On my Nerves

Well this summer is being interesting with regards to health issues…  Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with a detailed account of my symptoms.  It’s just that I’ve been given a rather interesting alternative way to look at things, which I thought readers might find thought-provoking.

To summarise briefly: July was more or less handed over to Covid.  I was laid out for around 10 days and slowly reached a point when there were a few things I could manage to do apart from sleeping, coughing and aching.  I’m aware, though, that I got off far more lightly than many, so was grateful for that.

Early in August, just after I’d started feeling good again, I was struck down by an excruciating condition called Trigeminal Neuralgia (= big trapped nerve in face).  Imagine the worst earache/sinus pain/headache/toothache/neck pain you can, taking turns to attack every few minutes and you’ve got the idea.  After that my jaw swelled up so that I looked like some kind of human-guinea pig hybrid.

Reluctantly (not a fan of allopathic medicine when it can be avoided) I contacted my GP and dentist.

The former is fairly convinced it’s caused by an infection or stones in the salivary gland.

Eesh!

“Not big pebbles – very tiny sort of grains” he assured me.  So I’m waiting for an ultrasound scan for that.

The dentist feels it’s a back tooth that needs extracting.  He’s going to x-ray, once I can open my mouth far enough for the plate to be fitted in.

Meanwhile antibiotics and painkillers and feeling rubbish.

Now to the interesting bit…

I mentioned my condition to a friend.  This lady happens (I tend to have that sort of friend!) to be a channel for a group of spirit beings.  She kindly checked with them.  They said my vibration was being raised to help me with a book I’m writing and to deal with communication generally.  Were there things I needed to say?  Things that needed to be opened up?

I thanked her and agreed to consider that.  It was certainly a new way to look at my ailments.  As I meditated, I saw an image of my daughter as an adorable but feisty toddler, clenching her fists and yelling, “Get oss my nerbs!”  That was her way of telling us that we were ‘getting on her nerves’ and she wanted us to stop.

I considered the idea that both types of ‘nerves’ might be connected.  We speak about our nerves being frayed or shredded, situations getting on our nerves, something hitting a raw nerve…

I decided to check with someone who would be able to explain all this to me.  Another of my friends is a medical intuitive.  I asked for his take on the whole thing.

He told me the information from the guides was accurate and that the insight about my child was relevant.  Covid, he told me, had attacked the protective coating of my nerves – both physical and metaphorical – making me vulnerable to damage.  He talked me through a visualisation, in which I saw the affected nerve as a long, thin and very sensitive slow worm.  Then I saw a heavy boot coming down on its body.  The creature was in agony and was writhing this way and that, trying to get free.  That represented the pain in various parts of my head.  The boot represented people or situations that were trapping me and compromising my freedom to express myself or to live as I chose.

I could certainly accept that.  I’d realised earlier in the year that I tend to be a ‘people pleaser’, to say ‘yes’ when I should say ‘no’, and had started to take steps to rectify that.  Seems I’d let it slip, though.

In the second part of the visualisation, I saw my ‘slow worm self’ in a large red sphere – a sort of holding bay where I would be safe while my human self worked at clearing the difficult energy (boot) that was sapping me of strength.  I noted that the nerve pain had largely ceased once the inflamed swelling had appeared.

Together we identified a few boot sources – people who were delightful as friends or relatives, but had a tendency to use me in ways that helped them, but were less beneficial to me.

“So,” I said, “the worm needs to turn – to fill my life with the pleasant, positive, optimistic aspects and ditch the pessimism and negatives.  Sounds a tad selfish…”

“If you see it as bringing light to the world, sharing your gifts and not allowing others to sap your energy, does that feel better?” he asked.

I had to admit it did.

Happy to say, my symptoms are becoming far milder.  That could be the antibiotics or it could be the energetic clearing I’m doing… but it’s probably both.

The Curing

I feel safest with stories.  They soothe me.  And the old stories are the best of all.

Today I want to share an old story with you – one that came to me and was most anxious to be shared.  Even the synchronicities that drew this story to me tell a tale in themselves.

I live in England, where currently entire households in which anyone has a fever or a cough must self-isolate for 14 days.  When my grandchild developed both these symptoms, her mother was faced with trying to work from home and care for both children.  I live far away, but decided to have a daily one hour video talk session with the children, giving my daughter a chance to get some uninterrupted work time.  I’m an ex-teacher, so we play maths games, draw, read, write and learn together.  It’s a delightful time for all of us.

