 “She’s gone”, I thought. I wrote in her eulogy that we each had to figure out who we are in the world without her, but now that is the reality I have to actually live.
As we head into another year, that is everyone’s reality, in the sense of rediscovering who we really are in this moment. Yet in the absence of something major changing, many of us slip back into old routines despite promises to ourselves to the contrary. Generally that is down to the day to day servitude, the things we feel obligated to, and they are powerful distractions. This year though, with mum’s passing, circumstances around me have shifted and I am forced to ask who I am now. After a year spent contemplating her illness as I walked along the beach many a day, now I shall contemplate her loss and all that means. Being in the UK to say goodbye to mum has also meant catching up with lots of family and friends that I haven’t seen in over a decade. It’s been a long absence for a girl with a large and close extended family. That said, emigrating to the other side of the world is never a decision I’ve regretted, I love the life I’ve created there, and the person I’ve become. But, there are also things about my roots that I find I miss too. For example, sitting in the Kings Theater in Glasgow, watching Elaine C Smith and Johnny Mac in pantomime, I rediscovered the joy of the West of Scotland humour (think Billy Connolly). Perhaps when you know where your humour is, you know where your heart is, or at least the way to it. And so I wonder what will unfold when I head back to the southern hemisphere, taking the best of this trip and the worst of it with me. Where one door closes another opens. I know this from experience time and again. The way the universe delivers serendipities and coincidences, things unfolding in ways you can never imagine save for looking back upon them. It’s another precipice of change. Despite the circumstances, I am curious to see what unfolds next, eager to understand what awaits in this life’s journey. This is not a new year I can talk to those who will determinedly pursue changes amid a stagnant daily routine, though I have done in the past. This is a year marked for me by endings and beginnings, which I accept with hope and mixed emotions. True to the journey I’ve been on so far, I will remain concerned with who I am becoming now and in what way I can be of help in order to feel the warm glow of happiness that emanates when I’m in tune with all of that. Whether you are facing major changes in your life, or things are just humming along, making a commitment to figuring who you are in this moment – now (not the you of yesteryear) – will be one of the best commitments you ever make. The kind of self awareness we need to develop in order to do that requires us to take a much broader perspective of the present moment. It requires us to live in the moment rather than to be swept along by it, to become aware of what we are thinking and feeling and how that is affecting the life that is unfolding around us. Making a commitment to figuring out who you are now, regardless of what unfolds for you in 2018, can only help you to deal with the worst of whatever the year has to offer in a more healthy way, and to receive the best of whatever the year has to offer in a way that can really fill your cup. Talking of which, raise your glass, here’s to you in 2018, whoever you are now. I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others if they inspire, 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.
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 This year has been a heart wrenching, heart melting, mind-expanding sort of year. Above all I’ve become more and more aware of our capability as humans and equally aware of how little of it we understand and use it.
