Monthly Archives: November 2013

The Gift!

It takes a long while to gradually know yourself. You think you do…at 20 or 40 or even 60 years of age, but in truth you only learn that it is an ongoing process. You ‘learn’ how you went through this or that event and realise you have done it right or wrong, so you change your approach by the wisdom you have gained by that experience. And this brings about an understanding that you use in your day to day life. It gives you a confidence in your ability to go through or handle different circumstances. Some things you do well, others could do with a touch up here or there, so that you are happy with who you are.

On a practical, physical level it is one of those things that if you are interested in something you research it, look into it to see if it’s a possibility for you and then start to practise whatever your interest might be, which would, like life, have it’s up’s and down’s. If it is any holistic, spiritual interest, you would approach it the same way. Like anything that you do, it comes with a feeling of good, bad, indifference or even intense, which assist’s you on your journey.

So where does a ‘Gift’ come into the scale of life. Everyone has a ‘Gift’ in one form or another and it can be expressed in so many ways. That ‘thing’ within that comes from who knows where. Not studied, looked for or even understood in it’s early carnation. Beautiful in it’s ‘touch’ for it leaves such a lovely and peaceful presence after it’s departure. And by that, it is sometimes sporadic in it’s nature, only being present under certain conditions. Some are quite powerful, others much more gentle, but more powerful because of that. And the fact that it is given from such a ‘unconditional’ place within begs the question…’If I didn’t ask for it, where did it come from?’.

In hindsight, and only when we are ready within ourselves, do we realise it has only been in those moments when we are ‘there’ in that space or feeling within, that it makes itself known. Becomes an extension of who we are and what we believe within ourselves. It is a giving from a place within that has such purity that we connect so strongly to it. It is our love that we portray out into the world from that connection that we bridge to that duality within. In that beautiful, unconditional space within, duality is no more. We are one. And from that place we can move mountains, build empires, but most of all, we love from such a powerful place that the simple act of a touch or even a smile can move us to tears or allow our hearts to create beauty beyond description.

The ‘Gift’ within is a contact to that heart inside us all. Usually silenced by the fears of this world but slowly realised as we understand that this worlds truth is not a place of happiness. Not a place where smiles are freely given. Not a place where our hearts do not need the walls of protection so that we can give freely. But it is that fearless place that we need to discover so that an opening can be made. An opening of that defence to see how we are dealing with what the world throws at us to test this beauty within. And when we finally say ‘enough’ and no longer wish to be the slaves to these chains of fear, then and only then, we will step into that truth and begin to give from a place that is free and can truly be called love. For in doing so, we are loving ourselves.

And in that freedom, that connection within, we realise that we now ‘know’ that truth. We have gone past what held us in captivity, and now give from a place that is an understanding of what went before. We are free, open and giving with the ‘Gift’ of love that resides within. It is an expression of our individuality for the beauty that we are creating within, to show the perfection that is you.

Remember, at any given moment, you are perfect for exactly who you are. You are on a path of creating that beautiful creature within who’s awareness is becoming stronger. And enabling that ‘Gift’ to be a beacon of what resides inside to show the world that you have reached that place, and now give in all it’s beauty. You are that beauty. Embrace it, and let it be a sign to others so that they too, can be a ‘Gift’ to this world.

Love, light and blessings to all.

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A ‘Shift’ from an Out of Body Experience!

After my previous post (Truth from an unexpected place!), with regard to a gentleman who had an Out of Body Experience (O.B.E.), I had a conversation with a friend (yes, Tammy), who suggested I should put MY experience into a post so that others may gain from the experience. Now my experience was quite different. Yes, it was an O.B.E. but not what you would call ‘in the classic sense’ of one where you are usually floating above your body and looking down on it and your surroundings. Mind you, others may have experienced what I did, I just haven’t come across one yet and have no idea what to call it. Let’s just say it was a ‘Shift’ for want of a better description.

It was in my early days of ‘spirituality’ and trying to find me. I was doing the meditations and had begun my Massage Therapy Course so I was just touching base with what I wanted to become, and reading books from all over the place to learn and explore other experience’s so that I may understand what it all meant. I suppose spirit knew I was ready for something that, even to this day, still gives me such a feeling of awe and majesty in just what is ‘there’ for us to be a part of.

A young lady (I’ll call her Sue), had joined the meditation group and after getting to know her over a few weeks we would spend some time going for walks and speaking about our journeys and what we had got from the meditations and just swapped information that we had learned from them. In the short time that I had known her she seemed a lovely young lady, knew her mind and the direction she wanted out of life. She also had what appeared to be a ‘depression’ that she was dealing with because of a breakdown in her relationship and was on some medication to help her through this time.

