Leaning into What is

Tags

Belief, Conspiracy theories, God, John Lennon, reality

I don’t believe in mantra, I just believe in me, Yoko and me, that’s reality.

Early one morning I was reading the preface to Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, about how the novel is about things as they are. What people are actually doing, raw, real life. It chimed with what I’d been thinking. In the face of conspiracy theories, politics, online versus real life, my focus more than ever had become our real life here on the boat. Me and my husband, the cats, being on the boat, cooking and eating dinner. (The cats obviously don’t participate in cooking but you get my drift.)

Anyone who’s followed this blog for a while will know I am no stranger to exploring all the other stuff but right now that isn’t where I’m at. It may be partly due to everyone getting into the weird stuff- something about everyone doing something puts me off it. It’s definitely about wanting to distance myself from the nastier sides (not that I was ever there) and realising that there’s some weird crossover stuff happening where yoga types march with neo Nazis and somehow think it all makes sense. I watched with horror and sympathy all kinds of people getting lost in conspiracy theories/politics, sometimes to the great detriment of their actual lives. E.g. the people who followed online conspiracy theorists and stormed the Capitol, found it didn’t actually happen how they had expected and are now facing lengthy jail terms.

And I thought about myself, living in my head, and in a fantasy future dream world whilst being largely secluded from the actual day to day world. I thought about how I do so much typing that I have chronic pain in my shoulder, arms and wrists. Is that really being in tune with reality? I was reminded about reading in After the Ecstasy, the Laundry by Jack Kornfield about the people who had spent years in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, encouraged to only focus on the spiritual and neglect their physical health, then after years eventually leaving and going back to the everyday world with poor physical health.

And I thought about my job, where I’m not using all my skills or fulfilling my potential. I began wondering about stepping up again into a senior role like I had before. One evening my husband was idly looking at jobs and said ‘I’ll have a look for you.’ A moment later and he was reading out the perfect job. A week later and I’d had an interview, been offered the job and we’d found a marina to move to. It’s funny, the exact same thing happened to my neighbour. She’d been unhappy in her job for ages. One night her husband had gone to bed and she thought, I’ll just have a look what’s out there,’ and there it was, the perfect job. Hers isn’t quite as far so she’s going to commute, but the look of glowing happiness on her face was the same as mine.

I feel it’s my response to lockdown, we’ve been sequestered here in the countryside, not doing very much, for the best part of a year. The new marina is half an hour by train to London, about the same distance or less to Norfolk, and is in a busy location beside restaurants and a small supermarket, walking distance to bigger shops and with onsite marina facilities including launderette and showers.

It is a bit daunting to move from our idyllic linear rural mooring to being in a sardine marina mooring, but we are a few feet away from the towpath and a grassy area with squirrels and the edge of the canal where swans and geese come to be fed. And life! We went to check it out and the area was busy and buzzing and felt like Spring, and didn’t feel as Covid anxious- in more built up areas people just can’t keep out of each others way as they do where we live now- people cross the road more or less as soon as another person comes into sight. It almost felt as if life was normal there.

We are going to allow around ten to fourteen days to get down there- so the holiday we planned for May is actually coming sooner and will be more intense- a one hundred mile journey with over fifty locks. In the meantime, we are both working out our notices, buying bits and pieces like a new witch’s hat (chimney covering) and wheelbarrow wheel, fixing things on the boat, sorting out our stuff, and doing all the normal stuff that is due at this time for us- car MOT, tax and insurance and similar for boat.

Making the decision to commit to the new marina was anxiety provoking as it all happened so fast, but since it’s all been set I feel surprisingly calm. I’m really looking forward to the job. It represents not only the chance to use all my skills to the max and be fulfilled, but also the people are warm and genuine and I feel I’ll be able to be genuine too. I’ll be working in a mental health setting with people who are facing the most complex difficulties and I’m proud and honoured to have been chosen for this role. Of course I won’t be writing about it and it’s also why I’ve ‘anonymised’ my blog and Instagram.