The year has ended with my mum’s passing, and some beautiful experiences that surround that. After her death (a welcome release after the months she’d spent debilitated, her body ravaged by cancer) I took some time to sense into her energy. I had a wonderful vision of a hand reaching down from the heavens to pick her up, with first one and then the other hand; the way one would with a small child about to be whirled around. No longer weighted down, light as a feather and as free as the wind, she took to racing across the land, running fast and free with thunderous exhilaration. Then she was a single drop of dew on a rose, then the thorn, then the flower itself, an insect, a blade of grass, the wind that whistled through and the life-giving rain that descended from the sky. All at once she took flight; she was everything and she everywhere. Like a kid in a candy store experiencing the jubilation of life. The feeling that accompanied all of this was exultation and absolute grace. Then a word arose, rejoicing. As wonderful as it was to feel, it led me to appreciate the gap between that and how it would have felt to be shackled to a body so sick. While hers was an extreme and devastating burden, I know how far from the feeling of rejoicing I often feel on an ordinary day to day basis, and how others around me often seem weighted down too. With mum’s passing we have made the trip back to the UK, and have been catapulted from the warm summer and longer days of the southern hemisphere to the cold and dark days of the northern hemisphere. From beach walks to bright lights, late shopping and an abundance of consumables, it’s quite a shift. There seems a lot to distract me here, and it feels pretty overwhelming. In that sense I feel a deep gratitude for the somewhat more low key life I lead back home, more nature and less consumerism. Yet there are the connections with friends and family to warm the heart and reflect back life in new and interesting ways. Being here with my family has made mum’s passing both more poignant and, at the same time, easier. When I experienced the freedom and jubilation in mum’s rejoicing of all that is, I decided that I want to be connected with that feeling more often. Everything in the vision was connected to the natural world around us, a world we often under appreciate, and so I think the key is to appreciate and revel in the simpler things within and around us. Many of our day to day worries don’t really mean much at all when push comes to shove. Most of us know things always work out in the end, yet we constantly worry about how we are going to get there, wherever ‘there’ is at that moment in time. It really isn’t worth it, the worry. Instead, reflect on the miracles we make happen. As much as I think we completely and almost universally underestimate our capabilities, there is one very obvious one we do recognise. The example I have in mind is the power of creation – the miracle of making and birthing new life. When you start to think about the complexities of that, just allow yourself the luxury of imagining what that might mean your true capabilities are. We take for granted this amazing power of creation, yet for the most part seem to miss that it would point to the possibility that we can indeed create anything the mind can conceive and the heart believe. I managed to create two beautiful lives, literally created two beings, yet for the longest time couldn’t fathom that the job I felt trapped in was a prison of my own making rather than an economic ‘necessity’. Suffice to say life has moved on enormously since then, and the journey is well documented, but still, am I truly rejoicing in who I am and what life has to offer? Far from it. Instead we become entangled in others’ opinions, and limit our lives and possibilities with beliefs that were passed along without too much thought, only fears. So my new year’s resolution this year is to uncover more of our human potential, master it, and rejoice in it. To be more of who I am, more of who I was created to be, and to revel in all that means. Rejoicing in who you are means beginning to understand who you are and loving every aspect of that and of life around you. As we head into the New Year, I hope more of us will seek to understand what we are capable of, and start to drop our attachment to those ‘others’ opinions and to rejoice in who you are. I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others if they inspire, 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.  At a family gathering recently a late night conversation turned to the question about what happens when you die. The question wasn’t asked of me directly, but our small group started sharing views in the zealous way people do when alcohol has lowered their inhibitions.
I remained quiet, not really enjoying the conversation particularly. My partner listened for a while and then prodded me “I’m surprised you’re not joining in” he said, as everyone listened, “this is right up your alley”. He started to add his views about us being energy and said perhaps the others should read my articles. It was awkward and I said nothing. Here’s why. For a start, my core belief is that there is no one truth, I believe each person has their own truth, “each to their own” as the expression goes. Expounding my own beliefs is fine if someone is genuinely interested, genuinely searching for answers and seeking inspiration in the experiences I’ve had. But then, that is why I share my experiences in these blogs, for those who are interested. From the conversation that had already taken place, and from what I already knew of the family, it was obvious to me that he and I were probably the only ones there who believe we are all eternal consciousness, non-physical at our essence, having a physical experience as humans. It was also obvious to me that no one was really looking to hear about my experiences, they simply wanted to state their beliefs. The reason I hadn’t been enjoying the conversation was its limitation; the limitations it infers of us as humans. Our general lack of awareness as a society of the vast powers of our