What is love?

You can only experience love to the extent that you can show it to yourself. That’s also the upper limit to what you can bestow on significant others too. If you deep down loathe yourself, feel you don’t deserve much and think you’re missing a vital part that might make you human or lovable, then you might want to start exploring this question. If you are currently being abused around the clock by everyone you meet, again you’re up against a twisted understanding of love. It comes in many forms that all have their merits but, in short, love is a willingness to be present and pay attention.

As you cultivate a relationship with yourself you find out gradually what is holding you back, it may be painful or cringe worthy events. It may be fear of rejection. Its likely to be any number of mental and emotional experiences. So love is also the commitment to explore your own blocks and triggers as a welcome part of your inner landscape. In relationships, this translates into an ever expanding comfort zone of shared experience with your partner. Romantic love, projection of your hopes and dreams, needs, obsessions and intensity all get a lot of bad press but they all have their part to play in the grand theatre of our lives! Why not!

Letting Go

You might be surprised to hear how hopeless many people are at letting anything go. Some people say well yes, I’ve forgiven but I’ll never forget. Others say, oh I hardly ever think of it but it was definitely quite damaging at the time. People with a cause are even more tenacious. This may be in support of an underdog or it may be because they have a strong ethical perspective but nevertheless people hang on to every detail, whether they’re aware of it or not. If we look further afield, or at least in to one, we notice that trees know a thing or two about the rhythms and seasons of nature. They don’t hold on to their leaves, they let them fall. Without fear or a shadow of a doubt, they demonstrate their trust that more leaves will grow.

We can practice letting the things we are emotionally attached to go. This should be a systematic exercise, lining up as many apparently good and bad people or things each time in your mind’s eye. Simply deciding to let go of your attachment to your partner or children for ten minutes allows a healthy breathing space. This is because relationships are often obscured by dynamics of guilt and anxiety. We are supposed to enjoy ourselves and each other. For this to happen, it is really beneficial to let go of years of conditioning as well, again just by consciously choosing to. Incidentally, the tao understanding of making love is that it should have nine courses, with all sorts of rapture and ending in the woman’s complete letting go, into bliss. The man’s role in this being one of butler, glad to be of service, perhaps! Anyway that’s one incentive to give it some time. The other main reason to keep letting everything go, however challenging, is because bitterness and resentment will follow otherwise and probably end in an ulcer!

Have been clearing illusiveness, trouble and to shift the dynamic from building blocks to reaping what we've sown. All highly recommended, as is my one the other day for punctuality. I didn't think I'd see the day but I've been on schedule ever since. Very peaceful!

How to heal a broken heart

The problem with a broken heart is that it is love and grief tied in a very big knot. One minute you think you’re tugging loose a strand of grief and ready to move onwards and upwards, only to find you’ve tightened the hold of your heart strings. The tension leads to breaking point. It doesn’t take much. Someone can unexpectedly show you a small kindness and you find yourself in a heap. You can have just taken a shine to someone only to jump to the feeling of having been used. More often, you shut down and privately vow never to feel anything at all again. This level of bad feeling can carry through generations as cellular memory and manifests again and again as heart attacks and cancer. So its fairly important to heal your heart. This can be done by acknowledging what’s stored there.

The heart is a tetrahydral shaped muscle and as such can hold millions upon millions of bits of information and frequencies, without them conflicting. The way people have it set up emotionally though is like a love heart-shaped room with one or two incongruous pieces of furniture in it, that must be avoided or run into - picture a suite consisting of a three seater sofa of guilt, an armchair of sadness and another armchair of some unfamiliar but toxic-looking material. The result is that no hopeful feeling can get past and no tentative idea can receive your full investment. Once you have the realization that your heart can handle anything by being open and receptive, you know everything you need to know. The emotional charge that surrounded your worst memories and fears starts to disperse. The shock leaves the rest of your body too, leaving you less reactive and more able to respond instead. Your heart returns to its harmonious flow of information in and out. You will be able to experience the whole spectrum of feelings from creative and blissful through to enraged or painful without judging any of them as good or bad. Best of all though, you will be able to freely express your love again at will.

Understanding dreams

Dreams are often a way for someone who has died to come and say hello, that they’re alright or need some further clearing. Patterns also show up like betrayal, rejection, being incapacitated or exposed in some way. These are all useful to observe in any healing journey, which is nothing more than an ever increasing self awareness. The happy knock on effect is a comfortability with, and compassion for, all living things. In the meantime, your dreams are an arena where what you’re afraid of can show up. This doesn’t really narrow it down as people are, on the whole, very afraid of anything out of the ordinary. They can hardly look or listen when they’re awake in case, God forbid! they happen upon something that contradicts the consensus.