I still intend to finish editing my travel/spiritual memoir book, and to post a blog once a month. I expect me or my husband will post pictures of our great narrowboat journey, follow us on Instagram travelswithanthony or always_evolving_ever_real

Thank you very much for reading

Rachel

Escape The Matrix Part 3

Tags

escape the matrix, Netflix, reality, The matrix

This weekend I have been pondering the balance between personal responsibility and ‘the matrix’.  It is for us as individuals to keep our emotions in check, manage our thoughts, and stay positive.  This helps us create our reality.  At the same time, there is stuff happening all the time around us.  This could be things that might affect us in different ways, which we need to manage and also includes opportunities being thrown our way.  So people describe this as like learning how to ride two horses, one being fate, the other being free will.  Then you’ve got people like Richard Branson, who appear to have boundless confidence and seem to see how everything works and ‘play’ ‘the matrix’ to their own advantage.

For me initially it began with realising (mentally) what I had, and what I could do, and then realising (as in making real, putting into practice) that.

I had anticipated that as I took the big steps of leaving work and selling the house I might be ‘rewarded’ with a burst of creative energy and opportunities.  So far that has meant that I have experienced a kind of further expansion of my mind.  I pictured myself looking back and reviewing this life amongst others and saying, Hey, remember that time when we sold our house and packed in our jobs and went off to India?

But as if that isn’t exciting enough, my mind has begun to come up with even more crazy ideas and possibilities, as if there’s this sense that this is it, this is your last time around, if there’s anything else at all you might want to do, best do it in this lifetime.   Watching BoJack, I thought, hey, maybe it would be fun to go to Hollywood, maybe it’s kind of like somewhere to go for creative people who don’t fit in where they come from, like art school.  To wander around, immune to the pressures of youth and thinness.  How and why would we be there?  Write a book, ‘Our Guide to Escaping the Matrix’ (just us, telling our story), find our very own Princess Carolyn (BoJack’s agent) and have our story made into a film starring George Clooney and Kate Winslet.  It’s important to write things down, to spell them out, however crazy they may sound.

Anyway, to return to my point, if ‘the matrix’ is just a reflection of us and not a thing of itself, then maybe all you have to really do is the self management bit, not concerning yourself with the matrix at all, and everything will just happen.  Is that an invitation to limitless self belief or a cop out excuse to do nothing?  (But we’d still need to actually write the book)  (and we need money/an income stream- we do need to eat after all- and you have to spend your days doing something)

Back to Richard Branson.  Maybe if you have a really strong sense of self you just know what to do.  You don’t have to learn how to read the signs or think about timing.  You just know, and whenever you decide to do it, that’s the right time.

What I’ve been watching:

Films:  The Fifth Element

The costumes are designed by Jean Paul Gaultier.  They are all amazing but it got me thinking that if you have hands and fingers and you want to learn you could sew and make costumes.  If you are interested in something, if you follow that interest, with dedication and devotion, then with practice you will get good at it.

Frank

This is such an interesting portrayal of creativity, particularly group creativity, as it follows a band making an album.  In the woods, for about a year, with loads of craziness.  It makes you realise how hard it is- by that I mean how much dedication it takes, and how it takes time and practice to become good at playing instruments and writing songs.  It takes dedication, time and practice, and of course you need to be interested and want to do it, or why would you be there in the woods for a year otherwise, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do it.  It shows you how it is done and what it takes.  I found that to be encouraging rather than off putting, although I am glad I am not involved in a group activity like a band, I prefer the solitary creative practice of writing.

Netflix shows:  The end of the f***ing world

Two young people.  Such good acting and really well done.

BoJack Horseman

What I’ve been listening to:

In a stunning example of awesome timing, my husband bought this CD in a charity shop for 25p, put it on the iPod and gave me the CD to play in the car.  I put it on for the first time as I left work for the last time.  Tracks 1 and 3 did give me goosebumps.

Green Mist Theory 08:08

Tags

dreams, escape the matrix, reality, The matrix

All this came to me, fully realised, in a dream.

You created a machine, a robot cyborg of flesh and blood, the movies etc. are clues or faint echoes of this truth.  We think they are fantastic fantasy but they are nowhere near as exciting as the truth:  We were ‘mist’ (we are energy) and we created a vessel that can cry and feel and we created the world we live in.  But then we got distracted by our bodies and sex and forgot.  (I even got/get distracted by that in the dream/my dreams).

Look in the mirror, at yourself crying, at your face melting, at it going through all ages.

