Everything is a story – and introducing mine

Everything in life is a story, and our individual lives are no different. We, of course, always take on the role of the protagonist and everything happens according to our perspective. In our life story there are those who support us, and also those who oppose us, i.e. the difficult ones, the villains. But it’s the latter group that makes life so interesting, and where we find the truth. Because only if we are maligned or misunderstood, we dig deep enough into ourselves to find the gold nuggets of who we really are. We find our authentic truth.

I’ve been busy for the past year writing a book. It’s now finally completed, edited and as good as I can make it given my limited writing talent. I’ve never had aspirations to become a writer, it sort of just happened. I had a story to share, and it was too complicated to explain in a normal conversation, so I thought it a good idea to write it down and get it out of my system.

So, what is the book about? It’s a story that spans a few years of my life – a memoir of sorts. It was a time of great upheaval, excruciating difficulties and great enlightenment. But without the opposition, the obstacles and ‘difficult’ people, there is not much of a story, now is there? So my book has its fair share of drama, but I trust that it also has its fair share of insight, and hope.

I intend to publish the book myself, and I’m doing it in two stages: first, as an ebook (in all formats), then a printed edition which can be ordered on line. I’m nearly there, so wish me luck on the last stretch…! In the meantime, I’ve set up a new blog to deal with the next phase of my life, and if you like, please join me there…

Creation 101

The idea that we can create, which is everywhere we look, may seem a novelty, but we’ve been doing it all along. It is just now that we have become more conscious of it, and we are starting to play with the idea that we can actively and consciously create what we want.

At its most basic, we have to understand that everything to do, say or think has consequences. Those consequences you can’t wish away, or pray away, or evade. It is there, and you have to deal with it. So every choice that we make, whether we consciously think about it or not, carries its own consequences.  Some good, some unpleasant.  All those little consequences add up and form the picture of your life. That is your creation. It is as simple as that. You are responsible for it.

It’s quite daunting really, even freaky.

So, if we want to consciously and actively start creating we have to become super aware of every thought that we have, because really, thoughts influence and direct our choices.

We choose what to say, and we choose what we do.

A simple example: I tell a colleague at work that she’s wearing a really ugly dress. It doesn’t matter whether I am wrong or right. The results of my unflattering thoughts and the fact that I choose to express my thoughts create in her a feeling of such hurt and negativity that tomorrow when I may need her help with a project at work, she’s unwilling and resentful. Am I justified in complaining that she is being uncooperative and unenthusiastic? No. I created her attitude towards me.

I’ve discovered that taking responsibility for my actions, words and thoughts is crucial if I want to create a functional and happy life. I need to full own myself if I want to harness and direct the creative powers that I have.

Taking responsibility for my life seems a nice catch all, adult phrase to use, but it isn’t easy to do.

Judgment and punishment

I’d like to talk more about the soul’s agenda, about why we even bother coming to earth, but before I can do that we have to talk about an idea that is so deep-seated and prevalent in our psyches, that most people don’t even consider that it may not be true.  It gets in the way of a deeper understanding.

It is the idea of judgment and punishment.

We’re dealing with two vastly different perspectives: our human perspective, and the God-Spirit perspective.

Coming from our perspective, we have an inherent need for fairness and justice. We want to see that those people who do cruel and inhumane things are punished, and if they seem to get away with it, then we have the comfort that they will be punished one day when they die. God will judge them, and they will go to hell as their punishment. We project our feelings of outrage and our need to see justice done onto God. Because we feel that way God must feel that way.We humans don’t even consider that there might be another way to achieve the same sense of fairness and justice, other than punishment and especially death.

The problem is, if we want and expect other bad people to be judged, we can expect that the same will happen to us. Nobody is quite perfect. So, how can we ensure that we will be spared that terrible judgment, or at the least negotiate some leniency? It’s a question that has been keeping us awake for thousands of years, and make no mistake, there are loads of people who have been telling us to be worried about it. Do we bring sacrifices? Do we live a good life? Do we need to do good deeds? Do we need to believe a certain way? Do we need an intermediary to intercede on our behalf?

