If some of my topics, the way I find layers of profound meaning in even the most every-day circumstances, seem to suggest I am larger than life its because…I realise…I have unwittingly done something a lot of motivational self-help books tell you to do; that is, I’ve written myself in as the star player in my own hero’s story…and I recommend it to everyone (and blogging really helps).

The journey of recovering all aspects of myself…from chronic health issues to deep emotional trauma…has necessitated that I put myself at the very centre of all my experiences, in this lifetime and any of the others I happen to have recalled; reevaluating everything that has ever happened to me in ways that are coherent and over-ridingly positive. The further I have gone down this route, the easier it has become. In fact, I have not had to work at doing this because it has become blatantly obvious that everything that ever happened to me was always working for me and with me, guided by an over-arching blueprint or design for my life that I might not have been able to see at the time but which was always there.

Its impossible to present your view of the world to others, from this perspective, without sounding like you think you are centre-stage of absolutely everything going on in your world and that nothing ever happens to you by pure coincidence; which can sound a bit like you live in your own fantasy world…but then its true since we are all the central character in our own major production. There really is an aspect of each of us that is “larger than life” and which has a much bigger, more amazing “story” in mind for us than we often see at the ground level; all we have to do is tune into it by making ourselves more aware. If I write about my own experiences a lot, its because I want to encourage more people to think like this in their own domain because it can transform literally everything.

Once this becomes our habit, the everyday fodder of our days turns into the sub-plots of a never-ending magical adventure packed full of synchronicities and paved with gold. I have long-since stopped having to try to live like this; it is so obvious to me that I literally trip over the evidence every day and have to refrain from sharing it all as I would have far too much to write about (and bore everyone rigid with all the personal details) yet here’s one anecdote I want to share since its what came up to inspire this post.

As I sat there poised to paint swan feathers in the golden light of today’s autumn sunset, feeling just-so lucky to be doing what I love in a place that I am so happy to spend time in (I really do adore what I do), the completely randomised music list that I was listening to online threw up a song that I hadn’t heard for years and it gave me enormous goosebumps since it was one that I played to death twelve years ago, during my darkest hour…until I simply couldn’t bear to hear it anymore and deleted it.

Its lyrics making reference to drowning in “feathers and down”really spoke to me back then, as though someone who cared about me (and it felt like very few did at the time) was counselling the person that I was with my fixation with  “four leaved clovers” (my one lucky charm), drinking too much and  drowning beneath a “blanket of woe” in a life that felt all messed-up. My take of things on hearing this come up as I sat painting feathers today: that the blissed-out and grateful “me of now” somehow sent those words of comfort back to “me of then”; after all, this kind of portal through time, bridged by song lyrics, has happened to me so many times before. So, do I insist upon these kinds of interpretation of life in a way that suggests I am losing the plot because it makes me feel better and makes for an interesting blog or are the so-called more rational people missing the point when these kind’s of synchronicity happen yet go unnoticed? For me, the whole path of life is so thick with synchronicity these days that it’s like walking on a pathway strewn with feathers  placed there expressly to guide my way.

work in progress…as is life

If you’ve ever done any past life regression work, you are probably more inclined to regard the life you are in through such “believer’s” eyes. Its been a while since I set out to regress (though it sometimes happens by accident, prompted by a sensory cue) but one of the most compelling versions of myself that I ever came across when I did, and who has stayed beside me like a companion ever since, is a not-that “earlier” version of myself who was born just before the turn of the twentieth century. This recollection was more detailed than some of the others I have had and I could try telling myself that it was a fiction from my own imagination except for the fact its “plot” was hardly one I found appealing or that would make a good screenplay; plus it was so incredibly vivid.

In this regression, I remembered myself as one of those rare early twentieth-century women who actually managed to get a university degree, a left-brained bookish type who loved to live in my head; and with a degree in chemistry of all things (though this has since explained many things about myself). Yet I ended up married to a civil servant, being put in my womanly place as a wife and mother and watching my intellect being swept under a rug of middle-class niceties and the dry domesticities of an ordinary life lived out in a modest house in Bloomsbury. Of this whole span of fifty or so years (I didn’t live all that long…), I mostly recalled the solitary years when my two grown-up children, with whom I had little in common, had moved away and my husband largely ignored me, spending what time I could wandering around the public art galleries of London (places I have often felt I know far better than this life could adequately explain). I recalled the home-grown, amateur love of art that made me want to cry and filled me with joy when I stared at certain paintings; the longing to “do” art, the craving to just give it a try…to pick up a brush, take the lid off a tube of paint. The most graphic aspect of all was my remembrance of the profound sense of waste and disappointment at the end of that lonely life as I lay dying of cancer in a drab little room with floral curtains in the mid 1950s. The first time I had this regression, it affected me profoundly, like I was mourning the tragic life of someone I intimately knew; and yes she was since she was a version of me.

