Dear Self…

I have a friend who is experiencing the most terrible of times.  She is heartbroken, flat, without hope, overwhelmed and filled with grief.  Her pain and suffering are not illusory (despite my continuing belief that life is a game – it’s real enough while we are playing it) and the problems seem insurmountable.

I considered writing a letter to this friend, suggesting how she might help herself emerge from these black times, but that feels wrong.  I haven’t walked in her shoes.  I can’t tell her what steps she should take.

So instead, I’ll write my letter to my Self – the Self I was in 2008: the year I had left my teaching career, my painful, trustless, crumbling marriage, my beloved grown-up children, my home and friends, and moved to London to care for my mother.  

She couldn’t acknowledge her dementia, couldn’t see why life was becoming uncomfortable and confusing, so directed all her anger, fear and spite towards me.

I’ll write to the Self who lay shaking and crying on the spare room bed, after dodging most of the vicious blows and scratches for barring the front door at 3am and not allowing Mum to ‘go to the hairdressers’.  The Self who had turned the gas tap off on the hob again, after finding it hissing, and was wondering how long before the house would explode.  The self who knew that – one way or another, even if she didn’t blow us up – we both had to be out of that house within the next three months because there was no money left.  The Self who had nowhere to go and no one to turn to.  Those are shoes I’ve walked in.

Dear Self,

I know how black it feels.  I know how heavy all those fears and injustices are.  I know it’s 3.30 in the morning and you’re at the darkest hour – in every way.

You’re asking yourself what you have done to deserve this.  The answer is: you have grown strong.  This isn’t retribution; it’s a rite of passage.  You have given yourself the opportunity to be tested as never before – and to overcome each and every difficulty, to emerge stronger and more confident.

You’re protesting that you didn’t want this ‘test’ – you want to go back to when things were easier: not great, perhaps, but easier than this.

It doesn’t work that way.  Your life has been moving towards this point for quite a time now.  It’s here, and I’m here to help you through it.

Me?  Yes, I’m yourself – one of the millions of Selves you create with your every thought and emotion.  The me who is writing this lives eight years in your future.  She’s happy, comfortable and lives a full and independent life, surrounded by like-minded friends, with a pretty home of her own, inspiring children to teach and learn from and a garden to tend.  She has all you now dream of and more.  I don’t expect you to be able to imagine that life yet, but it’s waiting for you, dear Self, once you get through this time.

You think you’re alone.  You’re not.  All your past and future Selves are there with you.  They send you experience, wisdom and inspiration.  They are as real as the Self you are, lying on that bed.  You are – how can I explain ideas you haven’t yet encountered? – ‘entangled’ with more other Selves than you can imagine.  Everyone you have cared for and loved, shared with and learned from is there with you.  Just like those little sub-atomic quantum whatsits you’ve read of in science books, you and those people – the ones you see as ‘living’ and the ones you think of as ‘dead’ – become forever entangled.  That means you only have to lie there in the night asking for support and comfort, and they will come flocking to you.  You know, already, that we are more than our bodies.  You know we are also spirit.  That is how they reach you, care for you and hold you up, if you can just allow them in.

Dad’s there – of course he is.  He knows exactly what you’re enduring.  Grandma, too.  She’s barely left your side.  Trust that they are with you.

Now I want you to look into your life.  Yes, I know, the one that totally sucks.  Only it doesn’t – not TOTALLY.  I want you to find something in there – and it can be a tiny, seemingly insignificant something – that is better-than-awful.

Your body, for example – it’s working pretty well, isn’t it?  Certainly the sleepless, interrupted nights aren’t helping and the IBS has flared again, but your senses work, your legs, your arms…  Take that body tomorrow – once Mum’s gone to the daycare centre – and give it a treat.  Take it to the park.  Leave the sack of worries at the gates.  Stroll in the sunshine and watch the squirrels and deer, the movement of the trees and grass, the ripples in the river.  Listen and smell and immerse yourself in nature and don’t allow yourself to give a single thought to the worries or fears.  This is your healing time.

When you get back to the gates – yes – the problems will still be waiting for you.  There will be a difference, though.  You’ll have created a piece of your Self they can’t get to.  Nurture that ‘safe’ fragment of you; spoil her rotten!  She deserves it – YOU deserve it.

You don’t need others advising you about what to do, or telling you how much you matter to them or protecting you.  You’re very slowly and wonderfully growing into the Self you can be – that strong, independent woman you were born to become.

It will keep hurting for a while, and there will be problems to overcome, but trust.  You’re going to come out of all this just fine – and it will be you (with a million Selves to back you up) who does it.

Love

Your Self   (please…)

Who am I?

I’ve been re-reading Seth again… Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul.  It always sets me off on the meta-fizzies.