Me to my mum: ‘Mum, are you awake?’  (Use of the word ‘Mum’ as a mindfulness bell (or spinning top, or programmed pendulum) as I don’t call her that).  ‘Is there a club for people who are awake?  Is there training?’ ‘Yes, in a mental institution.’  Oh yes of course, you’d think I’d gone mad… But it’s everyone else that’s mad, the mad people are the sane ones.  But fair enough, you’d think I’d gone mad if I said ‘None of this is real’.  The trick is, to know the truth but to still carry on living in the world (to keep one foot in the visible and one foot in the invisible).  We did this for a reason, perhaps we forget for a reason?  Maybe sex, and beauty etc was a trick we inserted to help us forget.

We made the body like people make robots but then it began to become real (like robot AI stories again) so yes, when you feed something, it grows.  And so we began to feel emotions in our bodies, emotions began to live and be processed in our bodies; so that our bodies became more than just a vehicle to hold the mist in or to transmorgophy the mist.  We only really need to remember this at death, that these bodies were only made up, and that we go back to being mist, and that this adventure was just a dream.

You get more out of the experience of being here by not being locked in a mental institution so it’s best to follow the earlier advice and keep most of this to yourself.

 

My attempts to ‘start a conversation’ and wake everyone up, were hey, let’s talk about being little kids, about when you toilet trained, about toilet stuff, hey, I wet myself once, or what about sexually when you are a child, did you ever, or let’s talk about sexual abuse… (groans from John)  okay, okay, let’s talk about… and John as old, lots of grey hair, beard.

(Not, how you used to always have in your draft manuscript as a footer, ‘all you have to do is meditate’- all you have to do is write, (which you are doing) so you don’t actually have to do anything: stop studying, stop meditating, stop all ‘spiritual practices’).

Looking in the mirror and crying, saying, what if I could create a machine that cried and moved how I wanted and could change its expression, and, and, and, that I could totally inhabit, so that even my emotions would be felt in its fleshy parts, because this machine is flesh not plastic and metal.  Oh look, I did.

Re aliens:  we are aliens.  We transmorgophied, and dropped into, or integrated into, living spacesuits, hence all the sci fi things along this line (no wonder I don’t like them).  They distract us by giving us something that seems fantastic yet the truth is far more amazing- it’s not made up on television, it’s here, in front of the mirror, take a look, if you look carefully, you can see.  (And if you take magic mushrooms, you can literally see)

Bodies are important as they are our vehicle to live on here and do things, so look after them.

Practical application: do my best to look and act normal at work; do as little as possible, for now, out of work, in order to leave space to remember to remember and to write it down.  Cease all spiritual practices.  Allow maintenance, allow reminder activities? Cease seeking behaviours but allow documentation?  My reminder activities:  read my writing, write my writing, old stuff, and maybe new stuff, read books e.g. Russell Hoban and Krishnamurti and Liz Gilbert.  Quiet time, meditation, contemplation, self healing, exploration.  Do healing, do writing, food and exercise of course, no fb just check for messages.

Mum:  ‘People used to say, remember to remember, but I’ve forgotten what that was about.’

But we must have done it for a reason (made these machines to live (love?) in and come down to live in this world) and seeing as when we die we go back to being green mist again, then that must mean that whatever the reason is it is what we do on the planet with physical bodies.

So it’s not correct to say ‘none of this matters’ and maybe it’s not actually correct to say ‘none of this is real’ because it’s what we’ve got- it’s all we’ve got, until our bodies expire.    You can spend some time hanging about as green mist (e.g. meditating, doing metta bhavna) and that is very nice but I wonder if it is not what you are here for?  You weren’t given, you don’t transmorgophy into a body and arrive here to sit in a room on your own and play at being mist again.

It’s useful to look down at yourself from the point of view of the green mist.  E.g. when to take a break from the computer, when to leave work on time.

In the dream I kept trying to write this all down but kept falling asleep or not being able to read it back, or kept getting distracted by sex, and then someone said they would read it out to me from a book, so I thought, oh well, it’s in a book, of course it is, I thought I’d thought of that myself…. but it isn’t in a book, unless I write it.

(This really did come to me in a dream, a couple of years ago now.  It’s old, but it’s still pretty good!)

Visions of female power and creativity

Tags

Feminism, reality, Work, writing

I felt this person come into me, like being possessed, except that it was me, coming into the present moment.

I always wanted to live in a gypsy caravan.  I actually did for a while in a person’s garden when I was sixteen.  It had two narrow bunks that came down from the ceiling on chains, like hammocks.

I’ve been away from the alternative world for a long time now, wrapped up in working in a professional environment.  My husband and I are going to a party soon and there will be three, possibly four vegans there in a room together.  It will be the first time that we’ve been in a room with so many vegans aside from a meet up.

