What does it feel like to have a spiritual awakening?
What does it feel like to explore the edges of one’s consciousness and sanity?
What do you do next?
Sometimes it felt like the sky was splitting open and sometimes I fell into a state of bliss while staring at leaves. Sometimes I went on extraordinary journeys from within my own living room.
But I spent at least as much time reflecting on and managing the tasks of day to day living and workplace relationships; using everyday life as a vehicle for spiritual growth. Feeling my everyday life infused by this newfound spirituality, and learning to find my own way and read the signs of the universe for myself.
At the same time managing feelings of depression, anxiety and OCD and eventually seeking therapy, the lessons of which are shared here.
Experimenting with religion but ultimately not finding a home there. With my husband, experimenting with different philosophies and spiritual practices, including giving up sex and orgasms. Stretching my mind to the edges of sanity and insanity, or at least, that’s what it felt like sometimes.
This collection, of blog posts and spiritual memoirs, charts a journey of spiritual exploration and self reflection which eventually led to us breaking away from routine, security and family expectations, and selling up and going off on an actual one year trip to India and Southeast Asia, documented in my travel memoir I fell in love with you and I cried.
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
One of my favourite posts from when I first started my blog back in 2014. Spiritual healing, religion, books, reading, managing time, being happy, Maya Angelou…
Inside I’m dancing* (First published in June 2014)
My healing teacher lent me a book a few weeks ago. She said she had been ‘guided’ to lend it me. This did not fill me with joy as it was all about grief and life after death. Was I or my husband about to die I wondered (I may be a healer and a therapist and into a spiritual life but I can imagine catastrophes with the best of ‘em). Anyway, this morning I started reading it: Beyond our physical bodies and our physical world is the world of thoughts. Beyond the world of thoughts is the world of feelings and emotions. Beyond or within that world is a world of pure love: Heaven. We can all access that place whether we are alive or dead. But like my healing teacher, the book was ever down to earth and pragmatic: of course, it said, even the dead cannot live on the top of the mountain forever. And the living must take care of their day to day life and responsibilities.
Just as I was drifting off into wondering about getting together with a group of people and us all raising ourselves up into that world of love, my husband who is suffering terrible toothache woke up and I found myself back in the practical application of love: calling dentists, making food, fetching painkillers.
Religion or spirituality can help guide us to walk along that bridge between the visible and the invisible, between this world and the world we cannot see, between theory and practical application. As each world both supports and enjoys the experiences that belong to the other, there lies Bliss.
Yesterday I had the rare for me experience of a day that was both busy and peaceful**. I accidentally slept in until 9am; I was due to be at a friend’s house to give healing at 10am. By some miracle I managed to get out of the house at record speed and arrived there only five minutes late. The healing went well and we both took our time to relax and chat before and afterwards.
Afterwards I went into town. I went into a large department store, well known for its book department which has existed for as long as I can remember. When I walked in I was alarmed to find that I couldn’t see it anywhere. For a few moments I wondered if I had been fast forwarded into the scary reality that people talk about, a reality of no books and no bookshops left. I pulled myself together and went out and in again through the main entrance. The book department had moved downstairs, that was all. It was a peaceful, library vibe and I felt an almost religious sense of calm as I dropped into the world of books and let myself choose, or be chosen by three books. As I paid for them, I wondered if there was anyone else anywhere who had bought the same three books at the same time: a strange and beautiful looking book about an exiled person and a hare, Iain Banks’ last book and an Introduction to Islam.
Then I went to see a friend and we sat in her garden enjoying the breeze and the sunshine and her garden full of flowers. The best type of friend, she is simultaneously interested, knowledgeable and non judgemental no matter what new and crazy ideas I bring up.
The hours of the day ran though but driving home towards the end of the day I didn’t feel panicky that I hadn’t yet done any housework or other chores or tired that I had been out all day, or worried that I had used up all my alone time on visiting and shopping and not writing. I didn’t feel any of that. I wonder if it’s the quality you bring to the day or that the day brings to you that determines the peace, rather than what you actually do in terms of quiet versus busy.
* ** I should make reference to the film and literary title and quotes I have used. The phrase ‘busy yet peaceful’ comes from one of my favourite books The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville. It is filled with many beautiful and moving lines and descriptions.