Fair enough, most people don’t want to see spirits all day of people long gone, let alone those of all the animals, but what else are we missing? All of it, I would answer. Guidance, for starters, from all aspects of our being, our innate intelligence. God perhaps might like to express something even, seeing as he has at least a good bit of perspective. Don’t get me started on his omnipresence, omniscience and eternal nature, all of which we have too if we only allowed divine aspects of our being to have a say rather than just the mundane. We also miss the restorative experience of the countryside, life lessons, foresight and the endless solutions there are to the difficulties we face. All these things, for the moment, then can only surface in our dreams. Perhaps with our next year’s tax returns we should be asked to also compile our dream journal in to a manifesto. They would make for the introduction of a lot of new policies and interesting reading but first you have to start keeping one.

This was my 5th article! Don't forget there is the shamanic journey and energy clearing at my house on Saturday at noon. I have made back from England and so should have something ready for lunch and a cake at very least.

Who is doing the thinking?

This is article no.4 which I'm uploading on the ferry to England!
Don't forget drumming at noon on saturday 22nd Jan at Harmony Hall.

Don’t be fooled in to believing that you’ve got a great head on your shoulders and that, of everything, your reasoning has never let you down! Look at your thoughts a little more objectively for a moment. They have effectively been waging a war of attrition on your well being, dismissing out of hand any feeling or intuitive insight. How many fleeting visions of imagination do you thwart as they arise, with a judgement like its impossible, that’s unlikely, I doubt it or dream on...without actually meaning that! What is really going on in your head is a very long or very short medley of tunes on a loop. Some short circuit back to the same song every few minutes or so, others are hoping they can write a new melody but find it strangely familiar after all.

We need some discipline around here to mentally move our thoughts from repetitive bias to conscious choice. We are each just a schism of energy that identifies with countless experiences and beliefs over time. Somehow you end up on this beach with all your baggage, completely disconnected from the ocean of possibilities you emerged from. Then to cap it all, you say to yourself, well this is who I am. I recommend stepping back into the ocean and this can be done by starting to allow a gap between your thoughts - if you don’t mind! Brilliant though they are! Although you will experience a loss of imagined control, in its place you will be allowing the infinite organizing power of nature to influence you. Then things really start to get exciting as the parameters of your old identity soften and inspiration rolls in for expression.

Do you want to change the way you are?

Hi, this is the third in the series of articles I've been writing. I have also done some mega clearings in the last week, which I recommend to those of you who know how to clear. I became interested in percentages after a client rang to say. Wow, I went to a karma clearing workshop and the guy said you'd already cleared 89% of my karma! It was funny to me at the time. I found myself asking what percentage of my being was caught in an ancient cringe from childhood and past life? - I got it from a wopping 30% down to 0%. I asked what percentage of my being radiates love and light. I got it from a respectable 79% up to 100%. Then I asked what percentage of my being am I cutting off from the abundance of the universe, had to get that down from a critical 80% down to 0%. You can imagine that those three uncovered much material and I have been in an emotional outpouring ever since. Goodness knows what I'll be like when I emerge. Its been inevitably fairly painful but I consider it 'accelerated learning' ! and the rewards are always way higher than the price.

It occurs to most people every day that they should try harder, if not be altogether different from how they are. The obvious set back to this thought process is that it repeatedly informs you that you are not alright as you are. Instead of being a motivating force behind self improvement, its a passion killer of self criticism. However, if your self acceptance grows, you can fundamentally change the way you are. From overweight or underweight to a radiant expression of aliveness; from too old or too young to a warm respect for yourself and others; from a victim of circumstance to a powerful creator of your daily reality. So, what is this self acceptance and how to get there? It starts with a realization and a continued awareness that it has been your environment that has dictated how you feel about yourself since Day One. By the time you are an adult, you are armored up to the hilt and on the defensive. When you live in an impenetrable fortress, you inadvertently leave yourself a very small comfort zone to move in. No one else is in it. Definitely not family and friends as they are too close a trigger back to painful old experiences and also most of you yourself aren’t in it. Your shadow side is shut out too.

This shadow side is the bit you have to explore. Yes there’s memories and unpleasant characteristics and feelings but this territory is also home to your greatest potential and gifts. Your way of life moves from an external reference point - the goal being approval by your peers and survival in your environment - to an internal reference. The questions to ask are how do I feel about this and that, rather than how might it be judged by others. Over time you’ll come to recognize yourself as ‘usually pretty fair’, or ‘my intuition serves me well’, etc and then you are bringing your thoughts in to harmony with all that is the case anyway. Resistance and stress in all their manifestations fall away. In the process you learn what makes you tick. You feel strongly about injustice or there’s a bit of a persecution complex at work or whatever. There is no longer anyone to blame, not even yourself. Addictions from love, to alcohol, to work no longer have the mental hold over you because you notice right away what you do and don’t want to do and trust it. You ask yourself what feels good and understand your cravings and can let them go. Then you are empowered and your care for yourself takes form as positive change in body, mind and around you.

