The Witches of Eastwick

The movie, the Witches of Eastwick, for me was a lot of fun. My best part is Jack Nicholson lying on bed proclaiming he is “a horny little devil”. This is most amusing as the three lady characters are all drawn to this obnoxious man, precisely because he represents what they really want, separated from what they care to admit to themselves: to be uninhibited to their primal (read sexual) fantasies.

Isn’t it funny how little of our true selves we want to admit to ourselves. And like the ‘three witches’, it always comes back to bite us in the… you know what.The darker side of who we are, is not ‘socially acceptable’ so we suppress that which our pretence does not factor as ‘good’. The truth is, our so-called evil, is more the ‘better the devil you know’-stuff, than that which is apparently evil. We know that acting in a certain way will give us acceptance, so we act ‘out of character’ because it represents a comfort zone and comfort is such a cop-out. However, comfort does not explore. Comfort does not make one grow. When we suppress something it becomes the devil we don’t know and that devil is one that you do not want to invite. That unidentified, subconscious part of our psyche becomes the demon that owns you.

What can be scarier than a deep, dark secret? Again, I am not suggesting that you should share your private life with everyone; the secret is kept from you and you only by your denial of its existence. Problem is, if we keep the proverbial skeletons in the closet, the ransom note is already written by our guilty conscience. The ransom note always reads: “This is who you are, see me, or pay for the rest of your life”

I am not promulgating indecent behavior; I am suggesting that some aspects of us need to be explored, even when they represent thoughts that aren’t ‘normal’. Even the Bible suggests that we should try everything once and keep the good. No, mainlining on Heroin is just plain stupid, but just because there is something that you are drawn to that goes outside of the boundaries, something that pushes the norm, doesn’t mean that such a ‘thing’ should be rejected before you explore it as a consenting adult. Remember, entertaining a thought does not equate agreeing with it. A thought represents an opinion, a different perspective, so don’t argue with it, it is only a suggestion!

Happy Valentine

There is amorous love, there is pa-and-maternal love, there is Agape, there is love for what one does, for one-self, but no love is love if it is conditional love.

That does not mean you have to love the personality, but looking 'into' anybody you can still see the soul that is just love.

Love is unconditional!

May you and your valentines find real love, the 'stuff' that holds everything together.

Remember, love is only a thought - it is the connotations that you have with the thought that is important.

Just because it smells like a rose, does not make it a rose. Real roses, unlike the imitated smell you can get in a bottle, does not have a shelf life beyond its purpose. Real roses die and that is their choice, that's the way they are meant to be, because like love, we need to know that every moment love is created is has to die. Nothing last forever, but NOW does, the only moment where you can choose to love again, again and again.

True love is a choice, made every day.

"So you say you are in love. So what of it. Everything changes, there are always changes"

Joan Armatrading: Drop the Pilot.

We fall in and out of love, as sure as the sun surrenders to the moon. You see true love, like the sun and the moon is not in competition, they have to respect each other for who they are: different - thank the Creator, they are unique - and as to mother earth, not one of us can live without both of them.

We often fall in love with a picture of our 'significant other', but when that picture changes over time, we want to change the person to fit the picture we had of them in the first place. That is controlling and true love does not want to control. True love shares its needs, but never forces its wants. True love cares enough to be hurt. It does not retaliate, when injured - it communicates.

Love is the fuzziest word of all and yet it is the 'real-ist' emotion there is. Problem is love's always the Solution. No, not the excuse. Love will not cure any and everything, love does not make the wrong right. Love is not a potion, love is a notion. And the notion has as many highs as it does lows. On second thoughts, "low" reigns where love is concerned: It is the one who is down and out who needs love more.

So we have a day a year that celebrates love. Casanova has it all wrong: love is not the one you want, it is the one you're with.

Love you - as you are..and more, mon Cherie

"I see dead people..."

Remember that famous line from 6th sense, starring Bruce Willis? However, I am using it here as a metaphor for us hanging on to yesterday, but more than that the regrets we have, about things that have past: We do not let go of the dead, symbolically speaking.

Furthermore the dead, also represents the shadow parts of ourselves, where the ghosts of our unconscious walks like phantoms, scaring us. But they are imagined monsters, for they have no power other than what we allow them to have. They, in turn, are there to remind us of what we have not yet dealt with in our lives: our unfinished business, be that an act of forgiveness, or regaining our power after a haunted experience, such as a set-back in life from which we need to pick ourselves up from.

Sometimes, we can be the ghosts, the walking dead, and will be until we wake up to our Divine potential.

Being human

Is there's a difference between a human-being and a human-doing?

Of course there is. Anybody aware of a sense of self will be able to tap into the knowing that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. Yet so many of us, knowingly or unknowingly live life mindlessly doing things and these 'things' become the sum-total of our lives. We do not live from the truth that our physical existence is a vehicle and our earthly life is the route our souls have chosen to travel along.