Inside I’m dancing is a film. I haven’t actually seen it, but the words just keep coming into my head these past few weeks. I am rubbish at dancing, hopelessly self conscious and uncoordinated and yet, I so feel like leaping and stretching out my arms and spinning and flinging myself around. I am so full of joy that it seems like such a natural way to let it out. I don’t though, I just think about it. Maybe, one day soon I will wait until I am alone in the house, draw all the curtains and double lock all the doors and just go for it.
Maya Angelou died just after I posted my last blog, in which I had cited her as a potential angel (as a writer I am ashamed to admit that I only just noticed that her name includes the word angel). If I feel in need of guidance, she leaves her many books of autobiography, her poetry, her Radio 4 Desert Islands Discs and Front Row interviews as well as many other interviews and many wonderful life affirming quotations and teachings. I give my sincere thanks. Rest in Peace Maya Angelou.
Call off the Search: How I stopped seeking and found peace
Chapter 10: Every Day Healing
Going through boxes as part of getting ready to move, old photos of me as a child- how terribly sad I looked at ten, better a bit later. My school books, I threw out. My son’s, I kept. My mum’s CV- travelled the world hitchhiking alone in 1968, all sorts of different community projects, renovating a derelict house singlehanded with two young children. My grandmother’s travel diary from when she took me as a sulky fifteen year old to Italy. Photographs of me in dresses my other grandmother made. A note from my grandmother after my grandfather died, ‘from grandpa with his deep love for you’.
Ancestors give you stuff; they pass on their attributes, and their weaknesses, they give you experiences, they show you how to be, as well as how not to be. They invest in you, give their love and time and attention, but the fruits of their labours may only fully blossom and then ripen once they and most of their things are long gone.
My mother’s mother commented on others’ lives right up to the end. She tried to control my mum’s life, or at least she commented on it, right up until she died, by which time my mum was in her sixties. Right up to the last months of her life she would tell me I was fat, in front of visitors and other family members. My mum doesn’t say anything directly to me, which is an improvement. And if I can learn not to tell my son what to do with his life and not talk about him behind his back, then that will have improved things even more. (Don’t tell my son how to live his life- this includes indirect references to things that could be construed as, or actually are, unsolicited advice- telling him about the Hare Krishna mantra was borderline at best.)
I used to just have guilt around my mother and my son, then I learned to have a little bit of anger as well, to be able to say aloud (or at least, to write down): bringing up my son was very difficult, I had a difficult child to bring up. (He was brought up by a teenage mother who didn’t know what she was doing, so he probably has loads of anger too, but that is for him, not me.) Into and throughout my adult life, I have had a mother who has very strong opinions and judgements about most things, especially men. It’s not so much the views themselves, but how stridently they are held, so that it’s hard to be free to be yourself. Myself.Funny how that’s hard to write. (But it’s not about her needing to do anything or that she should do anything- it’s for me to do the work, it’s for me to set myself free, to be free, and just do whatever I want without defending or justifying myself).
Emotions to deal with: anger: access and make friends with it, enjoy allowing myself to feel it and then let go, but I can’t let go until I stop repressing it. I could even be angry with my younger self, instead of always being so compassionate, poor her, etc. etc. You could have done so much, you were hot, you were powerful; you silly stubborn thing, determined to be miserable! I am perfectly happy now, but I am just saying; Wow, you made it hard for yourself/us!
Maybe instead of guilt being my default response to everything I could experiment with other things, like anger, like hedonism, like self care comes first, for example.
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.
On healing… I don’t believe in spirit guides or anything like that, not for me anyway, they may well be true for other people. I’ve been doing it a while now, and with experience comes confidence that it will come, and so it comes… I only have to think about healing, or raise my hands above a person and they heat up. I relax and tune in to all that feeling, and concentrate my mind and energies on giving healing- just thinking that that is what I am doing is enough really, and then just staying in focus. I start with resting hands lightly on shoulders, then go over the chakras, then back to the shoulders. And, often, bliss: like being ensconced in a bubble of love, feet swaying, body swaying, dizzy, feels almost the same getting it as giving it, except when giving I stay in focus that that is what I am doing. I see green light sometimes. A lovely warm feeling, purposeful, like I know what I am here for.
Healing a woman who said she felt as if she had stress in every area of her life, but was ‘trying to think positive as there’s other people worse off’ (i.e. telling herself off for feeling bad). I think trying to be positive when you don’t feel it is self invalidating and can cause more suffering and I also think the message has been corrupted; it’s more about remaining intact, having faith no matter what, not being happy no matter what. It’s like how people have interpreted mindfulness to be stopping all your thoughts- which my counsellor says is nonsense.
