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By Grace
Life is not some beast to be tamed,
a project to be mastered,
or your b$*%h to be controlled.Life is a gift.
The gift of Grace.And with this recognition
I bow to the feet of life
in gratitude.Grace courses through us
in everything we touch,
in everything we experience.
There is nothing that isn’t Grace.“It’s all by Grace”
For me is the most powerful and humbling recognition.
The acknowledgement that I have no control.
That I am here,
all of me,
all of my experiencing
by Grace.And so in this
it’s all seen as a gift.—
Some call it God.
Some call it Consciousness.
Some call it fate.
There are many names
all pointing to that ineffable impersonal activity of life.I call it Grace.
The infinite actions and endless possibilities
of life playing life
in the ocean of life.Wild and unpredictable.
Plenty of variation,
but no separation.Just as the sun shines on all,
Grace is in all.There are no distinctions of good or bad,
no questions of right or wrong.Everything that happens,
everything that doesn’t,
all by Grace.Every whisper of a thought,
every flash of a memory,
every definitive decision,
every decisive action,
every palpable desire,
every subtle feeling,
every wave of emotion,
every happening of life,
all by Grace.And so life is lived,
by Grace. -
The Heart of Life
Please don’t forget to save some love
for yourselfIt’s so easy to give so freely
so that you avoid the heartache that pulses insideTo focus on the other
to love the other
to help the otherTo have the attention be so fully on the outer actions of life
so that the inner shadows can be hidden and forgottenThose inner shadows and pains
yearn for your attention
yearn for your love
yearn to be acceptedDon’t forget that the kindest thing you can do for humanity
is start from you and radiate from thereNourish and hold that beautiful heart in the fullness of love
Let it shine with abandon
Let it sing it’s heart songA loved heart is the most powerful thing to behold
A loved heart is unstoppableStart from you
You are the key
to the heart of life -
Own Your Power
Do not shrink into smallness
Let yourself roar and feel fully into your inherent power.Your power is found in the courage to be you,
to fully present ALL of you.
To cease with the judgements and accept all of your wholly divine messy humanness as your own.
To not second guess and hide yourself for fear of shame and judgement from others.
To let them see you, really see you in all your glory, in all your power.Power is not an ‘evil’ blunt instrument that gets indiscriminately wielded around.
Power has many faces.
Power is found in full on vulnerability and openness
Power is found in the soft tenderness of heart
Power is found in the depths of sadness and heartbreak
Power is found in all the bits of yourself you can’t yet met
Power is found when living on the knife edge of exploration
Power is found saying no in order that you follow your yeses
In love and acceptance, there power resides.So don’t be afraid to stand in your power.
Don’t be afraid to turn up to your life in a completely unapologetic way.
Own your power, don’t shy away from it. -
Scary Beautiful Love
In relationships we have to trust and we have to communicate. It’s a constant leap of faith to say the things that we think they won’t want to hear and we won’t want to hear the answer to, to constantly face the fear of rejection and hurt.
But if you do take that leap of faith and trust, then it’s my experience that life constantly surprises you. It’s such a beautiful thing, but it’s scary, terrifying in fact. I’ve been with Martyn for 15 years and it’s STILL scary. I still have to take a breathe at first sometimes before I say something that is tender and edgy for me, something that I’m not sure of his response to.
This feeling of fear doesn’t disappear over time, you just get used to it. You learn to know it, you even learn to love it because it tells you where your edge of comfort is. It never fully feels safe to share those things that you don’t want to share, because it’s NOT safe. It never feels safe because when you reach an edge of yourself it’s ALWAYS scary. It’s not about the other person, it’s about you. It feels scary to you because you can’t guarantee the response and that’s terrifying, and that doesn’t stop.
If it does then you’re living out of truth and in a fantasy of your own making, because the truth is you can NEVER guarantee what’s going to happen, or what someone’s response is going to be.
So speak even though it’s scary, give them and yourself a chance to deepen and grow. Relationships aren’t easy. They never stop being a constant leap of faith. It’s very much a part of it, and that leap of faith is happening every single second if you’re lucky enough to be in a nurturing relationship. If you’re lucky you are relating new and fresh every moment, every second without reference to past or future and that is both wonderful and terrifying.
It’s opening your chest up, your heart, and trusting. Sometimes your heart gets hurt, but if it stays open life and love goes even deeper than the hurt and that is truly magical. Because with great risk comes great reward.
