A CONSCIOUS LIFE

WHAT IS A CONSCIOUS LIFE?
Since you are reading this it’s likely you are intentionally living a conscious life. But what does that mean and does it mean the same thing to each of us? I’ve been struck recently how, even among “like-minded people”, there are so many different ways of looking at things.

Diversity, uniqueness and individuality are what make a culture rich; finding points of connection, recognition and shared understanding give a feeling of belonging to something bigger than “me”; taking the time to acknowledge and embrace our differences is the compost which enables growth.

We may experience instant recognition when we meet someone new or have beautiful feelings of belonging when we join a new group, only to become disillusioned when we discover differences. Many of us have such a longing to find others who see like us, think like us, talk like us. Living a conscious life can feel quite lonely at times because it’s about being true to our inner being and that can involve breaking allegiances with any form of outer authority or restrictive rules and expectations. At times on the journey to authenticity we may need to separate from family, partners, friends and colleagues, simply to find out who we are as “myself alone”. To live a conscious life is to become a discoverer, an adventurer, an inventor, a pioneer. It means stepping out of the familiarity of consensus reality and into a present in which we’re guided only by the compass of our inner truth. It means becoming separated from the mainstream and finding ourselves in uncharted waters; exchanging certainty for navigation and invention.

Inquiry is a process of discovery
I’ve become more and more interested in the process of inquiry over the last few years. Inquiry is a wonderful tool for exploring. It allows and welcomes differences and starts from an attitude of curiosity. When I start from a place where I don’t know, there is room for expansion. I’m not trying to be right or prove a point but I’m wanting to discover something new. Asking questions requires openness and a willingness to listen and discover the answers. When we ask questions life becomes a process of revelation as the answers pop up everywhere and in anyone who crosses our path. We may start to feel there is an intelligence “out there” eager to answer and co-operate with us. Or is the intelligence “in here” and with intention we programme ourselves to notice and magnetise the information we need to take our next steps? Maybe both are true and revelation happens at the meeting place between inner and outer?

I’ve just finished reading “Broken Open” by Elizabeth Lesser, co-founder of the Omega Institute, and she says:
“ Everywhere we look we find accurate information and useful statistics about our most personal behavior. In fact there exists a brilliant feedback system that is working at all times, offering free information about how to – and how not to – function in our world. For every action we take reality leaves little messages about its wisdom or folly.

Chogyam Trungpa describes the message system like this: If you take steps to accomplish something that action will have a result – either failure or success... Trust is knowing that there will be a message. When you trust in those messages, the reflections of the phenomenal world, the world begins to seem like a bank, or reservoir , of richness. You feel that you are living in a rich world, one that never runs out of messages. Those messages are regarded neither as punishment nor as congratulations. You trust not in success, but in reality.”

Led by a bigger vision
To live a conscious life means to be led by a bigger vision for humanity; a healthier, whole, more compassionate and humane uniting vision for the way we can live together on Planet Earth. It means caring enough to be informed, being courageous enough to stay open to the complex mixed emotions which living at this time engenders, and being committed enough to take action for positive change.
When I was living in New Zealand I was fascinated by the early migrations, when people travelled great distances in their canoes, guided by the stars and carried by the tidal currents, until they came upon new lands. Perhaps that is what is happening now in this transitional time for humanity as we pioneers set out to invent a Whole New World?

For me, living a conscious life means being challenged by my human limitations as I fall short every day of my aspirations and fail to fully embody my values, then pick myself up, reset the intention and try again. It’s not about being perfect but learning to drop the judgements and turn on the loving kindness for self and others as we experiment and fumble and at times sparkle with magnificence.

It means giving priority to my state of conscious being, my state of presence, even when, particularly when, there is so much to do.

For me, it means knowing that whatever my circumstances I am one of the most privileged people in the world. I am free to choose. I am free to express myself. I am free to create the future.

Living consciously doesn’t make life easier; in some ways life becomes simpler, in others more complex. There are so many choices to be made, so many factors to consider - even in the simple act of choosing what to eat. To become more conscious is to become more responsible; to drop illusions is to see more clearly; to know is to move beyond the idea that there are individual solutions or places to escape, and to be obliged to act.

There are millions of us in the world awakening to this freedom and responsibility of becoming more conscious, and everywhere I go I meet people who are reaching out to connect with others who feel the same way. We are all looking for and creating our communities and joining our little lights into One Big Light that will circle the world and send out its healing empowering, visionary radiance.

