The Five Ways To Generate Positive Emotion

It Is Just How Energy Works

What was secret is now common knowledge... like this cove at the lighthouse

We don't need food to live

Very few think that I could be a breatharian. It’s true it takes a considerable depth of understanding that we don’t need food and water to live. To see that it is just an illusion of dependency, foisted on us to keep us needy and in and out of the shops and looking to someone other than ourselves with a ‘please, sir, can I have some more?’ expression.

Oranges, Olives, Avocados and Edible Flowers...to avoid the shops

Working with Energy rather Than Just the Empirically Obvious

But I am some of the way there. I can work with energy effectively. I know how to consciously imbibe what I need from the ether and I do it every day. I know, in principle that every thing is energy and that we ourselves determine the qualitative state/form of the energy that arrives, in our experience. For example, if I’m genuinely expecting nourishment, I receive nourishment. 

Dinner with the right company is physically, emotionally and spiritually nourishing

Low Expectations Are A Liability

The flip side is that if I am (somewhere in here, in my mind or in my heart) expecting a shortage or a depressing reality to present itself, then that is what I will receive, instead.

A half done hydroponic experiment and a log pile running low OR
Hydroponics nearly established and log pile saw me through the winter?!

When you feel strongly, is it strongly positive?

This is what makes it crucial to overcome a ‘lack mentality’ or, in my case, an ‘acute awareness of suffering’ mentality. Everybody I know has both these things. That’s how it works: 

If you have even one persistent concern be it the health service, animal or human rights or money…they will not, I’m afraid, prevail as you are more probably expecting the LACK of a health service, the ABSENCE of human and animal rights and the SHORTAGE of money.

Dissipate Pent Up Emotion

So today, I’m digging deep into all those concens and deftly and swiftly dissipating any emotional energy around them. I bet that if you too have any emotion around a topic, it is negative emotion and we know what that attracts: Shed loads more of the same.

So you know what I’m going to say, I’m sure:

Generate and schedule-in some seriously positive emotion to your days. If the draw to a bleak outlook is too great or you don’t know how to get past it, give me a shout.

They say; do not wait for someone to bring flowers. Most of these are edible, picked yesterday to save from being blown asunder in the gale and my two luckiest colours: Orange and  yellow

Generating Positive Emotion To Create Better Outcomes

There are five ways to generate positive emotion and turn your reality around. These are not just optional extras. You can’t turn your reality around unless you do the energetic work, master your thoughts, come to terms with how things work and make the concerted effort to generate positive emotion. And there’s not hundreds of ways there are these five ways. 

So…where was I”? Oh yes

1) Be At Peace With Everything 

       Affirm to yourself, I am at peace with everything in my life. This has the added bonus of being funny as it won’t ring true the first few times you say it. What with cognitive dissonance (your psychological settings taking a bit of time to get with the programme) you will just have to laugh with incredulity and keep persevering until you realize the truth of the sentence.

Even and especially your family

2)   Gentleness is Healthy

       Practice emanating gentleness from inside your body. Soften your heart and send it out. Soften your focus and send it out and then soften any other organs or limbs that feel a bit rigid when you quietly enquire within.

3) See Yourself As Majestic and Contented  

       This involves your Gaia energy field; your relationship to Nature. If we are all connected and made of the very same stuff, then it’s totally legitimate to identify for a while with a tree or a blade of grass, as it is to compare yourself to another human being.

This one has two added bonuses …bonii? A) Trees are so majestic and we don’t often get to feel like that and B) if you were previously feeling frustrated with your productivity or progress you can say squarely to a tree, ‘what have you achieved today? And it will say ‘No more than a busy day of photosynthesis and a chat among our roots about nearby insects and bacteria that could get problematic’. 

You’ll never get the impression they wished they’d done more though and you’ll feel better about what you yourself ticked off your To Do list.

