Read more about the article An Open Heart, A Kinder World

An Open Heart, A Kinder World

The deep heartbreak of what is and what has been happening in the world of late brings with it an opportunity to light a fire in the heart in service of lasting change. The willingness to be that change for a better, kinder world starts within us all, with an open, tender and loving heart.   I pray with every breath for peace in the world. Peace on all levels and for all beings. I pray for every individual to sink so fully into their hearts and with that to treat all in this world, inclusive of themselves, with the care and love that is so desperately needed.   We must not only cease the many conflicts in this world, but the conflicts many often face silently every day with the inner most tender, hidden and neglected parts of ourselves. This inner fight all too often spills out into the world in unforeseen ways, and vice versa.   It is not only our omnipresent, transcendent divinity but also our ephemeral, embodied humanity that unifies us. In finding our commonality we can truly celebrate our diversity and our differences, no longer seeing them as a threat of any kind. May all…

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Know Yourself – Simply As This | Interview with Susan Hill

Interview for the April 17th, 2021 Summit "Know Yourself - simply as this" by Susan Hill, of WoW Peace. The title of the talk was "Know Yourself - Integrating Humanity" where we talk about knowing yourself as the all-encompassing awareness. And how integrating all of life is a process and a healing of the body mind.

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Read more about the article The Antifragility of Freedom

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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What Life Asks of You

A video excerpt from the June 14th Sunday Zoom Group. The questions that were asked were: Are you always good with what life asks from you? Do you still like the change or development? Details of the Sunday Zoom Groups and other events can be found on the 'events' page. The YouTube link to this video: https://youtu.be/tg6saIOIzTo   Transcript of Excerpt I'm always sort of advocating and saying how important I feel acceptance is in life. That acceptance of what is. But what does that look like practically speaking, when life is sometimes asking something of you, as it invariably does. Asks you to drop something that's not working anymore. Or step up to something that quite clearly your life is moving in that direction. And then you get things like resistance coming in and you get the mind kind of analyzing and going, "should I do this? Should I do that?" But this is the way life is moving and so that question sort of sparked this feeling of you know, it's very well and good saying you should accept whatever is coming up in your life. But does that mean that you don't have resistance? That you don't…

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Read more about the article All Encompassing Love

All Encompassing Love

Make friends with that aspect of yourself that you are rejecting or avoiding, those aspects that you judge or deem unsavoury. That which we reject are often those aspects that require the most love, the most compassion, the most kindness, the most attention in-order that they be integrated into the wholeness of our Being. Those gnarly, messy, 'bad' rejected bits of ourselves are often being called to be transmuted into acceptance and love. For love is the greatest power in the universe. Love has the power to move beyond all seeming boundaries and inhabit every aspect of life. Love has the power to transcend any sense of separation or 'other-isation'. Love has the power to encompass it all. So fall in love with all of yourself, all of life, and you will see that that love is eternal and ever-present even in amongst the mess.

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Read more about the article Sacred Beautiful Life

Sacred Beautiful Life

This life is sacred. This body is sacred. This mind is sacred. These emotions and these thoughts are sacred. This fear and this grief is sacred. This existence is sacred. All of life's existence and expression is that of consciousness. Awareness-consciousness makes no distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary, no distinction between the humanness and the divine. For all is the playground of existence. All is the sacred emanations of life. All held in the embrace of awareness. Do not presume to know better. Do not presume that your mind's judgment of what is holy and what is not means anything in the eyes of consciousness. For even the messy, fearful and supremely human expressions of consciousness are sacred and beautiful moments dancing in the light of awareness. Even the protestations of right and wrong, the valuing and the rejecting of this or that, even these too are sacred expressions to be experienced and tasted fully. Can you include it all? Because how is it possible to not? Can you really truly reject anything if even that rejection is included too? That which turns up as us and in us is there through Grace, it's there as the wisdom…

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Read more about the article Humanness & Neo-Advaita

