17 Mar The journey is always you
Well, it has been a serious while since my last blog post folks and life has been a funny old thing these past few months hasn’t it? It never ceases to amaze me how we are always reminded, when we have the opportunity to quiet our mind and reflect, that the journey is always about us and that the destination is always moving deeper into ourselves, moving deeper into being.
I think we sometimes forget just how long changing aspects of ourselves takes, how much consistent effort is required to change a thought behaviour, an emotional response…and then just when we feel that we might have mastered it, something comes along not to trip us up but to enable us to check whether we have actually mastered what we think we have. Invariably we haven’t quite…and invariably some aspects of mental and emotional behaviours and responses will always be there lurking in the background and we will always have to be on the ball with making sure that we support new habits rather than slip back into old, and not as useful, ones.
We tend to think that people following a spiritual path have the crap together a bit more than those people that are not. In reality, we are ALL following a spiritual path. We are spirit in being, every single one of us, so we are all following a spiritual path. And you know, no one has their crap together all of the time – not one single person. We all have hours, days, weeks when everything just seems to fall apart and we have to pick ourselves up again, we have to remind ourselves again about why we are doing what we are doing, why we are trying to change, shift, evolve or transform in some way. And the only difference between someone who is more aware of their own spirit than someone who isn’t, is that these people tend to be able to pick themselves up a bit faster each time, get back on track a little bit more quickly and also they don’t knock themselves and beat themselves up quite as badly for falling off the rails.
Fear is a habitual conditioned response and it is inbred in our society. It takes significant work to move past that initial response, that initial knee jerk reaction but it can be done with consistent effort and a desire to understand ourselves and to allow ourselves to unfold more greatly in this existence. All of us, at some point, feel and know fear deeply. We feel it as the overriding experience that influences what we think and what we do. And actually the only way to overpower fear is to feel it but then to make a different choice and to choose a different response.
At the beginning of this year, I picked a card for the year – and overarching theme for me to remember and remind myself of. It was a card from Gabby Bernstein’s The Universe Has Your Back deck and it was ‘I witness the darkness and call on the light with my Prayer – Thank you Universe for Guiding me to perceive this fear through the eyes of the Teacher of Love’. I can’t tell you how many times I have reminded myself of this this year – and you know, when we stop and when we look at a situation, a circumstance through love rather than through a conditioned response, not only does that situation change but we change. We move more into ourselves, we move more deeply into our soul and we start to express our soul more fully throughout life.
Life will always have its ups and its downs, its ebbs and its flows. Some of those ebbs will enable us to focus on our own personal and spiritual development. Some of the flows will mean that our own personal development takes more of a back seat whilst we deal with the practicality of the moment that life demands but ultimately we are all coming to realise that life is not about life – life is about how we live life, how we express ourselves through life and that is something that WE are ALWAYS in control of.
Most of you will know that I’m a medium – in actual fact I’m not, not really. What I am is someone who is passionate about Spirit, someone who knows that their path is about serving Spirit – in whichever way Spirit enable me to. That doesn’t mean that I’m a medium or that I will always be a medium. Mediumship is just one aspect of Spirit and in fact many people come into mediumship not to be mediums (although they may not realise that at the time) but to understand Spirit – the Great Spirit, the Spirit World and their own Spirit. It is a doorway through which they are guided in order that they can start that deeper journey into themselves.
It takes a great deal of courage in life to let go of something, to walk away, to acknowledge that something that we have worked so very much with has fulfilled its purpose and is closing its door to enable a different door to open. Life, and Spirit, have a magic that simply cannot be understood by our logical mind.
For a good part of last year and for some of this year, I felt very much that my path with Spirit in the aspect of mediumship was ending. It was stepping back and there was absolutely nothing I could do to change that. No matter how much I pushed or pulled or thought or rationalised or argued nothing could change the fact that things weren’t working and I knew in my heart that I had to let go of mediumship. It hurt – boy did it blooming well hurt and I grieved because it was such a part of me. And at the same time I was going through serious emotional challenges within my relationship too.
Yet it was only through surrender, it was only through acceptance and it was ultimately only through letting it go that it came back. Different but far more solid. Without the same level of attachment but with a greater degree of certainty in my soul.
All through this period, love and acceptance were the keys. Not within relationships or within life as such but within me – within my experience of life. Changing thought processes and behaviours and responses to pause and feel the love before acting, before responding. Accepting before worrying, before panicking.
It isn’t about life, it isn’t about what happens within life. It is about us, it is about moving more deeply into ourselves, into our being, our essence and allowing, enabling, trusting that unfoldment. We don’t surrender to life, we surrender to ourselves – over and over and over again. And we cannot rush that process, neither can we time it or plan it into our schedule. It happens in its own time because it has to happen within the space and timing that is right for us – not logically or rationally or practically but essence-tially (just made that up but it sounds nice doesn’t it!).
It is only emotions that truly open us and take us deeper and it is only by allowing ourselves to feel them, to have the experience of them that we are able to understand what they are asking of us. We need to be brave to dive into the maelstrom of emotions that are waiting for our little sail boat to hit their waters but you know, we are far better navigators than we believe and our compass, that inner sense of knowing, it will always take us in the right direction, to our true North. It may not be the direction that we want to go in, but it will be the direction that we need to go in.
So don’t knock yourself if you’ve slipped back. Don’t beat yourself up if you aren’t quite there. Don’t berate yourself if you can’t quite seem to master that change. Give yourself time, give yourself hope and patience and keep on working.
Fall down for a day but pick yourself up. Cry on a friend’s shoulder but then wipe your tears, put your best smile on and know that you can, that you will, that you are worth it. Know that your crap is crap today but that tomorrow you will have it more together and that every single time you carry on with looking at yourself, working on yourself, loving yourself and looking at yourself and your life through the lens of love that you are ever more moving more deeply into being.
The journey is always you; the destination is always your soul.
With love, Nicola x x