Every kind of Fuchsia, Escallonia, Willow,
Oak and Hazel at Harmony Hall

       4) Cruise On Past Efforts

 Draw in your energy regularly and have four happy places to visit in your mind’s eye. One of mine is reading or thinking about the things I’ve written over the last week. This week; a good energy clearing report, a poem for a competition, a funny page bio and now this highly important post is getting written that could literally improve the lives of millions, instantly or in years to come.

That’s the beauty of the internet.

Or a simple achievement like getting the kitchen how you like it.

With Our Thoughts, We Make It Happen

       5) That last sentence about the internet is a good example of the 5^thway to generate positive emotion ‘Looking for the positive spin’ on things. Staying with the internet example, we habitually say ‘it saps our time’ and ‘it’s a bit of a rabbit hole’ but unfortunately that makes it a true story. If we can find and maintain an optimistic approach, then that becomes the reality. Literally, if I can come to believe that the internet is bringing happiness, solutions and meaningful connection then that is what it’s doing.

With our most persistent thoughts, be they conscious or unconscious, as they say in Star Trek, we “Make it so, No. 1”

Plant The Seeds of This Idea Now and They Will Bring A Great Harvest In Time 

They are only small but they represent hope and we all need that!!

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Poem for Jonah RIP

Answered prayers delivered every week day.

For Jonah

Beautiful Jonah

Who was so quiet

He only made one noise, once

When his tail hit a wire

In the last few years

He needed a high viz’ jacket

Or Dad mightn’t seen him there

At the bottom of the stair.

Faithful Jonah

Who’d always come in concern

To a cough or a sneeze

Not waiting for something serious like a turn

When he’d checked you were fine

He’d start sliding down

To your feet

To again take his ease.

Beautiful Jonah

A role model to others

Zola learnt how to behave 

Only once led you astray.

Sky, too, learnt how to be,

To try and hold it together and 

Not bark at the trees.

Beautiful Jonah

I understand Mum

With some decisions and sadness

You have to stay stum.

Soppy dog, Jonah

I understand Dad

To not get to say bye,

Would make you so sad.

It’s like Mum used to say

‘You treat this place like a hotel!’

But she couldn’t have born it

If I hadn’t come home 

Dad might be worried  

If the last time he saw him

He called him a mutt 

Or a total greedy gut

Knowing full well and indeed what luck

That it takes one to know one

And Jonah knew as much.

He also understood 

That we all loved him 

As much as we could.

Last night, I escorted his soul to heaven

It didn’t take much for it to leaven.

Clearing any fear that he had

At his passing

He is now again ready to

Receive prayers for the asking.

In addition to thank you for the wonderful time,

He told me specifically to say

Answered prayers will be delivered 

Every week day.

Little video of Jonah going off down the steps from the footbridge

The Air We Breathe a class for 8-10 year olds

I wrote this for the Castlecomer Discovery Park and Footprints in Coal Museum, for the trip by the Pushkin Trust who are focusing on cross-border relations and particularly (this year) on the air we all breathe. If you run it by your children, you will be equally amazed I'm sure by how much the children this young know!

For the museum, craft village and to cover all this and the ecology and maths in nature trails in the fun of the woods, you'd have to go to Castlecomer yourselves! 

All children will need is some half sheets of A4 again and pencils to draw.

Activities: We can go and find and I will get them to draw, 3 different leaves and a pine twig for comparison. A  little venn diagram of  the three components oxygen O2, carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen (N2).  Then we will discuss and look for bugs, divided into beneficial insects and pests. We will draw them. Connecting some parts to the museum - Ie how before the first plants (tall ferns), 400 million years ago, there was no oxygen and the planet was mainly desert. We will also draw a fern to compare to the fossils and consider what harmful things there can be in the air.

Why is it difficult to see what’s in air?

It’s invisible

Does anyone know?

Oxygen (21%) what else?

Carbon Dioxide 

Nitrogen (not important for our breathing but very important for plants, so indirectly important for us)

Does anyone know why trees are important to air?

Trees produce oxygen.

They are very clever as they use carbon dioxide in the air and mix it with water, making their own food, like a sugar and releasing oxygen.

As we will see in the museum, before trees there was no oxygen. The land was just a desert with no animals or people.