I went to my still fairly extensive children’s book collection (who can throw books away?) looking for stories that would interest a 5 year old and her 8 year old brother.  Almost at once my eyes fell upon Hugh Lipton and Niamh Sharkey’s beautiful ‘Tales of Wisdom & Wonder’.  It’s a glorious collection of folk tales from around the world.

On day 1, we read the first story, a delightfully silly tale of a monkey who demonstrates that we should be very careful what we ask for.

Last night I sat down to read the second story – a Cree tale called The Curing Fox – in order to re-familiarise myself with it.

The first sentence told of a little girl who became desperately ill with a high fever, dreadful cough and breathing difficulties.

Ah.  My initial instinct was to put this one aside.  Who knows what fears and nightmares the children are having as Covid-19 spreads through the world?  Then I thought deeper.  Why, of all the stories in my bookcase, had I been led to this one, at this time?  That almost imperceptible tingling that tells me synchronicity is drawing me in had appeared.  I read the story.

Mr Lipton tells it wonderfully, but here is the briefest summary:

The child’s anxious parents summon an ancient wise woman, who listens very carefully to the rattling in the girl’s chest.  She tells the couple that she hears from it that a small, sickly female fox is undertaking an arduous journey through the snow outside.  When the child coughs, the wise woman hears the sound of the fox’s paws breaking through the crust of the frozen snow.  The father offers to track and bring back the fox.  As he journeys, the wise woman is able to track his progress, and that of the starving fox, by observing the little girl’s illness; when she senses that the hunter has stopped for the night and lit a fire, the girl has a high fever.  Finally he catches the fox, cradles her in his arms and takes her back to the village.  The mother is told to feed the fox.  It then curls up and sleeps.  The child, too, falls into a deep sleep.  Eventually, both fox and girl awake at the same moment.  The parents are asked to feed the fox again and then release it.  The little girl watches from the doorway as the fox runs off.  As it disappears, so does her illness.  The wise woman asks them whether the fox cured the girl or she cured the fox.  The mother replies that the woman cured them both.  The old lady just smiles.

I sat and pondered the wisdom of that story.  Half awake and half asleep, I thought my way back into that First Nation culture and bank of knowledge that showed such subtle yet deep and abiding connectedness.  I wondered at the idea that the symptoms of an illness could, with the right level of focus, lead the wise to find and alleviate suffering elsewhere.  I marvelled that, in taking steps to alleviate that suffering, the illness itself would vanish.  Further and further I meditated my way into the meaning this story held for me.  I thought of the symptoms – the fever, the choking cough, the inability to breathe.  Clearly the girl stands for us in our present crisis.

And the fox?  What does she represent?

The words that floated into my heart were, “Think of the World’s cough.”

 

It was from the Cree that this prophecy came:

 

 

In Your Heart

Here we are in March, getting on for a quarter of the way into 2019, and I’m getting a feel for what this year is all about – for me, anyway.  This seems to be the Year of the Heart.

When I first moved to Glastonbury (known in some circles as the Earth’s Heart Chakra, although I didn’t know that at the time,) ten years ago, I’d neatly packaged my heart away – stuffed it deep inside myself and decided that just surviving from day-to-day would be a major achievement.  In those early days, it was.  I’d been – I felt then – betrayed, abandoned and let down by just about everyone and everything I’d given my heart to and for the first few months, those betrayals just kept coming, thick and fast.

I remember renting a tiny annexe behind a shop with my fast-dwindling savings, rooting around in the short-dated reduced items at the supermarket and having no income, no prospects and no friends here.  It was a true dark night of the soul which lasted well into 2009.

Eventually I stopped wallowing in self-pity and reached out to others for help.  I found a lovely, intuitive life-coach who helped me to heal my dried-up, fragile, damaged heart, to begin to love myself and to expect and accept the love of others.  That turned my life around.  Soon I felt resilient, hopeful and learned to put out to the Universe for what I needed and wanted.  Paid work, new opportunities, acquaintances and friends soon appeared.  By the end of 2009, I was in a better place than I could ever have imagined and life was good.

It was around New Year of 2018 that I agreed with the Universe that I was now stable enough and ready for the next phase – for new challenges.

