 As I look around all I see is fog, so I close my eyes and feel into myself. It feels like I'm flying, way up above the fog. Above the sky, faster than the speed of light, there is no wind resistance. I’m on the outer reaches of the universe and I am happy, oh so happy. I can see and feel everything everywhere and yet I am still.
The image is there in my mind, in my heart – a interactive video short of sorts, of me flying - to remind me of who I truly am, the clarity the larger part of me knows, way up above the fog. It’s there, like the things that are on the tip of your tongue, yet you just can’t seem to find them in your head, elusive, but persistent. Life here continues, amidst a wave full of low energy happenstance that serves as a reminder to turn and look another way. Yet there is momentum and so there is no quick out, but soon this wave will reach its shores, its force dissipating and clarity will return. There is clarity and there is fog. Take one of two routes, either trick yourself out of it, or outlast it, one is fast, one is slow. No use staying stuck in the fog, that will not do, might as well run off the highway. Life is to be lived. Life is about being happy. If you are not happy, what is the point? Yet at any point you hold the potential to be happy. Today my friend told me of children she is working with, at a school. Young children with special needs. A girl so neglected her ear is almost hanging off from eczema, a boy with learning difficulties who has never had anyone read a book to him, a child who can’t do anything physically for themselves. How do you see the beauty in that? Yet it’s there. If you give these children just an ounce of the love and care they deserve – that we all deserve – you can feel their beauty shining right back. Seeing the beauty through the fog is where we expand beyond where we have been. Land of the free, what a joke. Stop singing unless you believe it America. Freedom is felt within the soul, it is not given, you have a land that many have flocked to so they can live a life that matches what they know to be true within, only to find so many enslaved by their fears. Fear of no money, fear of no job, fear of no food, fear of death? Fear of suffering? Here we are again, a world of fear, when fear is nothing but an illusion brought to reality by the fear itself. Find hope in hope. These are the ramblings perhaps of someone privileged. Someone who can’t know the hearts of those who suffer atrocities. Maybe. But I can see the best in everything, I can see the possibilities, I can see the way through the fear and the suffering. I can see you. I can see that you have the power within you to let your light shine. Shut your ears and eyes and heart to every bad thing past and present, and continue to do it into the future, moment by moment. There is no good or bad, there is only the great in good and the good in the bad. The only person you need to convince is yourself. What you believe is all yours, it’s between you and your heart. If what you believe makes you feel bad, that is on you. Change your beliefs, if they are not working for you. Hating that person who betrayed you or harmed you, it’s normal. But get past it, don’t keep fueling that flame, the only person left carrying that burden is you, and you have suffered enough, don’t keep carrying that the rest of your life. Lighten the load, forgive because it frees you. There are too many carrying too much unnecessary stuff. This is the world we live in. All that energy once created always exists. There’s only one way to live here and be free. Dial it up people, tune in at a higher frequency, let yourself fly. Knowing I’ve helped in some way through my writing means a lot - I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others, or contact me directly at shona@shonakeachie.com, I’m always happy to help if I can. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also subscribe to my newsletter and, as a special thank you, you will receive the link to my video 3 Steps to Becoming You.
0 Comments
 Lately I have been catching up on episodes of Nashville that I missed. It’s one of only a few TV programmes I watch, mainly I enjoy the interactions and insights from the characters, their triumphs and frailties, and I love that the characters are pursuing their passions.
