Posts Tagged ‘Soul’

Hibernating

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009
Feeling the world upside-down......or sideways?
Feeling the world upside-down……or sideways?

Well, after a couple of months hiatus, I’m again feeling the natural impulse to write and express myself through my blog.  The world is changing always and the rate seems to be continuously increasing.  The ways that I find myself accommodating that is by pulling in more and simplifying my life to come into my centre more.  That is always where I can find a greater calmness and peacefulness.  Then something pulls me out again and I find myself on the edge of my ‘wheel’ and then things start to feel like it’s spinning again, so I feel the impulse like a wave, to return back to what makes me feel more balanced.

I have various subjects that I would like to touch on over the next few days and I’ll write about it in separate blog titles. About about energy auditing my home and energy efficient things you can do for your home, about some of my new writings that I am working on and about a wonderful world healing sound healing event coming up on Feb. 14.

Life as a Journey....following a path....to where....?

Life as a Journey....following a path....to where....?

In the beginning of December, the world began to wake up to the great reality of the economy.  Things began to falter, the governments began to wobble & change and indirectly, some of the work that I have in the office went on a slower track.  At first I thought this was not great, but the workload has been so heavy for so long, that my body actually felt relieved.  Now, things feel actually much more balanced and spacious and I’m really enjoying having more time to socialize, do more physical exercise & stretching and even start to do some more focused writing.  I’ve joined a fantastic afro-brazillian dance class in my neighbourhood that really get’s me moving and wakes up my soul to such an exciting depth of aliveness and vitality that is sometimes hidden from me.  I’m really enjoying myself and that in the end is the most important thing.

Hibernating in the winter is such a delicious thing.  The cold weather or excessive snow is a wonderful excuse to stay indoors and become more reflective, or more creative.  One is not so easily distracted by external things. Every week, I become more inspired by one thing or another.  I have discovered the world of self-publishing and have been deeply motivated to finish some of my old writings and pull much of it together in a series of different kinds of books.  I will be creating a small book of my collected works of poetry, and another one expanding on home energy balancing that is half finished.  It’s all very much fun!

Making a winter emergency shelter

Making a winter emergency shelter

I’ve also discovered a wonderful group called the Toronto Survivalism Meetup Group that I find fascinating.  They had a great morning in High Park over a week ago, with an expert on Outdoor Survival giving a wonderful demonstration on how to build an emergency shelter in the winter with a tarp and some rope.  It was great!  The ‘hosts’, Laurie & Michelle have a delightful energy and a good sense about what they are trying to create. Their focus is to;

“Meet with people in the GTA who are interested in discussing basic and advanced preparedness issues, long and short term survival, and mitigation. Learn how to care for yourself and your family and to navigate the urban landscape in the coming decades as civilization begins to change. This is a fun, peaceful group of people interested in learning, helping others and building community.

Topics include: Local edible plants, urban gardening, emergency preparedness, survival skills, first aid, community support, self-defense and traditional living skills.”

They just started it in August and the discussion board threads are pretty interesting to just pay attention to, let alone the various meeting themes that they are suggesting.  I highly recommend this.

A winter tree........alone and interconnected to ALL THAT IS

A winter tree........alone and interconnected to ALL THAT IS

The winter also is a good time to take the space for deeper reflecting.  With the shortest day of the year on Dec. 21, we slow down over the winter due to the longer nights.  It is hard to take the time to reflect if you feel overwhelmed or are too busy, running around ‘doing’ things.  I find it is so important to take the space to ‘be’ and in this space, you will find the time to reflect and know yourself deeper.  Holding balance between ‘being’ and ‘doing’ is akin to holding balance between your feminne nature and your masculine nature.  We need both and it’s always a dance between the two.

Hibernating and self-reflection can go hand in hand.  In the ‘being’ place you can write poetry, draw art, write in your journel, trance dance to music by yourself, chant holy sounds, or meditate on certain questions, and so on.  In the ‘doing’ place you can also explore yourself through self-growth workshops or various forms of therapy.

It’s never too late to begin to truly know your authentic self and the winter is a great time to start to listen deeper within.

Craving stillness in building my SOUL

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008
lotus

lotus

We now have to learn to invite the silence, and having invited it we now have to learn to enter it.”

- Robert Sarello

I have been noticing lately at how hard it is to hold a good, steady focus and how ‘busy’ things always seem to be.  I have understood this as a response to the creative impulse of my soul.  As I have truly followed my passion and trusted that what was calling me to create that which gives me the greatest joy, I have found many challenges as well as inspiring moments along this path of building my own SOUL.