What happens when we are disconnected from our inner world and live life on the exterior only, is that we become separated from our inner world because we are out of touch with this larger, richer part of ourselves. We drift between feeling nothing, cutting out the world so that we can't feel, for the fear of getting hurt again, or we feel too much, so much so that it overwhelms us. We are torn between these opposing poles, instead of being centered in the essence of our being.

Using the knowing that I am a spiritual being having a human experience, instead of being overwhelmed by my feelings or trying to cut the feelings from my awareness, I can experience my feelings – my emotions – as guides. When I feel angry, I feel the emotion fully, but instead of reacting in ways that are negative and don’t work for me, I can choose to respond to my emotions in creative ways that bring me closer to others and closer to myself.

Every choice, no matter how big or small, has an impact on our lives. Viewing myself as a spiritual being having a human experience also helped me when I was so deeply depressed that I had thoughts of suicide. I told myself that I wanted to ‘move on’, stop the pain of this life, but then I had a thought that made me rethink it: If being human was so bad, then why does the soul choose it so gladly and if I didn’t embrace the lessons my soul wanted me to learn in this life-time, my soul would gladly return to physical life to face the same lessons again. Better to live this life to its fullest, so that I can move on to higher levels of experience next time round.
Whether you believe in reincarnation or not, I hope that looking at it this way gives you a new perspectives on your life. I like to think of my life’s journey as a journey to find my way back home. Home is where the heart is and the heart is where love is, be that love for yourself or for another.

When we were young, in our innocence everything and anything was possible. Then life got a hold of us. Thing is, if we let go of the baggage we accrued along the way and simply remember who we truly are, the soul that lives within, we will find new inspiration in an ordinary day.

I feel loved…

“Let’s see where the journey is taking us”, are the words that I uttered just moments before I sit down writing this. Wow, what a statement of my surrendering to the Mystery of life, for which my soul has always yearned for. My soul desires this state of being, this passion, as it is where it can once more feel the ecstatic embrace of its oneness with God. Here where earthly chaos is the order that makes sense to the lover’s madness, herein must be the state in which Rumi, the lover, through the poetry of the soul explains: “If this is madness, then sanity pales in insignificance”. Herein my polarity and my temporary illusion of duality once more passionately come to the resolution of my divine feminine and masculine qualities. Herein opposites attract as I finally look into the mirror of my desire, I am looking back at myself.

Now I know that God cannot be found in the order of my intellect that will always be bound by the puritan views and conditioned beliefs of society. I now realize that the fear of my dark desires, my shadow/s is the warden of my imprisonment, the keeper of the keys that unlock me, when I turn that key inside and “get in the moment where love is the feeling”, I am free. As long as I choose not to know all of who I am, I will be a lesser child of God.

My yearning, my deepest and darkest desires for this ecstasy, once imprisoned by my ego and cleverly barred by the feelings of guilt and shame is now free from the illusion, woken up to the truth that the prison walls are never there, never beyond my choice, my beautiful and powerful free will. I now see that my insistence to choose a world I think I can control, a world of order, has become the very choice to throw away the keys that lock me away, where I suffer only because I choose to submit to my ego’s need for survival, its lesser value of myself that would rather have me locked away in the medieval dungeon of yesterdays memories, because it is what I think I know, than face the incredible power of who know I am right now.

Soon, I know the ego will rear its ugly little incessant head and this time I will be waiting right here in the moment of now, and I will catch it, as I will be awake to the thoughts and emotions, that will only be allowed for a little while, so I can gratefully receive their gifts and then move forward beyond the illusion that they temporarily present and once more experience the TRUTH that there is no separation with the God-force, which is NOW, always within.

I lost God in the lifeless boredom, the bound logic and critical condemnation of my religion and now I find God in the ecstasy of Spirit. As with Depeche Mode, I now know – even in the Dark Night of the Soul – my sweet desire is calling me, so that regardless the illusion of pain and suffering, “I feel loved”.

Life's a game...

In this game called life I can’t change what cards I have been dealt, I have to play my symbolic Poker hand as is. I have to throw away, let go of the cards that have no more value for me and then realize that I will be dealt new cards that offer new possibilities. Cards that one gets rid of are all yesterday cards: regrets, resentments and habitual ways of thinking.

Even then the game is not over, for as I know, it is not always the player with the best cards that wins the game. Sometimes the best choice is to ‘fake it until you make it’. Bluffing is part of the game. Remember that in Poker, bluffing is not lying. For this metaphor, in life one is faced with the reality that one’s current situation is not always conducive to having victory. The best option in these instances is to be something first and then allow the ‘doing’ to follow as a result. Form follows function; mind over matter and being becomes doing. These are all statements of truth that apply.