I am finding my own opinions, my own way of doing things. My own levels of healing: I had met John as I started to heal, more stuff came up, re childhood stuff, I dealt with that and moved on. Later, more stuff came up, I began counselling, and as I am healed, I become a better healer. I am a stronger healer for having gotten better (lately got really strong, same time as the counselling?
My teacher said, ‘this is Sadie, she is a very powerful healer.’ I remember her saying a while back, you have to sort yourself out first, i.e. before you become a healer, well yes, to a certain extent but then the healing helps you to further heal, in ways you may not have identified without embarking on it (like art therapy and having to have your own psychotherapy along the way as part of it). It’s perfectly natural really that it should be this way.
Practiced healing on Kim after yoga. She is a healer and I worried, what if she doesn’t feel anything, but afterwards she said it was the strongest energy she had ever felt from a healer. She doesn’t work full time, each morning she does chi gung and meditates and sends healing to people- goes through their bodies, sometimes does an hour as she has time and it made me realise, it validated: This stuff is important, even though work is the thing that pays the bills, or, the fact that work pays the bills doesn’t mean it is the central thing of value in your life. Meditation and healing are the pivotal things around which life can revolve (this concept of pivots etc comes up a lot in yoga). Build my life outside of work, invest in these things, and they will invest in me/all will be well.
Did healing on John- he said my hands felt so hot he could feel the heat off my hand which was on his chest, he could feel the heat on his throat, under chin, and when my hands were on his shoulders he could feel it all through his body.
At work I saw someone at lunch that I hadn’t seen for ages. I think it was to show me that I am different now. Sometimes you only notice by encountering a person or situation from past and finding that you respond differently and feel different. I noticed the way he seemed so supportive yet it is just business; the way he criticised people I liked, the way he gave me advice… And I realised, I don’t need your advice and support, I have outgrown you. I am not that anxious awkward person in awe of having dinner at the Premier Inn with people from head office. I am capable and confident.
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, Iam 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, Isleep well, I exist separately to my thoughts.
I get up early in the morning, compared with John anyway, who gets up half an hour before he needs to leave, I allow about an hour and a half or two hours. Partly because I faff around a lot and also this year I have been meditating but the real reason I like this time is that now and again I will have a little treat: I will put the internet on and check my emails or I will sit at the bottom of the stairs and read for five minutes or I will do a little sorting out job, something that I wouldn’t normally do in the morning before I leave for work. I had one of those moments looking at my bookshelf. John’s sister was coming to stay with her friend and spiritual guru so I had been getting the room ready. I started thinking about books and the bookshelf as it is in the spare room. I thought first about if I had anything to lend John’s sister, and then I thought about if they looked through the books on the bookshelf, and wondered if I should put them in any sort of order.
I looked at them impassively, as an outsider would, and this is what I saw: John’s books, sci fi, psychedelic, spiritual novels, and mine: New Zealand literature and creative writing books; a set of women’s erotica, all containing a short story written by me; Eat Pray Love, various other spiritual journey books, all mixed up and mixed in with Lace (from when I was 11 or 12, not the original copy, although it looks like it, old and battered. I can still remember the woman being fingered and brought to orgasm in the cellar, whilst wearing a primrose suit). Princess Daisy, ditto, loved for the hot lesbian scene; When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and Goodbye Mog by Judith Kerr, and The Fault in my Stars. All the books I have listed are my favourites. If that paints a picture of me, I feel it is strangely accurate. Looking at myself reflected back to me via the medium of my bookshelf was a thoughtful and nice experience, a concrete illustration of my eclecticness. That I am made up of a lot of different things that are strangely synthesised into something pretty. I like the way the bookcase is, I am happy for people to look at it.
Call off the Search: How I stopped seeking and found peace
Chapter 9 Discernment
Last night
Two episodes of House of Cards and then he puts my hand on his trousers and we have sex on the couch and I swear it was exactly like being on MDMA but with no side effects, no horrible head fucking thoughts. It felt like being in a film, so turned on it was surreal, happy MDMA-type tears, eyes watering by themselves. I said afterwards, ‘I went somewhere else’. The light, the room, juddering and flicking from side to side like it does when you’ve taken a ton of MDMA and him going up the stairs to bed saying what we were both thinking, ‘Who needs drugs’. We haven’t spoken about it since but oh my God, proof of everything, if we needed it.
