When I started this blog in 2011, I had just stepped through a crack in what I confidently thought of as “my world” before I (not unlike Alice in Wonderland) found myself looking at a completely different version of reality. In hindsight, I see that nothing was ever quite the same again and that March of that year was like a portal into completely new territory which delivered completely different results and, in the end, a vastly different lifestyle and a totally reinvented sense of self. I hardly lay claim to the person I was before as the me that I now know as myself; not because I have abandoned any part of that “me” but because I have released her from so many calcified layers of belief and distortion that I hardly recognise them both as the same person.
I had, in effect, hopped timelines and was now on a brand new trajectory that had “super-accelerated expansion of conscious awareness” as its unnamed focus; which has been my absolute focus ever since, becoming the pivot-point of everything that garners my attention across every single aspect of life, if I’m honest, whereas I had no idea what this even meant beforehand. Around that time, something burgeoning inside me, like a fresh green shoot breaking the soil, convinced me that I had to find a way to express myself to others, to “think out loud” as I went about my reinvigorated exploration of life, albeit in the closely guarded and not terribly “public” form of writing a blog with a very niche audience. From nowhere, I seemed to uncover this new found urge to “express” things that had never even occurred to me before; I also summoned the necessary courage to reveal this somewhat bizarre-sounding portion of myself through the written words of Scattering the Light, which would have been quite unthinkable even a month earlier. Five and half years later, I am taking pause to consider what that was all about and where it has led me to since.
When I look back to that extraordinary time – March 2011 – I see how it presented me with the first hairline crack between worlds that turned into the gaping fissure that blew my world wide open at the end of 2012. I had been desperately unwell for coming up five years and had recently undergone a series of “treatment sessions” – really, initiations into a vastly broader understanding of myself – that were the start of an awakening process that is ongoing and has no end. Before that time (I now see clearly) I was really fast asleep; locked up in so many layers of multi-lifetime trauma and conditioning that I had anesthetized myself into a state of near paralysis. I had locked myself down into such a tightly fitting corset of routine, responsibility and addiction as my way of suppressing or distracting myself from all that lurked in the secret vault of myself that the magnitude of all my untended trauma was starting to crack through my very biology as bizarre health issues that only terrorized me into even more versions of the most untenable kind of systemic overwhelm. I was so banded up in by the straightjacket terrors of a world I no longer trusted or felt supported by that this had made itself manifest as all the most restrictive pains in my body. When I first became far too unwell to continue working, I discovered painting as a kind of therapy that “took me out of myself” and it started to work its magic by opening me up to other layers of myself yet this was still taking place at a slow and strictly linear pace. It took an acceleration of dynamite proportions to blast this rocket off the ground and that was what happened to me in early 2011.
Since my own awakening got started, I have witnessed the varying stages of this awakening pattern played out in the experiences of so many people: have, many times, observed the fast-asleep stage, the very first cracks starting to form, the almost inevitable resistance to change, then the shock-waves of a whole new perspective opening up within a tightly constricted “old” paradigm built upon a very different set of premises and priorities. I have witnessed the strain this tends to puts upon family, relationships and careers; the conflict with lifestyle choices and the need to earn income. I have also come to recognise the patterns of those overwhelming waves of joy that come in, followed by the darkest old traumas resurfacing in their eagerness to be shown the healing light of that new day. There are many challenges that present when we seek to integrate an entirely new reality within the semblance of so-called normality that came before and there can be what feels like endless cycles of yo-yoing between expansion followed by contraction as layers of evolution are met but then requested to settle down into the pre-existing outline of the life we lived before. The very rockbed of why we do what we do can come under very close scrutiny and leave our motivation to continue along a chosen route in tatters on the ground. The process of waking up to a vastly broader sense of self – way beyond our “little” human perspective – can seem unbelievably daunting, like it is far more than we can take on in one lifetime and yet, when we surrender to it, it carries us effortlessly along with it, compensating all that seems to be dissolving away with so much that is bliss-filled and transformational. Even then, we can get taken off-track by old assumptions that try to tell us that some of the signs of this very-necessary catharsis are clues that “things are going very badly wrong” and this has been one of the big themes of this blog. That thing we call dis-ease is so often the fanfare heralding a whole new level of perfect, unconditional EASE galloping in over the horizon…if only we stop to listen to what it has to tell us and then snap ourselves out of our free-fall into terror over these sometimes quite alarming physical symptoms as they “happen” to us…or as our motivation to work at what we used to “do” falls apart….or our relationships shift beyond all recognition, sometimes to the point of no longer working at all…or we suddenly feel that we don’t fit in or relate to other people and their lifestyles anymore. This is a territory I know so well and which I write about both here and in my other blog, Living Your Whole Life.