If I don’t have to go out to work to this job, what will I look like, how will I dress?  (Warm, I have a long wish list for Cotswold Outdoor (if you’re reading this, I am happy to write detailed reviews for you; I am quite capable of writing an entire blog post devoted to the joy of a new winter coat.)

I’m going ‘back’ to who I really am, back to being really me.  Maybe I’ll rediscover elements of my early punk/vintage style.  When my new tattoos are completed I’ll be able to wear sleeveless tops and dresses and show them off.  Maybe I’ll dress up sexy and we’ll go out.  I’m going forward, with awareness, with this love for myself, with this feeling of being loved, without the lost exploitation of me at sixteen.

Remembering who I was originally, as a child.  And now I have my experience, the awareness to make the most of my talents.  Even back then, it was all about writing, sex, love and finding out who I was.

I have always been so anxious at work:  as a student, knees knocking together on my first day at placement,  feeling like I was going to pee myself on the bus to college; even now, I park up and have to psych myself up to go into work each morning.  At my computer I am over tense with hunched shoulders and I type too heavily on the keyboard.

I’m often late because I am so anxious about whatever it is I am doing.  It’s never felt comfortable.  The body knows.  I wasn’t meant to be there.  Not because I wasn’t good enough, but because it wasn’t me.  I like to be quiet and alone.  I like to be outdoors.  I like to be creative.  I like to think deeply about things.  I like to be with my people.

Is this a midlife crisis?  Or is it, as my husband said, a midlife awakening?  I’m looking around, I’m seeing the billions of ‘suggestions’ for life, I’m realising what I want.

 

 

Feel the fear and do it anyway*

Tags

Decisions, Dropping out, escape the matrix, Living on a boat, Narrowboat, reality, The matrix, Travel, Travelling

Choices are very scary.

I’ve spent the last week trying to recover my energies** whilst at the same time using them up on sorting the house out.  I’ve been concentrating on raising my frequency, eating well, eating vegetables from above ground, sleeping in separate beds, no sex at all, no alcohol etc.

Getting ready for new carpets coming and estate agents photographs a week from now.  It’s easy (for me) to get totally obsessive and exhausted, seeing more and more cleaning and painting that could be done whilst knowing that I can’t/won’t do it all.  At least this time I have stopped and rested at certain points, after I was tired and achey but before I was totally exhausted or in actual pain.  Some of it I’ve enjoyed, and certainly have enjoyed the results of, such as cleaning the windows (especially satisfying if not done very often!) and sometimes I have looked forward to doing things off the list with tomorrow’s new energy.

But then I got tired and had a meltdown over the skirting boards.  I realised I should have painted the skirting board before the carpet came.  When I did the painting mostly I just painted the walls and ignored the skirting boards.  Now, I see that they could do with being done.  Anyway, I did that room quickly with one coat and it is fine now, I know it only needs to look okay for the photos and then the buyers will paint over it all anyway.  But for a few hours I beat myself up: why didn’t I just do all the skirting boards at the same time as the walls.  Why didn’t I notice they needed doing before the carpet came?  Why do I prioritise the wrong tasks.  What’s wrong with me, I’m such an idiot.

My mum spent years thinking about it then a year seriously getting her house ready to sell.  In the last few weeks and months she worked on it from six am until midnight, DIY, painting, styling, as well as sorting out forty years of accumulated belongings.  She was almost seventy.  Then she moved into her new place and within a few months it’s all painted and perfectly styled.  I, meanwhile, find my shoulder aches from a couple of days of window and door cleaning, even with rests.  And as fast as one thing gets clean more stuff needs doing or the big stuff gets done but there’s still the ordinary stuff to do.  I get overwhelmed by DIY and big chores, always have.  Having a mother who excels at all that, who built her house herself, is a lot to live up to.  It’s impossible to live up to.  And then I remind myself that lots of people don’t do any of their own decorating.  They pay a professional, or they leave it undone because they work full time, because their free time is precious, or just because they don’t want to do it.

I’ve noticed that classic spaced out stressed feeling, which I haven’t felt for a while.  I dropped everything and went for a walk across the fields, because I remembered that being helpful.  I’ve also felt excited; wide awake and staying up late then lying in bed feeling wide awake and happy.  I haven’t felt this off balance for a while but I’ve been continuing on the path.  I told my boss and told my team at work today, to make it real.  Feeling a bit scared about everything, but totally sure about selling the house, totally sure about going travelling, and almost totally sure about buying a boat as a base/to live on when we come back.  Trying to raise frequency in order to make decisions from the best place- we are going to see the boat again on Saturday.

