Day 49 – A List from the Lighthouse

Gosh.  Who knew that 49 days of hourly morning self work time would end in me grieving its loss rather than hurling the book out the door like a non delicate frisbee?  I have absolutely loved this process that I have engaged in.  I can feel my cells changing at every level and I know that I am becoming more loving, softer, sweeter and more open to magic and goodness in my life, as a way of being.

Today is officially the last day so I’m working on some new blogging ideas cos basically, I’m starting to love this time we have together and want it to continue.  You are all like my cute little secret angels, silently supporting me on my path to becoming a living aspect of moving, grooving love.  🙂 I have actually not told one soul in my everyday life that I am writing this blog.  This is unheard of for me since I’m quite the sharer with my close friends.  But I’m kind of enjoying this little love affair of connection that I have formed with all of you, you little cuties around the globe.  It is a reminder to me that love and connection are indeed everywhere.

Today was about writing a list of what we are looking for in our loved one.  I had to write a list, then pick the top 5 things that I would not do without.  Then commit to only dating people who had these qualities.  It was beautiful.  As Kat suggested, there is no point doing this list if you are still looking outside yourself for happiness.  The only way is to come to a place of true self committment and from there, to openly claim what you know will rightly match and serve you.  What will make you become a greater vehicle for love?  What will help you grow and burst forth in goodness?

For the curious cats amongst you, my list goes a little something like this…

1.Self honoring.  I know that my partner walks a spiritual path, connected to Spirit and his intuition to become his greatest self.  He does this and takes risks to bring more light to the world.

2. Committed to love. After himself, I am his Number One priority and we plan our committed lives together in our sacred union of love.  We give one another time, experiences and adventures to help our love deepen.

3.Loving. He is a kind, loving, connected generous man with an open compassionate heart.  With me, he is tender and sensual, using sex as a vehicle for us to shine our greatest light.

4.Joyous.  He has an optimistic, hopeful, excited outlook on life where all dreams and magic are possible.  He is playful, joyous, fun, light, adventurous, spontaneous and funny and we laugh at ourselves in beautiful ways.

5.Noble.  He is honest and lives with integrity.  He is an excellent communicator (speaking, sharing, listening, understanding) enjoying lightness and depth as ways of connecting on all levels.

Now some of you may say “That is not a soul mate.  That is a fairy tale.  Or what would happen if Mother Theresa and David Deida had a love child.”  But I feel that my veil has been pulled sufficiently to believe that I have a right to a human like this.  That it is my birthright to honor and be honored in such a sacred union.  Not that I expect someone to be flawless.  After all, flaws are the juicy bit.  Flaws are where the fun lies.  But, I do need someone who I feel is beautiful on the inside.  Someone who believes in love and the magic of life, cos the alternative of dragging someone behind me kicking and screaming onto the path of love, is too painful.  I choose a more fluid loving game of life.  I will no longer chain a mate to my side and beg him to grow, for I am now starting to see the perfection in everyone.  But that does not mean that everyone is perfect for me.  Tricky tricky! 🙂

So, my new affirmation is:

I honor the sacred love that is coming to me now and accept it with an open heart, full of awe and gratitude.

I will continue blogging to you my sweets.  And whilst I’m a little sketchy on the detail, I’m sure that my continued path to love will be just as delicious as these 49 days have been.

To all of you on this incredible fragile and sacred path of living from the heart, and I mean really living, not just pretending, then I salute you for jumping in this insane pool called life that often feels like you have been dropped off in a jungle with no compass, no map, no back pack and a fucking hungry tiger on your arse!

Life and love are tricky.  They are risky but they are juicy and it is the juicy bits that make our souls sing.  Thanks for walking with me so far.  I send out my heartfelt love and gratitude with you all and look forward to sharing more of my journey.

Love yas! xxxx mwah xxx 🙂

 

Day 48 – Being Love in a risky world

To quote Samuel Becket:

‘Ever tried.  Ever failed.  No matter:  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.’

Wow.  Now that is risk.  Now that is owning your balls like small blocks of flats.  That is truly knowing that life, if fully lived, is bursting with a cacophony of failure.  Some days it may feel like it is hailing failure … for about 90 days, smashing your car, your outdoor furniture and smashing the fuck out of you should you dare to get out there amongst it.

It is time I grew a ball and got out there amongst it.

Today Kat talked about how when she was a little girl she had wanted to win a date with a particular actor in a competition, but was so nervous about the entry that she never actually put one in.  But then she convinced herself that someone must have magically put one in for her and was still stunned when she discovered that she did not win the prize!

This has been me in life and love on too many levels to count.  I’ve definitely has some delusional ideas about the ‘right’ ‘natural’ ways to meet a partner.  That I should meet him in my every day life.  That I should not have to do anything special about it.  And when I questioned this and for the first time, joined an internet dating site and was contacted by about 20 men in two weeks, I had a complete freak out, dismissing them almost faster than I could read their profiles.  I was terrified that getting back out there, actually meant getting back out there.  This would involve  real interactions with real humans.  God help me.