We’d spent most of 2015 completely straight: no drugs, no alcohol, I had also given up caffeine, John had also given up sugar. And then the Buddhism wore off…
But at its height it (Buddhism) felt ironically like being on drugs (high after class, the air cool and warm at the same time). We both realised it was over at the same time. We were standing in the kitchen by the backdoor and both realised we didn’t want to do the next class after all (we had planned to do the year long foundation course). John said, we burn through things quickly now don’t we? I had just bought him all this Buddhist stuff (we still have a Buddha in almost every room of the house) but neither of us were offended about the other suddenly going off it.
Shortly afterwards I went out to dinner with a friend and tried to explain, referencing Krishnamurti (don’t follow anyone) and John and Yoko (I don’t believe in magic, mantra, etc.)
‘It sounds like you’ve gone through some kind of enlightenment,’ she said and then asked, ‘are you still vegetarian?’
I was puzzled, thinking, it’s not that I’ve given up on awareness, and once you have it you have it.
Suddenly it just seemed pointless, the rigid no drinking at all, no caffeine, even the Buddhist teacher had said it doesn’t necessarily mean no wine can pass your lips, it’s just about not being intoxicated. It’s a barrier between me and friends who drink, so I decided that the day we went to another friend’s I would have a coffee and some wine. We made dinner while we got a bit drunk and we couldn’t mash the potatoes because they were still raw and it was all a bit chaotic for a bit. Maybe just one glass of wine is good for me now. And then when I went out the other night with friends I had a glass of wine, felt better re barriers, they were drunk, and we all got on really well, and I felt really relaxed.
So how does that lead onto MDMA? The MDMA is me, wanting that again, we both were, but now he is talking about never doing it again, maybe we just needed to remind ourselves we can if we like, maybe. Or just remind ourselves what it is like, the good and the bad- 3 or 4 days recovery. No music, singing along to YouTube, lying paralysed, naked and sweating. Marrying you was the best thing I ever did with my life. Or for my life: it gives me all this freedom, and it gives me excitement and bad boy tendencies without the angst and drama that wrecks and destabilises lives.
MDMA is like a searchlight, but this time at last there was nothing to find, we lay in each other’s arms on the couch, for an extended period with no tv, film or music, just us, talking, and aside from a bit of smutty sharing of sexual fantasies, there were no surprises, no dark secrets or hidden longings to discuss, no marriage, no children, no family secrets, no adolescent incidents of previously paralysing shame to heal…. It wasn’t boring by any means: it was wonderful, that we could be so free, relaxed and spacious, but at the same time, have we reached a clearing, a clear place? So maybe we can give it up now? Certainly, we have had sex sober that was every bit as amazing as sex on MDMA, and with us both entirely present in every way, from the cerebral to the mundane to the spiritual to the tantric ecstatic.
We said at the time, we should make time for this: lying together, smelling each other, just love, no conversations re kids etc., and if you can have a spiritual drug free rave and get high with strangers and no drugs, surelyweshould be able to do it alone in our house?
Well I guess we already did, last night. Sometimes you have an idea and realise you’ve already executed it, like life or the forces of life were faster than your ideas and imagination, which I guess is often or maybe always the case but doesn’t always get realised….
Christmas 2015: slacking off re caffeine, chocolate, sugar, alcohol and drugs and then realising I actually prefer life as it was: getting stoned really stoned once or twice after not doing it is great, and sex was amazing, but doing it every nights for four nights, it wears thin, and leads to eating chocolate, and being sluggish next day, sleeping in and being too lazy to do exercise. I prefer walking and doing yoga every day with the occasional blow out. It’s the same re the internet and facebook, food, shopping and time- discernment and awareness is the key.
Christmas
Thinking about what it would take for me to enjoy it- what do I enjoy that could be done at Christmas?
Things I enjoy or that make me feel good that with some effort, dedication and single mindedness I can do in spite of Christmas: a Yoga class on YouTube, an hour long walk, eating healthy-ish, even doing a bit of writing- just a snatched half an hour while everyone goes out (this is probably not even so much about the writing but about having a little oasis of alone time during the festivities)
Things I like about Christmas that go on anyway and I can just join in with: not going to work Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon, drinking Baileys at any time of day, staying up late watching films with my step son, sleeping in, eating whenever and whatever I like(contradicts previous bit I know!)
