The pool in which I swim is a vast one where I can no longer reach the sides nor can I push up from the bottom with my feet. This is important since it forces me to use other means to find structure in my experience. Synchronicity is the most important of these. Where two or more things cross over, they form buoyancy aids that I hold on to in the sea of relative non-matter that makes up my reality. It means that “what is most important to be known in this moment” comes to me, not the other way around. If I hunt down or pursue it, with my mind as a scientist would, I know it cannot be trusted in the same way since I wanted or expected it to be this thing before it even arose. When I allow information to present to me, I am shown which way to go with my next thoughts and they can be surprising yet the way they arise with perfect timing cuts out so much piffle. Then, only then, will I delve deeper into this thing with the intellect but it is that first intuition that guided me there. It is a whole new way of being, helping me to navigate at every crossroads. When I first started to experience it…for hours, sometimes days at a time in what I labelled the chronic illness of almost a decade ago, it frightened me hugely. It felt as though my intellect was melting away and I kicked my legs, almost drowned myself in the struggle. It was the surrender to it that brought me new means of navigating my reality and which delivered a much broader understanding of my world than I had ever had access to before. Without even having to use my legs and arms in any particular way, I guess you could say I learned how to swim.

This “new” sea of awareness (or, my experience of it…) comes and goes in its breadth and depth but is strongest during times of geomagnetic turbulence caused by a flare from the sun. At these times, I have come to expect the kind of so-called “brain fog” that broadens and deepens the pool of what my mind is experiencing. Having come to know it so well, I now witness this in others, especially those who rely more on their intellect to get by in their everyday lives; my daughter for instance. There was a such a geomagnetic storm in a week when she had an important maths exam. I suspected it would affect her (as it always does) but didn’t even tell her it was happening so what she noticed was entirely her own observation. She came home from school the day before the exam, the day this GM storm came on full and strong, and having spent the afternoon running through practice papers, lamented “I don’t know what happened, its as though I can’t ‘do’ maths anymore. It won’t stick to the sides, I’ve even lost all my common sense when I tackle the questions, like I can’t even use the basics of what I know”. “Don’t worry…”, I said “ just trust that there is a bigger pattern underlying what you know than just the formula, importantly RELAX and allow that a broader knowledge will come in when you need it, more like an instinct. The key is not to panic, not to go into white fear when you think what you have learned has slipped away”. Its true, once you get over that white-fear of what you have learned with the intellect not being there where you so neatly arranged it in all of it’s A-Z filing cabinets, the mind logs onto a vaster information pool that offers all that you need in any situation, assuming you steer with your intention. The need to use language or formula to grasp or frame a particular question – to initiate the left to right hemisphere dialogue – can feel like a stumbling block in such vast pool but that all important state of calm facilitates what is needed. A few hours of study later, she said she felt somehow smarter than usual, like she knew more…and deeper somehow. She was getting the patterns, the rhythms, the instincts of what the question wanted, not relying on the automaton of the formula. She had achieved a hundred per cent in one of her practice papers and was completing them all well within the allotted time; in fact she commented that it felt as though time slowed right down. This is what it feels like to know with the right portion of the brain instead of exclusively with the left; there is an ease and a “cut to the chase” about it once you get over that initial terror of it being less organised than you are used to.

The gift is to bring these two sides of the mind together; and for me that occurs once synchroncitiy has shown me where to land with my thoughts. Like a butterfly guided to the “right” flower by a landing beam of ultraviolet calling out to me across a vast sea of flora, I am told where to settle and then I go to work with my consideration. If that initial feeling isn’t there, I flutter on past…no worry that I will have missed something, there will always be more clues. What started as a pool without sides, making me flay and kick my legs, frantic for my own survival, has become more of a case of floating on my back in a sea of calm, knowing that what I need will come to find me when I most need it. Out of a molten sea of unmoving water, I can trust that ripples will form where they are most meaningful once I let go of any particular outcome that I already have in my mind. It’s a whole different way of being; one in which an innate trust that I am supported by a benevolent universe is fundamental to all that I am. The experiences I have access to feel vaster by far since I now cut to the chase of what is relevant, seldom pushing my feet off the bottom of what is not nor hand-walking my way along edges that were put there by others. Those things that make up my “relevance zone” are wilder, quirkier, more personal to me (yet also, somehow, more universal) and more intimately connected with each other than ever before. They are why this blog is so eclectic in its topics, why I seem to dart and weave between just so many unrelated things…but do I really, or are they all part of a vast coherent pattern that my very existence makes sense of. To me, both apply and this is the interconnected world that I have access to and now live in; where specialism and blinkeredness feel like the dead-weights of the past. In other words, while my pool has got infinitely bigger, I am no longer afraid to be in there since it is less about swimming than allowing the flow.