Overcome your fears

It might be useful to do an inventory of what you’re afraid of. This starts to get them out in the daylight. As you grow up you’re not afraid of the dark so much. Or are you, except you now have a family or partner in the house to protect or be protected by so you don’t think about it? Many emotional fears hold people in a lonely experience, for example fear of rejection and fear of loss. Then you notice your life is stuck in an apparent impasse. What is it that stops you from opening your mind to the infinite possibilities available to you? Again it is fear. It has sealed up your entire creative capacity, your resourcefulness, imagination and ability to express love. Probably worth dealing with. So, first you have to know your fears and then you have to practice being okay with them. See yourself as flanked by love and power, in what ever form they turn up, and facing your fears. In such good company, you will find yourself addressing your fears from a firm but friendly perspective. Fears only show up as an opportunity to learn something about yourself, don’t miss the opportunity.

When it comes to financial fear, I know there is a consensus. Everyone is agreed that we’re in trouble. More important to remember though is that it is the collective fear that has created the problem. There was greed and there was desperation, both sides of the same scarce coin; fear of not having enough. You notice how destructive its been to the individual and the world’s resources. If we hold the fear in ourselves we can only have it reflected back. Because we’re all connected, we create it again and again. Practice feeling secure about money, make gratitude for what you do have become a familiar feeling. It will start as a mental exercise in the form of maybe the sentence ‘right here, right now, I am ok’ The gift is to bring yourself back in to the present moment. Fear only exists as memory of past events or anxiety about the future. To then learn to behave with courage, start to cultivate feelings of trust. Learn to trust yourself and to trust that you are part of a bigger picture that isn’t trying to ditch you physically or metaphorically. Remember you belong here, you are crucial and equipped for everything life brings. Its the only way it can be.

Happiness - How to be happy and whole

There comes a time in your life when you realize that your happiness is your own concern. Unfortunately, what follows from that is the realization that you’ve been systematically depressing yourself all your life. I can confirm that you can turn those dynamics around. I have accessed my deepest wisdom on this and been able to assimilate it and bring it into every day life. Its a way of being called happiness, for want of a better world - word I mean! Your mission, if you should choose to accept it, is to cultivate a relationship with yourself. Simply make the decision to treat yourself well. Initially, you will not be able to hear yourself clearly, from under the blanket of denial and avoidance where our feelings have resided shame-facedly since we were young. Self awareness grows, however, with your commitment to listen to what you have to say and to notice with compassion the areas clouded by low self esteem and guilt.

Every moment you have the opportunity to make a new choice. Some of the ones I have made are to only give a minute to the negative thoughts of scarcity and not let the thoughts drench every cell in my body. To remember that everything and everyone in life is connected and I’m taking part in a playful and fluid movement of life, rather than a battle for survival. To build this sense of the whole, do what you love to do. Do it well, do it foolishly but make sure you do it. For me that has been academic life, playing the piano, riding, painting, knitting, cooking and swimming so far. Go for it and don’t stop because as you unblock your creative flow, you also open yourself up as a receptacle for ideas. An abundance of love, money and time get a chance to flow in for you to express. Because you have started to know and appreciate yourself, you’ll be able to give yourself credit for creating the turnaround and know at last for sure you deserve it. Bear in mind, everything you heal in yourself you are healing for everyone else too, so it is not selfish, it is time well spent.

Frances Micklem's book How To Live As One, a guide to clearing negativity and moving from old paradigm thinking to new

Happy 2011

Thank you everyone for being such brilliant aspects of the self; reflecting back exactly what I need to address in myself at exactly the right moment. I think we are all well able for what lies ahead. At 11 o clock and 1 o clock today, 1.1.11, I did an hour's meditation, allowing through support and intervention by a holy host of divine aspects, like God for example and to work from the top! to many angelos - messengers - and power animals like otter, dolphin and wolf and whoever else showed up like Windy of course. Went riding yesterday and I have to insist that everyone get outside preferably on horse back every day! Think we should also spread our arms around the world in some sense. I am so glad to have this way to be of service without leaving the building! That's the clearing I'm talking about! I have been doing alot of distance healing during the snow that have gone great for the whole family I'm tuning in to. It really is evidence that we can send good fortune and resolution around the world as long as we have the clarity of intention and the courage and compassion to try it. I also hope to prove that one can paint the way out of a recession or depression to a completely vibrant and heartwarming future, from the personal to the global. Further to my own colourful world of animals and wonderful people and natural beauty, I have already painted world peace and money arriving on angels wings. What reality are you yourselves going to create this year? x