I have just started publishing articles on an e-zine site called Suite 101.
The first article was on Aleya Dao, spiritual guide. Go to
http://www.suite101.com/content/meditation-intuition-and-working-with-energy-aleya-daos-tools-a314309
if you would like to read it.
Second article was just published 5 minutes ago. Its about Reiki.
http://www.suite101.com/content/mind-body-and-soul-healing-with-reiki-therapy-a315750
It has been a few months since I last posted. One of the main reasons for this has been the fact that this year has been very much about supporting my mother as she goes through the difficult journey of chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer. Sometimes, all we can do is just live each day, making it through to the next and then the next, holding our energies in reserve for the next challenge that awaits.
Watching someone you love go through this treatment has been one of the most stressful experiences of my life to date. My usually active and vibrant mother has been reduced by chemotherapy to a walking ghost. She is now, after 6 months of treatment, literally as pale and as white as a bed sheet, with not a hair on her head. We laugh and joke about the fact that she looks like the spitting image of her deceased father, my grandfather, when he was alive. It is funny but also eerie. She really does look exactly like him, but I would rather she looked like herself again. I know in time she will. We have a lot to be grateful for. At least she is still living and breathing, and we know that her outcome is very positive at the other side.
It seems to me as though there are so many stories of people fighting major illnesses. It’s very easy to forget how lucky you are if you have your health, for without it, life is a struggle of mammoth proportions. I try to appreciate my good health and ability to live my life with joy every day now. There are too many reminders in the world of what it is to not have good health. And it raises the obvious question of why, in a time where we have excellent sanitation, medicine, health care, information and all the structures needed to support healthy lives, are so many people still getting so seriously ill?
Recently I discovered the teachings of Abraham-Hicks. Abraham is a group of non-physical beings who is channelled through Esther Hicks. Abraham teaches that we create our lives according to what is in our vibrational energy fields. He talks about allowing or resisting, and says that all ill health is caused by the vibration of resistance. “In your world today there are countless action remedies, medicines, surgeries, and exercises offered—but there are not enough actions in the world to compensate for Vibrational resistance….Since every disease or unwanted condition exists because Well-Being is being disallowed, then, in the absence of that disallowance, Well-Being will return.” (Getting Into the Vortex~Abraham-Hicks.) It may seem a stretch in our rational, science based world to accept that we cause and create our own illness through our resistance to life. Yet in many ways, it makes sense to me. The more I live the more I realize that I am a complex energetic being, and that while my mind is operating on one level of comprehension of the world around me, my energetic fields are responding in another way. Its so important to become aware of where we allow and where we resist, and to reach out for healing of the layers of our energy being when we become aware that things are going wrong. I do believe that illness is a manifestation of greater causes than simply physical, scientific reasons. Our mind, body and spirit works together in an amazing way, and I am only just really coming to a greater awareness of how this creates the total life experience that I am having.
My mother has one final chemo treatment to go. We are going to celebrate with so much joy once her difficult journey through this illness and this year is finally over. I thank God for watching over all of us as we struggled along, just living each day as it came, and not knowing what challenges we would have to face in the next.
(I wrote this to a friend of mine.)
A meditation on love…and letting go.
Love is like a river. It always flows, and can’t be stopped or turned off. If an object sits in the middle of the river, the river’s life-blood, it’s water, continues to flow around the object, caressing its edges. If the object floats then the river’s current will carry it along, supporting and journeying with it until it decides to move off towards the banks and find a different grounding. But still the river flows. It can’t stop or be turned off.
Life is a journey shared. We meet and join up and share our flows. We seek and we learn. Sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, but always we are seeking for the next point at which we will leave the predictable safety of the banks and merge with the dynamism of the river. To be swept up in that force is powerful and exciting; it tingles every sense and encourages in us the feeling that we are truly living. It is sacred and special and real.
When two people journey a way on the river together, in whatever way, the memory of that shared passage remains. Love connects us always and through out time. Love always flows; it cannot be stopped or turned off. Only when there is a drought in the soul is there a drought in the river. And even then the wellspring that connects you to the source of eternal love is always within your reach.
Though I miss you, you are still part of that eternal flow that connects and supports us in everything that we do as separate individuals. Though we are grounded on different parts of the riverbank, I know that whatever resonance between us that brought us, two strangers, to share a connection in a moment in time will always exist. In knowing that I feel completely reassured by the processes of life.