Maybe a boat will be better for me, less to clean? But you have to be really tidy or else in such a small space the mess looms much larger!  Neither of us are super tidy and will we really be any different anywhere else?

A few weeks ago, on a whim, I looked at boats, and found one that was ideal.  A boat is at least capsule, simple living and more unplugged than our current situation.

This whole thing started with the idea of going off to India, or travelling the world, but for me it’s not really about travelling per se, it’s about testing my long felt urge to trust-fall into the universe, to let go my fingertips from the cliff face and fall into the unknown.  Mainly, it is about freedom; about realising where I am, what I have, and therefore what I am able to do- with a bit of guts and imagination.  The thought of just going off for a while with no plan other than to go travelling and keep writing, is, well…  The thought triggers a thrilling, glittery feeling inside me.

It means that at least for a while, I could imagine/believe that this was my life, travelling and blogging.  And for a year or even two, I believe it can be.  But what next, what afterwards?  I could get a permanent job again, I could do temporary work.  We could somehow maybe build a life that splits between the two, periods in England earning money, periods in South East Asia.  I don’t want to have a life changing experience and then come back to the same life.

If we buy the boat we have something to come back to.  We can even live on it for a few weeks before we go, thereby bringing the future into the now and beginning our new life right now, rather than waiting until we get back.  It would also be taking action rather than just seeing what happens/leaving it up to our future selves to decide what it is we are going to do.  It’s lovely, in a great location and available now.  My reservations- people say don’t plan on top of plans; are we tying ourselves down, limiting our horizons, preventing as yet unknown opportunities from arising and being taken up, such buying a bar in Thailand or opening a cat sanctuary in Vietnam.  (I am not really going to do either if those two things).

I know I am fortunate to be able to be in this position but I am still finding it very scary.  Giving up a good job, giving up a nice house, for something smaller and as yet unknown, possibly a small boat; well I suppose it is because of the conditioning that this is difficult.  And I suppose that’s also why it would be good to do it..

 

Just when I think I have put the past behind me, I go round my mum’s yesterday and out of the blue she says, you remember x don’t you, he was convicted of the rape of two twelve year old girls and went to prison for two years.  I met him when I was fifteen, he was thirty, me and my best friend and my boyfriend, both older than me, used to go and see him, he used to invite us in to talk to him whilst he was in the bath.  We just thought it was funny/weird.  He also took arty photographs of us, clothed.  He was one of my mum’s lodgers when I was about sixteen.  When I was seventeen or eighteen and had left home and was living in a caravan, he came round.  I think he had tried to get me into bed before but I didn’t fancy him.  I thought he was too old.  Anyway, he came round during the day and got into bed with me and just touched me in one place, one square centimetre.  I did want him to stop but my body just let him do it, and I had an orgasm whilst not fancying him, not kissing, not cuddling, it felt very weird.

My mum said yesterday, he was in the house with you and your sister.  I said, I was older, and I am sure my sister would have said something.  She seemed happy with that.  One lodger used to pay for my sister’s horse riding lessons and take her out.  Another (the one from my flashbacks) did the same for me.  The 1970s were a very strange time.

*a book from the 1970s.  That decade wasn’t all bad.

**lots and lots of sex, and lots and lots of orgasms whilst on holiday

Mission statement

Tags

escape the matrix, reality, The matrix

In Marrakech over breakfast, conscious of the need to maintain our focus and awareness, I asked my husband to explain what he would say if anyone asked him what we believed in and what we were doing.  I added things and kept asking questions and wrote it all down.  No one has actually asked me what I believe in or what my life’s focus is but now that I have it all written down on a paper napkin, where better to share it than here?

We believe: 

That this world is an illusion and the only thing that matters is finding out who you really are. 

Why are we dismantling our perfect life?

If life gets too safe, samey and routine, the mind begins to travel to the past and future (e.g. harking back to good experiences, looking forward to things to do after retirement) because there’s not enough going on in the present.  You get stuck, like quicksand, like cement:  if you don’t keep moving the matrix has you stuck.  You get yourself stuck in the matrix.  Mortgages, putting down roots, are potentially traps.  Keep moving, keep changing routine.