The so-called health issues that I was tackling when I first started writing were what people label “fibromyalgia” or “myofascial pain sydrome” or “super-sensitivity” to nearly everything in my environment; in short, an “auto-immune” type illness or a multi-complex pain syndrome with so many and varied symptoms that it affected almost every aspect of my biological functioning. Before 2011, I had tackled this slowly and mechanically via a series of conventional and (increasingly) less-conventional treatments and a great deal of research but not in any way that could be considered “spiritual” or exploratory at the broader-than-biological level. Then, at the start of 2011, that incredibly narrow way of looking at things was blown wide open by the hesitant stirrings of my very first consideration that there might be a somewhat wider picture to what was happening than I had previously considered. I had no religious belief whatsoever and only a very vague sense of my “spiritual-self” but, during 2010, had started reading Eckhart Tolle and began opening up to the possibility of reincarnation and that there may be childhood or even other-lifetime trauma held in the memory of my biological cells. Looking back at that layer of awakening from the perspective of where I am, it strikes me as quite remarkable that, across 40 years, I had never seriously considered reincarnation before since it seems so very obvious now. All our most ancient cultures take this broader perspective more-or-less for granted and so it is testament to the degree to which the society in which I was brought up had been “religiously” and “culturally” indoctrinated that I still lived, so concretely, in a one-lifetime perspective until that point. Opening that door of consideration was like allowing a chink of light around the edge of the previously sealed door and began the in-ernest process of healing that had previously proved so elusive to me; for which I have a particular healer (or, more aptly, “spiritual midwife”) to thank…and she, amongst others, has assisted me through many layers of rebirth since that time. Here is another truth I have learned along the way; rebirth is possible many many times during one lifetime and I have experienced its labour pains and exhilaration over and over again this half-decade.
It was in March 2011 that I was suddenly cracked open as distinctly as a golden egg that had sprang its first visible fissure, spilling out a golden yoke of light; in fact, this was my exact visual when it happened and that egg was me. On a crowded London tube train, I had an experience that was my first waking encounter (at least in this lifetime) of “unity consiciousness” where everything and everyone melted into a pool of molten gold and I could see and feel so clearly how it was all connected into a perfect and unified “oneness” with me at its epicentre as the conscious awareness experiencing it all as though I was both “in” the experience and the cradling container of it all, simultaneously. For the duration of this brief journey and for many hours after, I was infused with such love…so much love that I have never forgotten the sensation of it over-spilling my chest cavity in endless cascades like molten lava from a self-replenishing goblet-come-eggshell, pouring rivers of golden light into the everyday greyness of the city. I walked around smiling benignly at all these people who (almost to my astonishment) seemed to be quite oblivious to the enormity of what I was feeling and yet I didn’t mind since I felt profoundly connected to them all; and, on that day, a light switched on inside of me that has never gone out (not even in my darkest moments). It was the single most transfiguring moment of my life to date, though I have had many others since. The urge to write this blog came very swiftly on its heels and, though my subject made next to no allusion to it for a very long time since I felt almost afraid or embarrassed to share what I had “witnessed” at first, I see how that very first impulse to “speak my truth” was a very necessary part of the process of continual “opening” and “expansion” that has become my path.
