You Are

Do you ever feel someone’s trying to tell you something?
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This morning my cat, in the absence of words, made her wishes very clear. Clearly she felt breakfast took priority over answering phone messages. There’s so much every day we do, think we need to do and direct our attention to.
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On this arbitrarily chosen day to celebrate 💕love💕 (and materialism and economic growth), I share what is already yours, is you - love. It seems like there’s a lot to do, so it seems. It might feel like you’re reaching for an idea of you, shaping yourself into a someone. Truly, gladly, deeply - you already are.
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♥️ Happy Day to Be - You ♥️

(Written on Valentines Day)

Breakdown Before Breakthrough

Photo credit: Marcus McAdam, Isle of Skye

Breakdown Before Breakthrough
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These words were rising in me in relation to a client today, much in evidence in others lately too. It’s darkest before the dawn, you need to reach rock bottom before climbing up...so many ways of saying the same thing.
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We are in a period of Mercury retrograde currently, I am reliably informed. I’m not an astrologer but there is a certain reflected wisdom in understanding this rhythm. Mercury may be said to influence movement (travel, progress & plans) and communication, the movement of words. Retrograde times are the deep excavation of our thoughts, patterns, emotions. They draw out and reveal what we hold in relation to these areas, what we’re hiding in the dark corners of our mind, our heart. They are an unrelenting review of where we are.
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It’s interesting it all has a certain Kali-like energy - the exposure of the hidden, the call for truth, the understanding that this is the only path through. I’ve been feeling and writing about Kali leading into this time, a symbol for the intensifying energies of 2020.
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Here on the ground with our lives to live, what can we draw from this understanding? We can choose to see the illusion of any trigger in events, to simply observe and respond, if needed. We can. We may find that a stretch but there is no right or wrong. If so, back to basics is always best; breathe into this moment, your thoughts and fears do not belong to the present. If you can meet and feel whatever comes up, that’s a long postponed date worth your while. You are craving, seeking more than anything or anyone, you. Meeting you, your feelings and needs with the acceptance of neutrality is powerful. Watch, breathe, accept and repeat. The truth is always simple. The busy mind is not.
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I offer this as one who has been to dark rock bottom many times and now, I see the sun is rising.

Love Makes Us Better

Love makes us better - more compassionate, more connected - more. This is not reserved for romantic love, it isn't an emotion to come and go like the tide, it's a state of being. It's like the opening of your airways to fill your lungs...you simply open your heart and allow it to fill with love. The intention and the action are the same. There is no limit, as the more you have, the more you'll share with others. In so doing, it fills again. All that we need to do is open.

The Hard and Easy Path to Getting What you Want From Life

Is there anything in your life you feel you're lacking, something you're yearning for? Is it love, money, recognition – to be seen and heard. Does your heart beat for adventure, change to shake up your everydayness. Do you wish to break free of something, anything that holds you down?

What if this seemingly hard path was a great deal easier than you thought? Well, it can be I feel. If you're wanting something and that's focused on an external such as the need for a person, experience or thing it's coming from a part of you that feels unseen and unheard. Always. It begins with acceptance so you could start there, just accept what you feel. There is nothing broken in you, nothing needs 'healing' either; it's more like something you misplaced in your home and you just need to find it and connect to it.

Take the need to be loved, which essentially, comes from a sense of not good enough. Imagine that you're running around outside, seeking the love you mislaid, that you already have inside your home but didn't know it. You're looking here and there, from one person to another. Even if you do manage to think you've found it in someone else, it's never going to be enough. The love we seek in another comes from and is the reflection of need, naturally. With need, it only creates more of the same.

Once you realise this, you can turn your attention to your own home, within you. See if you can find your way to the first time you strongly felt not good enough. Then, remember the entire scene; the way you felt, all the detail and in your imagination, just merge, become one with that feeling. You do this just because it's waiting to be seen and heard. There's no good or bad here, positive or negative, no judgement at all. It just waits and you are going to become one with it.

When you do this without need and with no agenda in mind, there is a peace that will come over you in that moment or merging, whereby you feel it dissolved. It may be that you need to do this more than once. It's a lot like how the stars come out on a clear night, one by one a light, until the light of awareness illuminates you inner sky.

The unconditional love you seek lies within you. If you feel a lack of anything, the same is true. The need to be seen or heard is also coming from you, needing you. Whatever you seek, whatever holds you back – the answer is found within. Freedom is not found externally, it's found by setting yourself free from the bonds of a mental program.