I never told you the true depth of the things you taught me. You reminded me to lighten up and laugh more, and that humour is the best medicine. You taught me to expect the best for myself. You taught me to be truer to who I really am and to realign myself to that truth. Even now your teachings still resonate with me everyday. You are a teacher in your own right, and I thank you for sharing what you know with me.
Nothing you do can fail if it comes from the place of love inside of you. Nothing. Love is all there is.
Unfamiliar territory. We have all been in it before. It can be truly terrifying to face the unknown, to not know what is going to happen or manifest from one week to the next. Yet whether we realize it or not, our every living day is actually like this. We don’t really know what is going to happen to us or those we love from one minute to the next. We just take for granted that we will be following the same routines, the same structures that we always have, and for the most part we do. Sometimes then it takes extraordinary circumstances to jolt us out of this complacency into a new pattern, a new grid, in order to realise that we really do not have any control.
I find myself currently walking to some extent along streets that do not have a familiar feel to them. Mostly, these streets are in my head, as externally I am living back in my home town, in my family home, with my parents. There is a lot of familiarity there, yet, I can feel a turning upside down of something inside myself. On the outside, I am experiencing this force through the changes that are occurring to some of my friends. I look around and observe the life altering things that are happening to people I care about around me, and I take a deep breath and hope for the best outcome for all of them. Change takes courage, and the courage that I see around me is inspiring. It is also a source of reflection, because for every life altering event that occurs, questions are raised. Why is this happening? What is the lesson here? Why is it happening to someone I know? What does it all mean? These questions are often never fully answered, and it takes a lot of faith in self and in something bigger than all of us, as well as a big dose of resilience to keep traveling a path that has not always been chosen directly by the traveller. I know this because I have had to to do it myself many times before.
Life’s changes challenge all of us. No one is immune to them and some of us stress more over them than others. I had to laugh on listening to something the Dalai Lama said in response to a question a journalist asked him about how he coped with the tragedy and suffering all around him. He said, in such times he reminds himself of the words of one of the Spiritual leaders he knows: if there is someway you can help during a tragedy, then there is no need to worry. If there is no way you can help during a tragedy, then there is no use worrying! Such simple wisdom and yet so difficult to follow through on. I know that I am always worrying about things that I cannot change, instead of perhaps conserving that energy for other things.
One thing is certain, and I think that I can say this although certainty is always questionable. Significant change forces us to stop and think about many different things, including what is most important to us. Hopefully in doing that we become better people, more able to really live with a true sense of our priorities. To live life closer to the bone is something that in fact is good for us, I believe. In doing this, we are more grateful, more in touch with those around us, more attentive to what is precious and fleeting. Perhaps this is the true meaning of change; to travel the streets that have no name bravely, in the hope that somewhere in that lost wandering you are able to eventually find a more certain and lasting sense of home.
To all of you experiencing significant changes in your lives, you are not alone.
In the last week I have been thinking and reading about connecting with angels. Like everyone I can be skeptical. However, I now strongly believe that we are supported by angels in everything we do. Why do I believe this? Lets just say that almost everything I am connecting with now can be related back to my recent illness and the experience of brushing the edge of my own mortality. Its difficult to explain. Perhaps the best I can do is just say that its like a light has gone on inside and a previously darkened room is illuminated now. Its as simple as that.
I’ve found some information on connecting with my own guardian angels and I will put the links up. I have also been reading about connecting to Arch Angel Michael and asking him for protection and healing. When you think about it, these beings are no different to the saints and prophets we have always called on for guidance. This morning while walking I did in fact ask a favour of Michael and of my two Guardian Angels. I can actually feel their presence since doing it, and I am sure its not because my brain is sun-touched!
According to what I have read, if you want help from your angels, you only need to ask them, so go ahead. There is a whole world of esoteric thought and action that I am discovering, and while many different people are writing about it, they are putting out the same messages- the unity of all, the desire to love and act on love, the fact that we are spirits first and physical beings second. These things are all constant in the different writings. Now is a good time to start finding out more about yourself as a spiritual being, and the angels seem closer to all of us than ever before!
Its been quite a few months since I have written in my blog. That’s because I started the year 2010 with a trip to Indonesia and a bout of Legionnaire’s Disease which landed me in hospital on the day I returned to Australia. About 2 weeks and 2 hospitals later I was sent home to recuperate, which I did for a further 8 weeks. A time it was and what a time!