We can do all of those things, or none of it. We can do whatever makes us feel more secure, but it simply isn’t necessary. I’m not saying that some of it isn’t advisable for a good or happy life; I’m saying that we don’t have to jump through hoops to gain God’s favour.

God isn’t the ogre that we make him out to be. There will be no judgement or punishment. There is no hell, irrespective of whatever terrible sin you committed while you were on earth.

But, there is accountability. We are responsible for the choices that we make and the consequences that it produces. There is no escaping that. We will go through a process – an assessment process – where we will be required to take stock of who we were and what we did in our lifetimes, and why. We will understand the full scope of the joy and love we brought to others, and we will understand the full scope and pain that we caused others. We will feel it, we will experience it, we will fully understand.

Being in a soul perspective, when we are confronted by the pain, the hurt and the damage that we caused others, it invokes a pain so deep and excruciating within ourselves that it is simply beyond our human understanding now. We will be filled with a great, fundamental need to make things right, to clean up the mess that we made, to alleviate the pain and suffering we caused. And we will be given the opportunity to do so.

There is no need for a judge. There is no need for punishment.

Of course, it’s always better to go through this assessment process whilst we are still on this earth. It helps us to understand what lies ahead and goes a long way to help us lose our fear of death. It also gives us the opportunity to make amends and to clean up after ourselves right now.

Connection… the bridge to wisdom

If we are connected, then how do we recognise it? How much more of the Connection can we explore and experience? As a start, I thought I’d make a little checklist of clues on how to recognise our connection to God Spirit and our Higher Selves. This checklist is my no means exhaustive, and it’s based on my own experiences, but I thought it will give us a good start.

So here are my ideas. You’re connected if….

♦you ask for help or guidance and you are you able to identify it when it comes your way, connecting the dots so to speak. You pay attention to messages from seemingly random people, words in a song that catches your attention, a scene from a movie, or a book that you pick up.

♦you can identify the answers to your questions within yourself – you become better at distinguishing between your own mental noise and those special delivered insights that ring as clear as a bell, “Ah, that’s it! Why didn’t I think of it before? Why didn’t I see it?” And you begin to realise that those crystal thoughts pop up when you least expect it – doing chores, showering, not thinking about anything specific, and not being emotionally all charged up – then, there it was.

♦you are willing to pay attention to old painful memories that pop up out of the blue and discover much-needed courage to confront them, recognising that it may carry the seeds of the issues that you’re struggling with today. You know those memories – those that feel like you’re touching a live wire and from which you immediately recoil?

♦you realise that you’ve been acting like some cats do, unwilling or even unable to look at itself in the mirror, and discover that you’re strong enough to be completely self-honest with yourself, even if you come face to face with your own shortcomings, poor judgement and bad calls.

• ♦you are dissatisfied with easy solutions, obvious opinions by others and stuck thinking. Something within you wants to explore different questions, different answers, outside of your comfort zone. You start paying attention to thoughts in your own mind that at first seem really way out.

♦you have started to develop, for reasons you can’t explain, a sense of when things are wrong or a bit “off”, or conversely, an inexplicable sense of the rightness of a situation or a decision. On occasion you may have even experienced a little frisson running through your body when you feel that you’re on the right track, or a “buzz ” in your solar plexus area.

♦once in a while, you experience a moment when you move completely beyond judgment – the judgment of people, and situations – labelling them good or bad, right or wrong, even if you’re allowed to, and find yourself in a “space” where you recognise that everything is perfect exactly as it is even if it is unpleasant or painful.

♦you find yourself more and more in moments outside of time - where you catch yourself being miles off somewhere. Sometimes you were daydreaming, but often you couldn’t even remember what you were thinking about. But it leaves you a sense of well-being, perhaps even bliss.