Which part of the tree is important?

The leaves

There are broad-leafed trees and they are good for producing oxygen.

How else do they, help the air in summer?

Yes by offering shade and cooling the air.

If I told you the other sorts of trees are conifers, can anyone think of another word for those? 

Clues?

They have needles rather than leaves and we have one inside at Christmas!

Yes, pines or fir trees.

As they are not good for creating oxygen 

What else are they good for? Fuel

Yes they are used for posts, building and making fuel to burn.

Do you think they grow faster or slower than broadleaf trees?

Yes faster, so does that make them a renewable energy?

Can we get more wood to burn to keep our houses warm?

Yes!

How long does it take a pine tree to grow to full size?

Coilte, the forestry cut them down at about 25 years

Fairy door in a fairy tree, never burn wood from a Hawthorn  or you will upset the fairies

What else do we burn?

Oil, coal and peat/turf.

In the museum we will find out that coal is 320 million years old. And it took 30 metres of peat to press down into just one metre of coal. So can we make more peat or coal in 25 years too? No! 

That is what renewable means; we can get more of it!

If you were given the choice to work in the woods, cutting down trees or in a coal mine digging out coal, which do you think would have the best air?

What do we need air for?

Yes breathing!

Can you think of anywhere else there is air?

Is there air in water?

Yes. 

Does anyone know how fish breathe?

They take water into their mouths and push it out through their gills, which have lots of blood vessels in them that grab the oxygen on its way past and send it around the fish’s body.

Is there air in soil?

Yes plants need water, air and warmth to grow.

Do they need light?

No, you’re right, not to start with as we plant seeds in the soil, in darkness but when they have leaves and start producing their own food and oxygen for us all - Then they need light! 

The process (of producing oxygen from sunlight and water on the green leaves) is called photosynthesis! The way to remember it is like when you take a photo, the flash of light goes off!

What else do trees produce? (Moving from air to insects section)

Flowers and fruit.

But they don’t automatically produce fruit. Like with people and animals there are male and female plants… did you know that?  Pollen has to be transferred from the male anther in the male flower to the stigma of a female flower. 

So can trees move around and introduce themselves?

No!

They need someone’s help.

Has anyone heard of pollinators who can fly and flit from flower to flower? 

Who are the great pollinators?

Yes, bees. But also lots of other insects and birds. Even the wind can blow the pollen around but the wind is not so accurate!

What’s another word for insects? Bugs!

We are going to have a look for one or two and draw them.

‘Bugs’ is a good word but does anyone here totally love bugs?

Most people say no so I like to call some bugs ‘beneficial insects’ and some ‘pests’. So we know who to look after and who to take out of our gardens before they eat everything!

What’s another word for beneficial? Good!

So some insects pollinate and that’s good.

What else do some insects do which is important/good?

Yes, they eat the pests!

Insects you are pleased to see include:

Bees, ladybirds, spiders, green lacewings (which are a rather elegant green flies with long see-through wings about 1.5cm.) and worms. Let me know if you can find any of these.

Worms are particularly good at aerating the soil (burrowing around and breaking down rotted leaves etc to make a breathing, living soil environment for plants to grow.

Harmful insects or pests! Include slugs, snails, fruit flies, ants and larvae. 

Does anyone know what a larvae is? 

They are like rolly polly maggots, who live just under the soil and nibble seedling roots. Uuugh!

But, what will they grow up to become? Yes, beautiful moths and butterflies.

So don’t feel bad if your house and garden has a few spiders, they will keep the pests away.

But we must remember that it is us people who decide whether a bug is good or bad. Do you think the little slug means any harm? No. And altogether they make up a perfectly balanced eco system keeping enough good air and food for everyone. 

So don’t kill pests, just remove them from the vegetable patch if you find one! 

Do you think chemical pesticides/bug killers can tell a beneficial insect from a pest? No, they kill both!

It is the same with plants. Does anyone know what a weed is? Definition:

‘A wild plant (no matter how beautiful) growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants’ – cultivated means like a field of potatoes and lots of poppies growing up in the middle!