So I only agreed to communicate with one of these twenty and after our first date, I created by mammoth Peruvian bug drama, thus giving me the perfect excuse for no further contact.  Convenient is one way to put this.  A slippery slidey run away magician is another way to put it.  🙂  I ran so fast I’m surprised I didn’t create new fault lines between the two of us.

Kat described my life so painfully that it gave a sad little tug to my heart.  In her words ‘Until you embrace failure, loss, and disappointment as part of a life well lived then you will most likely have a life that doesn’t really light you up or inspire you very much.’  BINGO!  This is my life.  I take few risks and have few failures but God it feels so empty.  It’s like I’ve learned to treat life like a China shop.  Things could break.  Tread carefully.  When what I want to do is put roller blades on ( NB:  I have the coordination skills of a rhino on roller blades) and to fly around the shop, touching things, breaking a few here and there and maybe having to work a few hours at the shop in my spare time to pay for the damage.  But either way, this is life.

It is only when I put the roller blades on that I discover that it is actually not just a china shop but an all purpose everything shop.  Some things are fragile but others are incredibly sturdy and lots of stuff has padding anyway.  Breaking the occasional things could just be an opportunity to become a super glue Wizard, or a glue gun Master.  New party tricky for creating even more fun.  It’s all about perspectives.

The thing about living life in fear that you will break something is that it is … desperately boring!  It’s like watching grass grow and wanting it to do something faster or more exciting that its natural upward motion, slow and steady.  But when living a full life, suddenly you see magic everywhere.  You realise that you can roller blade out of the multi purpose shop where you have torn up a storm and that you can fly past a million bits and pieces of life’s quirky miracles.  Fun is everywhere.  For me, things like singing workshops, tantra workshops, creativity or acting classes, theatre groups, fun games nights, talking with strangers.  The world is choc a block full of good humans to play with.  But I don’t even see those cos I  stay stuck, tip toeing around some crusty bullshit china shop (that is not even a fucking china shop but I am in a cute little safe delusion where I thing everything is a fucking china shop!)  BLESS!

So, as has now become a repeated mantra by Kat, beating this message into my skull subliminally with her cute etheric 10 foot sledge hammer, over this 7 week process: You can’t find magical super swoon love when youa re tip toeing around a china shop like a dark ninja (my words, not hers! :)).  You have to drag your sorry arse out of the shop and look around at life.  And join it.  For real.  Not just pretend to join it (I am good at this!).  You have to risk looking like a dickhead in order to risk failing and opening up to the true juice that life has to offer.  You have to risk noticing that life is messy and people can be … odd… and that is ok!  That is part of the juicy bit of life.  We are all a bit odd and quirky, but still , we have to grow a ball and get out there and frolick amongst one another!

I love love and yep… looks like there is no other way around this but to learn to roller blade like a rhino through this next chapter of my sweet life.  Wish me luck!  Tomorrow is our last day with Kitty Kat so let’s make it a biggie!!!!!

 

 

Day 47 – Gratitude: The Freeway to light your life up with joy!

Howdy peeps!

I’m gonna read straight form the horse’s mouth today cos the following paragraph from Kat made me cry cute little tears of joy:

‘What I learned about gratitude is this.  When we give thanks for everything in our lives, specifically and exactly for the way they are, regardless of our preference for them to be different, our lives become lit up with joy.  And when we are lit up with joy, we become an absolute magnet for the blessings of life.’

I’m not exactly sure why this made me cry.  I don’t know if I’m feeling sad and jaded that this process is about to be over (only two more days to go :(), or whether it was realizing that life is truly such a damned tasty finger licking delight that naturally, our birthright is to be completely and overwhelmingly lit up with joy.  I want to be so lit up, that I make your local award winning Christmas light of the year Street look like a sad 3 hour no frills tea light tragedy.  I want my joy and my light to fill the world and to live life in this glorious mysterious way.

It is almost surreal to me how quickly we can choose our lives to be different, almost instantaneously.  We can choose to stay in wounded jadedness ( I have a doctorate in this!) or in head fucking brain strain freak out attack over everything and anything.  These puppies are like coats.  You can pop them on.  Pop them off.  You can pop on two coats at once if you are feeling game.  Anxiety and depression are a tempting double coat option.  And you can leave them on for as long as you like.  But the fuckers will suffocate you.  Particularly in the caribbean.

Or you can pop on the gratitude and acceptance coat.  This puppy is so magical it belongs in Harry Potter.  You pop it on and your feet start dancing to the new rhythm of your life and this life is juicier than a big fat tom cat with a bad arsed rat hanging out of its mouth.  This life is full, no matter what, and you become a super sleuth detective in snooping out more and more joy and fun.  You don’t just look for happiness and goodness you let them become you and before you know it, there is no separation.

