The Zen of Heels

Twice this week I stepped into cracks in the road on the way to the subway. Heels ruined. Morning spoilt. Pumps wrecked (well, sort of).

Every morning I would march towards the station, lost in my head. My mind chattering with conversations I had yesterday or last night or years ago or what I want to say and do today. The chatter disconnects me to the street, the people even the music blasting from my ear buds. So when I stepped into the crack again yesterday and ruin the skinny heel of my favourite black pumps, I became fully aware of how "not present" I was.

Being present and cultivating a deeper level of awareness is something I started when I got pregnant in 2010. And everyday I made effort in minuscule ways to increase presence in my life. A little sticker on my space bar reminds me to be conscious about my breath. Every morning I bring awareness to my whole body lying in bed for a couple of mins (and often failing because I would fall back asleep).

As I marched my way to the station this morning in my new red stilettos with the extra skinny heels, I remembered the crack in the pavement ahead. I looked at the road ahead and I slowed my steps. My attention returned to the here and now of my foot striking the ground. Attention wove its way up my foot to the rest of my body in motion. My mind cleared of chatter, I was able to see and feel instead the vibrancy of my little slice of Hong Kong gearing up for the day.

Click, click, click, all the way to my train. My heels were my Zen guru for the day.

Love Letters

treasures

old is beautiful.

Taken in an antique/junk shop in Singapore.

so simple. so pretty. so hopeful.

a random treasure found as i trawled blogspot

.

Spring of hope Winter of dispair

My favourite Dickens Quote

"It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us,
we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to heaven,
we were all going direct the other way..."
Charles Dickens - 1859

Seems incredulously apt for the present.
Certainly food for thoughts about universal truths which threads one generation to the next, connecting our humanity.

The power of language

Headlines, the news, radio talk shows are all repeating the heavy drag of a world in financial crisis, eager to taint our world in the same hallows shades of doom.

As a budding entrepreneur who gave up the security of my career last Nov at a time when the rising tide of dis-ease about security, I work hard to keep myself positive, energized in the quiet rebellion against the fear and uncertainty. I firmly believe my disempowerment will not benefiting anyone.

A few days ago I was listening to a rebroadcast podcast by Sonia Choquette and heard this.

“These are not bad times, these are challenging times.”

A simple choice of different words cast such a different light on reality.

The word bad brings with it a life long baggage of every negative circumstances and emotions we have experienced.
The word challenging calls out and appeals us to rise above circumstances with courage, dignity, creativity and invites us to defy whatever is challenging us.

5 years ago I did the Landmark Forum and from it I learnt about the transformational power of language. The Sonia quote above is a powerful demonstration of this.

Thank you Sonia. This entry is dedicated to you and your wisdom.

God's Gift

I just watched the youtube vid of Susan Boyle from the UK show Britain's Got Talent. What a performance.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY)

It was such a wonderful reminder for us all not to judging a book by its cover.
And to, never say never about realising your dream.

When we get to see people share their god given gift, I am touched and moved at the level of the heart and soul. It really feels as if the gift takes over and I/we are all humbled in its presence.

My teacher, Blair Singer said (at his Sales and Leadership Workshop), to hold back from giving the gift we have to give, we are being greedy.

My take on it is that, when we stop our gift from manifesting into this world, we stifle the flow of God force that is being channelled through us. My theory is when this energy builds over time as we pushed away, repressed, denied the expression of this gift, the energy discombobulates our equilibrium and causes malaise in the forms of illness, dissatisfaction, restlessness. When I stop my own creativity from manifesting because of a deep seated sense of unworthiness, I usually starts to feel nausuous, restless sleep, waking at odd hours and a sense of unshakable heaviness or actual weight-gain.

I can see that one of my personal spiritual mission is about liberating the human spirit from the shackles of inadequacy for them to feel the joy from their full self-expression. The how I not yet know. That's why I take it one inspired step at a time.

Stuie Wilde - Mister Radical

Stuart Wilde is a mystic, visionary, new age thinker and all round reality challenger/breaker. I love his books and CDs on Meditation, on Money or the smallest yet most magical book on Miracles.