These days, I utterly avoid regarding myself as “unwell” since that is not my reality and the label would dress me up in the victim mentality that I am no longer prepared to wear, not even for just a moment in order to explain or relate myself to others. Along the way, I have gradually let go of that victimhood, ditched the labels and put down the sense of there being “anything wrong” with me; helped along by the fact that what is going so very right with me blows all my prior experiences out of the water. I KNOW that I am doing better than great and no amount of temporary pain or persistently weird “symptoms” can tell me otherwise. In short, I have learned where to place my focus (and terminology) and how to pull my vision out to a viewpoint offering a far broader perspective; one where everything has its perfect place, even the seemingly non-sensical and the most abrasive of life’s experiences. With unfailing consistency, everything that has ever seemed to “go wrong” in my life…whether that is a current circumstance or any one of the past “traumas” that have, one by one, floated to the surface of me in order to allow me to shine this new light upon them…has gone on to show me the absolute perfection within its hardship, trial or supposed detour. Every single reappraisal of circumstance has revealed at least a pearl or two and all of those past traumas has slotted, with perfect synchronicity, into an intricate pattern of related themes, forming a coherence that has been like a map to myself – not just in this lifetime but across all of the adjacent timelines that I have become aware of.
Finding the themes upon which I have been “working”across multiple lifetimes has been like finding the code to a safe inside which was safely stored the blueprint of selfhood that enabled me to know myself like never before. I have unpicked cycles of experience across my own life, my family’s lives (going back several generations) and across aspects of remembered lifetimes that have lit up through dreams and distant memories triggered by places and synchronicities. I have watched myself complete many of those cycles of repeated experience and witnessed in those completions the profound healing of extraordinarily deep layers of myself. I know that this is the lifetime in which I intended to tie off many of those loose ends and that I am doing extraordinarily well in that process of watching my own new ending domino its way “back” across time to rewrite so many of those parallel “stories”. In the process, I have come to know the extent to which, in healing ourselves, we also heal countless others across all the vast landscape of those things we regard as time and space.
Along the path of conducting these metaphysical repairs, a vastly increased sense of wholeness has emerged, bringing with it a level of personal healing that is beyond anything that could be explained via the biological processes of any healing “steps” I have taken on the road to my own recovery. Yet this transformation of my inner landscape has manifested such a different reality in my cellular body that I have come to understand and respect the unseen “quantum” realms of experience far more than any of the “logical, rational” processes that could more easily be explained by anything we refer to as conventional science. I am a vastly healthier person living in an infinitely “fitter” body than I was a decade ago and it shows in the mirror as much as it is demonstrated through the deeper layers of profound wellness that I now experience as the top end of life’s inevitable see-saw. I have long since dropped the fairytale concept of there being an “ultimate healing” or state of “perfect health” that I am chasing after; this evolutionary trajectory that I am on is a never ending “journey” and there is no destination, no point of arrival, no completion point, no crowd-cheering finish line as I push through the ribbon and that goes for all of us. We go on and on and on…evolving evolving evolving and what we regard as our low points, now, exceed our very highest points of, say, a year ago by such an unquantifiable factor that we aren’t even aware of it most of the time since there is no logical means by which we can measure one against the other (though we can sense this if we try). We are like the tortoise who moves his whole world with him wherever he goes; since that whole “house” is now in a different place, how can he know what has shifted within that shell unless he takes a view from outside of himself.
Even when I have looked back and seen how I could have made things far easier on myself by chosing a different path, I have newly respected how, by chosing the one that I did, I ensured a maturity of soul-growth that now serves me far better. Thus, I have been able to retrospectively honour myself for the WHOLE of the journey and make absolute peace with all of the events of my life to date (and across other lifetimes), like someone might otherwise get to do during a life-review after their death. The ripple-effect of this has been immense! The superpower of “healing all”…in the very midst of life, not at its very end…is one of the most powerful yet least used facets of conscious insight that we possess and I long to share its value to anyone who will hear. It lies at the very heart of our creator power through which we all create our own experiences (though not everyone realises this); a process which ensures that nothing goes to waste, not even the rubble of all the failed projects and so called mistakes. Once we realise that nothing we ever go through is “wrong” or a waste of time, we really start to play life and art has taught me this repeatedly; my biggest mistakes often laying the foundations for the very best of what I go on to create afterwards. Thus I have played with the art metaphor many times in my blog-writing, using it to convey some of the least tangible aspects of personal transformation that I would otherwise struggle to explain – to myself or others
The super-power of being able to walk this life path fully cognizant of the creator god-self that you are, knowing that you never did, or could, place a wrong foot, is immense. Once you have it on board you can stop listening to anyone (perhaps even yourself) who ever judged you harshly for having made so-called “wrong” turns or “weakly” succumbed to health or other challenges; none of this is “your fault” or even a sign that you are failing since, if it is in your life, it is serving you in some way and you are doing all the necessary work upon your particular theme, for yourself and others in your position.