I have had insane amounts of challenges lately.  I had some weird arsed Peruvian invisible bug chew its way into my life, freaking the absolute shit out of me and making me put every aspect of my life on hold.  But it was only when I decided to simply choose life as it was, full of weird Peruvian chewing fuckers, that they slowly seemed to kind of magically evaporate.  I can not say that I fully understand this.  Nor do I want to.  Some things are best left not understood and to simply bathe in the glow of the trail of light they left behind.  I’m still bathing.  I’m still soaking in the unbelievableness that simply making a decision could be enough to start to shift everything.

During this time, I had to pack up my life, put it in storage and stay with friends whilst looking for a new home.  It would be way easy to say that I was in crisis and to stop this daily ritual and process.  Way easy to say that once again, my life should go on hold and that I should wait till my life looked more perfect before being so indulgent as to spend a few hours a day, every day, on my self growth and love.  But somehow, as I kept going, more and more, I am starting to see life for the everyday magnificent thing that it is.  It is raw, wild and perfect, no matter what.

Today the couple I’m living with had a fight, in the kitchen below me.   A bit of screaming.  A bit of anger.  A bit of stomping.  Normally, this would put me into some kind of spin.  But today, I wasn’t even phased.  I just felt ok that this was a couple doing normal communication explosions to get closer to the truth.  Sometimes the path to truth is murky and filled with a few explosions.  And that’s ok.  Cos love is a bit of a wild path and we don’t always feel like communication Buddhas vibing off love, light and understanding.  Sometimes we are like wild dogs gnawing our own limbs off, desperate to be right.  And then just as easily we realize that all we want is to see and be seen, to love and be loved.  And it is all beautiful and perfect in its seeming imperfection.

I got so engrossed in my ‘5 pages of gratitude’ exercise that i accidentally did 6.  It was actually amazing to keep finding more and more and more and more to be grateful for.  There literally is a never ending torrent of good shit coming our of this top little nook called earth.  And I am starting to let it fill every inch of me like air.  It is delicious and tastes about as divine as the sweet syrupy dessert I’m gonna make for the dinner party tonight.

I feel like all the pieces of this 49 day process are starting to float around me now like bees.  Lovingly pollinating me bit by bit.  Landing on the different blossoms inside me and giving them life.  And my honey is becoming sweet and rich and rare and even I am starting to drink it in.

 

Day 46 – You can’t forgive in a pool of rage! Who knew?

Ok, so this is not rocket science.  Especially where I live where there are more new agers tuning up their chakras than rainbow frocks  (and there are shit loads of those puppies too),  you start feeling cheap and dirty if you actually feel something that smells curiously like ANGER!  (cap lock for emphasis cos it feels like a big scary monster!)

Today was about forgiveness but I think that this is the first time I’ve ever read to not forgive someone ad infinitum.  Kat suggests that you ensure that new appropriate boundaries be set so that you are safe and honored.  Then and only then, is there room for healthy forgiveness.

The idea is that anger is a great teacher in boundaries.  Anger is telling us with a big fat stomping right foot ‘NO!  I don’t like that!  I don’t want that!’  Anger is often a top friend that we dismiss as being unholy cos of her wild seemingly uncontrollable intensity.  So we pick her up and throw her down some stairs into the dungeon and get her to stay there until she has cooled down and breathed it off.  Poor little anger was just trying, at all costs, to ensure that we grew a ball and some self love.  Anger is our ultimate guardian but sometimes she comes across as a cheap bouncer, covered in tats, kicking a metho habit and just doesn’t look good for us and certainly doesn;t match our new designer jeans  (as if I even know what designer jeans look like, but you get my drift :)).

The thing is,  anger will remain (and so she damned well should, feisty metho clad bouncer of glory that she is!) until we use her wild force to set new boundaries for our safety and respect.  Only then will the anger subside, opening a new soft space where forgiveness becomes possible.  Otherwise, forgiveness is just an exercise to inflate the ego but with no real lasting results.

If no boundaries have been set, then the cycles will keep playing out with the same or new players and anger will simply keep smashing her head on the dungeon door for eons until finally, she is heard.

I give my self a C for boundary setting.  I can be surprisingly amazing with some people.  But as soon as it comes to people I really really love like dearest friends, then I get wildly murky.  Then I start getting stuck in the business of whether I will be seen as a bad person for setting them.  So instead, I don’t set them, I get shitty and resentful and I risk creating distance and inauthenticity in deeply loving, honest connections.  No one is to blame but me becausse I’m scared I won’t be loved and accepted if I am not the Dalai Lama on roids, ever loving and ever giving, non stop, around the clock.