I love fringe thinking which cast such a different light upon the agreed paradigm of reality. Stuie is one that really pushes the boundaries. He talks about time travel and portals of dimension, transcendent beings. His perspective of the world is so radical and fantastical. I love how there are lots of Stuie students who share this view of this world. I never did believe the world only consists of what our 5 senses can detect.

He just started a new blog www.stuartwildeblog.com in addition to his very interesting website www.stuartwilde.com

Always Bet On Yourself

I lost my dad to a brain tumour when I was 18. I remember being 17, visiting hospitals after school and fantasizing to become a nurse to serve the sick as I was so grateful for the wonderful nurses at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney. I remember wishing I could get married to anyone, just so I can say my father was at my wedding. I wished I did better at school so he would be more proud. I wish I could have a baby somehow, so he would get to hold my child, his grand-child. So many crazy thoughts during those hazy days of his brain surgery, chemo and gradual decline. Funny now looking back, I never did wish for him to be cured. Back then my paradigm didn’t consist of miracles.

My father’s death was in many ways new beginnings for me. His death led me to question the nature of life and death, spirit, God and purpose. It was the beginning of growing up and facing the world. It was the beginning of self-enquiry and self-discovery.

Yesterday as I was watching Brothers and Sisters, the Walker kids shared a piece of advice which the dead patriarch of the Walker family had for his kids. The advice was “Always bet on yourself”. It felt like something my dad would say to us. I believe spirit speaks to us in so many ways, in songs lyrics, through a random comment on the radio, from a cab driver. When Y and I see butterflies, we feel him close. This feels like a message for me and C as we set out this year, to follow in dad’s entrepreneurial footsteps.

Pachamama Alliance's Awakening the Dreamer and Changing the Dream Symposium

I went to the Pachamama Alliance’s "Awakening the Dreamer and Changing the Dream" Symposium last night. It inspired and moved me deeply.

This is a grass root movement where by people in any community can be trained to lead the symposium so more people are able to experience and rethink about how they can make a difference for themselves, community and the planet. I’ll try to post a short video on the symposium as soon as I work out how! I am such a luddite!

As I re-awaken to so many of my passions in art, in poetry, in writing, in art, it is no surprise that environmental issues which I had long buried is re-surfacing in a new way in my life.

I am so excited I am going to be trained to lead/share this experience with the people of HK. I can’t wait to blog about it more after my training.

I have been getting my weekly stats report and I am amazed that there are people who are popping in to visit me!
Whoever you are, thank you for listening.

Life is Energy

I spent spend last week in Singapore attending T Harv Eker’s Train The Trainer program. When I did Millionaire Mind Intensive in March, I became a Quantum Leap member, effectively signing up for 5 courses in the Peak Potentials Curriculum. As you can see I love my personal development course.

One of the most powerful messages I got from attending the program was that everything in life is energy, be it money, training or life. Big energy begets big results. In a successful training, what is created is essentially a huge vortex of energy. And by managing, nurturing and sustaining this energy, everyone’s energy expands and so they grow.

About a decade ago I discovered a book that changed my life. It is call Paradigm Wars by Mark B Woodhouse who is a professor of philosophy. In his book he introduced me to the notion of Energy Monism which stipulates that all in life is of one essential essence. I later discover that that is the same fundamental premise of Quantum Physics. It was one of those things that fascinated me and eluded me. Harv was able to demonstrate how real energy was in a room full of people. He created high energy when he wanted to and brought it down when it was required. This was created in the context of training and it was incredibly powerful to be in the energetic ‘dance’ between trainer and audience.

Since I have been home, I became highly aware of energy. Being present to certain people’s ‘energy’ and also recognizing my own reaction to it. My dog Momo has this fragile, loving and pureness to her energy. My husband’s energy has grown since the training and his presence has become more open, steady and a new lightness is present. I feel I have expanded, fuller, more centered. I feel this is all part of the evolution of reclaiming my intuitive sense.

