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