With the sky crowded with stars that feel so new, the easy and the hard have dissolved too.

Imagine...

(photo credit: Colin Morrison)

Let us imagine we are light and that we illuminate this life and form we inhabit. As light, emotions pass through us. Our emotions and how we experience them are very like the way light moves through water.
This is a story of reflection and refraction, but don't leave me now thinking this topic dry – it is anything but. This tale is full of colour and as with the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, reflects all of life in every gleaming surface. This is the story of you and it is also the story of me. Who am I you may wonder? Mystery adds tone and so perhaps I'll leave that for now. I will say look no further than yourself, for the answer is, life as most live it is nothing but visual echoes in this idea of time.

If we stand in front of a looking glass, our image is reflected. In this way, there is nothing happening in the perception of outside ourselves that is not also happening within. If you see ugly, there is an ugliness within waiting for you to meet it. Should limitation be what you hold, you can be certain that you will experience limitation in circumstance. This will be played out in your world, in the people you interact with and what you perceive. You are your own creator and life is a mirror of your creation. We are all creators.
It's also true to say that for many, they are unaware of the emotions they hold in their deepish deep, in the cobwebby corners of the (constructed) self. This self is older than a rainbow but much much younger than you. In this illustration, the water droplets represent yourself, or at least the self you have come to think of as you. Emotions that pass through this experience of you refract, in other words, are bent and re-directed into other reflections of your story. Frequently they are projected onto others. If you use your inner vision you will see, these projections of colour have a way of illuminating other's stories too.
Maybe a rainbow is just a rainbow though – a beautiful show of light and colour that nature puts on. You see, everything is in everything and it matters not at all where you look, the mirrors are everywhere.

Not to Be Taken - That Which Hurts Us, Can Release Us Too

(photo credit: Alasdair Graham)

You've reached your limit and you're untethered. The stories race around your head on a loop tape of justification. Fight or flight is running the show and you just want to be heard – you will be heard! Is this familiar? Many are describing a version of this just now, deeply triggered, reacting to what seems like so many wrongs.

The journey here followed a predicable pattern. Once upon a time had you swallowing what felt like poison. You endured situations unendurable, listened to voices that drowned your own, your feelings pushed down. The rage seeped out passively, so hurt that those involved couldn't see your pain as things continued just the same. On and on it went, year after year.

Eventually those feelings couldn't be contained anymore. With volcanic force they started to show up in your life, your voice heard, your anger apparent. The pendulum had now swung in the other direction, you would be silent no more.

Both are states of reactivity of course. Your anger is directed at a shadow, the proxy shadow maker dwells in your past. At this point in the story, you become aware of yourself as a character playing a part, those shadow makers too. The truth will rise. You see the shadow maker and realise that you made them, they are a reflection of you.
Under the anger is the pain, your acceptance of this story. You surrender for what else is there to do. The anguished howl is met with the presence of one who has travelled far. Herein lies the release. Now there is nothing to be taken and the silence is infinite.

I Am Love?

Are you love? From one perspective, this assertion has been like a drug for every person who has ever felt not good enough. I saw something earlier today, it was a list of affirmations beginning with 'I am,' followed by happy, prosperous, at peace, manifesting the life I dream of, etc.

Upon waking each day, do you remind yourself that you are human? I imagine most of you have no need to tell yourself that you are breathing either – you simply do. I offer you this, anything that you need to assert, be positive about, affirm to yourself or manifest in your life comes from its counterpart in duality – the 'not enough' perspective. There is no difference between the two.

We do love to get lost in a story, especially our own. As has been suggested before, this fable (construct) is an illusion and the only one who can wake us up is ourselves.. Through these human eyes we see, even those who have awoken. It may seem that love is the highest truth or maybe it's simply a sleeping draught to keep our eyes closed to what is, has always been, right here – the one who wrote the story.

Keeping it simple, we can do away with the affirmations as they only affirm one thing; illusion. You can test this for yourself, feel what is in and behind the words. Say those words to yourself and then breathe...pay attention. You will feel the truth like a key fitting perfectly in a lock. It will not be felt in your mind but in your whole body. Try telling yourself you are not enough, then say you are more than enough. Finally, say, 'I am.' You will feel the difference.

That is not quite all though. I feel, sense somehow as one who is waking from a deep sleep, that there is more. I am, touching the edge of another dream. For now it matters not. Eventually, we all wake up. As Edgar Allan Poe once asked, 'is everything we see or seem but a dream within a dream?