Ocean of love

I went for a swim with R at the Victoria park pool on Sat evening and remembered how beautiful it was to swim in the Adriatic sea. Swimming in Hvar and Dubrovnik blessed me with a breakthrough… I fell in love with the ocean unexpectedly. I already love the sea, the beach being Australian. As one is surprised to fall in love again with something one already loved, much like the surprising moments when I feel the full force and magnitude of love I have for R my husband.

I have always loved the ocean, but as a frolicker rather than a swimmer, I would only venture out far enough to splash myself, never into the waters where my toes loose contact with the sand bed. This all went away in Croatia. The lichen covered pebbled seabed was meters deep and friendly fishes distracted me with their dance. Sandwiched between the blue of the sky and the aquamarine of the ocean, I was a speck in God’s world, the fish and me, we were both really just as microscopic.

Soul Knitting (15 Feb 2002)

I have been a closet poet for quite a number of years and only a handful of friends have been privy to my poems.

There was a time when words strung themselves effortlessly in my head. Ditty capturing micro moments, when a smell, a leave, a scene that flashed by my bus window imprint themselves as words, they self-organise into poems, which I unravel on to the page one word at a time.

The older I got, the better I got at my day job, the less important I made writing. I convinced myself, writing didn’t matter, it was a youthful hobby. Whatever confidence I had about writing, I chipped away myself. I stopped writing and the deeper the gnawing grew.

S0…I have been hiding, under excuses of not being good enough, not being polished, not having a voice or anything worthy to say.
In fact when I started this blog, I didn’t really want people to read it.
The moment I registered my name in full as the blog url (seized by an almost mad moment of courage) I remember the mad panic setting in. I was naked and exposed. If I wrote from the heart, then there is no hiding.

To ‘save myself’ I found more excuses to not blog.
2 weeks ago, I told a whole other group of friends to hold me accountable to blog every other day. And most of them were so surprised I had a blog.
They asked me to send the link to them.
And I kept quiet, and changed the subject.

The next day I decided to stop the silly racket in my head. I took on sending out the link and for the first time consciously created for myself that it didn’t really matter what anyone thought. It didn’t matter what I thought. All that mattered was writing. And quietly, uneventfully since that moment I chose to just be with my own words, to not judge them.

In way, this re-new commitment to just be with words, stringing them together just for the pleasure of it, reminded me of this poem I wrote over 6 years ago.

Soul Knitting
Eva Ng
15.02.02

We are,
the knitters of our soul.

Taking bare strands of life
weaving patterns with the needles of our
hands, eyes, nose.
Shaping the looping vision with our ears, heart and mouth,
entwining the fibres of everyday,
with cheerful dexterity the one day,
and morbid dread another,
winding highs into lows, lows into highs.

We patterned this youthful section with an unskilled
vigour, knitting frenzied patches of wild woolly colours.

Dropped stitches, joyful gaps filled with exhilarating delight.
Crimson glories of foetal blood flagged life beginning.

Sorrow and tears, together stitched an abyss of grey, charcoal and muted darks,
deep pains inking the patch in shadow.

Tidy rows, the disciplined threads of adult life,
captured by neat lines in formal shades.

Years, days, hours,
click, tick, click tick the needle goes.
This great mat of colours, textures and fibres
Bold and unapologetic.
Stitch switches, switch stitches,
ultimate chaos, a true tapestry.

Masterful Living

I love this little poem which I scribbled in my daily planner from somewhere.
I aspire to live in this magical equilibrium.


I draw no distinction
between my work and my play, my mind and my body,
my education and my recreation

I simply pursue my vision of excellence
through whatever I am doing,
and leave others to determine
whether I am working or playing.

To myself, I am always doing both.

Heart to home

This morning I received an email from my youngest sister YY, recounting her move back home temporarily before she leaves for Europe to take up her scholarship for a Masters in Education. She shared a humorous exchange between her and my brother C who is the youngest in the family.

Later this morning, C emailed me to call him to sort out some paper work. And he shared that he has created ‘house rules’ for YY – which I found totally hilarious as their eldest sister.

Small anecdotes, moments of comic domesticity, so common to people living under the one roof.

