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Thursday 30 May 2013

The Sacred Flame of Attraction

A friend of mine shared a quote in cyberspace saying that intelligence is the best aphrodisiac. I wanted to respond, saying that I disagreed and that to me it’s probably authenticity, sensitivity, creativity, more or less in that order. Then I thought of blurting out that I couldn’t help noticing when someone is easy on the eye. I realised that none of these are entirely accurate.

I had a conversation along those lines with a friend of my sister’s a few years ago. He asserted that women are interested in men because of their brains. I disagreed, saying that personality comes first. He said that that was what he referred to. I said that it wasn’t quite the same; it’s more about someone’s vibe. I told him that I have felt attracted to a man from a different race and background as myself during a few brief conversations I had with him. These conversations weren’t specifically intellectually stimulating. Just being in his presence was enough to tell me that there was something expansive about him, which I liked. My sister’s friend said that he understood. It wasn’t the brain per se but the demeanour, including body language and attitude. A bit closer, yet we didn’t quite nail it.


Regardless of how hard one tries, one cannot quite capture how the force of attraction works. When one is too clear about what one wants in a partner and responds only to that, it usually leads to disillusionment. Attraction happens when we recognise the sacred flame in someone else and feel it burning inside ourselves more strongly. It is because the flame is sacred that it cannot quite be defined or boxed in. That is why we find it mesmerising and why it has the power to change us.

Wednesday 29 May 2013

We Are From the Earth

I read this today via a community healing page that I follow on Facebook. It connects with something my teacher of shamanism posted earlier this week suggesting that we are all made of the same organic matter and therefore not as special as we might think.

Whenever people ask me what I really want to do with my life, I just talk around it, saying I’m “more interested in the arts” or I “want to do some form of therapeutic work but not traditional psychology any more”. How can I tell them that I want to work with the earth’s energies, that I feel her vibrations talking to me on a level that is beyond the mundane? How can I tell them about this invisible world that I always perceive behind the veil, subtle and yet so powerful that it makes daily life as we know it seem completely futile? I cannot and I don’t, unless they can perceive what I see.

I was raised Christian and it made me think of a verse in the Bible in Ecclesiastes: we are all dust and to dust we shall return. I never understood this verse as a child (like many other things in the Bible) and I found it very depressing. This week everything came together beautifully. The message I get is that I shouldn’t be ashamed of being in touch with the organism that we live on. Maybe it is not so absurd after all that I feel her flowing through my veins. It is perhaps more senseless to think that she is a dead piece of matter, only useful for providing us with food and stability so we can maintain our position at the “apex of creation”.

We have lived close to nature for millennia. Being in touch with our imagination and the organism we live on was an integral part of our survival. Economy and civilisation as we know it are still very new compared to our ages old spiritual traditions. Yet they have become the gods of today – different, duller, unimaginative gods but gods nevertheless.


Maybe the writer of Ecclesiastes understood that the earth and everything on it is sacred and that the same life force flows through all of us. There is an entire Universe that is far too large for us to fathom. How unimaginably massive is that compared to our little structures of meaning.

Tuesday 28 May 2013

The Days When I Don’t Feel Inspired

As much as I find myself bursting with energy and ideas more often the more I direct my energy towards playing my own game, there are days when my mood matches today’s weather, which is grey, dreary and downright depressing. On these days I don’t want to deal with the world, let alone work on anything that is supposed to make me excited.

During the dark times all my efforts seem futile and whatever anyone says, it doesn’t help. I want to hide what I’m feeling from the world and yet I know better than to fight it. “Solutions” only make me feel worse because they make me feel that I’m supposed to feel better when I’m not.

So how does one move forward on the dark days? I often find that the darkness is my friend. It shows me the parts of myself that I need to look at in order to heal. Discomfort is often just something trying to break loose and free itself, leaving space for new light to come in. The process of transformation never ends. When we have dealt with one thing, the light flows a bit more freely until it is time to deal with another spot of darkness.


On others’ recommendation I embrace the process. Having a down day doesn’t make me a bad person. I’m strong enough, so I sit with it. As far as working on any projects goes, I do what I can and the rest normally takes care of itself.

Monday 27 May 2013

The Experiences We Have Ignored

Today an experience I had when I was 15 years old re-visited me out of the blue. It was a good experience, one which I had ignored completely because I didn’t think my feelings were valid. I fancied a guy that was two years younger than me. I wouldn’t admit it to anyone, least of all to myself. First of all I thought it was completely silly for a girl my age to like someone who was two years younger. Secondly I didn’t think he would be interested in me, even if he had been my age. I secretly enjoyed admiring him from a distance even though we didn’t talk much.

Remembering this, I thought about other meaningful experiences I had ignored. A few of them were when I was in nature and felt a presence I couldn’t quite fathom. My imagination would run away with me whilst I thought that the rocks, the blue sky, the dunes themselves were alive. I couldn’t put my perception into words. Since it didn’t fit any of the boxes of meaning I had been taught, I discarded it us unreal or unimportant. The real world was out there where people strived for success and lived normal lives with normal jobs and families.

The experiences I have ignored were the moments when my soul was talking to me. I thought that as I grew up, life would become easier and I would learn to fit into the world better. Once I mastered my unruly ways and emotional impulses, I would have a stronger presence in the world. Needless to say, at the times when I thought I did a good job of assuming the persona I thought was required to be taken seriously, I was more depressed than the times when I couldn’t control my tendencies to be a misfit.