Now, over the course of those few weeks I did note that occasionally Sue would become quite angry and unhappy with the circumstances that she found herself in, and I would talk with her to help her understand and deal with her emotions and try to resolve how she was feeling. By the end of those weeks I saw that she was becoming quite agitated, and under the circumstances I thought I understood her emotional journey.

It was then that a friend told me that they thought that she had a Bipolar disorder, and she had gone off her medication. Well,  the only thing I knew about it was that it was a condition where your moods would alternate between being agitated and or elevated and that it wasn’t a very nice thing to have and it was a difficult thing to deal with at the best of times. And as time had gone past I was witnessing a deterioration within herself and how she coped with her day to day life and interacted with the people around her.

One afternoon we were having a discussion on the balcony of the place I was living in and Sue began a discourse on what she thought was the real problems that affected the world and her proposals to repair and heal the unfairness that was rife in the running of it. As the afternoon went on she started to really escalate and become angrier and angrier, and speaking more in terms that were becoming quite unrealistic, finally reaching a tearful stage into what I was now beginning to realise was a manic episode that is associated with this condition. I realised then how so unfair this condition was, the obvious pressure this had applied to her marriage and the current circumstances that she now found herself in. And all the while not being able to control it except for the medication that she had now stopped taking. My heart could feel her totally (and this ‘event’ showed me just how empathic I had become). I could feel her fear, her sorrow, her pain and the utter hopelessness she felt of the situation, and my whole being went out to her and just ‘gave from the heart’ all in an instant. It was an incredible feeling, an outpouring of pure love.

And then suddenly everything changed. And I mean everything. I was not sitting on my lounge looking out onto the balcony where she was sitting. I could not actually feel my ‘physicality’ on the lounge or in regard to anything around me. But the overriding thing about ‘me’ was that I now ‘knew’ everything. I did not have to ask, it was ‘just’ there, everything, all. Everything ‘was’ me. And there was ‘no time’. It did not exist. Time did not belong where I ‘was’. Everything was at my behest. But I did not need to even ‘want’ anything. There was no need or requirement or thought that I required anything. It was a total perfection as it was. It was the most all encompassing and total feeling of ‘I am’. I can barely describe it to give it any justice. In this place I was a total of everything that ever was, will be, all at once. I could see all around me but there was no need to ‘look’ at anything because I already knew it. But even so, all that I could ‘see’ was an olive green color. I never questioned it at the time because there was no need, but I think in hindsight that it was because of what I had become, that was the only way I could ‘view’ anything was because I was ‘seeing’ things through my senses, not my actual eyes.

My awareness had been raised to such an incredible level. I, with my brain and thought patterns, can barely grasp it now. It was the most all encompassing totality of everything. But this much I do know. I was given the most barest touch of what WAS actually there. I knew I didn’t have the ‘senses’ to understand the depth and vista of what actually was there. My mind would not have been able to absorb what incredible information was around me and I would have gone over the edge. I was being shown something so magnificent so that I could give from a place of understanding in what I now knew. It was the beginning of my connection within of my ‘knowing’ and bringing that understanding into my healing for myself and others. It was also a very important part of my truth, so that in feeling that I could give from that place.

And then I came back to sitting on the lounge, facing out to the balcony. Only this time Sue was walking back through the doorway saying that she was going home. I had no idea how long I was there. There was no way of understanding if it was 1 second, 100 or even an hour. It felt like it was but an instant, but it didn’t matter. But the one thing that I did know was I was as high as a kite. I was floating and feeling so light that whatever I touched was not registering properly. My perception of everything around me was totally out of synch. I could barely move to start with as it felt like my first time in a body. I was all over the place and didn’t dare try to get up or walk. I felt that I maybe I had projected myself or astral travelled for the first time and because I hadn’t done this before, it was taking a bit to get used to, to settle back into my body.

I was so relaxed and in such a state of peace that I deliberately let myself go back into what I had just felt and slowly went back over all that had happened. Absorbed this incredibly wonderful place so that I could savour it forever. Finally my awareness was bringing me back and I was balancing back into my body, so I slowly got up and ‘tried’ to walk and all those other things that a normal body takes for granted. It took quite some time (hours), to just walk properly. It felt like I’d been in traction for months and was taking my first steps. It wasn’t until then that I even registered that Sue had actually left.

After a good nights sleep (and believe me I crashed), I slowly got up, and yes, I was still quite out of sorts. My actions were quite slow and deliberate and I also found my state of mind was still in that ‘high’ of the day before. This went on for the next two weeks. The body slowly got back to working at nearly my normal pace, but the mind wasn’t going there. I realised I needed to ground myself or I couldn’t function properly.

