Let Your Heart Sign Its Own Love Song

Don't be tempted to listen to another's heart as each heart has its own way, its own movement that when allowed to fully shine sings its own song. Your song is unique and makes you YOU. No wrong notes, no right notes... just YOUR notes. More often than not all it takes is simply getting out of your own way, getting out of the mind and taking your hands off the tight grip of needs and wants. It takes a willingness to get quiet and innocently listen. The song of the heart never stops singing, we just get good at ignoring it under the weight of expectation. So let your heart sing with the fullness of its voice, the fullness of its love.

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Beyond Imogen

Martyn took this photo of me the other day and have to admit, I don't really recognise myself - and this was a bit of a shock at first.   So much has shifted these past years and months that the image that I once had of myself, is no longer there, it no longer fits.   Now I see a lioness, a strength, a power, a vulnerability, and an openness and it's beautiful to see. I see someone who is sitting in the pocket of who she is, finally comfortable in her own skin. That process has been amazing to watch and certainly very intense to live.   As I write this I get a flash of collective 'should' saying "You shouldn't say things like that out loud, you should be more modest and humble, you're being egotistical and attention seeking." But the truth is that to not acknowledge this is to dishonour life and the changes and growth that we all go through. To take a moment to really sink into this acknowledgement, to take stock of the shifts and changes in life is a good thing. It brings with it so much gratitude to life, gratitude to…

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Scars

I wear my scars not like armour that I'm proud of or a badge of honour that I boast about, but as acknowledgement and reverence for what I have experienced. For the lessons I have learnt and as a reminder of what I have gone through. I'm neither proud or not proud They depict the humbling life showed me. They are just a part of me A part that I once tried to hide A part that I was once ashamed and avoidant of A part that I have now learnt to embrace and love. My scars tell a story But it's just that A story. They don't define me.

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Some thoughts on World Mental Health Day

There's a tendency to avoid dealing with the subject of mental health in some spiritual traditions and teachings. To poo poo inner work and growth, to try to meditate away 'negative' emotions, reactions, thought patterns and conditioning. But spirituality and spiritual awakening is not a panacea, it is many things and in some ways a lot of the "problems" of the mind do in fact disappear. But in some ways post awakening the work and cleanup becomes intensified and it can become even more important to address and give attention to anything that's still arising. This can be when some of the true work begins, because the strategies that have stopped you from looking beneath the covers of the mind dissolve. It is the embracing not the running away that allows one to look at where the stored traumas, memories, reactions, conditioning and energetic imprints are having an impact on the current moment, your current experience of life. So in some ways it's only then that you can truly move through and on from the issues or patterns that may have plagued your life. We all know someone, or maybe ourselves that have experienced mental health issues, and yet it's…

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Unshakable Stability

Letting go of a specific image of safety and security is so tricky. But life calls this of us again and again when we get too comfortable putting our stability and sense of security into objects and ideas that in their fundamental nature can't provide that for us except temporarily.   Can you find your home, your safety, your energy and the warm embrace of love in something far more stable... your SELF?   It's to deepen and sink fully into that recognition and then all the other phenomena can and does come and go without the 'need' for you to depend on the ephemeral for any derived sense of stability and peace. Find that which is unchanging in your experience and it will lead you home to an unshakable okay-ness and acceptance of all that Grace presents you with on your path of life. True freedom.

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The Sweetness of an Open Heart

There are none so bright and full of love than those that have allowed life to penetrate them fully. Cracked open so immensely and felt so deeply the depth and breadth of their experiencing. Leaving no stone unturned, no shadow unseen, no feeling unmet. Those that have surrendered so tenderly to the acknowledgement that they know nothing. That they are but a whisper on the lips of life, carried in the arms of Grace, and held in the groundlessness of Being itself. Their cracked open heart laid gently to rest at the feet of their very own beloved Self.

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Resistance

If resistance shows up, then let that resistance in too.   Let it wash over you and into you without any sense of wrongness.   Even resistance in all its glory is held tenderly in the depths of Being.   So fall, fall darling one into the heart of surrender and let life all the way in.   Even if only for a moment, this moment is all it takes.