They arrived.

It was not an easy time.  I needed to stop sitting in front of my computer pondering metaphysical conundrums and to get up and deal with very physical problems.  It was all lower chakra stuff – root survival and safety for people I loved, followed by the gut-wrenching sacral issues connected to parenthood and the deepest emotional ties.  Depression and anxiety ricocheted around my family.  Gradually issues of power and control surfaced.  I worked to establish and maintain a safe and fair life for those who had lost everything, helping them to regain their inner sun.  It took bravery and resilience I didn’t realise I’d built up, but that’s the way life works.  We don’t get the challenges until we are ready to cope with them.

Then it was back to Glastonbury – back to the heart, in every way you can imagine.

Two people very close to me have had their lives changed by heart disease in these past few months.  In both cases it was very sudden, very unexpected and is throwing up massive challenges to their lives.  It brings up issues of mortality, of independence and dependency, of life-changing choices and ways of managing day-to-day.

At the same time, a friend and I have been working our way through Gregg Braden’s ‘Human by Design’ book and some workshops based around this.  It’s all about using the heart’s intelligence – the ‘little brain in the heart’ – and aligning it with our mental processes.

Then, as the final piece to the puzzle, I realised (as I said in my last post) that my ‘muses’ – the spirit guides, channelled messages and special intuitive humans I’d come to rely on for answers were closing the doors.  I tried one last time to contact Koimul, the Spirit Guide/s who helped me through so many difficult times.

JAN YOU CAN PICK UP ALL YOU NEED IN YOUR HEART

I was told. And when I asked why they were all moving away and leaving us alone, I was simply told,

YOU HAVE ALL YOU NEED FROM US

When I asked if they would return, there was no answer.  The crystal pendulum swung in a wide, empty circle, indicating that there would not be a reply to that.

So we lovingly took our leave of one another.  Now I need to trust that my heart and heart chakra are ready and strong enough to move me on through the twists and turns of this new chapter in my game of life.  They are, or I wouldn’t have brought myself here.

Loved

Looking at it from a purely personal and intensely human perspective, what I really didn’t need, after the agonies of the past year, was for another horrible, heartbreaking tragedy to affect one of my children.

He’d had a tough few years, with broken trust and unrequited love and affection and then the pain of watching his sister, nephew and niece go through all they’ve been through and by mid summer, he was deep in the abyss of anxiety and depression.  He worked so hard to pull himself out – therapy, counselling, even meds, when all else seemed to be failing.  Then he announced that he’d found a solution.  He would get a cat.

Now we’ve not been a pet-owning family.  There was the rabbit, when they were kids, but none of them took much notice of it, once the novelty had worn off, and it was left to me to care for it.  Still, he was set on this plan and duly acquired the most adorable little kitten.  He lavished money and endless affection on the little scrap and the kitten adored him back.  The pain and darkness left my son’s eyes and he positively quivered with the love he felt for his tiny pet.  We all remarked on the change it had made to his life.  The urge to care for something small and helpless was so strong in him – the parenting urge, if you like – that, once it was fulfilled, he threw himself back into his job and his life again and was the happy, resilient young man he’d been before.

Was there some seed of doubt and concern lurking just below the surface in my mind?  I watched them playing together and thought, “Oh I just hope that cat lasts a long, long time.  He’s such a central part of my boy’s life.”  But as I thought it and willed it to happen, I couldn’t visualise it.  I couldn’t see the kitten as an adult cat and the two of them moving together into a contented middle age.  That was the seed of worry that wouldn’t go away.

Then, last week, my son called to say the kitten wasn’t well and seemed to have some sort of infection.  The vet gave antibiotics, but was concerned enough to do a blood test.  Each day my son would phone me, saying some new problem had emerged; the cat was losing weight rapidly.  It culminated in an emergency night-time dash to a specialist vet hospital, many miles away, where he was told the infection was a deadly virus that was destroying one organ after another.  My son said goodbye to his kitten – only five months old – and embarked on the long journey home by himself.