I need to take my new little metho skulling feisty bouncer’s hand and sit with her.  Have a listen to what she has to say.  Because I have a feeling that she is not going anywhere until she gets heard and her new self respect policies get actioned.  Otherwise I may just wake up to find one of her bill boards up my arse.  Ouch.

 

Day 45 – Giving a F*@! about other humans!

Theory and practice.  In theory I am quite lovely.  I have a big fun heart and when with a group of people I can truly light up a room, if I choose to.  I could get a pack of suicidal teenagers to spill their guts and then belly laugh their way through heart warming stories about who they’ve pashed and what inspires them.

The problem is I don’t.  I don’t know why but somewhere, somehow I kind of stopped trying in life.  Full stop.  I kind of gave up the whole wild unpredictable ride and have been flat out trying not to care, ever since.  I’ve pretended I don’t give a fuck about anyone but myself and sometimes I’m astoundingly convinced.  But it leaves me feeling empty, like I just had a big plate of cheap no frills pasta.  No nutrients and full of something that is foreign and my body doesn’t know quite what to do with.

I think because I spent so many years in overwhelming adrenaline cascading fear, I kind of felt that all I could do was deal with myself.  I thought that if I could just get myself happy, then I could get on with the business of giving a fuck about any one else.  But this is about as fulfilling as porn when really what someone is crying out for is love.  Connection.  Something to make your heart burst and scream and let go and trust and pray and know that wow life is fucking amazing after all.   The fairy Godmother was not a psychotic narcissistic bitch out to get you.  She was right.  You are the fairy tale and life is there to give you all its incredible magic if you can only find the courage to … connect.

The challenge for me is my business admin approach to life.  Lists.  Dot points.  Cross things out and move onto the next task, human or event.  I wanted to get enough career fulfillment to then feel satisfied to join life, for real.  But, its a waiting game that could go on for ever.  I’m living on the side lines at the moment,  I occasionally run in and take over for a few minutes whilst one of the players has a breather.  I joined a theatre company and let my spirit come alive for two hours a week between 8 and 10pm on Thursday nights.  I occasionally let myself go to shows that make my soul sing:  But hopefully not too much cos then I end up all jaded that my life is not quite that vibrant or magnificent looking.

I can feel this shiny sparkly loving soul inside me that is quite wild.  A veritable torrent of love.  And lots of those in my life have felt it and are quite captivated by it.  But poor pups had better not be too attached cos it is gone just as quick as it appeared.  They are left with a tease and shadow of love and I am left empty wondering where all the love went.

This thing is love is not a game.  It is a way of being, a life style, a choice.  I have chosen a half life where I give very little of my self to friends, family, my community or the world at large.  Don’t expect too much of me and I won’t expect too much of you.  It is a stingy way to live, but such has been my self induced suffering and I have chosen it as the only way forward.  Focus on yourself now and plough forward like a death eater, keen to steal any scrap of joy in order to simply go on, go on, go on.

It is overwhelming to be so ruthless with my life right now.  So honest.  So desperately honest in the hope that this honesty will allow me to pick up my courage stone and finally rub it and let my genie appear.  The genie that has been waitng all my life:  The one who tells me that love is not a damned barter system and that if I want life to look more beautiful then I should become a torrent of beauty and fill the world with my flowers everywhere.  Love is not an excel spread sheet.  It can not be organised or ticked off one column at a time.  It is messy and only by getting all crazy and disorganzied and spread across it like a feral concoction of peanut butter, nutella and pickled tomato chutney can there ever be any hope of growing.  Love can’t grow in a vice.

Today has been a monster awareness day of admitting that I give very little emotionally or physically to anyone.  Even how I give to friends has become quite limited and neat.  It is time for me to start dancing naked in the pie chart of my life: To jump from segment to segment like a wild toddler after a gallon of red cordial.  It is time to stop waiting for the world to make me feel better.  It is time to grow up and stop expecting others to take care of my needs.  It is time to seize every single second as an opportunity to give and be love on this planet.  How can I honestly expect life to be generous to me when I am so insular?  Planet earth:  Welcome.  I’m stepping aboard.

 

Day 43 & 44 – An enchanted life and ‘what would love do now?’

I am on fire.  Once again I decided to punch through two lessons in one day like a dog downing two 6 foot T bones.  I would like to say that this is cos I’m wildly inspired.  But to be honest, I just wanted to match the number of my blogs to the number of lessons and needed it to all line up before the finish line cos I have perfection issues.  I am wildly cute. 🙂

An enchanted life:  What image comes to mind with this?  For me it used to be Cinderella, some bullshit prince on a horse holding a lost shoe that he pick up at the local thrift store, and some hard core evil fuckers to fight off.

