Lately I’ve experienced this feeling that I oughtn’t to commit things to writing, and yet in so doing I feel rather restless and inspired to the creative. I stood for five minutes this day staring at my typewriter, and yet something stayed my hand and prevented me from reaching out and grabbing it, and rattling off a series of pages on its antiquated keys.
It’s an interesting thing, what happens when one becomes focused on one’s own well-being, and on the focus of love, and the absence of fear and negative emotions in the world. It’s like the whole world gets cleaner. There is less of a desire to boast about what one is doing in the world, instead celebrating everything privately and with gratitude. Regarding the world with love and compassion and happiness has the amazing result of changing one’s entire outlook.
This struck me today as I rode my bike to the servo and back, having gone to acquire bread and milk (and coming back with bread, and bread rolls, and milk), because I cycled past the local Baptist church. This Baptist Church is extremely large. It is attached to a school, and has what it calls a ‘worship centre’, a ‘youth centre’, and a ‘community centre’. Its parishioners fill the centre’s many car parks, quite probably for the duration of the entire day on Sunday.
On the sign out the front it says something about God’s love. It made me smile and laugh. The laughter was not derisive, though admittedly it does sound this way. The laughter was because of it struck me how silly it is that people have to construct a deity, and collective rules and guidelines, in order to celebrate love and compassion without being ridiculed.
Can you imagine if I offered a place where people could gather every week, where they could give thanks for the great things that have happened to them this week, where they could meditate on giving room for more abundance in their lives, and where they can share in celebrating everyone else’s abundance – but did it without the framework of a god or some sort of dogma? Someone, somewhere, would want to frame it in terms of a religious system.
There is not one thing about love, compassion, and gratitude that is religious. It’s your natural state. Fear, anxiety, and prejudice is not.
And yet, while I don’t have a belief in a god or a system of gods, I do possess a belief in the way that energy works in the universe; a belief that is being unearthed and reflected in the researches of physicists and scientists as time passes. There are belief systems that are already far in advance of some of this research: Buddhist belief systems and other ancient Asian belief systems in particular. In this way, I also believe that your apparently concrete reality is actually a flux of energy and wave forms, which in turn manifest in the visible and felt spectrum in particular ways. Your thoughts are therefore also energy, and therefore have the capacity to influence your lived world.
Buddha also said that with our thoughts we create the world. Any fan of Monkey Magic knows that.
Of late, I have made sure to pay conscious and particular attention every day – sometimes twice or ten times per day – orienting my thoughts to joy, peace, gratitude, abundance, and wellness. I wrote a series of affirmation for the distinct purpose of doing this.
It occurred to me this morning that some would consider my focused, read affirmations a form of prayer – mainly because prayer is the one thing that they have in their lives (or know about) that is similar to a long, read affirmation.
The difference is that most people who pray recite things that they have learned because they believe it’s good to do so. Affirmations are quite different: You read them if you write them down, yes. But you feel them, create the vision of them in your mind, and resonate with them. If it doesn’t resonate, it’s not going to do you much good.
It’s a curious thing that the ongoing and continued use of affirmations does create a physical reaction. Focusing on love gives you a physical feeling of joy. You can’t help but smile. Your body comes to the party with chills, or goosebumps, or other similar reactions, when you read them.
I have found a curious thing, that affirmations speak to your subconscious mind. In a short period of time my patterns of thinking have changed. I find it easier to accept other people’s points of view, knowing that there are a thousand different ways of doing things, and my way might be just one of them. I look at all sides of an issue more easily. I tell myself more often that I accept and approve of myself and I create that mantra in my mind a thousand times a day. I deal with other people’s emotions more easily, engage in conversation without trying to push a perspective or a point of view, and am generally more relaxed.
And when I’m not really doing much, my mind is on its mantra that I approve of myself and I accept abundance, where before I was dwelling a lot on issues that made me feel unappreciated, or overwhelmed, or unable, or resentful, or any other million things that are negative.