While the brief illness lasted, I’d begged friends to send prayers, healing and positive, healthy thoughts to my son’s pet.  I’d tried so hard myself.  I worked and worked to visualise the cat healthy, the cat fully grown, the cat alive, but the pictures wouldn’t come.  All I could see was the little kitten, skinny and with huge, wide eyes.  I believe, one hundred percent, that we can affect the future.  It isn’t set in stone.  There are myriad possible outcomes for every situation.  With sufficient focus, we can nudge towards a better-feeling future.  So why, having managed similar things so many times in the past, could I, and all those working with us, not encourage this little creature to live?  Is it that some ‘probable futures’ are just so improbable – like the cat growing wings or learning to play cricket – that we can’t move into them, and an adult life for this kitten was one of those?

I asked my Guides and was told there had been a ‘contract’ between the man and kitten.  It had come into his life to show him that he is loveable and utterly deserving of love.  I asked why that very happy and beneficial set-up couldn’t have lasted longer and the short, brutal response was that it had been achieved and the cat’s job was done.  Now, I was assured, my son would be able to recognise and feel and accept the waves of love that would come to him from others in his life.

I’m trying to take comfort from that.  Maybe my boy is, too.  But it still feels so harsh, so cruel.  Now I’m working on visualising a happy, fulfilled and love-fulled life for this very special young man.  Join me.

 

Stasis – Unlimited

It’s been ages since I last did a course.  I chose one of those science-meets-spirituality online ones.  It struck me it would be a good way to settle back into my life, after all the disruptions of last year – allowing someone else to lead me, gently, into my old ways of learning, musing and wondering.

So there I was, following the course leader’s instructions and working my way into an altered state.  All fine and good.  Next, we were to ask questions and allow the heart to provide an answer.  The yes/no queries worked perfectly, but then we were instructed to ask our hearts, “What do you need from me right now?”

Clear as a bell, the answer came back:  STASIS.

Sorry, what?

An image of those spacecraft pods you get in sci-fi films flashed into my mind, the ones with rows of people suspended somewhere between life and non-life waiting to be brought back to themselves before landing on some far-distant planet.

To be honest, I didn’t get much from the rest of the module I was studying.  I was too busy thinking about stasis – wondering if it had some other meaning I wasn’t aware of; wondering how and why it applied to me; wondering why my heart would wish me, or itself, to be in that state.

The next question we were supposed to ask was, “What do you want me to know right now?”  We were told that the answers would be brief – a short phrase or even a single word.  My heart is clearly less loquacious than its bearer.  Another single word answer: UNLIMITED.

Since then, I’ve pondered on these odd messages.  I checked ‘stasis’ for other meanings.  There are medical ones to do with veins and something about ancient Greek tyrants, but I settled on ‘a period of inactivity or equilibrium’.

(Yes, my heart is doing that glowy, expanding thing that means ‘yes’ as I type this.  I’m simply learning its way of communicating, the way I did with my pendulum, when I first started dowsing.)

My heart has been through a great deal over the last year – all those dramas and emotional upheavals, anxieties and accomplishments, terrors and triumphs.  It needs, now, a period of stasis to recover, to rest, to relax.  It needs me to wrap up in a blanket, light the log burner and spend these winter days regaining my equilibrium.

After that, our potential together is – unlimited.

 

 

The tale of the parent – without a storybook ending

My body isn’t used to the time change yet.  We gained an extra hour this weekend, moving from British Summertime to Greenwich Mean Time.

That’s why I found myself wide awake early this morning.  That’s when I found myself half-remembering something from dreams and something from imagination, and I decided to try to turn it into a book for my two little grandchildren – a book in which everyone, even a parent, is fallible.

Not many people dare to write such books.  In children’s stories, even an erring parent usually comes right in the end.  He might be a loveable rogue or she may be scatty and disorganised, but these storybook parents – at least in stories for small children – always put the children first, always redeem themselves, always learn from their mistakes.

I wish life was like that for real children.  I wish there hadn’t been so many children in my life who had parents consumed by addictions, parents who turned to crime, parents who ran off to enjoy a new, carefree life without the drudgery of parenthood.  I wish two of those children hadn’t been my own grandchildren.