People doing something they love is always a draw card for me. But what inspired this particular musing was the focus on the various relationships, as the characters – like those of us in real life – try to figure out the magic ingredients to happiness. One line that really struck a chord was Rayna sharing with Scarlett that she thinks relationships are just moments, if you are lucky those moments will keep happening over the years. Then there was Avery’s wise observation to Will that never in the history of relationships did living with someone make things easier. In truth, these moments we have are not so much moments of connection with others, they are moments where we open within and that in turn opens us up to the connection we have with everything else. That is where we find true love. I was fascinated that these characters, like most people I know in the real world, really put themselves through the mill when it comes to relationships. There is this pressure to make someone else happy, and vice versa. Yet when the characters are pursuing their passion, their songs, they know that they can always find that connection and love within themselves. The relationships are secondary, no matter the ups and downs, their passion remains their core anchor; and that is how it should be, yet something I rarely see acknowledged in the real world. We have such high expectations of what relationships mean, and place far too much value on what others think of us and what we think of them. Growing up I used to read all the teen magazines and romantic novels, and I had figured that people in lasting relationships either had good sex or were good friends, and – if they were lucky – both. Now I see that there are just moments of connection as each life runs its own course. Over the years I have seen many people who stay in relationships (and have done it myself) based on distant memories of special elusive moments together. Holding onto the hope of rekindling these or staying out of a sense of fear or misguided obligation. I had a tendency to focus on the potential within people, then feel let down, rather than simply continuing to focus on the best in who they were being. The uplifter in me, who initially saw their loving soul and their beauty, generally disappeared after a period of time and became the critic instead. Always looking at it from a vantage point that I was somehow a half that needed a whole was entirely unhelpful. It was only when I discovered my own wholeness and stopped looking to others to fill my cup that I created the possibility for the love within to reveal itself more easily and more often. Just as people say “when you are in love you’ll know”. The same is true here, when you have experienced the love within you, you know, you get it. You feel the sense of connection and oneness not just with yourself or a specific person, but with everything. Call it what you like, from feeling elated, to feeling God, spirit or life-force, it doesn’t matter what you call it. What matters is the truth of the feeling and the power within you to connect with it; if only you can get out of your own way. I know what it feels to fear someone leaving you, I know what it feels like to have your heart broken, and I also know it was all an illusion. Right now, this moment, and the love you have within you - for you - is what truly matters. Putting your happiness first may seem selfish but it’s what creates more connection with others, more moments, amplifying the love within them to them. Let’s face it, who are you going to sooth when you are feeling horrible? Who are you going to inspire when you feel fear or worry or anger? Who can you make happy when you are miserable? The best you can do for anyone is to discover the capacity you have within you to love yourself, and to honour that. Do you really want to hang your happiness on another? When you make it your priority to get in that place, you will create so many more meaningful moments than you can imagine. A life fulfilled and a life experiencing true love. Knowing I’ve helped in some way through my writing means a lot - I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others, or contact me directly at shona@shonakeachie.com, I’m always happy to help if I can. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also subscribe to my newsletter and, as a special thank you, you will receive the link to my video 3 Steps to Becoming You.  I am currently in the midst of booking to travel to the UK later this year, the first time I will have been back in eleven years to the place I lived for so long. Friends and family, ever hospitable, offer (even insist) on us staying with them. Fine for a night or two, but when we are there for longer it’s a bit of a different story.
As ever, our children are our best teachers. I’ve watched what happens when they are with others, they become socially magnetized, unable to break away and take much needed time for themselves. Inevitable bickering starts and then all out tantrums become necessary for the body to find its equilibrium. This is what we parents commonly refer to as our kids going feral. We comment on how tired they are, but tiredness doesn’t always equate to a need for sleep. Our body has a rhythm, it likes to be engaged then rested, and so on. Engaged means your attention is outwardly focused, requiring lots of energy, it can be anything from a meeting, to constantly attending to the needs of others. But we all need regular inward reflection time (as in many times in each day) to keep our wellbeing in balance. I recall hearing a kindergarten teacher talking about young children and the need to minimize play dates and anything extra after kinde. She talked about the young child needing time to process everything from the dynamics of play that day, to the taste of the tomatoes at lunch. All of it new information, new experiences, all of it needing processed. When we continually fill our time with giving our attention to others, or to a device such as a TV, a whole lot of experiences get suppressed. Instead of regarding our experiences as new, they go in the pile in our subconscious, attaching themselves to previous like experiences, compounding the effects of the emotions attached to them. Sadly too many of the emotions are some shade of grey, negative emotions about our lack of worth in one guise or another. It’s kind of become our default and it’s created a whole mountain of unnecessary stress. Our body’s kicking into flight or fight responses when there is no real imminent danger to our life, more of a chronic danger to our wellbeing on an ongoing basis. I was thinking about how we got into this state. Recent conversations with my mum about her own childhood, which was hot on the heels of world war two, reminded me of the prevailing concerns at that time. Life and death were a reality for many who had lost loved ones or faced that kind of danger. For those left, life had been stripped back to its basics. It’s been somewhat refreshing to read Enid Blyton books to the kids, many of which were of course written amid the era of two world wars. The simple joys in life are extolled well by the Famous Five, Secret Seven and others, when lemonade and ice creams were rare treats to be enjoyed. These days, we are ‘doing’ and ‘having’ far more than we are just ‘being’. Taking space for ourselves means taking time to allow for the inward processing necessary to our wellbeing. That doesn’t mean you need to consciously take apart and examine everything that occurs in your life, it means you need to let yourself process things by focusing on activities that require just enough attention for you to stay awake without getting too focused and drawn into something that requires too much attention and energy. In other words, your body is a system that needs to defrag itself on a regular basis while you do something that allows your engine to keep ticking over. It might be regular walks you take, it might be chopping carrots in the kitchen, it might be listening or dancing to music, or reading a good book that you can get lost in (not the nightly newspaper that sets off a spiral of a whole other set of worries). Regular time for meditation and contemplation are really healthy things to do; though you really don’t need more than 15 minutes of meditation a day. The point is to give yourself enough space to start becoming aware of what you are thinking and feeling, rather than just running on default. This then allows for you to more consciously ditch the things that aren’t serving you, and start doing more of the things that are. I know what I’m like, if I stay with someone, especially loved ones I haven’t seen in a while, I’ll be wanting to soak up as much of it all as I can while I’m there. But if I don’t make the effort to detach and defrag, all those new experiences of people and places won’t get processed in a way that allows me to truly enjoy it. It’s like being presented with a good wine and just slugging it down like a glass of water on a hot day. You have to take the time to taste life and appreciate it, that can’t happen when you are too busy giving your attention to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, and trying to do more than one thing at a time. So do yourself a favour and take your own space, and allow others theirs, so that you can see things through fresh eyes and live your best life. Knowing I’ve helped in some way through my writing means a lot - I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others, or contact me directly at shona@shonakeachie.com, I’m always happy to help if I can. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also subscribe to my newsletter and, as a special thank you, you will receive the link to my video 3 Steps to Becoming You.  You know what this question means, she (or he) is in an abusive relationship. But my question is “why is s(he) so different to you?”
