Saturday, August 28, 2010

A STROKE OF LOVE


In this video from Ted Talks, Neural Anatomist Jill Bolte-Taylor passionately,
vividly and lovingly describes the path which led to her becoming a brain scientist,
and the brain hemorrhage which caused her to experience the expansiveness of
enlightenment available to all of us.


Friday, July 9, 2010

EVOLVING THROUGH TAI CHI


TAI CHI AND ME

“Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible.

Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary, emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly, like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.”

Sogyal Rinpoche.

The above quotation comes from The Tibetan Art of Living and Dying and pertains to the practice of meditation. It also encapsulates my experience of Chi Kung and Tai Chi, practices that soften and melt on many levels.

The most primary experience of Tai Chi is movement at a physical level, and I dread to think how my physical progression would evolve over the next few years if I wasn’t stretching during warm up, and during the various practices I have learned to enjoy. Spending a week in The Orthopedic Hospital after a horse riding accident in which I fractured my pelvis convinced me of the necessity of exercise. The ward mainly contained elderly people who had sustained injury during falls and brought to my attention the number of people on the street who couldn’t walk without the use of a cane because their physical structure had seized up.

As we are mind/body creatures, our emotions are intimately connected to our physicality and one affects the other. As Chuang-Tzu states, “In all things The Way does not want to be obstructed, for if there is obstruction, there is choking; if the choking does not cease, there is disorder, and disorder harms the life of all creatures.”

Maintaining an awareness of myself as a being of energy vibrating as part of a field of energy, facilitates my understanding of the necessity of keeping that energy flowing. Where there is blockage in the system, suffering ensues. This suffering will occur on physical, emotional and intellectual levels. Meditation and movement, indeed meditation as movement within the forms of Tai Chi and Chi Kung, softens the damaging grasp of contraction engendered by a cultural milieu predicated on argument, fear and the illusion of isolation. Sensing one’s own energy while consciously connecting to the greater universal field of energy, allows for a softening of the experience of boundaries thereby increasing one’s sense of being All That Is.

Sogyal Rinpoche uses the metaphor of a vase. Once the vase breaks, one realizes the space one previously discerned as being inside the vase was, all along, the same space as that by which it was surrounded. The culturally conditioned mind creates the boundary which the practice dissolves, until one becomes, to quote Deepak Chopra, a “citizen of the field.” As citizens of the field, we realize our connection to our greater selves. Free from the versions of Reality we have constructed, we are liberated to live more loving, playful, creative and compassionate lives. We are all genies, imagining ourselves captive in a bottle, until we realize there is no bottle and we are free to work magic in our lives. (This is a work in progress for me!)

Over millennia, Taoists have developed disciplined, specific practices designed to channel energy through our various energetic systems, allowing us to actively interpenetrate various dimensions of existence, drawing energy from those dimensions into the ‘physical’ dimension of the Earth plane, through our various energy bodies and into the physical bodies we have fashioned for this lifetime. It is my sense that these disciplines are interplanetary and inter-dimensional, technological gifts we receive in order to help us to complete our task of awakening to the loving creative power we are.

Learning to create a flowing energy system allows us to feel more compassionate towards the Little Self we inhabit this lifetime. As citizens of warlike cultures we learn to integrate conflict, creating an internal battleground in which we chastise our inner Other whilst simultaneously perceiving this inner culprit in those around us. The technologies with which we have been gifted, when utilized, allow our Higher Selves and Highly Evolved Beings access to the dimension of our human consciousness so that we may be assisted in the work we were born to do.

While we are in the midst of suffering without means of amelioration we exist in a Me-centered universe in which our transcendental heart struggles to open. Once we avail of this life buoy, the practice, which provides us with the means to save ourselves, we can become more compassionate towards others drowning in the sea of illusion and soften our attitudes towards them. (I’m also thinking of a few specific people here whom I am struggling to like, whilst acknowledging how much I’ve learned from my dislike of their behaviour, mainly, to look out for the temptation to behave likewise myself and to refrain from doing so!)

Practicing Tai Chi and meditation (though admittedly not on a daily basis) for the past two years has enabled me to integrate so much of the learning of my previous decades, each ‘piece’ of which has been essential to my growth as a human and a spirit being. I also feel privileged to know the people I’ve met during this time, people who are consciously working on the development of their awareness and exhibit a higher caliber of behaviour towards themselves and others as a result.

“Tibetan masters say that this wise generosity has the flavour of boundless space, so warm and cozy that you feel enveloped and protected by it, as if by a blanket of sunlight.”