It works like this: First you decide what state of mind you need for success in any given situation. For instance, to have success in one’s business, one has to ask oneself, “What kind of a person do I need to BE, if I want success?” One answer could be that one needs to be confident. Following the argument, you will have to create a picture of yourself as being confident already. If you act from that state of being your actions will slowly but surely be that of a confident person and success will follow. On the other hand (excuse the pun), trying to do confident things will fail because like the opponent in Poker you will see right through it, if it is not backed by affirmative internal dialogue.

Remember, in life you are both the opponent and yourself. In Chris De Burg’s song Spanish Train he sings of God and the Devil playing poker for his soul. For me this is again a metaphor for the eternal battle between our shadow side and our light, our ego and our highest potential. The Devil and God is within, our consciousness is both these forces and we are waging a bet that we will go one of two ways, to the Victory of our Divinity or to the demise of our humanity.
But now you may ask, if I am both the opponent and myself in the game, how can I bluff myself? How can I pretend to be confident, when I am not?

The truth is that we often bluff ourselves for destructive purposes. We bluff ourselves that we want to be successful when our actions reveal the opposite. This means that what we say is not what we mean. We do not “walk the talk” and that there is no or little congruence between our stated objectives and what is happening in our lives. If we care to look honestly enough at our situation we will see that we are not committed to what we want. For instance, I say I want to achieve success and be confident to achieve it, yet I listen to the voices that tell me I am worth less more than I listen to the voice within that is calling me to my highest potential.

This kind of ‘bluffing’ is subconscious – we are conveniently unaware of our sabotaging behavior and this obviously does not work for us, for we find ourselves again and again failing our objectives.

The kind of ‘bluffing’, the ‘fake until you make it’ approach which I am suggesting however is a conscious decision to reprogram the mind. Once the decision has been made to do this, one must become aware of the voices within. When a negative thought occurs, acknowledge it as a thought, in other words bring it into your awareness and consciously replace it with an affirmation that is positive in nature. For instance a thought like “I am never going to achieve this”, can be replaced by “ I live in the totality of possibilities”.

Affirmations are statements of truth in the present moment of now. Negative thoughts are vested in believes that come from one’s past conditioning, whilst affirmations take us to the only place in time we have power, the NOW and that brings us face to face with choices that collectively, over time, make up our future.

“Wherever you are, be there.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is important to remember that one can not, especially when we are still allowing the negative thoughts to be subconscious, avoid having a thought. You are not failing when you have the negative thought. Having them just seems to be the nature of our minds; however one can choose to respond to having such thoughts in a way that does not allow them to sabotage our success.

Viewing your life as a game gives you the opportunity to not take yourself so seriously. In other words, you can stand back and view yourself as a player and hopefully this gives you a perspective that is more objective than being caught so much that you can’t see the wood from the trees.

All that the soul wants is to be at peace and heaven is where thoughts and actions meet the choice of living life to its fullest.

A New Road Ahead

At first there is no road; it is only when one person begins it that others can see it. With time, our view of the road broadens.
Chinese Proverb

Who knows what will intrigue, inspire, and challenge us along the way?

This story starts where all great stories begin, without and end. This is my story, but then again how much of my story is ultimately my own and how much of it is a deep, intricate part of you? Only the story, not I can tell…

This is not the kind of tale you would expect, however life seldom resembles fiction, often imitates art and is a stranger to the kind of fiction we would like to, should have, had, have never been.

So, this is a story about the Mystery and how the chaos of it all is the order of the wonderful design of our journey we call life.

This is about a hero’s journey, a coward’s glory, a brave heart, how I was guided to guide, the temptations, the choices and the growing up. Ah, the innocence lost and found when everything and anything became possible.

This is a story about Creation and how it inspires the world. These are the lines, the pages, the thoughts; the energies that will do nothing more than promise you the environment of experiencing yourself as a Divine possibility. And in the end (which from the outset is not part of this or any other story) it is only about Love, trust, compassion and understanding prevailing.

If you can, read it without prejudice. After all judging the parts which this mirror may reflect would be like saying the glass is half-full or half-empty and it is my testimony that we are here to be all of who we are: Nothing less, so much more!

More about that later and less than before is where we meet. We meet in the only place we can meet ourselves, in the shadows: The darkest hour of our lives that cast the illusions of fear and separation upon us. As difficult as it may be, we must ultimately learn that it is still our shadows that if we care to look, always show us exactly where we are. Running away from that which is undeniably a part of us only gets us caught in our own ego’s clever dead-end -path that makes us mistakenly believe that we are running towards the sun, when in the universal cycle of life and death, the sun is always surrendering, to once more reflect upon the moon in the luminescent darkness of night.

Yet, this dark and sometimes scary and seemingly unkind place, I now know holds the treasures, the shining rocks that illuminates my soul and hopefully gives you the glimmer of hope that will carry you through your own story, your own dark night which will reveal your own Greatness.

Someone once said that by recognizing the Greatness in another is but a brief moment of remembering your own Divinity. Rumi, the great poet of ecstatic spiritual love echoes this when he contemplates: “By God, when you see yourself, you will become the idol of yourself”.

To continue.