Ask for what you need

I was clearing out my email folders when I came across this. It was the answer to a question asked in one of Julie Jordan Scott's online coaching classes in 2004.

"What I love about myself is my growing ability to ask for what I need. This was not always the case. I was always the helper and could never find the words to ask for help myself. I still hesitate sometimes and the words get stuck in my heart, but more and more often now, I just blurt them out, sometimes not very gracefully but increasingly clearly.
When you really love yourself, then you know how to ask and you know how to receive. That is something I needed and I love how that has changed my life. "

Learning to love and care for myself as much as I love and care for others was a long and sometimes challenging lesson for me. Now as a therapist, coach and Personal Growth Facilitator, it is a large part of my daily work to be a catalyst for this transformation in others.

One of the areas I love working in is the courses we run for carers under the auspices of the Princess Royal's Trust for Carers. We offer EFT, Be Your Own Life Coach and a Life Enhancement Course which is about raising self-awareness and self-esteem.

I see the same struggle in those carers as I found in myself. As we work together I can't begin to describe how good it feels when there is the momentary glimmer of liberation from duty and a glimpse of what it is to love and be your own carer. It is at moments like this that I count myself blessed to do this work.

My body's voice

When I enter the space between words,
Consciousness melts into the sea of becoming.
My voice enters those silent oceans
Sinks into its own primal life
Stripped bare of the overlay of intellect
Stripped down to the bones of who I am.

My body’s voice is the silence,
The absence of thought,
The awareness of energetic interplay
Igniting the cells of my being.

My body’s voice comes to life
When I am fully present
Flowing in motion,
In dance, stretching, spinning.
Digging deep in the fertile soil,
Sweat trickling down my face,
Salt and water flowing,
The sea of life itself.

On the 1st March, I was sitting quietly, chilling out, to one of my favourite television programmes when I suddenly felt I had to write. I had not a clue what I was going to write, just such a strong energy sweeping through me that would not go away. This has never happened before but here is what came. I have since spoken to a few friends who do the kind of energy work I do (Reiki and EFT) and they have shared similar feelings over the last few weeks.

Now just to be clear about this, I am not in to chanelling and have a strong healthy scepticism about things that go bump in the night. I do meditate daily and have a powerful sense of energy and its shifts. I think I am a very grounded person but I do acknowledge that I also have a certain streak of mysticism which bubbles to the surface every so often. Oh, what the heck, read and judge for yourself.

I am a receiver, resonating to the vibrations of something both within and beyond me.

It is a though I am tuning in to the distant strains of a powerful energy, as though I am hearing with the deep cellular structure of my body, elements of a vast cosmic orchestration, the individual notes of a powerful song of creation.

Sweeping waves of deep melancholy hit me like a long drawn out note on a violin reaching straight into the resonance of the heart centre. I want to cry. I want to mourn and scream and surrender to such sorrow. All in that note that comes from I know not where.Words are so difficult to form in a way that can even begin to convey this experience.

What comes to mind is the sound of a solitary whale crying in the deep ocean for its distant lost family, a soul filled with the longing to be born once more into the companionship of life.

It is a calling out and a calling together, a call that is redolent with loss and longing and yet still calls that which is separate home to the unity of one.

Soul deep I sense wave after wave of energetic longing - separate notes seeking their chords- chords seeking their companions -elemental - transcending - issuing forth from the source of all creation.

Sadness, deep dark mourning , yearning, calling out from the chasm of separateness, from the lonely voids outwith space and time, to be once more united.

Lost notes of a celestial melody seeking to sing their magic, the sounds of creation, the song of pure being.

The Power of Simple Pleasures

In a world where there is so much striving and fretting to possess the material, I wonder how it would be if each of us were to take a little time every day to glance around and appreciate the simple pleasures. What difference might it make to observe and absorb the quiet beauty that is all around us if we care to open ourselves to its presence.

I am blessed with a garden. Now I could look at it as a curse. It is a very large garden. It is mostly set on a steep slope which makes grass cutting a difficult and demanding job. It is extraordinarily fertile which makes it a paradise for every chance weed seedling in the West of Scotland. It is also a very rich source of my daily simple pleasures.

Do not fall into the trap of thinking that simple things do not have the potential for massive impact on your life and wellbeing. Have you observed the transformative effect of a day of sunshine after a long period of dismal clouds? People smile. They even say hello instead of tucking their head down so their eyes do not meet yours or even scowling in unconscious challenge to any positive vibration which might accidentally reach them in their self-imposed misery. The sun works its magic and even the sourest of dispositions is sweetened.

Right now as I type this, I can hear the birds singing in my garden. Now logically I know that they might be issuing territorial warnings to other birds but I chose to simply enjoy the beauty and think of them as calling out their pleasure at this little world, this green and tranquil place. I know that they have a whole stream to drink from at the bottom of our garden but chose to think that they come to drink from my bird bath because they like my company.

There is a huge black raven who visits in the evening and I watch him from my patio window, He usually brings large chunks of bread with him, collected from some generous soul. He had learned to dunk the bread in my bath until it disintegrates and becomes easy to eat. I am a simple soul and I cannot tell you how much amusement it affords me to watch him. I call him my raven but my husband says that he probably looks on us as his humans. I have no right of possession but he is a gentle companion, a simple pleasure to be treasured.

Another simple pleasure for me is the sight of a snowdrop pushing its way up through the frozen winter earth. It is such a small, delicate flower and yet it is the first to tell us that the long dark nights are beginning to come to an end. In that powerful little flower is the symbol of the reawakening of the world, of redemption after the dark night of the soul, of the light that always follows the deepest darkness. Simple, indeed.

So look around you today and consciously chose to become aware of such simple pleasures. In their simplicity lies a power that will transform you life.

It is almost three years since my friend of 30 years died very suddenly after the rapid onset of leukaemia. Her death hit me harder than I could ever have anticipated. I was thinking about her this morning after spotting her name on my friends' email folder. I have not been able to bring myself to delete our correspondence which includes her last message to me when she clearly had a presentiment of her death. In the manner in which coincidence works, later as I worked to delete some sent emails in one of my organisational burst of energy, I came across the following which was sent to another friend in April of 2006.

Funny old world and strangely wonderful the workings of the human heart. I had just finished writing a memorial for Deborah which was really quite hopeful and positive in my own uniquely Maria way. Then I started to write a poem for a class I am in and wham, there I was blind sided yet again, wallop, smack across the face. Grief is a bit like a worm wriggling its way to the surface. You are never sure when it will appear, if it it still there at all and where it might pop up.

Funny old world, indeed.

Has it been a year?

Time seems so sluggish

quagmired in deep sludge,

emotional debris of a life lost and mourned.

Strange thoughts come in unguarded moments.

Are our lives recycled as some great cosmic compost

Cast upon the earth again?

It really hurt.

You made your exit

I missed my chance to say goodbye

but truly we already had.

Words are superfluous

when you inhabit one another's heads

think the same thoughts

live the same fears.

I remember you at 18

crying in my arms

because you felt life slipping away,

afraid already.

Damn, it still hurts,

tight feeling in my chest,

across my heart,

as tears fight to escape my eyes.
I feel a scream building up inside

ready to explode

out into a world stripped bare of you.