The A CONSCIOUS LIFE PROGRAMME is starting NOW with an online community. For those who want to go deeper, Soul Cells will form in the UK at the end of January, in the US in February and in NZ in March. Based around the themes of the Consciousness Series e-books, we will explore:
Being Peace-in-Action
Living in Harmony with Nature
Exploring the New Consciousness and bringing it down to Earth
Creative Empowerment
A Soulful Life
Conscious Relationship as a Path to Wholeness

The series will:
Support you to connect with your own meaning, purpose, passion and inspired action as you face the challenges of living in our changing world.
Encourage you to commit to regular consciousness practices of your choice to maintain yourself in peaceful and creative states.
See www.awholenewworld.net/ebooksbuy.htm and www.awholenewworld.net/learning.htm

I am working with convenors in England to set up local groups and there are places available in a Women’s Soul Cell, to meet once a month on a teleconference call with me, Rose. If you are interested in convening a local group, joining the Women’s Soul Cell or receiving more information about UK, US or NZ programme please contact me NOW: rose@awholenewworld.net

TRANSFORMATION

polar bear on an ice floe
no tracks, no direction home
standing on the edge
certainty melting away

you can stand and wait
for reality to melt
or dive in
to the ocean of being
and swim
until you die

die to who you thought you were
die to limitation and separation
die to doubt and fear

swim into the One Being
melt into the One Love
surrender to the ocean
NOW
∞
I am the new born, without a shall

so soft and sensitive I can hardly bear to breathe.

I do not want to place a footprint on the virgin snow

nor flow into form to become fixed, held in, held down

I am the as yet to be, the coming solution

I am the next word you’ll hear, the next breath you’ll take

I am pointing to the future.

Yet I am soft, formless, so subtle, I am easily missed

you may mistake me for sadness, for loss, even for death

I seem like an absence

everything all emptied out, gone

I am a clear space for the breath of life

before words and thought

soft as a rose petal

formless as breath

Pure Love



I wrote this poem on New Year’s morning and it marks the end of three months in which I’ve been feeling the death of the old in me. The poem was inspired by a wonderful community brought together by Adela Rubio, 30 Days of Conscious Energy Shifts. http://selfcaremastery.com

THE CREATIVE PROCESS: CHAOS

How was your 2009? For most people I know it was a year in which there was a lot going on. For me it was a year of dedicated hard work, slow ox-like gains, opportunities disguised as sudden losses, and oases of soulful creative joy.

I started writing this a few days before the end of a six month visit to England, my birth country. Sometimes during those six months I lost touch with the human being I had become and regressed to human doingness. This was my own personal form of chaos and a reflection of the collective chaos and driven-ness I see all around me. As our planetary crisis becomes more evident I see several trends of behavior: some go deeper into denial and run themselves ragged trying to avoid their feelings, some work harder and harder trying to maintain the status quo and keep their lives functioning, and some work harder and harder in an attempt to avert disaster and create something new. I’m sure there are other options but whatever choice we make the result is stress. The Earth herself is stressed and we are all connected with the energy of the Earth, so to be anything other than stressed right now would be superhuman or out of touch. The best we can do is learn to manage stress and not take it too personally.

Back in the late ‘80’s and early 90’s when I was practicing as a Gestalt therapist and leading lots of workshops and trainings, I discovered Gabrielle Roth’s Five Rhythms, a dance practice which explores the rhythms of the creative process or the rhythms of life: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness. A 30 minute dance work-out moving through the rhythms gets the creative flow going and brings awareness into any resistances and stuck energy.

I used to love the point of abandonment and ecstasy when the rhythm of the dance raced ahead of the mind and the life force danced me. I became the dance rather than doing the dance. The root of ecstasy is ex-stasis, to be beside oneself, to get out of yourself, or over yourself. This is chaos. In chaos we let go of the fragments we’re holding together and trust that when they settle they will fall in an orderly way, maybe even in a higher order. Chaos destroys in order to remake and there is always an opportunity to remake consciously in a new way once the dust has settled.

As I was driving in my hired car from middle England to Northern England I listened to a cd by Caroline Myss, called Spiritual Madness (published by Sounds True). She talks of chaos as the bringer of change and how necessary it is to live with chaos and not resist it. Oftentimes when we find our spiritual path we hope our spiritual practice will help us to control life. Maybe, if I meditate every day I will become calmer, sweeter, more loving; that’s what happens to spiritual people isn’t it? Doesn’t spirituality make us nicer?