But more and more (now that I’m starting to make Buddha look like a wading pool), I’m starting to see a new enchantment, the enchantment of LIFE.  Gosh.  Like how a three year old looks at everything, in complete awe, with magic fairy dust sprinkled on her soul and fairy bread with an inch of butter.  She is reckless and wild.  She sees beauty everywhere for what it is.  She does not judge the sunset for being less pink than yesterdays.  She honors the newness and finds every single insect, being and moment a potential for her to experience more joy.

An enchanted life is about blessing everything in life as it is right now.  Not just accepting it, but actually seeing it all as supremely, sacredly blessed.  A life through the eyes of a child but with the compassion and wisdom of an adult who has suffered and knows what it is to fall and to fail.  Now this is living.

But life is a wild trickster and for me, it is easy to let it grab me in its curly arms and take me for an unnecessary ride down pain or trauma street.  I buy the tickets and happily jump aboard cos sometimes these rides look better than the vulnerability of living with my heart fully open and sharing all my gifts with the intense risk of being wildly criticised or not honored for my simple sweetness.

And so it’s good to have an anchor, something to drag you back from the pummeling rocks whilst you are hanging on, praying for help or death or just an end to the suffering.  And this is a good time to ask “What would love do now?”  (awesome segway!!!!) 🙂

I have definitely had inspired times in my life where I asked myself this.  But, I have not managed to live it as a way of being.  What would love do now?  Today I had to write about ares of my life that I have irritation about and to look at where I have judged those involved.  Then I had to ask myself what love would do.  As I said, pain is like a big slimy slug that grovels up onto your face like no body’s business acting like he belongs there.  He thinks if he stays still enough he will go unnoticed.  But eventually, when you ask what love would do now, you realise that this slug would be way happier on a branch in a big juicy tree, eating mini grovelling things of his own.  Not hanging onto you nose hair for dear life.  Pain is not happy there.  Even pain wants ot be free.

More and more I see life, or my life, as a series of simple choices.  I can choose to wait for some mystery to gallop in and save me from all my perceived woes or I can begin to see the enchantment in my every breathe and every encounter.  I can choose to stay upset that life does not give me more or I can choose to step up to my own life in the form of Love on Roids and to then allow all of its enchanted mysteries to start to unfold.  Essentially whether my life is a disastrous series of painful events or an exquisite explosion of mysterious adventure and fun is up to me.  Responsibility is a fucker.

Tomorrow is from ‘me’ to ‘we’.  Godamnit!  I’m just starting to get the hang of me… 😉

 

Day 41 and 42 – Heart listening and mega honest speaking. Go buddha!

Wow.  Two big fat peas in a juicy pod.  These babies were such a couple that I just had to do them both, one straight after the other.  Like two shots of tequila, but different.  No lemon or salt.  Actually, now that I think of it, it kind of is like sucking 6 full lemons down straight, such is my anxiety about this whole topic.

Listening.  It is such an innocent word.  I like the idea of heart listening, with no judgement or agendas or trying to get the other person to do something or tailor the conversation into my being right.  But clearly, I have a few more teency paces to go on my mini Buddha quest.  🙂  Somehow when friends are speaking, in a little cirisis, I tend to want to fix stuff.  So first I pull my judgement cape out and start making them wrong  (they are weak, afraid, non self respecting).  It’s a big list of what I label them with but unfortunately, not many of my inner mind sticky notes come from a space of pure open hearted accepting love.

Generally I want to make them listen to my profound wisdom and to guide them into some kind of mysterious light.  Often, I am full of shit.  But at the time, I think that I make Gandhi look shallow.  Also at the time, I would absolutely not label myself as judgmental, just as a loving friend who wants the best for her fellow home girl.  As I said, I am full of shit.

Basically, judgement is judgement and I can drown mine in maple syrup if I choose but it remains the same crappy shit, now drowned in delicious Canadian goo.  I do not listen with a fully open heart.  I rarely listen without interrupting and giving some version of pseudo intellectual brilliance.  Some times my speeches even seem to have a profoundly helping effect on them which makes me want to do more.  But I would question if they are always from a space of pure love.  I think often, they are to help my own world make sense.  I can not bare to have someone spout out a way of being that is so different to my tough arsed approach to life.  Hearing it makes me question my whole life so I start desperately spinning my bullshit wheel like a little ferret, trying to get them on board so we don’t all come tumbling down together.

The thing is, if they want and need to tumble down, then they at least deserve the chance to do that in their own way.  It kind of does my head in.  Where is this imaginary line?  When do you know when to shut up lovingly and when to, after letting your loved one speak, gently share something?  But only from a space of heart;  Not from a space of getting them on board , to change teams or to make sure they can fit into your mojo.  Life is tricky shit.