Today, they came to me as extraordinary gems, an opening for me to be part of their life that is made difficult with me being in HK and them in Sydney.

In reading her short email, hearing his humorous complaint, the world shrank and I was transported home.

Inner and outer space

A friend called to invite me to take a seminar for 10 weeks. It’s called the Mastery Seminar by Landmark Education. The premise of the seminar is not to learn anything new (for graduates), it’s about getting out of the way the barriers to extraordinary performance in all areas of your life..

I particularly love this description of the seminar - Mastery in living requires having nothing between you and people, nothing between you and life, and nothing between you and yourself.

As someone with an exceptional commitment to and appreciation of excellence, mastery is a virtue I find highly inspiring and deeply appealing. My head wants me to sign up immediately, but the wisdom of my heart says not now.

Over the weekend, I am able to understand my inner compass’ guidance.

I am walking into many changes right now with the two businesses I am creating with wonderful, soulful partners and transition out of my comfort zone of being a career salaried worker. For my world to be filled with the new that is coming in, I am guided to undertake an ‘emptying’ of all sorts– physical things, emotions, thoughts, that has anchored me in my world now but I will no longer be needing in my tomorrows.

So much clutter and memories for the emptying. I see so many things I hold on to because I have never trusted myself to be without them.

More so than a physical emptiness, I anticipate such pleasure to refilling my clean and spacious inner sanctum.

Becoming more of myself

Perhaps it’s the media I elect to tune into, the books I am drawn to reading, or the podcasts I am listening to, the theme of ‘healing’ is recurrent – healing on the physical, emotional, soul and even planetary level. For a brief moment, I felt irritated by the word. I found it annoying because to require healing meant that something is broken, impaired, in dysfunction. I don’t feel, broken, impaired or defunct. Why is everything telling me I am. Why does everyone need to be healed!?!

In the same swiftness the irritation was felt, it fizzled out. Perhaps I should be grateful, I don’t feel broken. In my good fortune, how self-fish of me to beleaguer what others need.

Once my mind was able to give up my position on healing, I had what one would call a ‘critical moment’, a penetrating insightful moment on my life.

In 32 years, I have never truly embraced being a woman. I envied the speed and obvious strength of boys growing up. I preferred the company of young men over young women in my teens, I gravitated towards their crass humour, the simplicity and brunt of their friendship. In university, I love the way we shared adventures, laughter and focused clarity of goals. A little emotion is already a lot of depth in these relationships.

Women friends on the other hand cried, needed stories, needed shoulders, needed confirmations of their evolving self, were soft, were clingy, were powdered divas whose emotions rode high and low like tides to phrases of the moon. I loved them, but I found it a challenge to truly embrace their waning and waxing reproaches and love affair with the world. Most times I am in awe of them, their beauty routines, their vanities, their sweetness. And I found myself a part of yet apart from true belonging in this feminine world.

I relished in not being a girly, romantic girl. I was a strong girl, a smart girl, an efficient woman, a thinker, a do-er.

Today I realized I never truly allowed myself to unfold fully as a woman, never ventured to a space of womanhood unbeknownst to the confines of past prejudices and preferences.

32 years late and tomorrow is a new day. The amazing gift of life is that each moment holds the seed to be different from the moment before.

I saw today the synchronistic unfolding of life in my future as an entrepreneur in creating businesses that are all about serving the evolving, unfolding women in my community, city and ultimately the world. And while I embark on my new adventures, I will be starting a family, stepping into the new role being a mother. In doing so, I can see myself ‘healing’ through living, those unexpressed parts of my soul as a woman.

As I learn to embrace the varying faces of woman, I will essentially re-incarnate daily to becoming more of myself.

Here’s a poem that celebrates just this revelation. And it is of course divinely guided that I came across its magical eloquence today.

Love After Love
By Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Communion

As I heard this poem being read as a prayer by Caroline Myss on her podcast Sacred Contracts, it took me back to a time when I felt totally complete, with no wanting, sitting on the shores of Hvar staring out at the infinite horizon.