Understanding and using this is one of the supreme skills that is now fully available to all of humanity…just as soon as we are prepared to get over caring what others think and stop measuring ourselves against defunct old belief systems that criticise our path or overlook the broader picture of why we put ourselves through what we do. When we never seem to “get better”; when life keeps “setting us back” or we keep repeating the same old “stuck point”…these are some of the situations that are ripe for reappraisal, in our favour since we have clearly proved ourselves incredibly stalwart in taking on these tiresome challenges to the brink of driving ourselves bananas. When this “thing” has been our theme for many lifetimes, we have proved ourselves to be astonishingly tenacious and it is time to honour that. I am of the opinion that it is those of us who have taken on some of the stickiest, most unrelenting challenges of this physical reality (especially chronic health issues) that form part of a leading-edge team that expressively came here – at this milestone moment in our evolution – in order to lead the way for the rest of humanity through times that are proving excessively challenging and severely uncomfortable for many and yet we know how to ride those long-suffering waves more cheerfully and creatively than most. We demonstrate daily how such unrelenting challenge can be survived, against all odds, without our morale and most shining qualities taking the knock. We model how we can still have absolute faith that we are worthy, whole and thriving in spite of what our circumstances seem to say about us and how fragmented we may sometimes seem to be on the outside. When we succumb to other’s opinions about how well we are doing or to the sheer overwhelm of so many challenges, we risk drowning in despair or giving up on this life altogether. When we perceive the far broader picture of why we are going through all of this, we step up to ourselves and it becomes easier than ever before; we rise up to this life that we chose and we know why we chose it, which makes all the difference. Once we know this important thing, we start to gain traction in the kind of improvements we long for and we model how to heal at some very deep levels; levels where far easier recoveries may have only tickled the surface of what we are capable of clearing out as extraordinarily determined beings. People really sit up and take notice when such healing is demonstrated with such easy grace and a big cheery smile; which is what I try to project in this space.
Over the course of five years, the subject-matter of this blog has evolved massively and never more swiftly than in the last year to the point that I – personally – don’t choose to revisit any of my archived posts; why would I, when I always feel I have traveled light years from whatever I have shared almost as soon as I press “publish”. I imagine that, if I did, some of what I shared a year or even a few months ago would seem incomplete or even misguided compared to where I am now; I might want to contradict myself or take out some of the substance of what I once said. Yet I also have no intention of editing or unpublishing any of my previous posts since I feel they will most amply meet people at whatever stage of their own journey they happen to be at when they are left out there for them to “accidentally” trip upon as needed. I believe in the power of synchronicity above all guidance systems on earth and know that the broad base of my own experiences will be waiting for people when they are meant to find them; I also receive private messages and comments that confirm this to me all the time so who am I to contradict the substance of those experiences. When people are ready, they will join me where I am now and that is perfect too. Today’s writing very quickly becomes yesterday’s archive and this has taught me a great deal about the nature of experience; none of it is wrong, it is all available simultaneously and we all get to choose where we want to be out of a vast sea of possibility. What I leave behind me feels like a trail of breadcrumbs leading to where I am now…which is already moving on to somewhere else and will be light years away again in no time at all. Sometimes the urge to write down my thoughts down feels like chasing butterflies.