Why does she stay? Lack of confidence, shame, a misplaced sense of duty, fear… they are all some version of fear. Anyone who knows me, knows I am an unlikely candidate for an abusive relationship. Yet I know fear; I was bound by fear’s chains for many years, until it nearly suffocated me. Fear is our dirty little secret, yet it is the fear itself that’s more likely to kill you. I had a fear of a lot of things, a fear of the dark, a fear of being alone, a fear of not having enough money, a fear of not knowing what to do with my life, a fear of what others thought of me, I could go on. If you had asked me, I wouldn’t have recognised it as fear, more a ‘healthy reaction’, based on facts and reality. But these were all things that I regularly mulled over, just like you have things you mull over. There are things we consider right or wrong, things we feel more or less confident about than other things, and most people worry about health, money and/or relationships at some point, most likely in some form each and every day. From mild worries and anxieties to outright terror, it’s all a form of fear. Fear is pervasive in the human condition, and whatever our response to fear, it’s that version of you that too often takes the driving seat. Growing up I was resilient, physically healthy, I swam competitively and my fitness levels were high. I didn’t suffer fools and thought I had a good sense of self. Yet I was too bound by fear, and I got slam dunked to shake me out of it. I found myself one day, in my early twenties, sitting on a bus going to meet my boyfriend when suddenly my chest got tight, my heart felt like it was going to burst out of my body (not in a good way), my head felt like it was in a vice grip and I wanted to throw up. I had to get off that bus, I needed cool fresh air. I walked on and on, for many miles, feeling better for the walking but not all me. Eventually I came to my boyfriend’s office, he had to work late; I lay down in the store cupboard, in the cool and the dark. A few hours later he was allowed to go, he took me home and I had cold sweats, and kept throwing up. I was so ill mum called the doctor in the middle of the night. Days later, weeks later, months later, still in the grip of the same cycle, having been (mis) treated for a whole host of issues, I eventually got referred to a psychiatrist for lack of knowing what else to do with me. “Generalized anxiety with panic disorder” was the diagnosis’s, I was affronted. I was strong, capable, how dare they say I was so weak? Yet I had reached a tipping point in my life, at 20 I had my heart broken, shattered into a million pieces, at 21 my heart was soothed for a time by a gentle soul, but ultimately this was not a relationship where I was being honoured. I was finished university and it was time to meet the world, but I had no idea how I was going to do that. I felt alone. The me who was experiencing all these physical symptoms of (what I perceived as) weakness, did not feel at all like the person I was inside. Neither did the person who hit her boyfriend across the face at 17 feel like me either. Or the one who completely exploded at the guy running a camera shop haggling for the best price in Tenerife years later. Nor the one who too often yelled and screamed at my (take your pick of) significant others. Losing control was not a feeling I enjoyed nor resonated with because it felt like something else was taking over. It is as Eckhart Tolle describes when he was somewhat suicidal, he suddenly had this thought “who is this me I cannot live with?” When I had my diagnosis, I found Christine Ingham’s book on Panic Disorder and I began to understand the role of the flight or fight centre in our brains. I met, for the first time in an objective way, what Parent Educator Mary Willow calls my guard dog. The flight or fight response is there to help us dramatically shift gears in response to a threat to our survival. Mary astutely recognises this manifests differently in different temperaments as well as different scenarios. So flight or fight may also manifest as freeze or fold (ing into oneself), as she calls it. The point is it’s a primal survival instinct. And for most of us, it’s damn well in the driving seat. How does that happen? Even after overcoming my panic disorder, and then – ten years later - overcoming my fear of being alone, I still had a lot of fears. As I have recounted before, my first child was pregnancy number 5. I feared losing her, and so from week 6 through about week 14 underwent a scan just to check she was still there, heart still beating. Can you imagine the anxiety she must have felt from me as she was tucked up in my womb trying her best to grow? And the anxiety in those early months and years trying to figure our way through parenthood? There came a point a few years ago, I distinctly remember being in a motel with the kids and hearing a bang in the middle of the night. Likely it was an engine backfiring somewhere, but my mind jumped to rabid gunman on the loose. There I was meticulously planning an escape