This sounds harsh, I know.  But life for those children IS harsh.
I remember the child who told me, “If my dad had liked me as much as he liked whisky and beer, he might have stopped drinking it when I asked him to, and then he wouldn’t have died.”
I remember the boy who said, “I can’t wait to grow up and get a wife. We’ll have lots of kids and I’ll look after them properly and never put them in danger, because I know how bad that feels.”
I remember the child who whispered, “I think my new teacher really likes me, so I don’t ever want her to find out what my dad did, because if she does, she might think I’m like him, and then she won’t like me anymore.”
I remember the little girl who would come into class with bags under her eyes, telling how Mum had crawled into her bed when she got back from the nightclub and spent ages recounting all her drunken escapades.
I remember the seven-year-old who sat with wide, frightened eyes, saying, “I don’t really like Daddy as much as I did before. I still love him, because he is my father, but I’m quite frightened of him now.”
And then there’s the little boy who told me, firmly, “Mums and dads ALWAYS argue. They all do.  Me and my sister go and hide in one of our special places when they start shouting. We take care of each other.”

So how to do it?  How to let children with far-less-than-perfect parents know they are not alone?  How to empower them to cope with a life where there won’t be a fairy godmother to wave a wand or a Damascene conversion that will make everything wonderful again?

The answer, so my pre-dawn inspirations suggest, lies in Chemistry (or Alchemy, or Magic, depending how you want to describe it).  So the story – if I ever manage to write it – will show the pure and inexhaustible supply of Magic that lies behind and within everyday changes.  It will show how intention can bend and shift those changes in the structure of life and of lives.  The wayward parent may choose not to change, but the lives of those around him will change.  Small children will become wiser, stronger and resilient.  They will grow as the story unfolds and they will gradually move beyond their fears and forge a better destiny because of the painful experiences they’ve endured.

I just hope I’m up to the task.

Your point being…?

Another of those long, rambling conversations I tend to have with Life, usually around 3am.

I’m saying something along the lines of, “So you’ve thrown just about everything at me this year, turned me upside down, inside out and catapulted me from highs to lows and back again.  Could you just run me through the purpose for all that one more time?”

And Life sits there, smiling calmly and replies, “Do you need to have a purpose?”

That pulled me up sharp.

Do I?

It’s a huge, broad, sweeping question, isn’t it?  For me, it touched a raw nerve.  I’m a people pleaser – the sort who always feels happiest when I’m making things better for other people.  It’s what I’ve always done.  That’s been The Purpose.  This year more than most, I’ve been on a mission to do just that.

Oh yes, before anyone feels the need to throw in that ‘love yourself’ maxim, let me assure them that I’ve done the work on that one too.  Took me quite a few decades and the help of a very skilled life coach to get there, but I do now always add my needs into the equation.  Despite that, though, I’m at my best when I’m working flat out to sort out a difficult problem and make life better for someone dear to me.

Such work has totally consumed me since February.  And now – uh – my work is done.  Yesterday I found the vision board I’d drawn back in the spring.  It showed my little family safe in a new home, reunited with all their possessions, after having had to flee for their lives, settled and smiling and happy again most of the time with a comfortable house and tidy garden to enjoy and new friends calling round to visit.

Almost single-handedly, and while helping to heal some of the emotional pains and fears of three traumatised people, I’ve transformed their garden from this… to this.  Even finished it on my daughter’s birthday!

So now what?  Is Life about to hurl me headlong into some new drama, so that I can once more prove my own worth and stamina to myself?  I suspect not.  I suspect that I’ve brought myself to this point so that I can stop and wonder whether I need to have a purpose.

Is just being enough?

 

 

An Open Letter to The Universe

Dear Universe,

Here we are then – another morning, another day in the Life.  Let’s decide how this one is going to go.

I have to give you credit.  I opted into this particular Lifetime in order to expand and learn through experiences and requested from you that I should have some, er, interesting scenarios to work through in order to achieve that.  You, dear Universe, certainly delivered.

Here I am in the middle of one of them.  It’s arguably the most complex, challenging and painful of the lot.  Am I learning from it?  Certainly.  Is it allowing me to expand my consciousness and understanding?  I suppose it must be.  Am I flailing about, totally out of my depth and panicking for much of the time?  Definitely.

So back to basics for a moment.  Life does not happen to me; I happen to Life.  It’s very easy to forget that when I’m in the middle of a Life drama.  It’s easy to sink into victimhood and wallow about there yelling, “This isn’t fair!  This isn’t my fault!  Someone else caused all these problems.  I didn’t choose them.”