Funny things such as realising for what seems like the first time, why people/a person/me might enjoy Christmas: the change of routine, the party atmosphere, the laying around, drinking, not having to go to work, holidays. Ignore the shopping and the stress and the religiosity/consumerism debates, the hand wringing, the sad stories and the stress. Just look at the lights and think of chocolate.
(I haven’t written any Christmas cards, nor did I last year, and possibly the year before. I used to make them all by hand and deliver them on foot!)
‘The family that I have chosen’, I said on Boxing Day when I crashed through the door, falling on the couch with a bottle of Baileys and all family visits done.
Friendship
Looking through my old, much scribbled in address book at all the names that are no longer a part of my life; old landlords, hairdressers, work contacts, book clubs I am no longer in, people who have died, people I have lost touch with, people I never really was in touch with… Hopeful contacts, someone I met at work that I thought might have become a friend. People I’d met through work who once the work finished I never saw. People who I had been to their house once: a mum at the school, who invited me to her house for lunch, she cooked lasagne, we saw each other now and again but didn’t really become close. The doctor from work who invited me and my boyfriend for dinner with her lawyer husband in their huge barn conversion. We were too in awe to return the invitation. Some relationships hopeful, some forced, some I wonder about calling, I think they would be happy to see me, but wonder if we really have anything still, or maybe just feeling awkward that it’s been so long. Others I know I will not call- it never was anything, and I am happy to let them go. And some of course long standing friends that I am still in touch with even after all these years.
The point of all this rambling and reflection is that I have always had some difficulties/concerns around friendships- namely, that I haven’t got enough, that I don’t call people enough (although actually with the exception of one or two people I don’t think any of them ever call me), and I often don’t feel myself with them. Or that I don’t know what sort of friends are me, or that I want. Because I haven’t known who I am, how can I expect to know what friends I should have? And how can I expect other people to know me when I don’t know myself?
Looking back I have felt so awkward with a lot of these people, it’s surprising we are still friends. When I lived in a council flat I felt awkward just going to anyone’s who had a reasonable house. I overcompensated: when I was in a middle class book club in Norwich I remember one night it was my turn to host it at my flat. Only one person came, and there was all this cheese, I must have spent twenty pounds on cheese alone. I understand now that my attitude must have created something of a barrier. But I also think that maybe I have struggled to meet people who I really click with because I haven’t really clicked with myself.
One of the side effects of a spiritual awakening is loneliness within your friendships. I don’t need to talk about it anymore, but I needed to when it was first happening to me. I told one friend that it felt like a miracle, meeting John, and she said yes, I think it is a miracle, which was nice. Several friends read my book, and put up with me. But still, it’s not the same when your friends are not going through the same thing and I often felt worse for trying to explain what was happening as I just sounded crazy. Nowadays I have a few people I can talk to, as they have discovered it since and some have come to me or come into my life and talked about it, but back then it was only me, and John. Not that I want to be with the really ‘out there’ people either- I want the down to earth. Which is why it was so nice at Yoga, the healing, with Kim and Melinda, feeling instantly comfortable, they are both down to earth and into healing. They don’t wear robes or anything, are not false or pretentious or over the top. I don’t need to find people that believe in exactly the same things, I just need people who have an awareness of something else, but in a genuine, quiet way, not in a provocative or statement way.
It’s well reported on that during or in a spiritual journey it can be lonely; you can feel disconnected from your friends, you can even feel critical of them, of their negativity, of their asleep ness, of the fact that they don’t have a spiritual practice and of the fact that they don’t ‘get you’. But aside from the advice of the Dali Lama which is that it is more useful to identify a single shortcoming in yourself than a hundred in others, which I will endeavour to remember, your friends have every right to feel at least as disappointed in you as you do in them, after all, they haven’t done anything wrong, they haven’t changed. You, on the other hand, could be seen to have to a certain extent abandoned them.
Sometimes I visit a good friend and feel distant, unable to connect. I feel more connected with a person I just met on my yoga class and the thought flits through my mind of abandoning all my friends and making new ones.
Sometimes I just have my usual old problem of not really planning or living my days according to my needs: I make a list of friends like a to do list, contact everyone, do loads of visiting, regret the time alone I lost. (I have read since that as your vibration level rises, or your frequency rises, friends do sometimes fall away. Also, that you don’t desire to see people as much, and need more time alone.)
Other times I visit an old friend, feel relaxed and connected, talk about all sorts of things including politics (her topic) and healing (mine). I maybe meet her halfway by raising politics (a subject I normally avoid like the plague) re getting active with food cycle, and she maybe meets me halfway by having healing, getting into it and talking about feeling a spiritual shift.