♦you have experienced strange sensations in your body that you can’t explain and feel silly to talk to other people about – such as the feeling that the top of your head is on fire. Or maybe a sensation that something is pushing down on your head, or maybe a prickling sensation/ strange pressure at the back of your neck or between your eyes. Sometimes your palms or the soles of your feet tingle for no reason. (As an aside: the more you move into the connection space and process, the more of this you would come to experience; this “sensory activation” is part and parcel of the process.)

♦you’ve become aware of some or all of these aspects and are hungry to experience more of it.

What have I left out?

Blessed, or not

There is something in me that resists the words “I’m so blessed”, or “God has really blessed me”. Not because I resent other people’s happiness or successes, on the contrary, but I think to myself, “What is the opposite of blessed? If my life or plenty other people’s lives are not so happy and prosperous, does it then does it mean that God is displeased with us, or angry? Is he punishing us?”

And right there I’m ready to dismiss the idea of blessings, aka as God’s favour.

I could believe in a god who may or may not like me, who seem to bless and punish at a whim, who make some people rich and let others starve, but that leads me to feel incredibly powerless. Even more dangerously, it leads me into judgment. I have to find fault with myself, find my sin. I have to look around me at other people and find reasons why God may have decided to punish them. I have to find and pick at their faults to make any sense of this, and to try and gauge what God likes and doesn’t like to avoid a similar fate.

This isn’t my experience of God-Spirit, and if I really think about, it just doesn’t make sense. It cannot be about blessings and punishment.

If you scratch a little deeper, then a different picture starts to emerge.

For starters, most people who are happy and feeling blessed made some really good decisions along the way, sometimes unknowingly, but most of the time because they were thinking about what they wanted, what would made them happy, and they made their choices accordingly. Their happy lives are not a result of God’s approval, but, because they have created it themselves. It could be that they made good decisions because they tapped into the guidance and help that God-Spirit provides, but ultimately they are in charge of their own decisions. They really created the blessings for themselves.

Am I saying that if we’re not happy and we’re dissatisfied with our lives that we haven’t yet learned to make good decision for ourselves? Yes and no.

Besides making bad decisions, there could be other reasons why we are not happy. This is one of the reasons why I’m so connected to the idea of a soul or Higher Self’s agenda. The explanations for my life lie there, as do the explanations for other people’s lives.

Sometimes bad stuff happens, which we had no control over, mostly because of some larger soul agenda or process which we don’t immediately understand the purpose of.

It could be that we’re waiting – we’re in the midst of making good decisions that will bring us happiness, but it isn’t here yet.

It could be that our higher selves are prodding us inside, pushing us to change direction, to make different decisions, and that creates a feeling of unhappiness or dissatisfaction with the status quo.

It has nothing to do with being blessed, or not. Does it?

What happens during the reconnection process?

So what happens during the reconnection process – the technique – that I’ve explained previously?

For one thing, it is literally a connection process. Do you remember the movie Avatar? The blue people had special tails that they used to connect to people and animals to create a special bond? And they also used their tails to plug into the spiritual string network?  Our process is not so different. (I love the fact that movies come out these days that help to explain spiritual ideas. Coincidence? I think not.)

We have several connection points (or tails ) throughout the body and I may at some point talk about it in depth, but for now I want to focus on the connection aspect.

We are always connected to our Higher Selves and Spirit through these connection points, but it is the strength and purity of these connections that is the subject of this conversation. There are several reasons why these connections get thin and faint throughout the course of a lifetime, mostly because we clog it up. We do it by insisting that we’re separate from the Divine. We do it by being afraid all the time and fear is a thick, black smog that really obscures the connection. We do it when we harden our hearts because of the hurts that we suffered. We do it when we forget that love is our first priority. After a lifetime of all of this, we’re hanging on by a thread.

During the meditation process when we express our desire to re-establish our connection, the Spirit energy which we move through our bodies starts to clean up, it blows open the connection “pipes”, and then works on strengthening the connection bonds. It’s shouldn’t be a once off event, because as soon as it’s clean, we have a tendency to clog it up again. We experience fear, we remember pain, we move out of love, and there it is again, it’s clogged up again. We go through the process again, but we clog it up again, and so it continues.