That risk is terrifying, love is terrifying, so it’s okay to honour that and feel that. But I encourage you to step forward even so, to open your heart wide. Only you can do that. Love is magical, love stretches you to capacity and then stretches you some more.
Love is all there is.
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Courageous Openness
When we show ourselves to others, fully open and vulnerable with our hidden tender aspects, without self censoring and hiding, we step into the conversation, into the relationship in a new way. Through this we also invite others to free themselves of their constraints and speak their tender truth too. It’s a true gift, the gift of openness and love.
Come as you are, no agenda and no expectations, heart open and ready to be met. There are no boundaries between us, no gulf to be filled. Meet me in this moment where you are, without pretence, without posturing or needing to be anything or anyone. Without judgements of good or bad, better or worse, just tender openness.
If you find yourself being uncomfortable been seen fully without a mask of pretence take a breath, it’s in those moments that it takes great courage to stay open, to stay present, to stay vulnerable and trust.
There is a great strength in vulnerability and openness, a strength and power that brings with it such freedom and sweetness that all else melts away in that moment.
This is my invitation to you, to meet your fear of being seen and judged with the fierce love of courageous openness.
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A Call To Be Present
When we experience a strong emotion or felt response to life there is a call to be present, a call to sink into it. It’s not the moment to run away and avoid. It’s not the moment to reject and try with all your might to change the course of life. Life is giving you a gift, an opening, the natural call to Self, the great unknowing by which all becomes known, accepted and loved. Don’t be afraid, the call into the unknown is the call home, the call to the ground of your Being, it’s the natural call of freedom and peace. In this moment attention is your true power, your place of healing. The only doing is the seeing, is the accepting. Tender loving attention embracing the aliveness of life.
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Pick Yourself Up, Dust Yourself Off
Sometimes life brings you to your knees.Floors you with it’s strong wisdom.Shows you where the shadows still lie.Where the aspects of yourself are that still go unmet.It’s a calling that when ignoredscreamsandkicksandshoutsto be seen, to be heard.It’s a gut punch of a momentone that takes the breath awayand leaves all else quivering in its wake.All else stops.So you stop with itclose the eyesand listen.Listen to where life is taking you.Listen to what life is showing you.Listen to your heart, to your soul, to your Being.No more strategiesNo more solutionsNo more resistanceNo more avoidanceJust simply what is.And in that silenceall is found.All the messall the heartbreakall the mistrustbeing met fully.All the darkness comes into the light.The opening of yourself so vast that the edge is never metThe melting of all the hurt and violence into acceptance and love.Love wins out.And so you pick yourself upand dust yourself offand on you goheart fully cracked openwith love. -
The Head or the Heart
There’s a constant
exploration of life
that is immediate.To listen to your body,
your physical response to life,
your intuitive knowingness.
The pull towards yes or no.Not on an intellectual level,
but on a physical level
of what’s right or wrong
for you in that moment.And we are conditioned to override this all the time.
There’s a bravery
and a risk
to listening to that intuition.
Your heart,
your physical
response and reaction
to life.Often it can go against
everything that you think you know.But it’s screaming for your attention.
Will the head win?
Or will the heart?Will you let the conditioning and the head run the show?
Or will the naturalness of life win out?This can be a big battle for most.
The intuition and the heart
eventually will win the war,
but it can take time. -
A Place to Contemplate
We’ve lost the focus of a spiritual centre in communities and culture today. Don’t get me wrong I am not advocating for religion in its traditional sense, but what I am noting is that life used to have a balance of both the practical or material and spiritual. At the heart of our communities used to sit a church or maybe a temple or synagogue, a mosque or even a shaman’s huts. These were places to contemplate deeper and bigger ideas, bigger aspects than the day-to-day practicals of life.
They also provided sanctuary of contemplation and silence, a place to look inward. Currently Martyn and I travel around almost constantly never staying in places for more than a month or two. In each of our adventures we seek out these places of quiet. It’s in someways strange that I’m drawn to these spaces of worship because my parents never brought me to church (or to a synagogue as the case maybe) as a child. But in later life I have been drawn to the silence and contemplation that I find in these spaces. If you look around they are actually the only places where one can sit quietly, no phone in hand, no distractions, where one can sit in silence without drawing a strange stare.