So where am I in this moment and what have been the most significant stages along that trail? One of the most obvious “events”, explored across much of my written landscape, has been the awakening of my metaphysical self, the part of me that follows the patterns of synchronicity and plays with metaphor…not as some sort of academic, literary device to make for a clever blog but because this is exactly how I have come to experience all of life, without giving it a second thought. Life constantly presents to me through a series of beautifully connected metaphors and interconnected themes, peopled by archetypes and long-standing human belief systems that I strive to unravel from their tangly knots. They weave seamlessly through the actual physical landscape of places and things that make up my ordinary life whilst deep-diving into the unseen layers of the multidimensional realms that are as familiar to me as anything in the third-dimension. It is not that I try hard to seek these clever riddles in my experience; they actually make themselves known to me through everything that I do, intersecting (though not exclusively) with the leylines and sacred sites that I find I have gravitated to all my life but also with the everyday landscape of my ordinary domestic world and the accidental places where life happens to take me. “Reading” the landscape of my experiences as an energetic, multi-dimensional map made manifest through artifacts, metaphors, energy portals, synchronicities, symbols and cross-over points is, I believe, a natural skill set that has lain semi-dormant in me all my life though I recognise many instances of it popping up its head in my much earlier life through my fascination with literature (my university degree), with art (my occupation), with philosophy and archeology (two of my earliest academic specialisms) and my healing journey (the physical body is such a vast multidimensional teaching-ground). I also recognise the direct link between the multilayered way that I perceive all things with the fact I have synaesthesia, which means that I experience all the usual sensory experiences, such as colour, sound, smell and touch, being “mixed up”, their borders blurred to the degree that I sometimes experience one sensation in lieu of another and, through the all-hands-on-deck “language” of my mixed-up or substituted sensory experiences, I often perceive deeper levels of understanding and relationship between experiences that might otherwise struggle to express themselves to my mind.
I am also a mirror touch synesthete, which means I experience what other people (and even so-called inanimate objects, including Gaia herself) experience at the energetic level so that, in essence, I read their vibration and experience the sensation exactly as though it were my own, even as extreme pain, which can be as poignant as it can be traumatic if I let it. These days, I tend towards regarding this mixed-blessing as a gift that signals the expanded (and still expanding!) awareness that I am and the way that we are all heading, biologically speaking. I strongly suspect that “feeling much more” than we are accustomed to registering in our bodies is an experience that is set to take humanity by storm, which means a lot of people are going to be sent spiralling into overwhelm and panic if they are not shown how this is also a blessing and not something to panic about. Our DNA is waking up and using codes that have lain dormant for a very long time and, combined with so much happening in these almost too eventful times, the sensation of this can be thoroughly overwhelming if we let it be. To say that we are becoming “more psychic” does not even begin to cover the new array of skills that are on the verge of manifesting in our experience and it is so important that we take the time to uncondition our bodies from the learned trait of regarding everything that presents as “new” as being a potential threat to our wellbeing. One of the long-term gifts of this evolution is that some of the least savoury traits of humanity will inevitably be brought back into line once we all start to tune into each other’s pain, joy and everything in between.
So, yes, I firmly believe that we all have these skills within us and that they are fully available for us to bring on line as soon as we are open, not resistant, to the newness that is coming. For many who are already registering these changes, their default is to register new sensations as pain, illness or something going terribly wrong, including a profound fear of their environment. This is a default I hope to help some of those people navigate their way through since I know how unwieldy such an experience can be. Many people that deep dive into alcohol or drug abuse (including prescription medication) or any one of a zillion unconscious, addictive and self-destructive behaviours – including obsessively fighting whatever they deem to be “out to get them” – are probably doing so to try and hold at bay the first birth-pains of the their own best evolution yet they don’t realise that they are on the threshold of something marvellous and so they fight it all the way. My suggestion is to stop fighting and become the observer of what is happening to you; allowing that, however apparently malevolent its source, your own highest interests are perfectly intact just so long as your are not being undermined by beliefs that tell you otherwise. What we believe to be so is, quite literally, everything in this world in that we create what happens next as soon as we assume this outcome or that one is our so-called reality. Why not play with this, as I have done, I see this for yourself.
You will find many of my posts gravitate towards the subject of “journeys” or “pathways” as this is what you could call my specialism in line with one of my primary archetypes: Elen of the Ways, the softly-treading “green lady” and goddess of the woods who is here to remind us of our sovereignty and light the way, making sense of what might otherwise seem arduous or to be going nowhere. The goddess aspect is something I have talked about with ever-increasing regularity as I have awoken to my own sacred female aspect; which incorporates that part of me that has been suppressed, silenced, tortured and abused for many lifetimes. No more quickly had I identified with those aspects than I had healed them and was ready to lead the route through and out of all that “old stuff”; prepared to honour those old wounds and yet let go of them as a necessary part of the healing that is now ready to take place. We have already been through all of that – with knobs on – and do not need to revisit it all again; this is what I have learned and it is such an important message to share. So many people who tune into the sacred feminine freeze on the spot of that place where they fully register how much abuse has been received and so, newly traumatized or angered by that recollection, they stall their own evolution by becoming rooted to that incredibly traumatic spot, held prisoner by their own pain-paralysis, which serves no one, least of all themselves. The pressing need to STOP paining over all that old trauma so we can get onto the important business of bringing the feminine fully “on board” is a movement I seek to champion in this space. I know that the world is now ready to fully meet and integrate the much-needed feminine aspect so that we can bring things back into balance and heal this world from its roots right up to smallest leaves on the highest branches; we are ready and poised for this and I consider myself to be part of the first wave opening doors to welcome it in. It really is time to stop licking our wounds and step up to this task.