consciousness is something I view as a sad state of affairs. I don’t want to dwell on that, I don’t want to give any energy to it by pushing against it; I’d rather just continue to strive to live life to its fullest potential and share that with others who are interested. Besides, how on earth do I put into one or two sentences (which, in a setting like that, is all you get if you are lucky) the current answers I have to the questions I’ve been seeking answers to for more than half my life. What happens when we die? What is the meaning of life? What is life? What is our human potential? As I say, these are all questions I’ve actively explored for years, it’s an enormous field of study. It’s not just something I give thought to now and again. Sure, the science of consciousness has moved far beyond many of the current views of the world’s residents, and anyone who checked out the latest research and findings in the realms of neuroscience and epigenetics would have cause to reevaluate some of their beliefs. However, most just aren’t that interested. Why push a boulder uphill? And why try and persuade anyone to your point of view? Isn’t that the single cause of conflict on this planet? Isn’t that where religion fails? At the end of the day, we each have an opinion and only that. As I shared recently in Why the Big Questions are Important, when I was talking to someone about life, existence and human potential, he acknowledged the probability of ‘something more’ because of the astounding perfection found in nature, but felt it was fruitless to pursue it as nothing could be proven. My response to that is it can be proven, but only by yourself - through your own experience. And to have mind-expanding experiences, you generally have to be seeking them to be open to them. It doesn’t matter what our science can now tell us, you need to have the experiences to believe them. As part of the same gathering, in a more sober state, the topic of my daughter’s ear infection came up. We happened to be flying in next week and so it was asked whether she was on antibiotics to make sure she’d be okay. All the same emotions and thoughts came up for me then as they did when discussing what happens when you die. To most they are not related, to me everything is related. Here are the thoughts that went through my head. Our bodies are perfect, they are far superior to anything man has ever constructed or dreamed about. They are most certainly capable of (and intended to) heal themselves. We are at a point as a society where we know antibiotics (like most synthetic medicines) kill not just the germs that are harmful, but those that are helpful, we generally all now also believe they are over-prescribed and the germs they were intended for are becoming resistant – and this is just in a matter of a few decades of use. Yet, in fear, many turn to them at the slightest hint of an infection. Here is what I had done about my daughter’s ear infection. I first contemplated the emotional cause, for the body in its perfection uses illness to teach us what we need to learn in order to be healthy. It’s common for children to have earache because of the constant moralizing of adults – she had it at the end of the last school term too (though I don’t exempt myself from the choir that is preaching). Then I had my daughter’s ears physically checked, indeed flying with earache is not just undesirable, it would be a dumb risk for me to take with her hearing. We could see there was fluid in her Eustachian tube. The fluid needed to be drained as it creates pressure on the ear drum, which can be done by blowing your nose regularly and using a nasal spray with just saline or something else natural, along with steam inhalations. If the fluid becomes infected it can become painful, and the body might need some help. Antibiotics have been shown to be effective in only 1 in 9 cases of earache like this (though you can find evidence to support or refute this, but it sounded about right to me personally). I have a preference for energy medicines, homeopathy in particular, and chose Merc Dulc for the job. Within hours the pain (that had become debilitating for her, along with the fever and vomiting) subsided. The next day the pain was gone entirely, the day after her appetite was back, and now the regular nose spray/ blowing sessions are revealing there is no infection and little fluid. Her body, in its perfection, has healed itself. So, what did I say when asked if I’d given her antibiotics? Just that I didn’t think it was necessary or would have been effective. This was enough to kill the conversation in truth, because it lay at the opposite end of the spectrum from the questioner’s beliefs and they did not want to get into an argument. If the topic had come up again in more general terms, I would have just ignored it as I did the question about what happens when you die. Many of us feel awkward when faced with these questions, and we can feel awkward not answering, but it can get very awkward if you end up disagreeing or arguing about your opinions. What wasted energy, for they really are only opinions after all. So when faced with these awkward social situations I think the best thing to do is just to respond as I started here, with “each to their own”. On the other hand, when people are more open or accepting, even if they don’t share your beliefs, it can be inspirational and uplifting. What is by far the most inspirational tact to take, is to simply live your own truth, and let others awaken to their own potential as life leads them to it. I’ve found the best approach in social situations is to turn away from the awkward subjects and lean into the ones in which you have more common ground; it make the whole experience a lot better. I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others if they inspire, 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.  Last week my young daughter’s poignant observation that her life was far from free, set off a chain of thought that led me to the point of realizing we needed to do some good old fashioned (and somewhat cliché) dream building with our kids.