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Healing Our Traumas
Many of us have experienced trauma and hurt from abusive, harmful or dysfunctional relationships of all descriptions and types in our lives. I bow at your courage to try and move beyond it and heal. Equally if you’re not quite there in your journey that’s okay, I honor that too. I feel conversations about this topic are so vital so that we can explore these sorts of things together, both individually and in a broader sense within our communities and society at large. This is where I think healing happens, through open dialogue and exploration and I believe a lot of healing needs to happen overall as the world seems to have a lot of traumatised people who in turn perpetuate and carry on this cycle. Shutting the conversation down isn’t the answer, opening it up is, even though it opens up those wounds. Those wounds need to be seen and given some TLC to be healed so that the cycle can finally come to an end.
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Not a Safe Space
This is not a safe space.
I am not a safe space.If safe space to you means that you will not be challenged,
and that you cannot challenge me,
then I am not a safe space.I want to fully lean into life,
have no stone unturned.
No sacred cows that cannot be found.To me the only way to deal with this life,
is to learn how to live it without a safe space.
To learn to live it without the need to avoid.
To meet everything, in every moment, fully.I’d rather meet and be met then avoid.
No matter how painful, how raw.
I’d rather live in openness, not closed-ness.So IF I offer a safe space, it’s the space where anything can be explored, anything can be embraced, with compassion and tenderness. But especially those things that trigger us, because how can you expect those triggers to ever be healed if you’re not willing to go there, to look at them. They will forever be in the corner of your existence, just there within reaching distance, never far away. Leaving you with an ever-present sense of insecurity and danger.
So to me a safe space is one where there is no walls, there is no ceiling, there is no ground, there is nothing to hide behind. Anything and everything can and does show up. There’s room for it all. And so I offer a space with room for it all.
I’ve spent plenty of time in my life avoiding my trauma and triggers, my hurt, my conditioning and my precious concepts. I’ve learnt that this only causes tightness and suffering. The opposite of freedom.
It was when I learnt to meet all of my unexplored pains and traumas, that I was able to be free of them.
So that now they can show up, they can be there, and it’s okay. I have the facility and the sufficient openness and vastness to meet them and not be afraid.
In some ways I’m feeling life more fully, more intensely, and with a rawness that was never there. And that’s not because I avoided or stayed in my sandbox, my safety. It was because I blasted those doors open, no matter how painful, how scared, how vulnerable that was.
I live in perpetually shaky, unstable ground.
But it’s in that instability that I find my true stability.
That I find that I need no stability, that I need no ground.
This is my grounded-ness.So if we are talking the same language of exploration, then yes… I offer to you a safe space.
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The Impulse to Avoid
There’s an impulse to avoid difficult and uncomfortable feelings. To reject them and cast them aside, to deny their existence. We think we can exert mind over matter and control our inner world, think positive thoughts and all will be okay. Yet when we do this we push these experiences into shadow. We don’t resolve them, we hide them, we sweep them under the carpet.
Life includes in it the whole gambit of human experience, all feelings, all sensations, all types of thoughts and emotions, the whole spectrum. By judging what we experience as good or bad and trying to ‘keep’ good experiences and ‘get rid’ of bad experiences then we are limiting the wholeness of our expression. We’re putting ourselves in opposition to what is, we’re creating tightness and limitation where there naturally isn’t any. We’re trying to control what turns up in our life, a futile and unnecessary battle.
So instead don’t listen to this learned conditioning of avoidance, break the cycle and embrace all, reject none and find freedom in the wholeness of your existence.
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Walking in Old Wounds
Here I am again,
holding space for the palpitating panic that I’m experiencing.
Giving it the space to roam free.
A safe, embracing, loving space
of not trying to fix it.
A shaky space of unknowing.The need to fix, to help,
to soothe, to solve,
taps into my deepest struggle of a core wound.
It still comes up, especially in the role I find myself in.Somedays I feel like life is playing one big cosmic joke on me.
The joke of putting me front and centre in the fire of my biggest struggle.
Making me face it again again until it’s accepted, healed, dissolved, seen through, felt fully….
I don’t know what, all of the above and more probably!The need to fix so as not to feel this burning,
this sense of helplessness,
the uncomfortable,
unbearable pain and heartbreak.
The deep feeling for another’s struggle.