This also brought brings back all those other moments when I am next to the immensity of the ocean and I always become deeply filled with a sense of peace, bliss and connection to the world. In those moments I feel the ocean once again accept me and a profound sense of returning would fill me to the core. I could never explain why this is so, only to know it is. Maybe the vastness of all those water somehow fills and reflects a vast void within which longs to hold such magnificent.

Here’s the beautiful poem that transported me to such a moment.

When I Was In The Forest
by Meister Eckhart:

When I was the stream,
when I was the forest,
when I was still the field,
when I was every hoof, foot, fin and wing,
when I was the sky itself,

no one ever asked me did I have a purpose,
no one ever wondered was there anything I might need,
for there was nothing I could not love.

It was when I left all we once were
that the agony began,
the fear and questions came,
And I wept, I wept, and tears I had never known before.

So I returned to the river, I returned to the mountains.
I asked for their hand in marriage again,
I begged --- I begged to wed every object and creature,

and when they accepted,
God was ever present in my arms.
And God did not say, Where have you been?
For then I knew my soul ---- every soul --- had always held him.

Cornered

Reflections of the day:

 

All the money in the world

cannot not coax a simple smile

if I feel cornered inside

 

 

Accepting Frustrations

I don’t know why my side bar has gone “hide-y” down at the end of my blog.
My posts are also looking messy, there doesn’t seem to be any linebreak or paragraph breaks. This is all very perplexing! And annoying.
No matter what I do, I can’t fix it. Maybe its time to try another template.

This is the latest on a mounting pile of things I am feeling frustrated and annoyed about.
Eckhart Tolle says that peace can only come in the letting go of wanting this moment to be different.
I drew an angel oracle card last night about something else I am frustrated with and the message was this:

Blessing In Disguise
“What appears to be a problem is actually part of your answered prayer.”

Seen from another angle, the universe is giving me lots of opportunity to practice acceptance which I now remember creating as a possibility as I was doing the New Earth Webminar. Sometimes ...LOL...taking responsibility for how my life is turning out is not as fun as I thought it would be.

War and Peace

A lot is going on at work and I woke up literally ‘buzzing’ from the spinning thoughts in my head. Ideas, scraps of thoughts, worries, concerns, schedules, expectations.

My head feels heavy and cramped. I am disconnected to my center, and I can’t access peace.

Taking a cue from The New Earth, I took deep breaths and brought myself back to this pinpoint of time, this moment.

This moment looks like this.

At the sink.....Water under the tap.....Water cupped in my hand.....Awash over my face.

This moment..... This one breath..... This pinpoint of attention is my life.

Waiting in my inbox, a gift.... A poem name War and Peace.

How apt. Life feeding life a needed dose of loving inspiration.

Here it is.

If you stumble across this, you too must have been calling forth for Peace.

War and Peace

Man invents war. Man discovers peace.
He invents war from without.
He discovers peace from within.
War man throws. Peace man sows.
The smile of war is the flood of human blood.
The smile of peace is the love, below, above. Peace is the whole truth that wishes to enrapture humanity.
War is the whole falsehood that wants to capture humanity.
Peace begins in the soul and ends in the heart.
War begins in the mind and ends in the body. War forgets peace. Peace forgives war.
War is the death of the life human. Peace is the birth of the Life Divine.
Our vital passions want war.
Our psychic emotions desire peace.
War is clear futility in dire spear-stupidity.
Peace is flowing infinity in glowing eternity. Man seeks war when he thinks that the world is not his.
Man invites war when he feels that he can conquer the world.
Man proclaims war when he dreams
That the world has already surrendered to him. Man seeks peace because his earthly existence desperately needs it.
Man welcomes peace because he feels
that in peace alone is his life of achievement and fulfilment.
Man spreads peace because he wants to transcend death. The animal in man wars against peace in the outer world,
in the world of conflicting ideas.
The divine in man wars against ignorance in the inner world,
in the world of mounting ideals. The animal in man wants war for the sake of war,
war to devour the snoring world.
The divine in man wants peace for the sake of peace,
peace to feed the hungry world.

By:Sri Chinmoy From: Songs of The Soul