The Antifragility of Freedom

What is your capacity to be with loss, to be with grief and sadness and loneliness, to be with fear? What is your capacity to embody all aspects of the human experience, not just the ‘good’ stuff? It’s not that we need to go looking for this stuff, court it, wallow in it, seek it out. But it will inevitably find you, one way or another. If you spend your life running from this, finding safe ground away from the mud and melee of life, when it does show up it will feel overwhelming and scary, it will feel like it could break you, even worse, it could kill you. This safe space, this gilded cage that you have created from life will be shaken to the core. Your fragility will become apparent. Freedom is the ability to encompass and embrace it all, it’s the antifragility of life. It’s the allowance of the full expression of life to move through you unimpeded. Root out where you are feeling fragile with life. Become aware of it and the tendency to avoid it at all cost. The seeing of this tendency, the noticing of what it FEELS like, how the body responds…

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Love Not Fear: Freedom of Speech

I saw an article about a popular video platform (ahem... shall remain nameless) banning "medically unsubstantiated" content today... It's not the first thing I've seen in recent weeks and months on various platforms that brings into question freedom of speech and censoring of content all in the name of trying to curb "misinformation" or "fake news". Once upon a time misinformation or fake news would have been to call the earth round rather than flat. It would have been a heresy to suggest it even but science and understanding is a constantly evolving thing, a working hypothesis rather than an 'Absolute Truth'.   Lack of freedom of speech honestly terrifies me as a proposition for society. It's not even the thin end of the wedge... I think we're past that analogy. I understand the imperative need to work and pull together as a collective, especially right now but not in the name of shutting down exploration, not in the name of shutting down thinking outside of the box.   To try and calcify and control life's expressions and evolution is madness. And while I do see a lot of weird and opposing views and opinions out there, even those termed…

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Conversations & Questions: 17/1/20

Did I Miss My Chance for Awakening?   Q: I feel like it's too late for me, I missed my chance of awakening. Too late... too late for what and for who? These are fears born of the mind, see this and you shall be free of this fear. "Too late" suggests awakening only happens in certain circumstances under certain rules and conditions, that you only get one chance at it, or that it's only available for a finite few who deserve it. These are ideas and implications built from the mind (or learnt from others) about what awakening is or isn't and allowed to run free with the fear of 'missed chances'. But awakening doesn't happen TO the person, awakening is FROM the person. It's not anything the person DOES to achieve. It is the seeing through the facade of the person and in many ways it's Grace that places that insight in the heart of you. Awakening is the description of consciousness waking up to itself, of consciousness knowing itself. But you are already consciousness whether your mind sees this or not. It really only comes down to a pernicious belief stuck in the mind and taking false…

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Current Times: Practical Advice

Boy oh boy it's been an intense year so far! I've noticed a massively heightened presence of energy in myself and had others report the same since around the end of January, before the covid-19 situation really took hold in much of the world. But I had no idea what was coming and it's become the new norm, the energetic intensity and the ground shifting beneath the feet, only time will tell where or if it will settle. Overall I feel there's also a beautiful opportunity right now to face the things that are being forced to the surface of experience, many of which were always already lurking in the shadows, with compassion and kindness - both on an individual level and a collective or global level. I've actually been blown away by the kindness and love I'm seeing on both small and large scales, it's incredibly heart opening and beautiful to see that our nature of love shines through in times like these. The ground is shifting quickly beneath our feet and that mirrors the process of awakening in a way. It's the dissolution of the certainty and assumptions of stability that were being falsely held on to, falsey…

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Conversations & Questions: 19/09/19

Post-Awakening Integration &  Releasing Old Conditioning   Q: I’m fearful of what will happen as I continue on this journey of awakening. It’s coming up right now because working with you these past weeks I finally experienced a shift into Unity Consciousness and see the integration deepening as well. But the fear is mainly there because after my initial shift into non-duality a year ago I had a pretty traumatic time of instability and integration where I couldn’t function in the world very well. I don't want to go back into that unstableness and overwhelm that came with that first major shift. I’ve felt this sense of “My God what is coming next, what if it’s like the other time?” And while it’s not been like that at all this time so far, I still have a little bit of fear of “how will this be?” I feel I can't make plans because I don't know how I will be in the coming weeks and months and this scares me. That you will hit against a major period of instability is an assumption and definitely not a certainty at all. What I can say is that you will go through…

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A Call Into the Unknown

Fear is a call into the unknown beyond the known, and the mind hates nothing more than the unknown. The mind is the realm of the known, the content of life, but our essential ground of Self is beyond that, it's prior to the known content. It's not the object, it's the subject - the seer, or awareness of the object or content. And so fear arises because the mind cannot grasp the magnitude and scope of what lies beyond it. It can't find the edges and boundaries that it looks for. This is because objects have edges but Being has no edges, no start, no finish, no physical attributes for which the mind can grasp on to, categorise and 'know'. So arises this fear. This panic. This free-fall into the unknown. The fear that it will never get 'it'. The fear that it can't control 'it'. But there is no 'it' so both of those fears in a way are very well founded in Truth. Fear isn't something to circumnavigate, something to avoid. It's just a sensation, often intense, arising in awareness. It shows us where our boundaries lie still, it shows us what has already been lit up…

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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 breath 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…

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