So, an earlier version of me wished that they knew how to paint or at least that they could give it a try without someone belittling them; wished to not only go to galleries but to hang work in them, to play with paint and music and writing and so many creative things, to express herself, to know what it felt like to be loved and appreciated, to talk animatedly about what thrilled her and to be heard, to do things that were spontaneous and felt anything but predictable or mundane, to live in the colourful world that she only ever managed to peek into through the window of her own drab existence. She was another version of the little match girl…always stood with nose pressed to the glass, watching other people do what she really wanted to do…which is a theme that runs through several of my previous lives and which I am here to put right.

If, in that lifetime, I imagined this one as my ideal then no wonder I threw everything over, even my health, to make it happen. No wonder that, as soon as this life started to look like a trap, another ruse to pin me into a miserable marriage and a drab little world where my attempts at art were belittled, I started digging my way out of it using anything I could find as a shovel. No wonder it looks like I took a massive u-turn to get here, like something I caught a glimpse of on the horizon of my life had startled me into turning very quickly on my heel (having been there before); and get here I did. That earlier version of me (and many others) have conjoined in this lifetime in order to throw a massive party of completion as I live out so many of the things on their combined wish-lists. If this is living it large then it’s doing so with very good cause…since there are a lot of us to “fit in”, all gathered in the “me” that I am today!

Once you realise that you are the sum of many characters, past and probably future, all playing as one, you realise you can’t be complacent any more since you have all these eyes upon you now; all those hopes and dreams wanting to be realised, all those hearts willing you ahead, all these threads brought together. It feels churlish in the extreme to say “no, I can’t be bothered” or to do anything but give life your absolute best shot once you see it through all these many souls that are rooting for you. I suppose you could say, it gives you your best ever reason to go on living…and to live life really well.

And I know that’s what I’m already doing…but it didn’t hurt to be reminded why (one more time) today. There can be no mundane, no “blah”, no “not really trying” kind of day from such a perspective since it is all another chapter in the the epic story of you. Whatever plays out, whatever seems to be happening, there are layers of significance that are speaking only to you through it all and, as you make sense of them (as only you know how…), you realise you are tying off ends, not just for yourself but for your many selves, across the whole vast landscape of all experience. Like an immense and very beautiful tapestry made of many stitches, you start to marvel at what comes together (which is so much larger than this one life) which means that it can never…ever…seem drab or meaningless again.

More about channelling through song…

The lyrics I refer to are from The Cardigans “Feathers and Down”; extract below (or full lyrics here):

Oh I wish my arms were wider
I wish that I could hide you
So you can rest and repair
Without the blanket of sorrow
The thick and the grey
Your blanket of woe
So heavy and stained
And it only weighs you down

Just you sleep a little baby
Leave the world alone and later
If you wake up alive
That old blanket of sorrow
Could be feathers and down
Your blanket of woe
Would leave you alone
And I can love you till you drown

Come to me let’s drown
Come baby let’s drown
In feathers and down

As you can see, I took the advice and left the world alone for quite a while…and awoke to my own feather and down, which seem to want to be painted, more and more, in my current series of work.

If you are open to being “spoken to” via music, the best way I have found is to play music on random, either from your own collection or using (my favourite source) Spotify. I have had some incredibly powerful synchronistic experiences using these methods and it is a valid form of channelling aspects of yourself that want to give you a nudge or help you to make connections.

If you remain the cynic about reincarnation, consider this: we are reaching the end of the only era (largely built upon centuries of religious indoctrination) that refused to consider multiple lives to be a “given”. For centuries, we have been deprived of this essential perspective (one that was fundamental to our sense of self for far more years than we have been without it) and it has left many of us feeling profoundly baffled and, at some level, incomplete as though we have lost “the point” of living.

When we believe we only have one life, the pressure to get it right can be interminable and sometimes we bow down to that weight, giving up on everything beneath our heavy grey blanket of hopelessness. We also get mud-stuck in the material world. Conversely, realising we have multi-lives doesn’t mean we throw life away as though disposable but that we act like the pros that we really are, deciphering codes, playing with patterns, discovering whole themes that we are working on and feeling like we are (finally) getting somewhere with it all. It can elevate life completely once you start seeing yourself as the main character in this vastly bigger “story” where even the pitfalls are “another go” at tackling a theme that has tripped you up before. You can even see beyond the so-called bad news when you know there is so much more to everything; and, of course, you have a much more vested interest in how things turn out and in this planet and its people in general. To miss out on this perspective is like thinking the crescent is the whole of the moon or taking the two minute teaser to be the whole of the movie; you just don’t get the subtleties or the those all-important, and rather wonderful, twists in the tale. I used to be just like that but, for the last few years, life got so much better and vastly more interesting and today’s experience gave me the contrast of the two.