Plus, we are working on stripping away mental conditioning…  

Via behaviours e.g. learn to go out without wearing makeup, keep trying new things etc, and via wrapping the mind around ideas such as there is no time, there is no past, there is no future etc. etc.  It can help to try out different conspiracy theories:  if you can wrap your mind around the Earth being flat or Paul McCartney having been replaced in the 1960’s, even if just for the duration of the YouTube video, then you are training your mind to disbelieve.  Nothing is real, everything you’ve been told is a lie:  Lots of people say they agree with that statement but actually find it very difficult to put it into practice and begin disbelieving in everyday ‘facts.’

And all the time, through it all, be truthful.  Be truthful to yourself.  Deconstruct yourself in order to find out who you are.  Getting rid of clothes, possessions, house, is all part of that.  Stripping away everything, all the surface layers, until you are left with nothing but the truth of who you really are.

Really, all this is a full time job.

When we had finished, I read it aloud.  Good, my husband said.  Maybe I can use it as my resignation letter, I said.  Of course, the finer details, indeed any of it, may well be subject to change, as with everything I do, say and think, but for now, it is as good an ‘explanation’ as I/we can come up with.

P.S.

Actually, this is too important to be just a PostScript, I’ll give it a proper heading:

My intention

I am dismantling my home and I am leaving my job to go off travelling and blogging.

Marrakech

Tags

escape the matrix, Marrakech, Marrakesh, reality

I have just returned from four nights in Marrakech.  So beautiful, so nourishing.  The orange buildings, the limited advertising, the sense of history.  Seeing so many people in traditional dress.  The ancient music.  The palaces.  The alleyways, the shops and food stalls; pancakes and pomegranate juice, cane sugar and ginger.  Tailors’ shops with people at sewing machines, shops which were tiny dusty rooms with trays of eggs, sacks of spices.  People selling wares from little carts, or on the ground, or just walking.  Women selling homemade biscuits, children selling little packets of tissues, boys and men selling coffee from a huge kettle.

Above it all the Koutoubia Mosque, its gardens orderly and peaceful, tended with sprinklers, all lush green grass, neat hedges and healthy fruit trees.  Standing in the square, hearing, feeling, the call to prayer from all directions.  I enjoyed dressing modestly, and it was also so nice to be in a country where alcohol isn’t the social norm.  It felt so safe, even in the alleyways after dark.  Welcome and safe, a new honeymoon.

Outside a cafe on our last evening, me staring at an orange wall and thinking about how and when are we going to come back.                 What are you thinking about, my husband asked.                       Marrakech, I answered.
Well that’s a coincidence, he said, here we are, in Marrakech.                     It was one of those comments that tripped a switch and for a few minutes I felt we were both ‘there,’ in that place that I used to call being in the present moment.  That night I called it us both being at our highest frequency at the same time.  In those few moments I could believe that we had arrived in Marrakech simply by thinking about it, by thinking our way there.                                                                           How would that work, my husband asked, where would we really be? Where are we really anyway, I said.
So in those moments we are both at our highest frequency and maybe there are things we can do when we’re both there.  Maybe those things are so good they’d be worth giving up sex for, like being able to think yourself to different locations around the world.  I know, every trip begins with a thought, maybe this way cuts out all the bits between thought and being there.  Or maybe just by being really there (in the present moment) all the previous stuff falls away and is irrelevant, so that it feels as though we’ve both always been there and yet are also simultaneously sitting on the couch at home.  That’s as far as I was able to take it that night, although there is another level or slant on the situation, that we are really sitting somewhere else, outside of this matrix, and that’s where we actually are.
In bed that night just before sex, I thought what if that’s what we end up doing instead of sex: lying in bed travelling, creating our own reality. It’s another chicken and egg situation though, the only way to get to that high a frequency would be to give up sex; to give up sex we both need to believe in why we’re doing it, what the point is, etc.
We agreed to remind each other when we both feel ‘there’, in order to help us stay there, as when we go off onto the mundane, when one suddenly can’t hold the thought or denies all knowledge of what we were discussing, that is then that person, or both, dropping to a lower frequency, and it can appear as if the lights are on but no one’s home, or at least, that they are holding out on you.  So make it our mission to prioritise above all the raising of our individual frequencies and supporting each other to raise the other’s frequency, by keeping moving, staying neutral, staying in our now day, not getting emotional, questioning everything, reminding ourselves and each other…

Photographs:  First two are of El Badi Palace  The third one is our hotel.

