Back again

Do you know how you can feel stunted by pure hatred and ignorance. What does ignorance taste like? Bile, of yellow and beige, I think. The same vibe as jealousy. Well, being stunted is not like being in shock, but more like losing all of your senses, but feeing. No matter what you do, you can not stop feeling and you cannot get other senses back.

This happened in 2022. However, as I have discovered over the course of my life, in every tricky situation there is a blessing, a learning and even a transformation. And here I am, having spent the whole year stuck in a place of intense feeling, yet frozen and devoid of imagination and creative sparkle and that freeing sense of flow, I am claiming it all back. What I have felt through the emptiness and the ugliness of the physical and human was the beauty of the spirit. It’s defiance, strength, unwavering loyalty and an unshakable sense of purpose. This year will always stay with me as a year marking my homecoming in the most profound way. There might be and will be, no doubt, more of these periods coming, yet for today, I am here, sitting fully back with myself, writing again with all my senses back together in perfect partnership. 

Life is ugly and stunningly beautiful. It is cruel and violent yet filled with tenderness and grace. It is challenging and complex yet profoundly simple. As one great writer once said ‘do not look closely at life’ meaning the beauty is in simplicity, life itself, day-to-day sparks of joy and just being alive. From tragedy come revelations. A brush with death can release and propel us into living harder. 

Let us all remember to appreciate the journey and trust ourselves to know the right way forward even though quite often it is simply one day at a time, one step at a time, and when one day an expansive landscape opens up in front of us and we know we belong and feel that God within us like it’s our own heart, that’s what we all thrive for. 

Grab that joy with both hands and run with it until our legs are exhausted in satisfaction of being able to feel the earth underneath us and our face hurts from smiling too much and all that light within is a feeling one can never explain only that it tastes sweet and it is pure like heaven on earth.

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Approaching the Hag

Order here

What of her in these times of destruction and division? She is angry and she is hungry. Furious at humanity and hungry for punishment and resolution. 

The forest is on fire and the walls around her dwelling, which is now a fortress, are higher than they’ve ever been before. 

The horsemen are dressed in black. Their armour heavy in readiness for destruction of its own kind – complete elimination of nature and all that is human. They are ready to carry out her will. 

She’s furious and in mourning for humanity that is no longer… yet there’s an opening, a small one, a loose panel in her fortress wall for those, who are still aware of their soul; that element that remains unaffected, pure and unchanged. Hope it is not, but a connection to what they are from the root. She thinks of those, who have some memory of where to go to become whole again. However faint the memory is by now, it is still there and she smells it. 

I feel small and insignificant in the face of all reality and such is my preference during these years. Resignation and tiredness are part of my day-to-day and only participation in watching it all burn remains. Hopeless anguish. Despite it all I wait for the time to rise again when the voice can be heard from the depth of the forest summoning the brave and crooked; open anew to learning; in eternal love for what remains of nature external and within. Even if only one tiny flower can be saved, it will be worth doing. If only one soul can be awakened, it will be worth the work and hardship. As one wise human said: ‘For as long as there is birdsong, we must listen.’ 

And for now, we scream, we rage and we sob until the sky above is cloudless once again and there’s renewed stillness in the heart.

Beauty in a heartbreak

When a heart breaks magic happens. It reawakens qualities in us we forgot existed.

Ever since I was young I have been an advocate of feeling. Feeling deeply, openly, letting your pain spill out into the world like a cry from a place of the darkest shade. There’s beauty in suffering and sorrow and that is because something in us awakes when we are broken hearted, sometimes subtly, sometimes profoundly and we all know that nothing can be the same again and we are changed by it. It often goes unrecognised as we are programmed not to feel, shamed and punished for it from tender age and so it goes from one system into another. For as long as I remember I have been revolting against the oppression that is ‘no dark feelings are allowed’ and have been fighting against suffering in silence. It damages the soul to the extent of it being either abandoned or exiled.

Do you know what a gift it is to be able to feel to the deepest places which only soul can touch? Sorrow speaks of the depth of feeling one is capable of and most of the time it speaks of the power of love that is immeasurable and precious. Through the pain it shines like nothing else.

If only we let ourselves feel to the full open capacity, with honour and compassion not only healing occurs but a transformation that takes us to another level of being present in our authenticity. There is nothing more real than a broken hearted being. It’s raw, it’s tender, vulnerable and beautiful.