Is there anything in the air that we don’t really want and can harm us? 

Yes, there’s pollution, car fumes but also there can be bacteria, spores and dust.

I just put this photo in as, like Monsanto, this advert is trying to make something toxic look heroic!

We know bacteria as we can catch a cold if someone is sneezing a lot nearby. But does anyone know about spores?

The plant with a lot of dangerous spore we have a lot of  here is the fern! So never cut down ferns in autumn when they are letting their spores fly around to reproduce. They can be very bad for our lungs. Ferns however, were one of the very first plants to grow on earth. Wait until you see the fossils of the first trees that grew. They look exactly like this but 20 metres taller! Let’s draw a fern now so we can compare it when we go in. 

These are actually blue bells but I'm sure there's some ferns in there somewhere

And what about dust? Do you all dust your rooms? Have you ever seen a layer of dust on a table or flying around when you shake a blanket? Let’s see if we can find a sunbeam and see if any little bits are hanging in the air.

This is not too dangerous but think about the dust when coal miners were in a small space, chipping out coal from the tunnels far underground. Let’s go and see what it was like.

Sharing Writing As A Visual Choreography, Carlow 8.5.19

A Woman With A Baby...Stolen, even though she's watched over by angels!! 

This is a once in a lifetime, lunchtime, show case of work done by the screen writers and poets in our Carlow College Writing club!! We have been working with writer in residence, Oonagh Kearney who is a multi award winning film writer.

1pm on Wednesday 8th May, meeting at the entrance to the George Bernard Shaw and Visual Arts Centre, we will move as a group, audience and performers, around the grounds - if it's sunny! for four or five succinct poems and readings and then follow scenes that take place in the theatre building itself, ending with refreshments in the bar. Hopefully a lazy lunch hour in total!

Everyone is very welcome, although none of us have ever performed before and certainly not our own work! But I've heard what comes out of these guys, just in automatic writing sessions - when we're given a prompt and told to just write to it for 10 minutes, off the cuff. It gladdens my heart how much genius, creativity and expression there is around!

This is my most unusual commissioned painting so far...'I need a painting of a woman and baby, to steal from the gallery'. This might mean that the gardai will get it back and it will be for sale again but it might not!!

George Bernard Shaw was an early Irish vegetarian and a playwright rated a close second after Shakespeare!! He gave his property to the Carlow council to be used in trust for the less fortunate in the community...the council sold most of it off...No Change There!!!

Now this is a book review! How To Live As One

If you help one person, the book was worth writing.

I can’t tell you how happy I am. How restored too! I was approached at work today, by a woman, completely elated to see me. She said I’ve just this minute put down your book. For a split second I thought she might have the wrong person!

She went on to say I looked at it there for sale 3 times and thought to myself what would I want with a book like that? Then, on the fourth occasion, she thought, at ten euro, what harm could it do? She said it had changed her life. She often dipped into it. She said ‘it really is about remembering that we’re all one.’ ‘I’m through things that I never thought I’d get out of. I’ve no bitterness, only recognition and still lots of love and hope. She said ‘there were bits when I first read them that I thought, this one (as in me!) is for the birds, no way I’m doing that. But then I went back and tried it and it has completely changed my life. I came to your talk in the library, she said, so I knew how to use the pendulum but I knew that night that I’d have to keep going with it, for it to work. 

I’ve worked through the whole book. She really wanted to impress that on me …that this wasn’t just an enthusiasm as she’d bumped into me. She ran back to her car to get the book to show me and there was a well-thumbed copy, with not just occasional notes in the front but at least 200 words of notes crammed in around each page. We laughed about how brilliant it is to keep growing, for insights to keep rolling in, alongside every thing we read or experience. We talked about the ripple effect of energy, as you let go and see things differently. 

It was the boost I needed as I’d all but forgotten I had anything important to say. And that whenever I ask what I’m supposed to be doing with my life, I get that it is to write and remind people of the spark of divinity in them and in animals and nature too. To remind people to acknowledge, appreciate and respect it and that that is the way to heal. 