No more potatoes

Tags

awareness, escape the matrix, Law of Attraction, reality

One of my favourite lines from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is when Xander comments on what someone else is doing and is told not to be judgemental.  His reply, no, not judgy, observy, is both accurate and inspiring.  One of the ways we learn and grow is by looking at what other people are doing, but there is a fine line between judgy and observy.  I hope I’m just about staying on the correct side when I say that a lot of people who talk and write about the law of attraction and raising their frequency do so in the context of wanting success in life, be that in business, attracting a romantic partner, needing ready money or even just a parking space.  The focus is on raising their frequency in order to attract good things to them.  Although I agree that that works, for me it’s more the other way around.

For me right now the raising of the frequency is the thing.  Everything I do, everything that happens to me, is an opportunity for my frequency to rise (or to drop).  That’s my focus.

This (illusionary) world is there for us to interact with, to find out who we are through the way we respond and the actions we take.  The experiences are a vehicle rather than the thing itself.  Our mission here isn’t the actual achievements, the extraordinary and the everyday adventures; these are the how, rather than the what.  Our mission is to find out who we really are.

And who are you?  A powerful creator, the centre of your universe.  You were asleep, and now you are awake.

I had this perfect little snapshot earlier:  in bed in the spare/my room which is all cream and more or less clutter free, just a few essentials, a portable electric radiator, and my tablet propped up on two lilac yoga blocks, the opening credits of BoJack Horseman, all warm toffee and pink colours, like Neopolitan ice cream, that lovely woozy music, with BoJack the horse sitting up in bed, waking up…  A momentary snapshot of ‘yes’.  Yes, okay, yes, I created this.

So I can believe in my room.  Can I extend this to advice I have miraculously come across on WordPress, and the teachings of my awareness guru?  What if everything is there to tell us exactly what we need to hear?  What if all I need to do is face down the complexity of it all and distil it into something so simple (and so amazing) that it would trip a switch right now and the light would come on?

I think maybe we arrived here as adults, and were children only in a previous life.  What if all my childhood memories are just deja vu, memories leaking in from another life?  One night when we had just moved in my husband and I were sitting by the fireplace and I had this vision of us being old sitting there, or sitting there in a previous decade.  I looked at him and said, don’t you see, we’ve always been here.  So this time around we must do something different, and leave.

So I can give up potatoes and cutting my hair easily enough.  I can keep on working on staying in my now day and not being judgemental.  I can reduce and restrict the amount of sex and orgasms I have.  I can do all of that, with the intention of frequency raising.  One day maybe I will completely give up the low frequency activities, but right now just as I occasionally eat co op donuts (vegan) but overall believe myself to have a healthy diet, I still want to have the occasional wild night.

This is where I am right now.  The message that has been circling at the outer edges of my consciousness all week is this:  There are no rules, except those I set myself.

There are no rules, except those I set myself.

There’s just one tiny flaw in today’s, or rather yesterday’s revelations.  If everything is a creation of my own mind, that is at times hard to believe.  Like whilst watching the amazing, incredible, completely original show that is BoJack Horseman*, for example.  But it isn’t that I literally created everything out of my own mind, it is that I pulled it towards me.  I drew what I needed to me.  The teachings of my awareness guru.  Advice and insights from WordPress.  Like in The Field, all possibilities exist for us to then create our reality from.  But, and this is where we come back to the beginning again, as a happy by product of raising one’s frequency, good things do arrive.

And it doesn’t matter whether I’ve been walking and blogging like last weekend, or cleaning and decorating and overdoing it like during this week, or being laid up in bed with a cold watching Netflix like this weekend, it’s all me, it’s all life.  Learning has still gone on and progress has been maintained, even if I haven’t realised it until later.

*Shines a light on everything and shows just how f***ed up most media, consumer society etc is, not by being negative but by being a beacon of light.  Really interesting reading interviews with the show’s creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg.

Reasons to be cheerful

Tags

awareness, depression, mental health, reality, spirituality

I don’t have a smart phone, I don’t read newspapers, I don’t look at any online news media.  This is fine when I am out of the house, I always carry a notebook (moleskine) and pen (pilot G2).  But what to do in the house, in those little bits of inbetween times, waiting for dinner to cook or a bath to run; or just wanting to do something diverting for a little while.  My husband has particular things he watches on youtube.  I, nowadays, have wordpress blogs.