In my practice I work with feelings more than anything else. It is the work of carving the light out of a dark cave that is pain and trauma. It is hard, labour intensive, emotionally taxing yet when the break occurs and the heart turns to healing through allowing feelings to flow, results are stunning in its beauty. One touches the soul place once more and it speaks of all that’s been forgotten and suppressed. It offers gifts to us that we had always had within and now we can use them.

Feelings are wise. They live in our bodies and attempt to bring us back to who we are truly from the first moment before the world stamped its hard armour onto us. Through opening up to pain we recognise and accept and visit all the places within that had iron gates on them for what seems like eternity. It is that stepping off the predictable, lit and well-walked path into the dark woods where treasures lie and transformation back into the soul beckons.

Winter, anxiety, death…

It has all been rather grey and moody this month as if life stopped at this place of no particular interest, a downward mood yet not particularly depressive. Confusion, uncertainty and anxiety have been at the centre of the feeling of it all although with a clear awareness of everything actually being all right. There has been motion yet it felt dragging. There has been laughter and warmth with odd moments of grief flying in from nowhere. Most peculiar presentation of the season I’d say, however thinking about it there is nothing really surprising about it. Winter and grief go hand and hand and death and anxiety are good old friends.

I have experienced it all it seems in just one month and something in me can’t help but wonder what the next month could possibly bring.

My body has thrown up another mysterious ailment. Usually these happen in spring for me, but this time it came in winter and I believe it is linked to both grief and anxiety. Those two human issues have been present in my life always and I have come to take it for granted and somewhat my body, the wise old vessel that it is, decided to remind me or rather slap me in the face with asking me to revisit what both of those mean to me. Is it actually good for me to be exposed to it all the time or is it time to admit it is not always the best? I realised that I abandon myself over and over again when faced with grief and anxiety and not only that both signatures go right through my body and always manifest in curious things. I am completely disarmed by them, it seems.

This time I was faced with not being able to breathe. That tapped into my death anxiety and having to face that and look underneath of what that presentation meant, not to mention lung being directly linked to grief and death. How vulnerable I am to it all and how clever my body is to jolt me into considering the consequences.

I don’t want to die gasping to air and I don’t want to live my life waiting for the moment when I can’t take another breath and die. I can’t placate my anxiety or avoid it with doing the exact thing that takes my breath away in a sense of killing me. There is so much connection and meaning to it all. All quite sad, dark and paralysing.

What I am trying to say here and learn from is that our body is so wise and knowing if only we listened to it and for sure there will be consequences if we don’t. That much is clear. I know my body for being friendly and always on my side despite a life-long abuse thrown at it. How much it had to put up with yet never left me and when the ultimate function of air in my lungs became compromised suddenly death stepped in with a possibility of taking me. Truly awakening.

What a month it has been so far. Scary, up and down and everything in between yet nothing at all. In the stillness of winter, indeed, we are often faced with the darkest faces of existence. It is stark in my mind the true meaning of the season this year. There’s a certain old and murky wisdom taste to it this year. Perhaps this will only amplify with myself getting old, who knows, but one just never knows what awaits us.

Run away or stay

The urge to run away is natural on one hand and on the other is contradictory to our innate capacity for compassion and staying with pain. There are millions of examples of open-hearted compassion and humility from humans in times of extreme crisis throughout centuries, yet parts of us want to run away and not feel. It is always way easier to hide, stay in the vibration of fear and non-connecting than open up to all horror and sorrow of the world and connect to as much and as many aspects of us as humans. It is understandable and sometimes we do need to withdraw just to catch our breath. Sometimes things make us freeze following trauma. The most difficult thing to do seems to be our connection to ourselves. We no longer in touch with who we are and what we are doing here. Often we become ‘robot-like’ and desensitised to all that surrounds us. It is a way of avoiding the harsh and painful, the unthinkable. It is a coping way, when life becomes disabled. At that point hope is lost, defeat prevails and we continue as we were on the road to nowhere, not feeling our own bodies. Again it seems something that happens naturally these days yet what about our natural ability to feel again, what happened to parts of ourselves that feel through life and live through all experiences that life offers, dark and light. We have potential for all things.

Tragedy carries a vibration of shattered hopes, dreams, connections and explosion of an array of uncontrollable feelings that seem impossible to contain. Connection with others will help that, safe and accepting holding will do the job, unity in sorrow will provide a refuge from the attack of extreme emotions. Tragedy can also propel us all into action, into feelings and into becoming more ‘us’. It can potentially get us in touch with life, with our own beating heart. It is an opportunity to be you! Please take it. Please choose compassion for the world and yourself as a part of the complicated system of connections and human life.

Blessings to the world! loss