This Golden Sun of the practice, the warm blanket of Divine Light experienced during meditation and further integrated through the disciplined, orchestrated movements of Chi Kung and Tai Chi is not only a true agent of positive change, but a solid base from which to reach out to facilitate a wider transformation, as it naturally translates into behaviour which benefits others.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Happy, sunny days











Ok Just in case I've contributed to y'all thinkin' it rains on our glorious Emerald Isle all the time, I'm chucking up a few recent photos of the summer we're having. Yes, along with the UK, Ireland is actually having a proper summer this year!!!

Monday, May 31, 2010

THE ALL POWERFUL WEATHERGOD



I'm feeling decidedly mean. I love dipping into the blogs I follow and keeping up with the lives and interests of their authors and feel suddenly miserable that I've been so lax in contributing to this great world of blogging of late. As I'm about to begin my summer hols soon I'll rectify that in the not-too-distant future. Meanwhile, I'm lazily offering some of anothers hard graft, to whit a poem by one of my favourite poets, Billy Collins. Last week and weekend the weather was splendid; hot, sunny - provoking lazy days in the garden and activity filled picnics on the gorgeous local beaches. For the past few days it's been raining and cool and all of us locals are bemoaning the change in climes - yes, the conversation at the hairdressers today revolved around the well founded Irish paranoia that we've had our summer already, and this could be it for the rest of the so-called summer, whilst we remain hopelessly optimistic that "things will pick up again"....and we'll be rescued from our fears once more!!! The rain once diverted Billy Collins thoughts into less sanguine channels before he allowed the possibility of a return to better weather to again claim his allegiance for this earthly realm....

Rooms

After three days of steady, inconsolable rain,
I walk through the rooms of the house
wondering which would be best to die in.

The study is an obvious choice
with its thick carpet and soothing paint,
its overstuffed chair preferable
to a doll-like tumble down the basement stairs.

And the kitchen has a certain appeal -
it seems he was boiling water for tea,
the inspector will offer, holding up the melted kettle.

Then there is the dining room,
just the place to end up facedown
at one end of its long table in a half-written letter

or the bedroom with its mix of sex and sleep,
upright against a headboard,
a book having slipped to the floor -
make it Mrs. Dalloway, which I have yet to read.

Dead on the carpet, dead on the tiles,
dead on the stone cold floor -
it's starting to sound like a ballad
sung by a man in a pub with a coal red face.

It's all the fault of the freezing rain
which is flicking against the windows,
but when it finally lets up
and gives way to broken clouds and a warm breeze,
when the trees stand dripping in the light,

I will quit these dark, angular rooms
and drive along a country road
into the larger rooms of the world,
so vast and speckled, so full of ink and sorrow-

a road that cuts through bare woods
and tangles of red and yellow bittersweet
these late November days.

And maybe under the fallen wayside leaves
there is hidden a nest of mice,
each one no bigger than a thumb,
a thumb with closed eyes,
a thumb with whiskers and a tail,
each one contemplating the sweetness of grass
and the startling brevity of life.


And he wrote that poem in November - this is June!!!

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

BABY BLACKBIRD BYE BYE



Little Joey’s gone. He was only in our lives for a few days, but had a huge impact. I initially called him Mussolini because of his face, cross looking when viewed head on, the sides of his blackbirds beak widening to give a dictatorial aspect, that, combined with his demanding cheeps earned him the moniker.

Caoimhe, who has a bird phobia, had found him around the side of the house, almost stepping on him, and had run, breathless into the house, calling “MUM! Muuuum!” Her sister, upon hearing her tone, had run out and when I arrived I was greeted by one baby blackbird and two upset daughters. A shoebox was lined with dried grass and moss, and I 'deftly' lifted the bird and deposited it in it’s new nest. I had observed the bird appeared to have a damaged wing and at least one damaged leg and was hesisitant as to whether we should be helping it at all. Having become aware of it, or course, and not knowing what else to do, I felt we had to ‘do something’. I learned through Googling, that taking on the care of a baby bird is a huge commitment – the box needs to be kept, ideally, at 85 deg F, the air around the bird needs a moisture content of 25 percent, it needs to be fed every two hours around the clock (at least, depending on it’s age) and, baby blackbirds need to be fed pureed dog food with a high water content as giving it water by syringe could drown it. Phew!

As my concerned daughters were too scared to go near Mussolini, I had to step in and become mother. Having breastfed two human infants didn’t prepare me for this task. I’m not a bird and found trying to keep this little mite alive very stressful. I worried about it getting enough food. As it’s legs were so damaged it couldn’t do what baby birds usually do when being fed (i.e. stand up and flap it’s wings – this info thanks to YouTube!) it would fall forwards on it’s beak when trying to feed. At first, I interpreted this as bird language for not wanting food. I eventually learned to wait until it got itself into a position where it could put it’s head back and ‘gape’, and developed a technique of putting the tip of a watercolour brush into it’s beak for it to gently take the food. Then the moistened brush side can be used to wipe excess food from the sides of the beak.