I don’t want to get overwhelmed with too many blogs coming into my inbox, or end up spending too much time on the internet, so I am very discerning about who I follow.  I have got it down to a few that are all different and that I have chosen for different reasons:  writes beautifully about Japan, I want to go there now!  Has a great bio.  Describes Buddhism in action.  Teaches me about India.  Writes about writing.  And then there are the young women who are so smart, who write so well and so openly at the same time, about a whole range of subjects, some inside my experience, some not, who are putting their observations and opinions out there for us readers and writers to experience and learn about each others lives.

So it seems like such a shame when these same smart, funny, capable individuals report their sadnesses and struggles.  I want to offer unsolicited advice, words of encouragement; to be able to say something that might help.

I don’t know if that is possible though.  I don’t know if when I was sad and lonely, when I couldn’t see further than the fog in front of my face, when I didn’t even know I was on a path, let alone that that path would lead me from ‘There’ to ‘Here’, when I didn’t even know that ‘Here’ existed…  If someone had said to me, keep going, hang in there, it won’t always be like this, one day you’ll look back and find your life, and you, have changed beyond recognition, would it have helped?

I don’t know.  But I do know that on the other side of friction and difficulty is growth, and that it’s the strange world/society/life we live in, until we break out of it, that is often the problem, rather than the sensitive, creative individual that is struggling (although it is the individual who has to change things).

Who knows what is going to be the thing to trip the switch?  Meeting someone, taking up a practice, changing something, anything, that in turn triggers some kind of shift.

And in the meantime, there’s always cats!

Meet Fred (big, and extremely cuddly once he gets to know you)

and Alfie (adventurous, sits outside the house making friends with all the passers by; one little girl calls him ‘Steve’.  Will sit on anybody’s lap if they sit down for two minutes).

With metta.

You say thank you just by being yourself

Tags

escape the matrix, reality, The matrix

Several years ago I had a student who had spent time in Japan.  During her placement with me she did some workshops including sushi making and calligraphy.  She taught us how to write our names in Japanese, as well as their Japanese meaning.  I did my husband’s name.  We had only just met and I was in the full throws of this new love and the associated spiritual awakening that had come with it.  So to say that I was happy when she told me that his name meant ‘God Has Given’, is an understatement.

I was so excited and pretty crazy when we first got together.  I used to go on and on about how amazing it was, how lucky, how can I say thank you, to him, to Him, to the Universe, the whole world…  John just used to say:  You say thank you just by being yourself.

In the film The Matrix the machines said that the first matrixes they made were perfect, lovely, but the people didn’t believe them.  They went mad, or kept trying to wake up.  People didn’t believe that such a perfect world was real, and so the machines had to put bad stuff in to make it like it is now.

Which maybe explains why we have things like this:* We have the technology to build soft crash barriers that absorb the shock of impact and save the lives and bodies of those people in the cars that crash into them…  but we don’t use them, we don’t implement the technology.

Is it because if everything was good (like it was, and is, in my world:  job, home, happiness etc), it would mean that people were happy, and not tired and sad.  So they would begin to look elsewhere…  begin to wake up…  begin to think, that’s nice, but is that it?

And ‘they’ can’t have us all selling up and liquidating and dropping out can they?  No energy harvesting would go on.  But it’s the only way:  ignore the car crashes and the tragedies, it’s all in your head anyway.  Create the life you want- not even by having to imagine it yourself…  but just by BEING YOURSELF.

I looked up the Japanese meaning of the name John, it said it doesn’t mean anything, it can’t, because it can’t translate.  I don’t care:  I don’t need to be told that God gave him to me, I know I couldn’t have imagined him myself.**

My mum said to me the other day, if John hadn’t met you he’d still be driving a bus (instead of doing a job he really enjoys).   Aside from the fact that John has had just as much of a postive effect on me in terms of career, it’s not those things that are ultimately important (except as signs and markers that the bigger stuff is going on).  And the bigger stuff, she doesn’t seem to notice.  I was like a baby compared with what I know now, suicidal, asleep, alone with just a bottomless need and capacity for Something More.  Now, every fibre of my being is taut, ready, alive:  Awake.  I know who I am, what this is, and most importantly, what I’m going to do about it.  But that’s not that easy to explain to your mum over a cup of tea is it?

*This is just one example out of millions; for every disease there is a plant to cure it.

**Or could I?!