It’s really hard to be down on yourself when you’re telling yourself how much you approve of who you are, what you do, and the decisions that you make. Try it. That one habit will actually change your life.
In speaking with the subconscious mind, I have found my subconscious mind talking back to me, in my dreams. One of the most significant is that, in a previous negative relationship there are a lot of things that turned into hang-over negatives (physical ones) in my life, including chronic shoulder pain. I’m working through the emotions relating to those issues on a daily basis, and consciously letting go of all the old fears, doubts, and guilts that created the physical manifestations of pain and disorder and negativity. It took a long time to set down negative stuff, and really hardly any time at all to get rid of it. It just takes focus.
And so it was that the other day I had a dream in which I watched people tumbling in a dance class, in which I felt loved and saw representations of my husband everywhere, before being somewhere else and being offered a buffet of amazing foods by that earlier-mentioned ex, who told me that there was a message for me written on top of the cake. Curious, I went to look at the top of the cake, and on it was the number 4. When I looked over at my ex, he faded away.
It doesn’t take much knowledge of symbolism to understand that the carelessness of others will result in my profitability; the love I felt at seeing representations of my husband in my dream is a happy consideration of my true daily life in which I do feel loved by him in all areas of my life; and the 4 is the Chinese symbol for death, meaning that I’m no longer attached to the past, particularly the past involved with that person.
It’s also a matter of some interest that I have also had random instances of memories just burst into my conscious mind, memories onto which I have, for 20+ years, attached feelings of regret, remorse, or guilt. Things like nasty comments I made to friends when I was a kid! I’ve been dealing with these by allowing my full body to feel the emotion, and then forgiving myself and consciously letting go of the feeling, allowing myself to see the memory without feeling the emotion attached to it.
It is more than a coincidence that the affirmations, the daily reorientation of thought, the dreams, and the sudden bursts of ancient and childhood memories, are occurring and allowing me to deal with things. While I feel at peace I am in the best position to go through this kind of therapy.
And therapy is really what it is. It’s an intensely personal type of therapy, guided by myself and my subconscious mind, helped by a conscious reorientation of my thoughts, and gaining the ability to deal with negative emotions in a mature way. If you feel them, deal with them, and let them go, then the attachment is no longer a problem.
The biggest problem by far has been in letting myself do things. Letting myself feel at peace, and feel happiness in everything I do. Letting myself just exist without the roundabout of worries that I have had whirring in my head for the majority of my life. Letting myself feel joy and ability to accept the huge amount of good things going on in my life all at once. Letting myself let go of the bad shit.
It’s not necessary to exist in a whir of dogshit, and in fact, life is a lot better without it. Relationships are better, all situations are better, and learning from every experience is easier. Not to mention, life is more abundant when you accept abundance instead of feeling like you want it but deep down that you can’t accept it or don’t deserve it.
Of course you do accept it; that guilt and feeling undeserving comes from something else, and it’s that something else that you have to deal with.
This is all very spiritual, I realise. If you resist this stuff, I don’t care: Your blueprint is different to mine and you have another view. There are a million ways to live life, and a million ways to think; this is just one of them.
Man is ultimately a spiritual animal, and his purpose in life is to learn whatever his lesson is. I make no apologies for my spiritual perspective of life; the word spiritual itself causes people’s shackles to rise into sharp and deadly spikes, but that’s most often because of a fear of looking at something that nobody can say for sure exists. Or because of an experience with a dogma that was negative.
Your own spirituality is your own business, and how you deal with it is entirely up to you. The problem is, nobody can tell you how to do that, nobody can give you guidelines on dealing with it, or give you any methodology. You have to find that on your own.
For some people, it’s easier just to deny spiritual life altogether than it is to work it out on their own. And that’s ok, too.
So, what does this all have to do with my writing and creative ability? Not much, really, except that perhaps my mind is so taken up with these notions that getting through them to get the words down takes more effort than when one is spilling over with feelings of inadequacy.
There’s probably a thesis in that.
This blog was inspired by a conversation with a mate of mine, @MyBrainItHurts.