My need to fix is my escape,
an escape which solves nothing,
certainly not permanently.But can I walk my talk?
Can I hold space for this?
Can I let myself fall into this burning,
into my own heartache?
Can I let go of this escape route?Yes.
Because what is the alternative?
Perpetuating this unhealthy old conditioning of ‘needing to rescue’.
This option isn’t available to me anymore.
I see the futility of it again and again,
I see the dead end and the falseness of it.
No-one is anothers rescuer,
life doesn’t work like that.I’m not talking about being cold and hard and not feeling deeply for others pain and suffering.
I’m talking about seeing that I cannot fix it.
I can hold space for it, but I cannot get rid of it.
That the real power, the real truth is in letting them see that they too can handle it.
All of it.
That no-one can fix anything for them.
No-one is responsible for their salvation.All I can do is respect and honour the journey that they must and can walk for themselves.
This is the only sane response to life.
To love, but to let go.
To support, but not fix.Can I be ‘the bad guy’, the one that doesn’t come charging in with all the solutions and stop the suffering?
Can I stand in my burning uncomfortableness and heartbreak because I know in my heart my ‘need to fix’ is mine, not theirs.I am no-ones savour,
I don’t have solutions,
I don’t have the answers.
I am just here,
burning in my own fire.
Trusting.
Trusting that life has a plan,
That life embraces all of these struggles. -
Buckle Up!
I find it funny that the further into this journey of life I get into the less and less ‘spiritual’ I become. Granted, I never self-identified as particularly spiritual, but at least outwardly I certainly was a card-carrying member of the ‘spiritual seekers brigade’. I was brought up surrounded by spiritual types, I meditated from aged 6, I want to a spiritual consciousness-based school and university. I worked for companies where every single employee was a meditator and spiritual seeker. I’ve lived in spiritual communities and Ashrams. I’ve lived like a monk, albeit a married one, but a monk nonetheless (and I still do pretty much live like one).
For a while my focus was well and truly on the abiding recognition of awareness
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The Difficulty of Pretending with Others
I was asked the other day how I deal with being around others, particularly when there’s a level of pretending or not speaking your truth that seems to be required of you.
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I too know all too well this feeling of suffocation in the company of others. The subtle unsaid permissions of what you can say, which topics you can touch on and how deep that can go. The unsaid permissions that someone can’t give for fear of threatening their own sense of Self, views and place in the world that they hold so tightly so as to keep the facade of security and knowingness intact.
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My Role
There’s so much focus on enlightenment and awakening in the abstract. In the projected ideas and ideals of what people, seekers, see in their idolisation of gurus, teachers and enlightened sages. In the goals and focus of wanting never-ending bliss and happiness, and superhuman abilities and powers because they think that’s what it’s all about. The person becoming bigger and better, the person becoming enlightened.
But what is enlightenment really about? What happens when someone awakens, how will their expectations match the reality? This is what I’m interested in, exploring this, the lived experience, the embodiment of awakened living. Not the projected and imagined experience and the constant trying (and failing) to match up to this – but the actual lived experience. That lived experience can’t be codified, it’s a moment to moment exploration without rules. It’s a free-fall through the groundless experience of life.
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Being Human
The only way forward and through this life is to embrace our humanity, not run from it. It’s no good hiding in “nothing is effecting me” and “I am beyond it all.” While true on an absolute level, it doesn’t account for the lived, embodied experience of being human. To be beyond it all is to accept it all. You can’t hide from it, you can’t run from it, you have to lean into it, breath into it and feel it all, right from your fingers to your toes.
What does it mean to embrace our humanity? It means to accept all and reject none. It means that even in the midst of messy, ugly, complicated life that you embrace all of it as part of you. Does a tree reject its gnarly root?
What are we afraid of? What is it in our humanness that we don’t want to look at, don’t want to accept?
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My Heart Hurts Today
My heart hurts today.
The loss of a loved one is never easy.Tender, broken and so wide open.
So full of love, so beautiful.
The waves of emotions, energies and memories break over me when least expected.Life is a precious thing,
but so is death.Death brings up so much to the surface
The unavoidable mirror of change
and the inevitability of loss.
The lack of certainty and control,
and the great unknown.Emotions are high,
everyone dealing with it in their own way,
messy and inelegant.The appreciation and love for those who are both gone and those who are still here.
All parading past in my heart.