I went to a friend who is a Reiki Master and told her the story and asked if she could bring me back and ground me so that I could bring what I had learned down into the ‘now’. It worked quite well and I could function much better after it, but I did realise that regardless of what I did, it had changed me forever, and I needed to begin my journey of what changes the ‘event’ had now created within me.

I now understand and realise that this ‘event’ was a forerunner to my path of spiritual healing and the understanding of bringing the ‘love within’ back into my day to day life. The healing of the heart within is just as much a spiritual as well as a physical healing of us in this world that we live in. It has it’s trials and tribulations so that we may understand our journey, but it is in the end, where many do not understand, that it is in loving ourselves that we are able to heal and finally create that beautiful place within, that unconditional love that no longer fears this world, and then begins to give from that place within.

With Love, Light and Blessings,

Mark

Truth from an unexpected place!

I did it again. Pre-empting a night of ho-hum with my 83 year old mum out celebrating an early Christmas dinner with all her tennis chums, I assumed a night of conversation that would consist of the latest thrashing such and such gave to someone else, and how they got them in the final set would be the highlight of the night. Little did I know that the foreign gentleman across the table from me was going to fire a rocket across my bow and make me sit up and really take note of a truth from an unexpected quarter.

A general polite conversation had begun about the use of statin’s as a cholesterol lowering drug and the uproar that had hit Australian television a couple of weeks ago after a very respectable scientific show called Catalyst (Part 1: Heart of the matter, Dietary Villian’s, Part 2: Heart of the matter, Cholesterol Drug War), had done some serious research to show that the cholesterol came after heart disease, not before it. And the research that had determined that cholesterol was the culprit, was seriously flawed. As you could imagine that caused a sensation that is still reverberating around the country now. (By the way, I am not suggesting throwing your statin’s out the door, speak with your Doctor first, then do what I did and flushed the con job that they are down the toilet).

Anyway, this, believe it or not, wasn’t what threw me. The gentleman with the smile and twinkle in his eye quietly let the hubbub die down and he proceeded to tell us of his heart condition that he was going through at that moment. They had inserted a stent to try to repair the vein to the heart and reduce the strain on the heart wall muscle that, he had been told, the statin’s appear to have weakened. That went well, but his heart condition still left him quite weak. They also said that in his weakened condition they would not be able to operate again because he would not survive it. And he was still smiling.

A lady next to me said it must have been a terrible ordeal, to which he thought about for a moment and then said ‘Yes, it was. But while I was hovering above the surgeon watching him operate on me, it really didn’t matter, I couldn’t feel anything’. You could have dropped a pin, in the middle of a restaurant seating 150 people, and heard it roll over the floor. We all sat there stunned, myself included, by this admission from someone from the old school who usually kept those things to themselves. He went on to say it was peaceful and he could see exactly what they were wearing, what they were saying to each other and what everything looked like in the room. Even how they were doing the operation on him.

To say the least, he had all our attention. And finally spirit gave me a nudge (I was still sitting there in a daze), and gently got me to ask him, ‘after being a part of that, how do you feel towards life now?’. To which he replied, ‘everything has changed, things that were important, no longer are. Other things that didn’t seem to matter, now do. Life has changed’. (And where have I heard that before!). And as we all sat there nodding our heads and seeing the truth in his words, we all realised our lives were very artificial. Very keep up with the Jones’s. And full of stress for all the wrong reasons.

As I write this I even think that where I am coming from can still use a lot more changes. Changes in what I feel is important to me, and those things that I really don’t need. My attitude to a lot of things can still do with a lot of tweaking for the simple reason I still allow many things to come into them that in reality have no meaning. Yes, I need to learn those things but more to the point is in having the attitude of giving from a place that has meaning and truth. And I realise that I still have things that need to be expressed and let go to heal so that I can actually live the truth that I am, not the version that is giving, but with a layer of fear wrapped around my heart for protection so that my attitude is restricted by this layer getting in the way of everything.

So at the end of the evening, we could see that this gentleman was becoming quite tired, and even I was beginning to feel he was actually in quite a bit of pain, so with a little nod of his head to his wife they bid their good nights to one and all and made their way home.

I went out with the expectation of a dull evening, and spirit being spirit decided to show me what life was really all about. In the most unexpected place, from the most ordinary circumstances, life is alive and well. And from a place that seemed lifeless and coming to an end. He had a smile and a twinkle in his eye, and I know why. I now even feel that within myself because he was able to express his truth to us all. Life is what we make it. So what do you really want out of life? What really is important? This life is really but a brief sojourn, and in reality it is to those we love, ourselves included, that we should give from a place of truth and feel from our heart within. Too soon time has come and gone before we realise that maybe we should have done this or that. Now is the only time…forgive (for you may not be able to later), let go (for pain is the only thing you hold), hug (for it cares from within), say ‘I love you’ (for most of all, it means everything). Namaste