This ‘process’ I am going through is having a cleansing and purifying effect; spring cleaning me, applying search and destroy, finding residual issues to work on. ‘It’ works in a different way to worry, where the mind skates around, looking for things, real and imaginary, to worry about. This works on an unconscious level so that, for example, when I need to work on my thoughts, I pick up a book and open it at the ‘thought lab’ page containing everyday thought exercises. I keep it open there for weeks, and when I do pick it up to look at other exercises, all the other things I find are so totally not me that I scurry back to the thought lab page and leave it open there in the bathroom for another few weeks.
My last post was all about my need for solitude and yet I spent last weekend in the bosom of a crowd of people with barely five minutes alone. I had a really, really good time.
My friend brought us all together. She has three children, 11, 13 and 18, and an event shelter. All three children invited friends, my friend invited her friends and so there we all were, four days camping in a field together, 17 of us ranging in age from 11 to 54, half of us strangers before the weekend.
The weekend relaxed all my inhibitions or maybe I had to relax all my inhibitions in order to embrace the experience of the weekend, I am not sure which came first.
Being with so many young people brought me to realise and accept where I am, i.e. no longer what anyone would call young. At the same time I realised that in some ways I am still the same, my brain hasn’t changed that much, it’s just that I lived through it. In having lived through it perhaps older people send the message to the young that they can live through it too. We didn’t sit giving advice, but just being a person who is older and who has survived, maybe gives a reassuring vibe. These realisations enhanced and strengthened my sense of self.
I had a role, something like: cook, feeder, mum, healer. I felt held in place, but I didn’t once feel like I was putting on an act, making up a role or being anything other than totally myself.
As a healer, the whole weekend was profoundly instructive. Healers need to learn how to heal themselves as well as learning how to heal others. I drove straight from work and was totally and utterly relaxed within a few hours. I lost track of time on day one. Being outdoors in the fresh air for four days felt good. I spent whole days with frizzy hair and no makeup and I felt just fine.
I healed myself of regrets and envy and of getting older. I saw myself concretely reflected by a big group, as having a place, a role and a value. I enjoyed having the company of women.
One of the women taught me a kidney cleansing healing (place left hand on top of head, right hand on kidney and feel the kidney spin, she didn’t know that my husband has had some kidney problems). She told me about bringing up phlegm and that it is okay to vomit during healing (useful as the next day someone I gave healing to was sick during it).
I practiced healing on four people and I learned how to end it (say, ‘blessings to (person’s name)’, the answer comes back, ‘they are blessed’, or, ‘you haven’t finished yet’, in which case, do a bit more, on shoulders, sending it everywhere, or go over the chakras again). I learned how to do grounding (after doing all the chakras, place a hand on the ground beside their feet and another hand of the back of their neck and feel them being ‘earthed’). I learned how to have a conversation with myself and with the other person to ensure I wasn’t pushing them toward a spiritual emergence that they were not ready for (it’s easy to feel evangelical when I have found such personal happiness and want others to share it, especially as I have seen them be sad and think that I can see an opportunity for them to be happier, but people must do things their own way. I thought all this and I said it aloud too). I learned to think about and focus a bit more on the third eye, or brow chakra, as this person was in the middle of thinking ahead and planning for a big decision and event; afterwards she said she had seen an eye, and lots of light.
Healing at a festival was great because I felt super relaxed and in great condition and there was probably lots of positive and healing energy around, from the other people and from the healing area. I went to gong therapy (more next time). I did a bit of drinking, being silly and tipsy in the rain with lots of fun and laughter. I was in my element, happy, relaxed, having a good time.
Standing quietly listening to a band in the music tent, thinking over my last big problem, a fairly mild but definitely present OCD. The conclusion to this music induced thinking session: 1) Resist the compulsions, 2) Relax, 3) If I can’t do it on my own, get help (from husband, a book, or a service).
Since I’ve got home I have gone up to bed first and left my husband to switch everything off. He realises what I am doing and has been supportive in a gently humorous way, perfectly pitched to help me.
It was profoundly healing to be liked and accepted by lots of people and to feel the same about all of them. I made sure I said thank you to my friend. I told her how grateful I was to her for bringing us all together and for allowing me to share her life, because that’s what we do, we share our lives with each other, because you can’t create everything yourself.
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?*
Rachel 