And for a singer, I have got some major repression stuff going on.  Basically, I feel that if someone is doing me a favor, that I have no right to ask for my needs.  So, right now, I am living with a friend whilst looking for a place and this creates a weird arsed power thing for me.  A part of me feels like I am back at my family home and I need to behave and cooperate or I’ll be out on my arse.  I also feel that I have no right to state my needs cos I should be grateful, not demanding in any way.  Then a part of me gets resentful about little unspoken things,  completely unnecessarily and no one is at fault but me.  I am the common equation.  I constantly create situations where I feel I have no right to state my truth cos it will be perceived as selfish or bad.  I’m forever terrified of being seen as a bad person.  Maybe a little part of me still feels that unless I’m in complete service to others, that I am indeed bad.  Clearly this is a crock, but the human mind is like a game of jenga.  Sticks everywhere and damned tricky to pull apart.

The trouble is that the only way through is being completely honest.  Bugger.  I can’t pretend this one away.  It’s weird cos for the first time, I feel that I’ve created a situation where I’m shifting some patterns and I know the friend I’m staying with actually loves having me here.  She is not just tolerating me.  I’ve only ever had this with my sister who’s house I know I could just rock up at, any hour, day night, with no time limit and have a monster basket of love and acceptance thrown my way.

This is an unusual experience for me in my life.  Often I create lots of feelings of conditional love around me.  Like I’m on trial.  They are waiting for me to fuck up and let me know that their love has a cap on it and a time limit.  Or so is my experience from my damaged space that love has limits.  The truth is that if I do not have the courage to listen with purity and no agenda then how can I ever find the courage to know that I also have the right  to speak with no backlash.  I feel that I need to consciously shift both simultaneously but that somehow the second will shift more naturally once I can actually listen from a place of love, thus opening up the space to be heard as well, when appropriate.  Not out of some weird manipulative game, but more out of the simple laws of nature and peace. If I don not allow full open expression from others, how can I tolerate it in myself?

My journey with Kat is seriously like being thrown in a car wash for 49 days.  It is a bit rough and ready but in the end, with lots of trust, you come out kind of sparkly.  Right now, I’m full of suds pouring out of my nose and arse in a very non delicate way.  Tomorrow is the final week, about living a love fulfilled and an enchanted life.  Gotta crawl before I fly.  Today I will practice aware listening and see where that gets me. 🙂  Ciao peeps xxxxx

 

 

 

 

 

 

Day 40 – Becoming a super self detective

In the movie ‘Just like Heaven’ with Reece Witherspoon, there is a super chillaxed dood working in the new age book store who tells a customer dealing with a persistent ghost ‘you are asking the wrong questions’.  It finally clicks to him to ask ‘why can I see her when no one else can?’ and the dood tells him, ‘Now, that is the right question?’

We are a wildly questioning pack, us earthlings.  We query everything.  But that doesn’t mean that it always helps us.  Sometimes, as Kat pointed out today, we ask questions to put us into further shame and trauma.  Today is about asking questions that help us move, shift and grow out of our slimy little mess.  Questions to get us unstuck.

So, I looked at key aspects of my life where I’ve had recurring stuckness or problems or whatever label we wanna give these pups.  Mine were:

1.Being single

2.Fear of taking risks and inaction in career

3.Money drama

4.Moving house drama

5.Committment / routine responsibility dramas with time or day jobs

What I found, when I started asking the right questions, were themes as thick and fat as the big fat sack I’ve been trying to hide them all in.

Basically, I’m a bit of chicken.  I’m fearful of taking risks with my heart and with my creative passions.  I’m not into pain and I tend to link these areas of my life with shit loads of pain.  By staying single I stay wildly safe and get to be in control and out of pain’s cheeky grip.  By staying frozen in my career I get to avoid further criticism and stay stuck in a nice safe victimy ‘life is too hard for me’ tantrum.  I get to prove that life is hard and I get to stay a child, waiting to be saved, taking no responsibility for my life.

The money drama is awesomely convenient cos it means that I don’t have the funds to move forward in my career.  These puppies are like a damned rubix cube, they are so interconnected!  You can’t press an album and do a web site with zero cash.  So, once again, I get to stay a child, angry at how hard and unfair it all is.  And I get to play the rebel trying to prove how cool I am by not simply fitting into the ‘system’ which I paint with a big black dirty soul destroying brush.

This works well with my alergy to routine or feeling imprisoned in a day job cos I create a great situation where I feel I can’t move forward cos of lack of funds but then create this kind of bullshit fake pride ego thing where I am too cool to simply sell my soul and join the system like all the other clones.  It reeks of judgement and leaves me in an absolute lose lose tug of war where any decision puts me into despair.  If I take a day job I feel guilty and ashamed that I sold out.  I fear that my soul will die there and then I use that as a reason to completly stop all creative endeavors.  But if I don’t do it, I allow my lack of funds to put me in quick sand, on hold from life, since I can barely do any activities and then feel like a complete failure for not moving forward in any way.  I make sure that I lose no matter what so that I keep feeling like crap cos some how that is kind of comfortable.  Growth is a scary place.  It means joining life, taking risks to be seen and being completely vulnerable with every breath.