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Divine Humanness

Your humanness is a gift to be cherished not a dirty little secret to be hidden It is divinity in it's expression ALL . OF . IT . Don't be tempted to run from it Embracing the fullness of your experience reveals the fullness of love it reveals the emptiness of your core and reveals that there was never anything to run from and nowhere to run to

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In the Embrace of Love

One of the biggest helps for me to move beyond my conditioned responses and traumas and to heal and integrate them has been learning how to cope with strong and intense emotions - which for the record I was pretty fantastic at avoiding for most of my life! I would say that when all the strategies for avoiding no longer worked the only way to turn was through and into them. It was a case of let go or be dragged but turning into them was definitely the last thing I would have originally thought would be of help, go figure ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ For me this was learning to hold emotions and energetic arisings like you would a small child in a loving embrace, to pull them closer and say, "It's okay you can be here. I don't need you to change or be gone, you don't need to be fixed or healed. You can be just as you are for as long as you need. You are also free to leave if and when you're ready to as well." It was Adyashanti that first introduced me to this idea of embracing not running away from difficult experiences. To lovingly hold…

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I Have a Secret

I have a secret to tell... I sound like I know what I'm talking about but in truth I live entirely in the unknown No stakes to place No walls or ceilings or floors to hang on to life is a free-fall of continuous newness It's a leap of faith and trust and it's the ever present continuation of acceptance I have no opinions and no agenda nothing to rely on or anything to lay claim over I see life as a gift and all the content that shows up in it part of that gift Most people are so quick to try and pin down life to make rules to live by find positions to take and opinions to have But to step into the unknown is to step out of the mind of conception and into the realm of Grace into the realm of Self into the realm of awareness logic will do you no good here

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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…

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The Heart of Life

Please don't forget to save some love for yourself It's so easy to give so freely  so that you avoid the heartache that pulses inside To focus on the other to love the other to help the other To have the attention be so fully on the outer actions of life so that the inner shadows can be hidden and forgotten Those inner shadows and pains yearn for your attention yearn for your love yearn to be accepted Don't forget that the kindest thing you can do for humanity is start from you and radiate from there Nourish and hold that beautiful heart in the fullness of love Let it shine with abandon Let it sing it's heart song A loved heart is the most powerful thing to behold A loved heart is unstoppable Start from you You are the key to the heart of life

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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.

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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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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…

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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 ignored screams and kicks and shouts to be seen, to be heard.   It's a gut punch of a moment one that takes the breath away and leaves all else quivering in its wake.   All else stops.   So you stop with it close the eyes and 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 strategies No more solutions No more resistance No more avoidance Just simply what is.   And in that silence all is found.   All the mess all the heartbreak all the mistrust being met fully.   All the darkness comes into the light.   The opening of yourself so vast that the edge is never met The melting of all the hurt and violence into acceptance and love.   Love wins out.   And so you pick yourself up and dust yourself off and on you go…

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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.

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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…

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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. But it doesn't mean it's an easy topic to talk on, the courage and vulnerability it takes to even go into this subject from any angle (and as reader or writer) is not…

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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…

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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…

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Buckle Up!

I find it funny that the further into this journey of life I get 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 went 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, consciousness, the absolute, the silent awareness at the heart of all experiencing. Seeing that the kaleidoscopic arisings of the content of life was just that, an arising, a happening, a dream. And while I find this to be true, the primordial ground of life as I know it.... but also there IS a life as we know it and that's not to be ignored or denied, it's to be LIVED. So now I find myself focusing instead…

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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. --- 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. I think this is why the idea of Sanghas can be so enticing, a place to commune with others who were of like mind and place in their journey of unfoldment, of seeing. A place when you can find common ground and openness, common experience and views. Alas it's not as easy as it sounds to find the 'right' sangha! You are lucky if you can find this in a partner or in a close friend or two - this is what I have with Martyn and this is what I am eternally…

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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. As a spiritual mentor I'm not interested in making promises, I'm not interested in creating students who feel they need to learn from me, I'm not even really interested in 'awakening people' as a goal. I'm interested, or rather I find myself being called to be totally present to those that find themselves knocking on…

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