These forgotten experiences don’t go lost. They come back to remind us that whilst we failed to acknowledge them when we were there, the magic stays with us. The best moments come from nowhere – they aren’t staged or created. The beauty of magic is that it wants to find us, regardless of how hard life could be. Looking back, it is the good moments that we remember and the really unimportant ones that we forget. Love flows more freely through things that are flawed than through things that are perfect.

Friday 24 May 2013

The Most Important Thing is to Act

Lately I have found myself in an extraordinarily good mood at work. This is surprising considering I have felt trapped in my office job for such a long time. So what has changed? I don’t like to use the analogy of death approaching, but I know my remaining time there is limited. I keep telling myself to slow down and be present while I am still here. The things that normally upset me are easier to deal with when I think about the fact that I’ll be away from it all soon.

What I am doing at work hasn’t changed much recently. Since I might as well, I go in and decide to have fun at work. I approach things that are normally dull or intimidating as a game. “OK, let’s see what happens when I try this.” Naturally I lean towards wanting to turn my experience of something tedious into something joyful, so I imagine myself to bring joy to the experience while I do what I have to do. If I fail in whatever way then it doesn’t matter because I’ll be leaving the company soon anyway. They will find someone else to drive their profit driven objectives.

The difference is amazing. I find myself bursting with energy and a good mood. It’s like the light that I believe in and want to be more prevalent in the world flows into the office simply through the fact that I have acted. What I am actually doing has nothing to do with anything grandiose such as “what I really want to do with my life” or “whether I’ll be good at it.” Yet I have transformed the experience of feeling trapped. Simply by acting, I have felt closer to what I would like to bring into the world. Even the most mundane things felt magical.


What we are doing isn’t the most important vehicle to take us where we want to be. To realise our dreams, it is simply important that we act. Our dreams are happening right here, right now, waiting to materialise through us. Acting strengthens our belief that we have the power to realise our dreams.

Thursday 23 May 2013

Identifying with a Label

I’ve finished writing my first book. Having worked through the second draft I approached the point where I had to take the next step. I thought I might ask friends or people who love me for feedback first before weighing my options. I could work on it some more, change all of it, burn it and start from scratch on something else or alternatively send it to an agent just as it is, hoping that it would catch someone’s eye. Boy, did it turn out to be a terrifying experience! I melted away at the first hint of criticism, telling myself that all those people were right and that I would never make it. A day of depression ensued, but that’s a topic for another day.

To divert my attention, I did some reading on two successful authors out there, the ones that have “made it”. Their lives are none of my business, but I got some consolation from the fact that they didn’t always seem to have everything together all the time - very often to the contrary. What they did have in common was a persistent desire to be a writer from a very young age. I have long ago come to the conclusion that strong desire was far more powerful in leading to success than doing everything right. Although it was supposed to make me hopeful, in a way it made me despair even more.

I cannot remember ever telling anyone “I want to be a writer” although I have always said that “I want to write”. I am not sure if that indicates weaker desire on my part, since I have wanted to do and be many things. For the last 10 years or so I have wanted to “be a healer” (in different forms according to the phase I was in) perhaps more than anything else. That is also the way I have thought about it, rather than “I want to heal”. Yet it often felt as if the universe was against me in my “quest to become a healer”. In the end trying to find ways to be a healer in the way that I wanted to be one turned out to be very frustrating. I have felt that I was bumping my head against a brick wall with no doors opening for me. I couldn’t understand why the universe wasn’t supporting me if I was trying to work with it, living my purpose. In the end I kind of gave up, or rather surrendered, unsure of whether I still believed in the hand of destiny and spiritual healing. What I have believed for a long time to be my life’s mission ended up causing me suffering rather than fulfilment, which defeated the purpose.

It seems that the universe does have a way of making our deepest desires come true. Reflecting on my likelihood to be successful at anything, I asked myself what I have desired most for longest. Although “being a writer” and being recognised as such would be great, it is much more important to me that my writing brings joy into the world. My thoughts keep returning to healing.

Thinking of “being a healer” is still too painful though. I am not sure if that decreases my likelihood of success, but the moment I start identifying with a label too much, the vision loses its brightness and instead becomes sticky at best and painful at worst. I “want to” be a healer but nobody seems to be interested and I have no clients, which not only makes me doubt my beliefs about destiny, but also makes me a massive failure.

Thinking about it, I realised that I have 84 clients who fell into my lap through the marketing company I work for. Some of them have cancer, have just ended their relationship, have illness in the family or are having a hard time at work. Some of them have other problems which they don’t tell me about. Here I have an opportunity to make a difference by helping them increase their sales (the way the company sees it) or just bringing a cheer to their day in whatever way I can (more important in my eyes). I have had an opportunity right under my nose and yet I have failed to notice because I have been so attached to a label, insistent on having it my way. What the universe has sent me was the chance to make a difference in the best way I can. I have looked past it for such a long time, blinded by resentment at having to serve objectives which weren’t my own.


Today I thank the Universe for knowing what is best for me, bringing my deepest desires to fruition. I have been given the opportunity to live out my highest vision, cleverly disguised so it doesn’t become a drudge because of my preoccupation with my own success. Where I kill my own ambition, the spark that reignites it is always there, coming from the space between something and nothing.