Humanness & Neo-Advaita

I came across this great post by Scott Kiloby this morning on Facebook , it's long but worth the read... (probably before you read my comments on it) https://www.facebook.com/kiloby/posts/3541003099281007?__tn__=K-R [I'll post the full article at the bottom of this page if you don't want to hyperlink out to it.] I agree with Scott here in that awakening is not the end. For me it was the beginning of meeting myself, maybe for the first time, and seeing where there were traumas and conditioning to be met, worked on and integrated. It's a continuing process for me, one that I believe wouldn't be fully possible without awakening (for me at least) as there were far too many egoic structures in place to prevent the ability to go where was needed to go. With awakening there was openness and space for it all. The statement "there's nothing to do and no-one to do do it" for me has truth to it on one level, but where the rubber hits the road on this human embodied level of existence it doesn't account for the felt experience of living. And what really matters for our daily life is how we experience it, how we…

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Read more about the article Celebrating the Expressions of Life

Celebrating the Expressions of Life

In all that I write and share I only ever want to invite you to explore, discover and ultimately accept the entirety of your experience. To standing in YOUR truth, YOUR self... not mine and not anyone else's. To encourage and support you to see more and more of the beauty of your expression, even when that expression isn't how you thought it 'should' be.. to accept even that too! It's never been about knowing or being anything. It's never been about gaining or loosing anything. It's never even been about changing or fixing anything. It's never been about being more than or less than. It's simply about coming to see all that you ARE. It's an accepting, it's a recognition, it's the very act of living and being ALL that you ARE. Taking the binds of limitations off and taking a full breath of life. It's about walking through life step by step, moment by moment, learning to love all aspects of it. Learning to love even the hate, or the fear, or the shame, or the frustration; even the sadness, or wrongness and definitely the messiness too. Learning to see it's all there as part and parcel of…

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Read more about the article Finding A Crack

Finding A Crack

It's those moments where we are hardest on ourselves that actually call for the most kindness, for the most understanding, most forgiveness, the most self love. But sometimes that feels like an impossibility, the moment feels too heavy, too overwhelming to bring kindness into the equation. It feels like too much of a leap and too far to go. In those moments where self love and compassion can't be found maybe it's possible to look instead to the ways in which we're being unkind and too hard on ourselves and loosen the grip just a little, for just a moment. Let some space, some breathing room into the moment. Take a momentary pause and feel the relief and space and peace that that brings. Sometimes it's not a case of completely flipping the script, sometimes it's just the case of simply finding the tiniest of cracks to what is already there. Those cracks can be found anywhere and are waiting and willing to be found. Sometimes the kindest thing that can be managed is to find that single crack in life to take a momentary respite.

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Read more about the article Some thoughts on World Mental Health Day

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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Read more about the article Divine Humanness

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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Read more about the article In the Embrace of Love

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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Read more about the article I Have a Secret

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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Read more about the article Own Your Power

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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Read more about the article Buckle Up!

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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Read more about the article Embracing Your Totality

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. What does happen is that when established in silence, in Being, in the Self, when faced with…

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Read more about the article Getting In The Mud

Getting In The Mud

This morning I came across a beautifully articulated post on Facebook by Unmani (one of many I might add). She recently unexpectedly lost her husband and has been sharing openly her journey/processing throughout this difficult time - it's beautiful, raw and brave and I see that this is very much what she is being called to do, for the benefit of herself and for all those who read what she writes. She writes: In yesterday's online open meeting someone asked me a very interesting question that I feel has been coming up for many people around my recent sharing on Facebook. What is true spiritual attainment if a so-called spiritual person can be so human? Usually being or attaining a spiritual state is assumed to mean that you rise above the ordinary human emotions, sensations, thoughts etc. Here I am, as a so-called spiritual teacher, revealing that actually I am very human and have a wide range of human experiences that many people can relate to. If you have put me, or any spiritual teacher, up on any kind of pedestal as being the ideal to aim for, then you will most likely be disappointed by my down-to-earth humanity. I am…

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Read more about the article The Humanness of Existence

The Humanness of Existence

The utter humanness of existence cradles in it every possible emotion, sensation, feeling & thought. We can’t run from that, we can’t hide from that, we can’t avoid or resist that, and nor should we want to.

It’s our human experiencing that reveals the ever-changing world of perception that we live in – our ‘world’ is constantly being born and reborn in every moment. Embrace this change, embrace it as the play and display of awareness-consciousness (you). This play is set on the stage of pure open, unconditioned and ineffable awareness-consciousness. (more…)

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