Every moment filled with equal intensity of love and pain.
In memory of my dear Uncle Andrew, 1951-2019
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Taking off the Mask
There is a mask that we’ve all experienced. Many even have several masks, each for a different set of circumstances, a different set of people. The mask that you wear for your boss is not the same mask that you wear for your grandmother, which is not the same mask you wear for your friends. All a partial view of who you are, what you’re feeling, what you’re thinking.
But what happens when the cracks in the mask begins to show? What happens when that mask full of pretense and fake smiles becomes heavy and suffocating? When the toll of not showing the full range of your human experience, showing your whole vulnerable self becomes unbearable. What happens when you find that mask slipping off or not fitting anymore? So what then?
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Where Does Your Loyalty Lie?
What if your true Self was something your mind rejected, found disgusting or worthless, what then?
Would you spend your whole life rejecting what is at the core of your Being? Or would you give up the constant resistance and accept what the mind won’t?
It’s exhausting to be in resistance to what is.
What is it in you experience that takes no effort? What is it in your experience that you cannot NOT be?
Discover this and discover the natural omnipresent awareness that is you at the center of all. The unshakable core of your Being. It may not, no – it WILL NOT be what your mind dictates it should be. It might not even be something your mind likes or even respects. It might not be something you mind can grasp and relate to. But does this make it any less true?
Where do you go from there? Where do you go when the insight and discovery of who you are doesn’t match up to the mind’s view? Which will you find yourself choosing? Where will your loyalty lie? With yourself, or with the thoughts and concepts of the mind?
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Embracing Your Totality
We deny our humanity. We hide in the ideals of ‘The Absolute’ and yet it’s the absolute that contains all of humanity. It’s the absolute (field of awareness) from which all of this springs. Does awareness have such distinctions? Does awareness *need* life to look a certain way. No! That is the small limiting notions of the human mind, too feeble to comprehend the magnitude and the mystery of how life is playing out.
It’s easier to think that we don’t have to deal with difficult emotions and wounds. It’s easier to think that all our problems will be solved when we are established in silence, in the absolute. But silence is only half of the equation, silence may be the ground of experience but from that ground springs forth the full diversity and experience of life. And included in that is the story of our personal life where wounds and traumas and relationships have a deep impact on our emotional, physical and energetic experience of life. So we can’t hide in the silence expecting that those experiences of life will fade away.
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Acceptance = Love
In my travels it’s become very clear to me that to talk about acceptance is to talk about love, and to talk about love is to talk about acceptance. They are one and the same. They are the key to peace and freedom. They are the key to the recognition of your own nature. They are the key to everything. And they are happening right now, right under your nose – whether you recognize it or not.
When you fall in love with another person you accept that person, you accept their differences, you accept who they are. Similarly when you love an aspect of yourself, you accept that aspect of yourself. Equally, when you hate an aspect of yourself you are attempting the futile rejection of that part of yourself. In this way love and acceptance are seen as synonymous.
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Notice and Return
You have all the tools, all the things you need in life. You are not lacking in anyway. You are not broken, you just need to accept all that you are… accept even the seeming imperfections into the wholeness and you will see that your light was there all along… hidden under the rock of self doubt, strategies and egoic-mind. But the light of your true Self is far too infinite and vast to be hidden by a rock.
Emotions, traumas and experiences, all of it are life’s way of showing you that it’s alive and kicking. Don’t be tempted to create separation where there is none. You contain multitudes and that’s a beautiful thing…not something to run away from, minimize or control. But something to be embrace, accepted and integrated.
When you notice the pernicious tricks of the mind creeping in, simply let go and return. Let go into the unknown. cast aside the tendencies of the mind to grasp and ‘know’. Notice this dynamic and let go, anything other than this simple act is a distraction.
So notice and return to the core of your being… everything you are, everything you think you need, right there at the bedrock of your experiencing all that time.
You are perfect.
Just.
As.
You.
Are.
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The truth can not be broken so don’t be afraid.
Trust that life will take care of life.
Hold on to that even in the depths of fear.
What you are can never be lost.
The truth will win out. -
Clues
What is the ground of your experience?
Is it the world?
Is it the body?
Is it the thoughts?
Is it the sensations?Or is it the simplest form of non-conceptual awareness, aware of all of *this*.
Search for the gap in between the content.
life lived in this moment