My moving dramas are just a nice juicy cherry on my ‘fear of life’ cake.  Just when things start to look like maybe I’m getting into a joyful rhythm and starting to appreciate the little things and remember that life is actually peaceful and joyous, I do all I can to yank my arse out.  I like to create big juicy moving dramas where I either have to settle for a home I don’t like, thereby proving that life is hard and I was right all along, or I have to spend a few weeks at a friend’s place between the move, feeling like a failure and testing their love and acceptance of me.  It is all wildly boring.  But until I did these questions right now, I did not see it as ludicrously clearly as I am seeing it right now.

What these questions are showing me is that when I have the courage to have the right inquiry, things look surprisingly simply.  All the glitter and razzle dazzle fades away and I am just left with me, my bits of fear and a new path where only risk and courage belong.  This is the space I am now walking into.

Today I have to walk around looking at things saying: ‘I do not know the nature of this’.  This is either gonna be wildly cool or do my head in.  Tomorrow is listening with an open heart.  My poor little heart, struggling as it is to stay firmly shut, is cracking open like a tiny egg in a sweet new spring day nest.

 

Day 39 – Taking Responsibility for my Caca!

Responsibility and blame:  Don’t we all love this little juicy carrot?  I have developed a highly sneaky method of shifting responsibility that I think will impress you if not make you shake your head as though Someone has just smashed you over it with a frypan.

You see, I am a well read multi year self healp trouper.  I have seminared the fuck out of myself, cried big fat tears in front of hundreds of people and done cathartic shamanic ceremonies involving burning shitty ‘bits’ that I am releasing.  I am the queen of responsibility for my stuff.  And what I mean by that is that I totally get that I can’t blame any one else for how I feel or for the erratic  array of dramatic circumstances that I continually manage to create in my life.

But no body said I can’t blame God!

He/It/Spirit (insert your own title here) has been coping a shit load of flack from me since time began.  Basically, I do this faux-take responsibility cabaret number on him.  All song and dance.  But when it comes to the finale and things don’t go my way, I jump off the stage and start strangling the fuck out of him screaming “Why didn’t you help me?!  Why didn’t shit go my way? Why don’t you make my life easy for once… you narcisistic prick?!!!”  (NB.  For those of you struggling to read between the lines in my Oh so subtle prose, I am kind of somewhat jaded with God) 🙂

Basically, I think I’ve been wanting God to care for me in a way that my parents simply never could.  I was continually told as a child that life was hard and I simply could not do what I wanted.  I was told that life was full of suffering and  was not allowed to pursue creative interests.  Life was about accepting the shitness and just pushing through it.  What a pretty little parcel of joy.

Basically, I think I’ve spent the last 15 to 20 years being jaded about this picture presented to me as I grew up.  At random times I would try to set out to prove my parents wrong:  See!  I can do what I love!  I can become a struggling musician playing at dodgy pubs, trying to sing my pretty little acoustic ballads whilst truckloads of loud drunks tell me I sound like Jewel.  Now that is fulfillment.  I am a manifesting genius.  I somehow managed to create experiences where no matter what I did, I always ended up feeling that life was hard, and I was its wounded suffering victim.

So after years of dancing with this equation in lots of forms and self helping my way to pretend peace one skanky chakra at a time, I decided that really, my parents were fucking right.  I threw in the towel.  Life was a series of shit happenings all strewn together and God was clearly a rightful prick for not being a little more helpful and saviour like in it all.

I have this awesome and highly little entertaining pattern that I live:  Just when my life is starting to feel good, peaceful, full of love and stuff that smells curiously like joy, I create a killer drama to get me all jaded.  Now, because I have become a mini Buddha rock, this can no longer be a mini drama.  It has to be a big Kahuna to throw me off my rock of Godly peace.  So, just when I was starting to feel that maybe life was actually a lovely peaceful thing for me to deliciously inhale one sweet, gentle day at a time, with love pouring out of it tirelessly, I created some weird arsed Peruvian bug mystery to throw Agatha Christie and created a pseudo housing ‘crisis’.