For too long I’d let the doubt creep in, mirrored by endless clients who wanted me to write things for them, Masters theses, legal documents, formal letters, advocacy and maybe to teach someone piano or how to cook vegan or share my little bit of enthusiasm for organic growing… all of them insisting, hoping, or just letting me know in a multitude of ways that they didn’t want to hear any take on what’s really going on energetically (for them, me or anyone or anything) Just not comfortable with that mirror yet, even though I had ideas how to handle what came up to. I used to be sure that these were the real gems I had and I just learnt to keep them to myself… (except for Freya. Thank God for her, the only person always ready in 5D and 3D and 2D (coz usually on the phone) to hear what I’m really on about and how it might be crucial in the bigger picture.

My book on Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/How-Live-As-One-Yourself/…/1481184369
Freya Lawton's book on Amazon: The Peace Intention.
https://www.amazon.com/Peace-Intention-Handbo…/…/ref=sr_1_1…

I went on Amazon and was reminded how controversial the book was when I published it - on 12th of the 12th 2012 - End of the Mayan Calendar!! I was interviewed for radio and newspapers on 5 occasions, maybe more and NOT ONE MINUTE OF THOSE INTERVIEWS WAS AIRED or cameos in the paper!! Even though the journalists did their best and loved it. Vetoed from on high!! Which is interesting. 

So then I remembered the lady's opening gambit yesterday, about my book: She said I was brave to write it and brave to write it the way I wrote it. But it wasn't courage or perseverance that time, the book was what they called 'channelled'. I just sat down every day and asked for what I was to write about to come to me. Every time, it came as an exact paragraph. That's why, I suppose, it's an easy one to open at a page and mull it over, in the context of what's happening for the reader.

So I didn't write it, I allowed it through - Like the wonderful dance I had a few weeks ago, I had got ready but I hadn't dared to imagine what my efforts could be distilled into!!
Like, I had an entertaining turn of phrase already, I had done the multidimensional adventure, I had shown up to listen to as many people, places and animals that I could and then came the book. I had hoped that it would sell like hot cakes and I wouldn't have to meet anyone in person any more, just hang out here, in my own sacred geometry world, tuning in to things I wanted to work on, from afar. 

This is a way of working that Freya again validated in her explanation of what needs to happen and what life is all about (Just your average lofty topic for one afternoon!!). She described something along the lines of; we are here to intuit and articulate our own unique understanding of reality. Her example was Bach and his Flower Remedies, all discovered while communing with plants. Not about research or repeating and adopting what someone else said. 

So lets all trust ourselves and get our ideas down on paper, in art, in food, in business, teaching, whatever we do, just let it through from the heart not the head.

Washing Vegetables - The Devil You Know or What The Shops Come Up With

1min Video about washing leeks from the garden

Eclectic potatoes from last autumn, that front variety is truly a pain to wash let alone peel, as there's nothing left after! so just a scrub down is the answer!  

It's sometimes the small things in life that slow us down and put us off...like having to wash vegetables that you have grown yourself, as opposed to getting some Linda McCartney vegan sausages out of the freezer and have to only lightly rinse pre-washed organic potatoes, bought from a supermarket, to cut into organic chips. 

Spinach, chard and purple sprouting broccoli leaves about to be individually washed and checked  for visiting centipedes, baby slugs and snails from the garden!

With my own produce, sometimes only a quarter of the thing is salvageable and it's covered in soil and in a big sense you 'seen where it's been' - like when you caught a slug sliding over it earlier in its growing process.... STILL, persevere! Why? Because it is better the devil you know. A little bug, now all trace removed and rehomed in a less precious part of the garden is much much better than the invisible traces of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, preservatives, taste enhancers, plastics and often cooked to oblivion ingredients you will find in shops!

The non organic apple is shiny and that coating needs to be scrubbed off, using vinegar . The righthand one is from the garden, total perfection in nutrition and texture, if a little tart to the tastebuds!