English: Prism Alchemical Art (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As usually happens, though, my ‘main’ reading material is synchronously supplemented by other gems that drop into my lap, so to speak, and allow me to explore the subject matter in different and fascinating ways.  One of these was a five year old post from Ask The Council which I hadn’t seen before, in which they speak about the difference between spirit and soul.  The other was this recent post on Life is a Journey…Not a Guided Tour which ends with these questions:

Do you have a favorite way to connect to God? Is there a special place you go to, or a particular ritual that helps you get there?

So, as I say, my thoughts are now meta-fizzing in all manner of directions and if I trace them back all the way to their root, what I’m considering – usually at around 3am – is what comprises ‘me’ in the broadest sense?

It’s not the easiest of questions to answer.  For example, for the past three nights, I’ve been having a dream – one of those ‘to be continued..’ dreams that carries on where it last left off.  I’ve woken up thinking, “This is ridiculous.  Why on Earth am I having a dream this stupid?” But it’s kept going until the task I was involved in was complete.  (Thankfully, this morning it was, I think…)

The dream, should you be interested, involved myself, another female and sometimes a child in covering a series of pyramids with a layer of what I can only describe as marshmallows and then with a top layer of – I hesitate to say this – what most closely resembled some non-conscious/non-living equivalent of huge rhinoceros-like creatures.  I can promise you it wasn’t easy.  None of us knew the reason for our toil; we only knew it had to be done, and done to a high standard.  All that, of course, involved some aspect of ME – an aspect, moreover, quite close to my conscious physical self.

Obviously, dreams aren’t to be taken literally and while I could blame the ones above on eating too much halloumi cheese (Mum always claimed cheese gave you weird dreams) I would prefer to interpret it thus:

The other two people were a friend and her young son – people I recently spent time with on a journey to some ancient, sacred places in the Mediterranean.  There we found wondrous but mysterious sites (represented by the pyramids).  In order for us to be able to grasp some of the mysteries, we need to become comfortable with them (hence the coating of soft marshmallow) and attach many awkward, hard-to-handle truths/myths/concepts to them, in order to be able to process the strange and wonderful experiences we had.  Released by sleep from the mundane day-to-day activities, we were free to do this processing at a deeper level.  No doubt at some point, it will seep into our consciousness.

So anyhow, who-I-am runs, in my mind, something like this:

All-That-Is or Source or God/Goddess or what you will, is just that –   ALL     THAT     IS.

View image | gettyimages.com

There are myriad aspects of this ALL.  Like the globs in a lava lamp, it can separate and recombine at will and does so in ways my little mind can’t begin to imagine, way beyond the limits of time or space.

One of this infinite number of aspects is my Spirit.  Looking at it fractally, my Spirit can be seen as my macrocosm – the sum of the parts of me.

This Spirit, too, has an infinite number of aspects.  These, too, can divide or weave together as suits them best.  They include a number of ‘souls’ – parts of the Spirit which have chosen to temporarily break away and experience a physical life.  One of those is the ‘ME’ sitting at the computer writing this.  The others are my reincarnational lives – ‘past’ and ‘future’ in human terms, but all co-existing and constantly influencing each other.

To complicate it still further, each physical ‘ME’ personality creates an infinite range of potential selves – what Seth calls ‘probable selves’.  Each time I make a choice from a range of options, the other options – those I’ve currently rejected – have a life of their own and head off along parallel paths.  I am, in a very real sense, the creator.

Each of my soul-personalities (‘lives’ if you prefer) has a range of ‘bodies’, from the dense, physical skin-suit I walk around Planet Earth in, through the etheric (spiritual Sat-Nav) and on to the astral, mental, higher-mental and causal selves, which variously link them to one-another, to the Spirit and, eventually, to All-That-Is.

Since the choices and experiences of physical life feed directly into Creation, there are other aspects of All-That-Is who guide and assist ME throughout the experience.  I can interpret these in various ways, from hunches, dreams and intuition, through synchronicities and serendipitous meetings with other soul-personalities, to spirit guides, angels, gods and goddesses or however my current cultural references permit me to interpret them.

So, to return to Susan’s questions…  In one sense, of course, I’m never separated from God, since I am part of the ALL.  However I’d be the first to admit that the connection is usually tenuous, to say the least, from my conscious perspective.  I’ve been on this path a long time in Earth years now, and I’ve learned to dowse with a crystal pendulum over my computer keyboard, in order to converse with my Guides, my Higher Self and even the Higher Selves of those particularly close to me.

My other way of making that contact is to lie in bed, with eyes closed and reach my hands upwards, palms outstretched, until I feel a tingling in them.  This I interpret as ‘healing’.  If I keep my hands there long enough, they begin to move by themselves, settling for a few moments over various parts of my body and often over the main chakra points.  When they come to rest on the bed, I feel for more healing, imagine a flame cupped between them, and mentally invite anyone I know who is in need of healing or comfort to step through the flame and share my connection to All-That-Is.