As a result, I am in the process of change. Yes, the other scary C word. Change is always challenge, sometimes frightening, but constantly demanding of us to let go of the old and let in the new. Because of this, my blog is also going to reflect the changes that I am personally experiencing. Last year (2009) it was all about my journey as a writer. That journey has by no means finished, although I have not been able to focus on my creative writing in the past 5 months. Rather, the journey is changing. I am still going to be working on developing my creative writing, because that is one of my special abilities- to write stories. But I am also going to start focussing more on my role as an evolving, changing and growing human being. I think that has to come first, and maybe my recent brush with mortality has been the catalyst to awaken me to this reality.
I’m starting to reawaken to my spiritual purpose here on earth, just like a lot of people are at this time. About 15 years ago I went through a similar awakening and delved into all things New Age. Looking back I can see that while it was right at the time, I was not developed enough as a person to support alot of the things I was discovering and playing with. I really had no idea if I were to be honest.
Part of my recovery process was to go within. I was literally forced to as I spent a hell of a lot of time alone in the house day in, day out for 3 months. I had to cope with myself. A lot of the time I didn’t cope! Now I can see what an extremely valuable time it was. It has enabled me to get in touch with sides of myself that were dormant for a long time. I am exploring a lot of things at the moment, some new and some I have touched on before. I know without doubt I am being called to change and evolve, to wake up and to renew my sense of who I am, to re-integrate sides of me that have been asleep into my conscious, everyday life.
Because of this, my blog is going to start reflecting more of who I am. I am a writer, but I am also an evolving spiritual being and I want to write more about this too. I want to share the journey of change with you. We are all fools taking our first steps on a journey that we are sometimes called to without any warning. Don’t be afraid to travel the path! Its an amazing time to be alive.
Namaste!
Im in the process of writing my school reports for the end of the year. While this is probably my least favorite type of writing, it is still a skill and forces me to think about the rules of writing this type of text. I am often confronted with my own inadequacies as a writer, despite the fact that I have University degree majoring in English Literature, and that I have taught English as a subject for 9 years now! How can it be that I still make grammatical errors and still seem to have no idea about how to spell certain words? Its ludicris but sadly true.
Today I had to rewrite a whole class of reports and modify them because what I had written was inadequate and poorly phrased. I am blaming being over tired and over worked, however there is an element of learning in this. I am learning how to write reports in the style that this school requires. Every time I change schools I have to learn a new way of shaping these documents, a new standard of expected vocabularly and a new range of appropriate comments to match the client base. Language and writing genres are tricky. Things change. There does not now seem to be one set way of writing things, and while this is also fascinating and intriguing, it can also be challenging and make one feel hopeless at times.
Being a teacher of adolescents who are learning how to negotiate and use language, it is good for me to feel this way. I need to feel occasionally lost and hopeless. It helps to put me in their shoes and to understand the real challenges of language acquisition. And when it comes to grammatical rules, some of them could definitely teach me a thing or two!
This year I have been trying to learn how to bring my novel writing to a new point of completion. In the past I have always just written for inspiration, and while that is great at the time, I have not been able to get past a certain point with each (there are about 5 at the moment) novel. So, I found a great writing school on line and I signed up.
Gotham Writers Workshops (http://www.writingclasses.com/) is a really great writing school based in New York which provides both on site and online courses in all genres of writing. Being based in Australia I needed the online courses. I originally found them while living in China, but didn’t actually enroll until I had moved home to Australia this year in June.
First I signed on to do the basic Fiction 1 course. I think its always good to go back to basics when you get stuck in your craft. I completed that course and enjoyed the feedback that I received from the other students and from my tutor, Season Harper-Fox. Season is a really supportive and very experienced tutor who writes herself, so it was all very sound and well directed advice. I moved on from that course (which ran for 10 weeks) and then enrolled straight away in Novel Writing 2. In retrospect I maybe should have waited a little bit, as the commitment involved in these courses is quite significant in terms of reviewing other peoples work. I must say though that I have stuck it out and received a lot of great and useful feedback from fellow students and the tutor. The only problem is that I haven’t really had enough time to write ( i work full time as a teacher) and have to spend way too much time reviewing other writer’s work. Even so, this process in itself has also been quite useful and at least I have had to touch base with my craft every week which is more than I was doing before.
For me, being a regular writer when not inspired is difficult. I can find a million reasons why, but I have realized that what it comes down to is that if I continue to wait for inspiration and not develop some kind of discipline, I will never end up finishing anything. Hence my decision to also start blogging about my development as a writer, my interests as a writer and to try and always keep myself writing no matter what other things seem to crowd my time and attention.
If you are developing your craft as a writer and have had some similar experiences or would just like to make a comment or offer a suggestion, please do! I would love to hear from you.
Meg
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