If there is another way in which I would like to help forge a new path it is as someone modelling how we are now more than ready to step into our “bigness”, to own all that we are, to accept that we are divinity embodied and that we need no one…no religion, no political-saviour, no anything at all…to bridge all that we are capable of and make it manifest in this world; no one, that is, apart from ourselves. We are the ones we have been waiting for, as the oft-repeated saying goes. We are one hundred per cent self-actualised as soon as we accept this and step right into those big shoes and I encourage anyone who reads what I have to say to take ownership of this truth without hesitation or apology and to start to welcome this into their daily experience as all the so-called proof that god exists as us, through us and with no intermediary required. Believe me, as soon as you own this, it will present to you across every single aspect of your life so hold onto your hat. My own “adventures” through life demonstrate this amply and part of my motivation for writing about the commonplace from a perspective that incorporates the metaphysical is to try to show people how “the spiritual aspect” is not something separate from life, it IS life and we are the living vehicles of it, every single common-place day of our lives.
Viewed from this place, nothing is truly daunting, obstructive or fear-inducing ever again and all of life is a wonderful adventure, like waking up on Christmas morning every single day of your lives and opening an endless array of unexpected gifts wrapped up in all sorts of unlikely packaging and all with your name on them. Truly, life is so ecstatically joyful, thrilling and delightfully unexpected in this place that I long to convey that in my writing; which is why this is, fundamentally, such an uplifting if hugely diverse blog. That’s not to say that horrible-seeming, painful, frustrating and downright crappy things don’t happen – they do – but seen from this new perspective, you get the “why” of them very quickly and the coherence that follows allows you to navigate the territory in ways that show they always had your highest interests at heart. Curiosity overtakes fear and the sheer fascination you experience in the face of what might have completely tipped you over just a few months or years ago is reward enough for how much you might have had to dismantle your old conditioned responses in order to reach this new enlightened place.
To get to this place…and I will be honest here…I see that I have been through a process that has been nothing short of a complete breakdown of all that I thought I knew and then some. In the last ten years, I have watched my health crash brick by brick to where it lay all around my in piles of rubble on the floor….that was five years tumbling down and another five steadily building it back up into a whole new form, though not without its apparent set-backs and frustrations. It is my understanding that such a monumental “break-down” of everything you know – concurrent with a perceptible “build up” of something quite new and inexplicably thrilling within the seeming chaos – is absolutely consistent with the metamorphosis experience that typifies spiritual transformation. This kind of breakdown or mini-death is extraordinary convincing (when you are deeply caught up in it) since it can feel like life is utterly dissolving from the inside out and that complete destruction of all you once knew, perhaps even life itself, is the likely outcome on such a trajectory. Yet, like the caterpillar, who must withdraw and then watch its “safe” cocoon plus every last vestige of its familiar body-structure dissolve to mush before it has any idea what kind of new creature it is on the verge of turning into (in fact, one has to assume it probably believes it is a “goner”), we too need to surrender to the complete dismantling of all that we once knew before we get to see our own wings unfold and experience the unlimited freedom of the skies. The butterfly is a metaphor that first occurred to me, four summers ago, through a series of powerful synchronicities as my healing “took off” and has stayed with me as one of my most consistent writing and painting themes, keeping me company on what has been a remarkable journey of transformation.