When Thinking and Doing Become Being

There comes a point where we're ready to meet the truth, to go beyond our construct of self. The five stages of grief offer a clue, so often, our way through.

1) Denial: Whereby we invest tremendous energy into this 'idea' of self and chase endlessly after external validation, one mirror after another.
2) Anger: Directed at ourselves and others when either do not meet expectations and give us the 'good enough' that we seek.
3) Bargaining: A catalogue of conditions, a deal with self to promise release (love) when...the day that never comes.
4) Depression: The anger turned inward as overwhelm is reached from all of the above.
5) Acceptance: What we have been waiting for all along.

It's a bit like Ikea really. You can go through the whole Marketplace, be pulled this way and that by all manner of pseudo Swedish named goods; a colourful this, a plastic that. You can jostle with the stream of people and trolleys and pick up the obligatory Billy Bookcase (doesn't everyone have one) and stock it with all the self help books there ever was or will be. Your self does not need help.

Once you've been through a time or two or ten thousand and two, you may be ready for the shortcut. If it's time to checkout, you know what to do. Read the writing in the sky – accept.

The Date

You've got a date with someone and it was arranged a long time ago. You can't even remember agreeing to it and quite frankly, you'd like to give it a miss. You're convinced this will be the date from hell. Thus, a whole world of escapist tactics have emerged. Special Forces would be hard pressed to run an operation as subtle and complex as your avoidance strategies. Every time you think about the date you break out in a cold sweat.

You've kissed a lot of frogs it's true but as the Scots say, that's the way it's aye been.* To calm the anxiety the impending date brings, you remind yourself, you are so much more than enough. The air is scented with burning sage, your ears filled with mantras, the music of dolphins adds another note, while you bow, namaste you say before a crystal alter – amethyst is soothing you've heard.

Your date is no mystery to you, you've known them on some level your whole life. Everything else, all the avoidance and the soothing, the feelings of not good enough expressed in locking lips with amphibians, the affirmations of good enough that pay homage to frogs and more – all just smoke and mirrors in preparation for the date. There is no comfort needed, what is cannot be avoided, what has always been is already there. It's aye been.

You're feeling uncomfortable, it's true. Is there any point in telling you that hell is made of runners, forever running in their minds. You're tired and you're scared and that's okay. It is what it is. Or not. It's just as uncomfortable as you wish it to be until you're ready to set yourself free. So do it. Go on the date and don't judge the feelings that come up (none of them), nor the one feeling them. Let it be. Bring your presence and open to the cluster of emotion at the root of it all; it's vibrating, this energy on the move. E-motion, designed to flow.

So know, there really is and never has been any wrong or right, avoidance or soothing and nothing you say or do will make those things true. The stuff of smoke and mirrors. You are not enough, your are not more than enough. The truth is always, infinitely, unavoidably and beautifully...so simple. When you're done running, kissing and calming and whatever else your mind contrives there is just this, your date, the one who waits. If you listen carefully, deep in the quiet you will hear, 'I am' (the one).

*'aye been': Scottish, from the Borders meaning 'it's always been (this way).'

The Way Home

The way home. We're not our thoughts, our emotions too but how then, do we find our way through? Humour me a popular reference, the world of Harry Potter. The Hogwarts Express that takes the students of magic to their destination is found on Platform 9 3/4, not visible to the average eye. It's found by knowing, far beyond belief and into the realm of being. The students know if they hit the spot between platform 9 and 10, the arch of brick and mortar will yield - after all, it's only held there by the desire of those who wish to see it.

This day and into the evening the emotions have been running through me faster than a northbound train. Thoughts have followed like steam, if I allowed them they would have clouded my vision. Instead I watched, felt the pull of the old and familiar. I knew what to do and now, I will share it with you.

Finding our way through is a journey to platform 9 3/4, a knowing that becomes a being. I gazed out into the suburban night, the sound of traffic a hum. First I matched my breath to that hum. Then I brought an awareness (observation) to the breath, to the spaces inbetween. I drew my breath into the center of my chest, to the heart center. How did I do this? This is the knowing; I just think it and without hesitation or doubt, without any limitation at all, I do it. It really is that simple.

I hung my head out of the window breathing and feeling the spaces between the breaths elongate, the peace from that center dissolving all the previous thoughts and feelings. There was only this moment, there on Platform 9 3/4, I let go of those old thoughts, shadows from the past, I let go of the future projections too. In this timeless moment I found my way home.