route in my head, figuring out exactly how to wake the kids without them making a sound. Awareness struck, awareness that I had let my imagination run away with me. Instead of fearing the thoughts, I started to play out what happens. All roads led to some sort of suffering or death if you go in that direction. Let’s not specifically go into the fear of death here, I talked about that in Saying Goodbye, but it’s a common fear. In Fear of Suffering We Suffer From Fear Regardless of what you fear, unless the gunman is actually a reality, or any other imminent danger, my fight or flight centre was definitely being overworked, it was in the driving seat too often. Even with my kids, who vacillate constantly between desire and anger at desires not being instantly met, too often I meet them with my own guard dog, in anger, instead of the real me. Anger too has its roots in fear, a fear of being disrespected, a fear of our children not becoming socially accepted citizens, a fear of not being allowed to simply be who we are “just leave me alone, get out my face”. Rewind, let’s see how we get there. I came in to the world the same way everyone else does, starting as a tiny baby. My parents had lost their first children, twin boys, so no doubt they carried similar fears to those I had carrying mine, and no doubt I felt that anxiety. We teach babies fear. We don’t mean to, but in our own mix of anxiety and hope for them, that is what we teach. Society drives and perpetuates it. Babies must lie on their back to sleep or they could die. You must get vaccinated or you could die. You must go to school or you will not be able to contribute to society and then, not only you, but we all could die. You must eat vegetables or you will be unhealthy and then you could ultimately die. You must use protection when you are having sex or you could die. You must have insurance or you could be homeless, and then you could die. The list is endless. And the hook is, yes, you could die, people have and – ultimately – everyone does. But if you live your life in such a fearful way, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. You attract too much suffering in your fear of suffering. Do you know why animals sense fear? It is palpable. You are made of trillions of cells and at their basis they are energy. Energy vibrates with the prevailing emotion. The prevailing emotion in too many, too much of the time, is fear. Fear attracts what it fears. I can’t honestly say I fear nothing, because there’s still the odd gremlin or two that works its way to the surface and I continue to deal with that. I still occasionally feel the day to day pressures of ‘being on time’, or ‘what others think’. But generally speaking, I now know I create my own reality, and I really don’t fear or worry too much about anything, I know things work out in the end. But back to why she stays. She stays because she’s rooted in fear, what is known seems safer somehow that what is unknown. The same as why the other s(he) is violent to begin with, or why you stay in that job you hate, or stick with that diet you loathe, or with that person you don’t love, it’s all rooted in fear. Life will often present you with BIG things, like near misses, disease, death, because it knows you need dislodged to get out your comfort zone and show you that you can do it. So you can wait for the slam dunk, or you can start to see the fear for what it is. It’s a thought. And thoughts can be changed. Beliefs are just thoughts too, and so if thoughts can be changed, beliefs can also be changed. You just need to start reaching for better feeling thoughts. It’s simple, if a thought feels bad, it is not serving you. Simple, but not easy, but there’s plenty of help out there, you just have to reach for it. Start somewhere, I’ve written dozens of articles about it, and there are many hundreds and thousands more people out there who have shared their experiences too. You can overcome your fears, and you can lead your best life. Boot fear out the driving seat and let desire take a hold again, learn instead to love yourself, you deserve it. Knowing I’ve helped in some way through my writing means a lot - I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others, or contact me directly at shona@shonakeachie.com, I’m always happy to help if I can. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also subscribe to my newsletter and, as a special thank you, you will receive the link to my video 3 Steps to Becoming You. |
This is a two-step sign-up process, you will have to verify your subscription by clicking the link in the email you should receive after clicking this 'Subscribe' button. If you do not receive the email please check your Junk mail.
By signing up you will only receive emails from shonakeachie.com related to Shona's Blog and you can unsubscribe at any time, thank you. Please note if you are using the Google Chrome browser and want to subscribe to the RSS Feed you will first need to get an RSS plugin from the Chrome Store.
|
RSS Feed
Site powered by Weebly. Managed by iPage