There is something supremely powerful about making the process of choosing a trajectory into a conscious thing, especially when you are only observing the feelings around that initial nudge onto a new track without having any clue where it might lead you (yet not seeking to control the outcome with the projections of your intellectual mind). I remember trying to demonstrate to my daughter how powerful an altered trajectory can be when she was just seven years old and we were about to pull her out of the commonplace schooling system where she was anything but thriving and place her into the exceptional one where, indeed, she has thrived beyond words. To do this, I sent two tiny balls rolling across a long wooden floor and gave one such a miniscule nudge that you could hardly see the difference in their paths…to start with. She was so impressed with how they ended up in entirely different places that she has never forgot the conversation of that demonstration; she already has a profound sense of how her life has gone and how it might have gone otherwise. The interesting thing about making life’s trajectories and choice points conscious is that there will come times when you almost get to meet those other versions of yourselves who took some of those other paths; you will find your skin goosebump into recognition of yourself in the people you meet and certain circumstances that were very nearly yours and these can serve as some of the most transformative cross-over points of your life since it is never too late to fine tune the course you are on once you are wide awake enough to notice the differences.
Across the time span of a decade, I have seen myself go from being a conventional thirtysomething single parent with a demanding career and a reasonable pay packet (and yet somewhat dead on the inside) to where I was in no physical state to go out to work and so I surrendered utterly to what became my strange new reality. Across that time, I have remarried (to my best friend, lover and spiritual-adventuring companion), totally reinvented my parenting style, turned vegetarian, divorced myself from the culture control-machine that includes television, unconscious eating/drinking habits (including sugar and alcohol) and keeping up with “the news”, become something of a recluse while learning to love that thing I once hated – my own company…and have discovered that I truly relish my new way of life far more than anything that came before though I would never have planned it this way. I have taught myself how to be a respected professional artist from absolute scratch, been published in a book, written several blogs on a variety of subjects and have come out of my shell in so many ways that astonish me yet they have all been on my terms entirely. I have slowed things right down, learned how to be still, to mediate, to do yoga, to appreciate and to notice subtle things, to “read” energies and tune into the unseeable. I have given up my micromanagement of just about everything that used to consume me, released most of my obsessive compulsive or addictive habits, reconnected with nature and reprioritized my whole world. I have utterly reinvented my diet, my exercise and my fundamental biology and look healthier, and am far fitter, than I thought I was (which was only ever surface deep) when I still wore a suit. I have remembered aspects of “past” lives and felt into “future” ones, delved into the far reaches of my DNA and reaquainted myself with the multi-dimensional tree of experience (you could say, the Tree of Life) that connects us all to one another and to the source of all things. Meanwhile I have found these things means far more to me than nationality, culture or the genetic “tree” into which I was born whilst also honouring and reevaluating all the many gifts presented to me by the birth family I chose to incarnate into since this served a very distinct set of purposes that worked so brilliantly with my life-theme. I have learned to love myself and witnessed how this enables me to love others as unconditionally as I now love my own heart. That heart-space has become my modus operandi, the source of my most intuitive wisdom and the link between my physical and spiritual selves; a filter system through which I run all of my thoughts and decisions to ensure they are in alignment with that bigger picture and to check in with my biggest objectives across multi-lifetimes. I have discovered that my true vocation (something which, finally truly, deserves that word) is PAINTING, which not only aligns fully with the heart but which, should I stray off track, so abruptly stops delivering the very inspiration upon which I rely to create what I do that I am kept perfectly and effortlessly in check of myself as regards my highest purpose. I have also stopped fighting my intellect or having the long running see-saw experience between my intellectual and spiritual aspects. In fact, the “whole that is greater than the sum of two parts” is a theme that runs across all aspects of my life, one of these being the deep and intimate way that I know that my intellect plus my heart – working together – equal a sum total of such (w)holy magnitude that it is the key of all keys, leading me through the doorway of “stuck-little-human me” directly to my highest aspect who sees things in a whole, quite incredible, so beautiful and vastly more coherent way. I write, as much as possible, from this self (a mix of the unfettered intellectual pursuits that thrill me combined with the intuitive adventures directed by my inner vision) in the hope that it will help others find their own version of such a reconciliation and a key to their own door!