That then made me realise just how little time we assign to any conscious creation of the life we actually want. Instead, most of the time our thoughts are lost in everything we’re observing and experiencing and that just perpetuates more of the same. So, as I vowed, I started a conversation with the kids about our ideal life. It has only been a brief conversation so far, which in itself is ridiculous as the kids and I have spent enough time together to have had several really good goes at putting together a pretty good picture of the kind of life we would like. As you might imagine, the kids had no problem in coming up with ideas. What I found interesting was the tack they took in their line of thought. Everything they dreamt up appeared to be based on the premise that they would create a lifestyle purely from nature, and it would involve nothing we have commercially available. When I asked them why this was, they replied that they didn’t want to use money. They have none and they have seen the life of bondage it creates in adults. It was fascinating to realise that the kids and I seemed in tune about our ideal lifestyle, even although I have shared very little with them about the direction my own thoughts have taken of late, involving a great deal of contemplation about getting back to a more natural lifestyle. While we spent only a few minutes talking about our ideal life, it has set in motion further thoughts and comparisons with the life we lead now. I have no wish to make life harder than it is, and it can often feel hard just to think about bucking the ‘normal’ ways of living, never mind doing it. I don’t have any aspirations to Tom and Barbara in The Good Life (a 1970’s British Sitcom about a couple escaping commercialism to become self sufficient), I have more of a vision that the new normal will be a return to self sufficiency and sustainability. To create the kind of lifestyle that we would find ideal needs to feel easy though, and not like we would be pushing uphill, though admittedly alternatives lifestyles are certainly more on the agenda these days than they were in the 1970’s. For example, when I consider the schooling choice we have made for our kids, it has exposed us (perhaps more so than in a state school environment) to alternative lifestyles; mainly evident around food choices. Gluten-free, sugar-free, dairy-free and vegetarian are all common place dietary choices and, while it certainly poses a challenge to cater for any event that traditionally involves ‘treats’ for a number of kids, these types of food are certainly more widely available and easily obtainable than at any other time in my life. Despite that, food shopping, baking and cooking are not high on my agenda. Neither is gardening, although I do appreciate plucking lettuce leaves and other fresh things from our garden - courtesy of my partner’s endeavours - to eat only minutes later. For my own part, I find it simpler to avoid anything involving catering and am just grateful my daughters’ birthdays generally fall in strawberry season, since these are fairly universally regarded as yummy and meet most of the ‘free’ requirements. While I’m not a zealot, I am an advocate of natural living (including food) and feel that, quite simply, the closer something is to its natural state the better it is for us. Yet here we are plopped right in the middle of an age and society that has created a crazy world (see Escape the Insanity of Your Life) where, instead of it being easy to eat richly beneficial food that grows under our noses on the land where we live, it’s easier to eat food that we go online or get in our car to obtain, and may have been flown half way around the world, be genetically modified, highly refined and/or pumped full of enhancers or preservatives. In this regard, I think I need to take more of a lead from my kids, who were not in the least bit concerned about how we would make any of our ideal lifestyle happen. I was busy telling them we could just trust that whatever we came up with would no doubt unfold so long as we trusted and believed in it. Yet there I was, contemplating all the uphill struggles I could foresee. I know it’s not down to me to make everything happen, and I know things always work out, I have just been programmed the way most of us have. Despite all the work I’ve put in on raising my conscious awareness of the thoughts running through my head, and in starting to focus on the thoughts that are more beneficial, that old societal programming still has the ability to kick into overdrive at times. So much so that a whole week has gone past and the kids and I had only that one conversation about creating our ideal life. What happened to all my intentions of getting them to draw pictures of it? Like happens with all of us, life gets busy. I could give you the run down and you may even sympathise, though most likely you’d simply recognise the same craziness in your own life. That is okay, even if it takes me a month, or six, I know we will spend more time dreaming the lifestyle we want into existence. We’ve just made a start, and that will do for now. What about you and the life of your dreams? It’s almost holiday season; most of us get at least some time out. How about just taking a moment of that to dream a little? You never know what could happen, and it’s certain to at least take you in the direction of your best life. I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others if they inspire, 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.  Yeah right! Except… what is stopping us from making it that way?
