shirt. Printed on the t shirt, over her heart area, were the words, ‘It’s broken here.’

Thank you very much for reading

I found that my mood dipped as I was writing this chapter. I found this song helped:

If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts and feelings PLEASE SEEK HELP. Here is a page I have found very useful in the past 

About the author

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.