It’s one thing to create your passion and unblock what may be holding you back from receiving ABUNDANCE on all levels.  I have spent years clearing my past emotional history, to change my patterns and re-organize and re-frame how I view reality and my expectations.  I have learned how to let go of the past and to manage and hold a clearer intention of what I want in the future. To imagine what before seemed the impossible and to dream bigger than I could even imagine.  I have learned how to listen to those minute wobbles of non-clarity within myself and to do what may need to be done to change myself, attune myself differently to get what I think I might want (sometimes you learn it’s not really want you want, so I’m much more careful when I do wish for something!) .  And then it’s quite another thing to be in the FLOW and to manage the SURGES of how my spiritual, sexual, creative impulse goes out into the world and then actually experience the world responding back to me with an even bigger YES!

Then there is so much to do that I often find myself running around, driving too fast on errands, letting papers pile up on my desk, trying to manage all the parts of what I’ve started, but feeling like I can never really catch up!  I’m learning how to delegate more now and to trust the flow and let things be a little messier or uneven.   I’m noticing how my breathing goes higher up in my chest and how my stomach goes tight in anxiety to keep it all together.  My work can be so, so, busy, full, demanding and overwhelming at times.  I feel this constant pressure and feel like I am always rushing from one thing to the next.  In the evenings I just can’t think and when I don’t take down time to do absolutely nothing on the weekends to balance it, I feel it during the week.

I find that when I can relax into this and let go a bit, trusting my intuition more, magic & synchronicity starts to happen.  A kind of effortless lightness begins to be cultivated and things begin to get accomplished quicker in unusual ways that my chronological, left brain never considered as a possibility before.

What I’ve learned is that whenever I feel this ‘rush’ kind of feeling, I have to slow down, get more grounded and centered and then should triple check the minute details of what I’m doing.  I find when I’m in the ‘rushing’ space, details get lost and I make mistakes.  I used to do that when I wrote tests as I child.  I could write them fast, but I often didn’t double check the test and made silly mistakes only because of my speed.  The thing is that when you are in it, it usually is hard to know that you are not grounded as you normally are.  It’s more in retrospect that you find this out, after you’ve made an error or crossed a line and felt afterwards that something doesn’t feel right.

I’ve also heard from a number of other sources that it is continuously harder for us to feel grounded or centred on a daily basis due to the fact that the earth’s electromagnetic fields are weakening because of EMF (Electromagnetic frequency) toxicity and I am aware too that the North/South pole is slowly also shifting on it’s axis, which affects our equilibrium.

And I’ve also heard that TIME is doing weird things and actually speeding up – we don’t see that on the clock or how time is recorded, but the feeling is there and has also been commented on by various friends to me. It feels like time is compressed and events appear to rush by, the day goes faster and faster.  To stop and just breathe, taking in someone’s kind comment, eye contact for a minute or noticing a beautiful thing outside in nature, all helps to slow it all down.

All of this means that we have to constantly ‘recalibrate’ ourselves daily and do things to slow us down more and more to be able to catch those details and also be gentle on ourselves when we make mistakes (my reminder as I am still hard on myself for doing that).

I find myself craving downtime to balance the business of the majority of my days.  I often will watch a movie, to help shut off the thinking of my huge to do list.  But what I’m actually really craving is to touch into the space of SILENCE.  Everything else is a temporary band aid solution that only comforts for a bit, manages me temporarily.  Finding the time and focus to drop into SILENCE is what will be able to hold me in such a way that nothing else will satisfy.

Just like we build spaces and buildings around us to shelter, protect our physical bodies, we can also cultivate inner spaces that can nourish us, inspire us, re-charge us.  It takes attention, self-reflection, spiritual warrier work to be able to sit still and hear your fears, face your aloneness (or all-one-ness), learn how to slow it all down and come back to the centre, the hub rather than running around like a goose with it’s head cut off, running around the periphery of the wheel, of yourself.  This hanging out on the periphery of who you truly are in your SOUL, keeps your energy on the edge, loosing bits, scattering yourself in a kind of constant, high anxiety,  panic.

Hub and spokes wheel

My gentle suggestion for all of you is to find out what you need to do to come back to your centre and to learn how to cultivate your inner silence and then practice, nourish, grow it as much as you can.  It is a practice and I’m still only a beginner…….I hear my SOUL calling me deeper into my interior……gtg…

“Drawing attention to the heart focuses the mystery we are entering. As both physical organ and spiritual-imaginative center, it is the only true organ for perceiving Silence. Once activated in the heart, Silence spreads throughout the body, and we feel as if our entire physiology alters. Instead of perceiving things held apart from other things in sharp and heavy outline, as is usual, we enter into a feeling-perception of the interior space around us that gives birth to all things. Artists have an intuition of this kind of interior in working with negative space. But the space of Silence is something more than that because it is not merely the void from which things spring up; it is a living presence. The deeper we enter into Silence the more we become aware that this living presence is primary and the contents of our perceiving are the secondary bursting forth of this original presence. For a moment we are dizzied beyond belief. If only we had the courage to ward off the dizziness and stay in its presence, who knows where we would be taken. Instead, we recover our usual sensing and, at most, feel the continued resonance of the Silence.”

Robert Sardello

Inner Silence

Inner Silence