“Life is free and life is fun” said the narrator calmly. “Life isn’t free!” my daughter exclaimed; our kids were listening to a bedtime meditation story. Straight away she cited some examples dear to her heart “we don’t have free (style) drawing at school, we have (designated) play groups and, if life was free, we wouldn’t have to go to bed at a ‘reasonable’ hour.” Of course she is right, from her vantage point, life isn’t free. “You can change that” I told her “you came to build a new world, not live in this one. You just have to be smart about it.” I started in on a brief explanation about focusing our thoughts, then just told her to put her attention on what she wants rather than what she doesn’t want. “Imagine what you want in great detail, as much as you can, and trust what your thoughts have set in motion.” The way she picked that statement out about freedom really stuck me, especially as I had just written an article only last week about the insanity of our lives. “It must be the current theme I’m currently exploring in the journey of life” I mused. It reminded me of another story I heard recently, about a priest in Egypt watching on as many hundreds of slaves were put to work on a building project. After a long contemplation he decreed the slaves should be set free and offered coins to do the same work. There was an incredulous response to this course of action, and so he explained that the slaves begrudged the work, and so were slow in their efforts, requiring constant goading. The slaves were also expensive to keep, they had to be fed and housed. And so, for less money, they freed the slaves who – of course – came back to the same jobs much more willingly for coins. “This” the priest said “is democracy”. The key in this story, and the one of our life, is the contemplation that took place on the priest’s part. Those with true power are those who know that power lies within – within the realms of your thoughts and imagination. We only need to grasp that thoughts really do create things, and we have our solution. Of course, we can keep going round the same old hamster wheel year after year, or we can take charge of our thoughts. Or at least start by just noticing what those thoughts are. As a friend of ours said to me today when I told him the story “yep, we get to choose what we think and how we feel”. This is absolutely true, yet most of us run on autopilot and let our feelings be dictated in response to whatever we are experiencing. So we harvest more of the same. If our thoughts and feelings are running on autopilot, who did the thinking that put the thoughts in there? This was the theme of the article Your Best Thinking = Your Best Decisions = Your Best Life. We all have the choice to be like the priest in the story, to observe and to make smart moves, or equally we can choose bondage, like the ‘freed’ slaves. So life can be free and it can be fun, is yours? Mine is probably like yours, I still let what is happening around me dictate what I am feeling too much of the time. Intellectually I get what I’m pointing to in these thoughts I share with you, but emotionally I get wrapped up in everything from the fights the kids have to the things that are happening on the other side of the world with the people I love. There’s nothing wrong with feeling the range of emotions I feel in response to those things, but they create more thoughts, and the thoughts spiral, and before I know it the whole direction of my day can go down the gurgler if I don’t catch what is happening. So I make it my business to catch these thoughts, to be aware of what I’m thinking and feeling, to simply take the steam out of them. I manage that more easily now than ever because, by regularly meditating (for 15 minutes each day), I have practiced and practiced noticing and letting go of thoughts that aren’t helping me. Now it’s about kick starting my fervent imagination, to create the kind of world I want to live in. In What a Wonderful World This Is, I talked about the great things we have to focus on in the here and now, those create a good backdrop from which we can start to paint the canvas of the future. My kids have an amazing imagination, I know when I talk to my daughter about using it to build a new world that she gets this stuff better than I do; she’s not nearly as buried under layers and years of dogmas and societal constructs and other nonsense that has filled our heads and cut us off from our hearts. Perhaps it is time to write a story of the future, the kind of future where life is free and life is fun for all of us all of the time? This is the story of my life, and your life, and our children’s lives, and their children’s lives. It starts here, today, right in this very moment, invest in a bit of dreaming and you’ll have planted a seed for a better future. I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others if they inspire, or contact me directly at shona@shonakeachie.com, I’m always happy to help if I can. 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