Well no, in everyday terms I would never have chosen to have people I love suffer what they are going through.  It is all too easy to blame the perpetrators.  If those people hadn’t done those things, Life wouldn’t be this way.  If those people hadn’t done those things, I wouldn’t be here, having to deal with the fallout, day after day.  If those people hadn’t done those things… something else would have shown up in my Life to allow me to learn and expand and find ways of dealing with the issues here, because that’s what I asked for when I began this Lifetime, and that is true for everyone involved.

So let’s dispense with all the victimhood and blame and anger – the easy stuff – and move on to happening to my Life.

This is what I’m learning, you see, Universe.  You’ve given me some real humdingers to deal with in the past and I’ve often seen myself or – worse yet – people I care about, suffering, and been willing to blame others for that.  It is hugely difficult to see that every single individual concerned acted from what he or she considered to be a reasonable or practical perspective.  They each carried out what they considered to be the best or most expedient response to a difficult situation.  It’s not my task to question their actions or to blame them.  It’s my task to take steps forward and move myself and my loved ones into a safer, more secure and comfortable situation.

My little family – the woman, the child and the toddler – are in a safe, though temporary, home.  We are making plans to move them into a relatively safe and secure permanent home.  We are taking steps to make that permanent home safer and more secure, but that is still not reaching to the nub of it.  Security devices, high fences and locked gates may help to protect against physical intruders, may help to make people whose previous home has been violated, whose lives have been threatened, whose trust has been destroyed feel slightly better, but the real work is to build up inner protection.

Each of them is traumatised.
The smallest is terrified by loud noises, raised voices or passers by who remind her in some way of the ‘bad men’.
The child has just built himself a dreamcatcher – a wooden pop gun beside his bed that ‘shoots’ nightmares into a hoop, from which they are projected into a baked bean tin across the room.  For him this is serious work – serious self preservation.
For the mother, who seeks to protect and nurture the little ones while dealing with her own loss, grief and traumatic stress, there is a long, slow and painful journey.  I can see the glimmerings of a stronger, wiser, truer woman emerging.  I can see tiny steps towards the rebuilding of shattered self confidence.  I can see a brighter, clearer future that far surpasses the web of lies and deceit that were lurking and waiting to sabotage the past.

My task is to hold that image and project it to you, Universe, because then you will mirror it back to us.

Yours in love and gratitude,

Jan

 

 

Lost in Conurbation

“Stone walls do not a prison make
Nor iron bars a cage.”

wrote Richard Lovelace, back in the 1600s.

I’d sometimes wondered, passingly, how true that was.  Could the human spirit rise above physical incarceration and fly free, despite all?

Life – considerate as ever – has given me the opportunity to find out.  Not, I hasten to add, that I have been walled up in some dreadful prison cell.  I’m free to come and go as I wish and my surroundings are clean, dry and comfortable.  It is, nonetheless, a cell.

I will be living, through the rest of spring and summer and well into autumn, in a square white room.  There is a tiny shower room, but all other aspects of life must be accomplished here.  Where once I had rooms, now I have corners – one for cooking, another for sleeping, an eating, relaxing and working area.  Where once I had a garden to tend, stuffed with nodding daffodils, bluebells and tulips, I now have a single pot of hyacinths on a white windowsill.   Where once I watched the sun set amidst distant hills across the Somerset Levels, now it drops below a tower block across the car park from the one I live in.

My windows look out on to other blocks of flats.  A hollow-eyed woman with dark hair sometimes peers out from the one opposite.  A gaunt man coughs and gasps in the window as he drags at a cigarette from the room below hers.  Beyond the blocks are housing estates on two sides and roads on the others.

Yes, it would be easy to sink into self pity in this sterile, soulless, monotone place.  On my first night here, I lay in bed listening to the sound of traffic, far below, on the dual carriageway that leads to London – a soft, irregular swishing sound that rose to a crescendo and fell away again.  It could almost have been taken for waves, breaking on a pebble beach, I decided, before noticing that this gave me no comfort at all.  I’ve never much enjoyed the sea – too wide, too cold, too unpredictable.

I have with me the few comforts and essentials I was able to cram into a relative’s small hatchback and a few sticks of furniture I’ve borrowed, or bought from local second-hand shops.  It’s a world away from my lovely cottage, my dear friends and my contented life over in the west.

So is my spirit broken by this cruel exile?