Now, it’s interesting that I created all this drama in the midst of this process, just when I was really starting to enjoy the sweet idiosyncrasies of it all, the gentle musings of it like a cat laying in the sun.  Just when I started thinking that this whole drama theory was up to shit, there I went again, Queen of the manifesters of caca  (spanish for poo) creating turds so big that I really can’t jump over them.  Fyi – Caca jumping is not an Olympic sport!  Apparently they need to be dealt with.  And then I pull out my default, highly evolved reaction:  It’s not fair!  Why doesn’t God help me?! Why does God keep doing this to me?  And my final clincher:  Why is life so hard?!!!!!!  (Enter toddler sacreaming banshee ear drum psychotic breaking scream here!) 🙂

For those of you who do not play this game, I would not recomened it.  Not surprisingly, it takes a shit load of work to maintain this level of anger and anxst.  But amongst it all, I get the ecstatic fulfillment of being right.  (Highly evolved head space goes something like this:  See, I was fucking right!  Life is a sack of shit and you can all just get fucked you damned doo gooding inspirational fuck heads!)  Bless 🙂

So, I guess that my challenge right now, in this moment is to simply accept that I actually created EVERYTHING.  Life started getting easy and sweet and something inside me got confused and started missing the drama and crisis of it all.  I wanted to be right and prove that I was the suffering queen.  I wanted my crown.  But walking around with this crown is like walking around with a grenades as earrings:  a little sketchy!

So, all that I can do right now is breathe, give my self a little pat on the back for doing an exquisite job in the role of  Drama Queen, surrender my Crown (and sketchy earrings) and simply trust in life again.  This is about me stepping into a new idea that life is actually not out to hurt me but, if I persistently think that it will, then it will sure as Hell come back at me with a wild display of its hurtful goods, generous as it is.

It’s hard to give up being right.  As I said I’m pretty good at it in relationships, but I’m just getting that I’ve been holding a 20 year debate with the Big Guy over this one, a real ball buster and have been holding on by my teeth, my limbs long ago numb then severed from 20 years of non stop tugging.  I gotta throw this rope back out to sea cos maybe just maybe the whole world has better things to do that collectively set out to make my life caca.  Maybe, just maybe the only one who can make it anything at all is… me.

 

Day 38 – Being friendly to your biggest fear. Meeting the boogeyman.

Quotes for today : ‘Some of us don’t have relationships.  We just take hostages’.  GOLD Kitty Kat!  Gold!

At different times in my life, I can honestly say that I have taken the odd hostage or two, or twelve.  My wildly needy beast inside lured them in with my damned wit and charm, only to claw at them like an animal should they try to grow or move out of our pit of pain without me.  This is not reflective of my most enlightened state.

Today I had to pick my greatest fear ( she provided a killer list to help) and to allow it to write to me.  Then I had to write back, nurturing it and simply speaking truthfully, with love and respect.

My greatest fear is disappointment.  I have often chosen paralysis in my life rather than the risk of being further disappointed.  For me, this is mainly about expressing my creative gifts and thus being fulfilled by simply being and living the fullness of who I am.  I have never completely seurrended to this life.  I have taken steps but am always so traumatised by disappointment that I stop.  Disappointment at having loved ones tell me that they did not like something about my music,  disappointment at promoting workshops and having no participants, disappointed at advertising to doing healings with no client calls, disappointment as singing to a near empty room.  Disappointment at feeling like a worthless loser with nothing of value to offer.

Clearly, this lack of self faith has been the backdrop to my life and all the other players are merely responding to my dirty game of poker.  They meet my bluff.  I know this because no amount of incredibly positive feedback was ever enough to make me feel that I could keep going when disappointment came back with his gangster crew.  I allowed every disappointment to completely paralyze me, to stop even more of their shitty gang coming.  It is exhausting.

So, I let disappointment write to me.  The head honcho is a dark jaded tiger, that one.  He needs to look at the old glass half full idea.  Seriously, I don’t know how he hasn’t just gone and topped himself.  In fact, having him as such a team player in my life, I am not surprised that I have thought of doing this on more than one occasion.  The fear of Disappointment has been ruling me since I can remember.  It is as though I’m allergic to him and to his cousin pain.  I’ve never really managed to stay in action knowing that the joy of living my truth is greater than any possible or continual disappointment.

I think it’s because I am still so affected by what others think.  Those damned opinions of random earthlings.  Or my perceived opinions of them.  They have been ruling my life since I started breathing.  And my continual disappointment at feeling that I was not up to scratch for this nasty judgmental crew has been one big slab of a thorn in my side.  And the only way through is through.

The thing is that yes, some people will judge.  It may take me years to not be affected by perceived ‘failures’.  But can I find the strength to go on regardless?  Can I dig up my inner fuel to feed my own fire of life, knowing that I am the only way forward?  I wrote back to my D gang lovingly letting him know that this way of living really wasn’t working for me any more.  I can’t just keep opting out of life as though it was a B rate movie.  I can’t just keep sitting on the bench waiting for it to be 100% disappointment proof.  Life will have disappointments if I want to look at them that way.  But can I go on regardless?

I am starting to get that the only way to really move forward is to not just love who I am.  It is to have faith in who I am and to know that my road is worth walking.  It is about committing to a beautiful journey a midst rain, lightning, loneliness, cruelty.  It is still knowing that the journey of fully expressed living is a blanket of love and power, even when I don’t feel it.