The way of the mystics is not to seek to control life but to allow oneself to be broken open by it. It is the way of surrender. We have to be prepared to let go and surrender to the bigger energy that is pulsing and dancing us: the energy of chaos.
The value of chaos is that it cannot be controlled; it is a bigger energy than us. When we try to resist or fight it, chaos bends and ultimately breaks us. It is the energy of Kali, of Shiva, destroying in order to rebuild. Chaos carries the opportunity within the crisis; the gift of transformation.

Nature is an energy bigger than us. Scientists, industrialists, capitalists and politicians have done their best to dominate and control nature. I hope they never succeed. I value wildness and being part of a world in which I know there are forces outside my control. I don’t want to live in a controlled and sanitized world in which every apple is the same size, every fish has been farmed by humans and even the trees are cloned.

I was listening to Caroline Myss speaking about spiritual madness as I was driving up to Cockermouth, the small town on the edge of the Lake District, which was recently badly flooded when rain fell in a deluge and the Rivers Cocker and Derwent burst their banks and poured through the streets, blasting through doors and windows, destroying homes and livelihoods, devastating farmland; altogether a catastrophe. Where’s the opportunity here?

There is an opportunity in loss. We humans are comfort loving creatures. We define ourselves by our comforts: our things and we use our comforts to separate ourselves from others and mark out our own little private space. We all need comfort at times; life can be tough and demanding. Yet comfort can be the compensation we take in exchange for giving up our freedom. We identify with our comforts and become bound by them.

When life rips away who and what we love and comfort ourselves with, there is an opening; what Eckhart Tolle calls a portal. Whether the door is ripped off its hinges or gently and silently swings open, we have the chance to walk through into a bigger space, a more expansive and inclusive identity. Whether we lose a loved one, a job, a fortune or a cherished belief or illusion, we are rendered vulnerable, and in our vulnerability we are more open for change. I saw this openness and vulnerability in my father after my mother’s death, in my best friend Woods when he was preparing for major heart surgery earlier this year, in my community in Nelson NZ when we received the news of 9:11. There is an opening, a portal, an opportunity for transformation but the door always closes again and, if we don’t choose the transformation, habit and comfort move back in, the old order is restored and life goes on “as normal.” We have to be ready and willing to walk through the door without any thoughts, plans or expectations but with a willingness to invent and discover in the now.

In David Attenborough’s stunningly beautiful “Life” series, (published on DVD by BBC Earth)there is a scene of thousands of crabs scuttling across the seabed, shedding their shells. Having outgrown their shell they have no choice but to risk for a while being soft and vulnerable to predators, until they grow a new one. We humans are the same aren’t we?. We build shells around us to protect ourselves from the chaos of life. Some of these shells are habits like smoking cigarettes, drinking wine, watching tv, playing computer games, shopping, over working, whatever keeps other people at bay. We try to make our homes havens of order; we make rules or live alone, whatever it takes to escape from the chaos of life. But if we are lucky the flood of life finds us in the end and the world spins, like the world of the dancing dervish, and we are left disoriented and pointed in a new direction.

This is chaos

The purpose of the spiritual path is not to avoid chaos but to allow ourselves to be moulded by the movement of this bigger-than-us river of life. The flood strips away outworn illusions, carries away chunks of ego, dissolves who we thought we were and where we thought we were going. It stops us in our tracks and suspends us, like the Hanged Man or Inanna hung on her peg, we are forced to question anew and more deeply: Who am I? What is the most important thing for me to do here and now? What are my priorities? What is trying to emerge here? How can I best serve this emergency?

And when the river of chaos flows through a community what happens to those who are dispossessed? Who is responsible for them? Who takes them in? Who turns a blind eye and clings more tightly to order? Where are the boundaries of our communities? Are those people and animals now starving in Africa and Bangladesh and Peru and Russia and Alaska as a result of climate change, part of our community? Are we responsible for them and if so, how?

Collectively we are in the chaos of global crisis now. It is a portal to a larger identity, to recognizing the essential interconnectedness of life and becoming One Global Family. Chaos is the Great Leveler. Life is bigger than us, it breaks us open, teaches us to surrender and how to serve and co-create.

After the chaos, comes the sweetness of the lyrical and the profound simplicity of stillness. I hope your Holy days are bringing you some of these fruits.