Bringing these two parts of myself (the intellect and the heart; my human and cosmic selves) into a state of full reconciliation to achieve a brand new degree of unity is one of the biggest themes that I understand myself to be working on in this lifetime; knowing that, as I do this for myself, I help this potential “reality” to ripple out into the experience of all, taking us a giant leap forwards towards the kind of world-scale reconciliation that will alter absolutely everything. Along the way, I have learned that I am both a supreme alchemist (working in the “laboratory” of everyday experience) and that I am a visionary shaman “tuning in” to my own future-self as my own best tour guide. I am also modelling these broadly available qualities so that others stand a better chance of recognising that they too are alchemists and visionaries and, so, tune-into the frequency of their own best “future” reality. As such, I find I have largely done with playing so heavily with “the past” or so-called “history”, at both the personal and shared levels, having already extracted its many gifts in the earlier portion of my self-exploration (as you will discover in some of my earlier posts). I now choose to put the larger part of my effort into reaching out towards all the “future” gifts that are currently held in potential for me to claim in order for them to manifest as my next best reality. Thus the stage of watching the dissolution of all that I once knew seems to be moving on towards the equally daunting stage of leaping towards the unknown, with very few signposts and only a feeling here or a glimmer or two of light there to guide me…yet I find that I am ready for it now as I claim my mastery, having reappraised all that I have already achieved. Perhaps we are all on such a threshold together at this time and are holding each others hands as we take that next leap…
Does a butterfly, on the brink of that first flight, with nothing but an instinct as her guide to something she has never done before, suddenly decide not to jump? Could anything persuade her that there was no point to it, that she might as well curl up and pretend to still be a caterpillar down there on the ground? Launching ourselves at that “future” version of ourselves (rather than harping upon the experiences and limitations of the past…as we have learned to do so very well) is exactly like being a butterfly that must first try out those newly unfolded wings without having a clue what they were intended for and yet we are at that point as soon as we say we are ready for it. My writing and painting is all about encouraging that next forward-leap and tuning into what is truly possible around the edges of what “seems” to be our world.
If I consider myself to hold any job title at all, these days (apart from artist, of course, which goes without saying) it is probably that I regard myself to be an interior architect of the fourth dimension, encouraging people to view their cumbersome inner furniture rather differently to how they always regarded it before. I am here to help them move their familiar beliefs around, to check-in with whether they really want to keep them at all, to ask “does this one even serve me any more; do I even like it”. I like to help them to see all the hidden potential of that inner space, to regard what they already have in a rather more encouraging light and to understand that they have a choice as to what “wallpaper” to hang, what “pictures” to put up, whether to listen to that talking box in the corner or to switch it off in order to hear the sweeter sound of birds singing in the garden or the rustle of leaves in the trees. Our belief systems are the very furniture and decorations of our life, as are the things we place our focus upon…our jobs, our politicians, our fears and our so-called choices. What our family taught us about the world is so often that hand-me-down piece of furniture we don’t even like any more yet we live with it anyway, long after it serves any real purpose. What we watch on the television is the garish wallpaper that we put up with, even though it makes us somewhat unhappy or downright depresses us. I am on a mission to help others to see – as I have – that the ways in which we make use of this inner space is not the embellishment of our life but the be all and end all that dictates what manifests as our “hard” surfaces down here at ground zero. What we belive in, the archetypes we aspire to be, hope to be saved by or find threatening, serve as the very blueprint for our lives and dictate what gets built as the cellular and circumstantial reality of our world; as the cancers and the stuck points or the transformations and glorious breakthroughs. Not enough people seem to realise this; and I feel I am here to try and help redress the balance as best I can in what I share to my niche audience.
As I have, step-by-step, abandoned many of the old structures that held together my old life, I have garnered an understanding that time and space are just a mechanistic construct, a device that we have become far too reliant upon and that these can be made as flux as we like, even dispensed with altogether, when playing with experience across a multi-dimensional “landscape”. Yet – referring back to those paths and tracks I often talk about in my writing – I do so strongly feel that we are all on a journey of progression and that I am modelling one of the available “ways” towards choosing you next best reality rather than taking pot luck. When I paint a fresh new canvas, I already see in my mind’s eye what I am about to bring forth out of the unrealised potential staring back at me and life is just like that; but you have to see and really hold onto what it is you want to create to make it happen. Once we truly believe that we get to create what we really want and that it is already up ahead, waiting for us to reach out to it, we become the completely unlimited artists of our own lives and it is quite astonishing what we get to create when we do that.
spinning the light 
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