So, something else has to happen, and something does.

Every time we connect to the Higher Energies, it also downloads information, insights, guidance and even the ability to heal to us. Whatever help or guidance we need, we can ask for – but, and this is important, we have to ask. God-Spirit, including our Higher Selves won’t infringe on our right to choose for ourselves, but are keen to help and guide us to change our thinking, to remove our fears, to heal our hurts, and if we do that, the connections start to function better and better and don’t clog up so often and so much. We and our Higher Selves can start working in tandem.

Reconnection – a technique

Let’s get real. It’s absolutely possible to connect directly with God-Spirit, which includes your Higher Self. There are many ways of going about it – there is no right or wrong way – but I’ll share with you a simple and very effective way.

We’ll start off with a very basic meditation process, and even if you haven’t practiced any meditation techniques before, it doesn’t matter. You have no need for chants or special breathing techniques or even postures.

You’ll need some quiet dedicated time, about twenty minutes or so to start off with, and make sure nobody bothers you during this time. Phones especially are irritating and counter-productive, so are cats jumping on you.

Make yourself comfortable on your bed or on your couch – not so comfortable that you’ll feel the need to sleep – but comfortable enough so that your body doesn’t bother you along the way. I for one can’t sit with crossed legs for long before I get so stiff that I have to interrupt what I’m doing to change my position, and that breaks my focus. Don’t fall asleep. Rather stop the process and try again when you feel a little more awake.

Close your eyes and take a few slow, deep breaths. Count them in your mind, about five should do it – five in, and five out. Then focus your mind and bring your attention to the point between your eyebrows – that’s a connection point and it’ll help you to focus. If at any time during the session you get distracted and you find yourself with your thoughts way out there, just bring back your focus to this point.

The intention is now to connect God-Spirit/ Higher Self with your body  -  and you invite God-Spirit to literally enter and connect with your body. Say the words in your mind to be absolutely clear. It sounds almost too simple, but don’t underestimate this process: it’s potent.

Imagine the top of your head – your crown- opening up, and as you do it, imagine a white light – the Spirit light, to flow down into your head. (If you prefer, you can imagine this to be a Godly golden liquid). As you do that, focus as on your breathing, so that you “inhale” the Light as it is starting to stream down into your body. With each successive breath, as you inhale, bring in or pull down more of this Light into your body; when you exhale you relax and allow the Light to flow down into your body. You don’t have to get too technical, you can just breathe normally while visualising the streaming of Light, but I find that this way helps me to stay focused. But don’t breathe too quickly or too deeply, or you’ll start to hyperventilate!

Visualise that the Light is filling your head, then the back of your neck, then streaming down your throat, pooling into your chest area, filling your lungs, your heart, running down your arms to the tips of your fingers, filling your solar plexus area, your stomach, all the way down to the apex between your legs, then down your legs, your knees, and pooling in the soles of your feet.

Bring your attention back to the point between your eyebrows, and spend some time just sitting and experiencing this Light filling your whole body. If you feel you want to spend more time in this space, or if you find your mind wandering to chores still to be done, you can repeat the exercise, and this time after you brought in the Light, you can also visualise the Light as spilling over your head, your shoulders, as if you’re under a Spirit waterfall. Just sit with it, immersed in this Light, in the Spirit-filled space.

When you feel you’ve had enough, slowly rub your fingers together or flex your toes to bring you out of the Light space back to your normal surroundings. Come out slowly, because as you do this more often, you will go into this space even more deeply, and it will become more disorienting when you come out of it.

Try it out, see how it goes and ask any questions you may have. Just remember you can’t stuff it up. It isn’t really your process – your job is to do the invitation, the rest is up to God-Spirit.

Another time I’ll explain a little bit more about what actually happens during this process, and what you may experience, but I don’t want to take away your joy of discovery .