Slightly battered, perhaps, in these early days of readjustment, but far from broken.  This has become an exercise in actively seeking out the positive.  Since my arrival two weeks ago, a froth of may blossom has covered the narrow strip of wilderness – a haven for dog-walkers and fly-tippers – that separates the estate from the trunk road, so that I now barely see the lorries and vans hurtling towards the city.  Tiny bluetits cling impossibly to vertical brick walls outside my window as they gather some form of sustenance from them.  Beyond the flyover, a single green field can be glimpsed obliquely from one window, if I position my chair carefully.

The greatest help, though, has come from the two little children I have come here to be with.  They and their mother have been permanently uprooted from their home, in the most traumatic of circumstances.  They, too, are living in temporary accomodation nearby, but with no hope of returning to their home and friends.  They have lost so much, yet they teach me, each day, about positivity and optimism.

“Grandma has a lake in her garden,” the six-year-old informed his mother, referring to the drainage ditch that crosses the small piece of grassland beside the flats.
Scale is unimportant. For us, now, it is a river, with meanders and tiny waterfalls created by twigs and leaf litter.

His three-year-old sister can easily spend ten minutes peering with total delight into a patch of wild violets she found there, stroking its petals reverently, or having earnest conversations with a passing beetle.

Even in my room, their imagination and creativity fills the space with magic.  A side table became an enchanted forest home for the fairies for a while.

A garden, bath and sofa were created in a box for their toys.

For all of us, now, Life insists that we build our own joys and delights and that we trust to its bounty and goodness to allow my little family to heal and rebuild their lives, so that I can ultimately return to mine.

I won’t be the same person who left, though.  There is richness in this experience that will stay with me forever and I am deeply grateful for it.

 

 

Trying to Re-Member

There’s a group I attend from time to time here in my town.  Each week they provide cups of every kind of herbal tea you can imagine, biscuits or cake, and a speaker.  The talks range over many areas and subjects, but they must always be positive.  That seems to be the only rule.

I’d never heard of that night’s speaker, but his subject was ‘The Eight Elements’ and partly because I’d been pondering on elements for quite a while and partly because he was speaking as a follower of Krishna – a Truth quite new to me – I decided to go along.

The gentleman stood calmly before us, looked around the room at the sea of faces and announced, with total certainty, “I’m not the only person in this room who has been to the breaking point.  I’m not alone in having reached a point in my life where everything I lived for, everything I believed, everything I cared about was swept away, leaving me lost, broken and utterly alone.”

All around the room, heads nodded slowly, solemnly, mine included.

The talk was excellent.  Krishna’s take on the elements was oddly familiar and linked in well with the Egyptian, Greek, Shamanic, Medieval and alchemical ideas I’d been reading and thinking about.  What I was left with above all, though, was that idea of the breaking point – the need to go through what feels at the time to be a crisis, a disaster, a destruction of all you’ve held dear.  It is the tower card in the tarot – the card I used to fear above all others, back in the days when my life was settled and sorted (although very far from perfect).

I thought of the many friends and family members I’ve seen hit that point, whether through a sudden incapacitating illness, a financial meltdown, a job loss, a relationship breakup or what’s commonly called a nervous breakdown.  Often – as in my own case – it’s a mixture of several of these.  Like the body of Osiris, we are broken up, hacked into pieces and scattered in the waters of Life.

There follows a time of the most awe-ful emptiness.  We shut down.  We exist from moment to moment, day to day, with no clear idea of how or why we are still functioning.  This is the time we need to hide away, to withdraw from everyone and everything, knowing at some instinctive level that we require peace, and that healing will eventually flow from this.

Despite the kindness and ministrations of others, there’s ultimately only one place that healing can come from.  It comes from within.  It comes from our soul-selves – the part of us that is, and has always been, whole and complete.  Slowly and painfully, we begin to re-member ourselves – to put ourselves back together.  This time, though, we will be different.  We will have shed the limiting beliefs that we are not complete without money/ health/ family/ possessions/ career/ home/ friends or whatever we relied upon for stability and identity in the past.  That’s not to say we won’t regain or rediscover some of these, but they will no longer take centre stage.

Now we will have re-membered who we truly are.  We will recognise that we are whole and complete in ourselves.  We are not – primarily – parent or employee, partner or owner.  We are infinite aspects of the great I AM and as such, we have no limits.

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore, trust the physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility.”

Kahlil Gibran: The Prophet