While I continued to feel stressed, I began to enjoy the sound of the blackbirds song in the house and to appreciate it’s contented little cheeps once fed. My concern for it’s condition never waned however, as with a damaged wing, and two damaged legs, how would it ever fend for itself. Esme began to feed it and to share the responsibility for caring for it, followed, miraculously, by Caoimhe, who initially was so sad to not be able to go near it to help it, but who, by day three, was participating in feeding Joey, having thus affectionately named ‘him’.

I wondered at the reason for this little birds appearance in our lives, as everything in the external world is a reflection of the internal. I thought about it’s injured wing and crippled legs, and how sad it is for a little creature to be unable to fulfill what it is born to do. The likelihood was this bird would never fly. I reflected on my own able body and skillsets, and vowed, once again, to fully spread my wings and fly.

On Monday morning, just as I was leaving for work with Joey where I intended to get the vet on The Animal Care course to take a look at him, I received a phonecall from Caoimhe at school asking me to collect her as she was experiencing breathing difficulties, again. She’d had some similar episodes the previous week so this time, I brought her straight to the doctor. After the examination the doctor recommended we go to the A+E at the hospital to rule out a pathological explanation. We came home and fed Joey, who, I noticed also seemed to have developed breathing difficulties. When we returned from the hospital five hours later, having received the all clear for Caoimhe, little Joey, wings spread, head thrown back, had died. This came both as a disappointment and a huge relief. He had been loved and looked after during his short life, helping us in return and now, Little Joey had left behind his damaged body, and his limitations, having reminded us to let go of ours, and flies free, at last.


Image courtesy of Nigel Chaney

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

FOLLOW YOUR HEART- AT ALL COSTS!


Nick Williams, author, spiritual life coach and co-founder of Inspired Entrepreneur, a network which provides support, seminars and training to people who want to change their lives by following their hearts, kindly agreed to answer some questions I posed to him. I hope you will find inspiration in the following Q&A with Nick which is followed by my video pitch of a story of personal transformation I have entered in The Next Top Spiritual Author competition, I hope you will find inspiration here also.





What do I feel the ultimate purpose of human life to be?

To remember that in this world of seeming separation, that we are divine spiritual beings, all part of the same one creation, that we are the light. We remember our true identity by letting go of erroneous ideas, beliefs and thoughts about who we believe we are and by sharing our creative gifts with each other. It is to remember that we are loved, we are loving and that ultimately we are love, and that the creator places no conditions on their love for us.

What is the greatest fear that I have overcome?

Probably listening to, trusting and acting from the wisdom of my heart when I was in the corporate world and left the conventional career path. I had a good job and the trappings of success, but I didn’t have the experience of feeling a success and fulfilled. It took all the courage I could muster to leave it behind and trust both in my own resources and unseen powers and that there was a greater life beckoning me. I followed a crazy dream of inspiring people, teaching, being creative and creating a truly meaningful life, but discovered that was in fact my life purpose and calling beckoning me. As I have had the courage to follow it, I continue to be transformed.

What is the single most important insight I would like to share with people?

That your existence is a blessing and you do have purpose for being here. But that purpose may be the thing that scares you most, that you most resist and try to logically talk yourself out of, but is in fact the truest direction of your life and the direction that will lead to your greatest fulfilment. Your hearts deepest dream may well not be a fantasy but your soul revealing to you the grandest path for your life. And you can create an abundant living doing the work you were born to do.

Nick Williams is co-founder of Inspired Entrepreneur and is passionate about helping people find the work they were born to do and build successful businesses around it.

If you are not yet clear about the work you were born to do, you can download your free copy of a nine part programme to help you discover it and become an inspired entrepreneur now at: www.inspired-entrepreneur.com


To vote for me please visit the following link:


Friday, March 12, 2010

INTEGRITY INTEGRITY INTEGRITY


INTEGRITY INTEGRITY INTEGRITY

Antony De Mello began his bestselling book Awareness with the words Awareness, awareness. awareness. With good reason. Most of us are not aware of ourselves, others, our motivations, or the potential consequences of our actions. This is causing us all a lot of problems, for example, on a purely practical level, the economic state of this country and the world as a whole, is based on that very condition – lack of awareness coupled with lack of integrity. Certain individuals in positions of power saw opportunities to increase their wealth and, irresponsible of the consequences, pursued those opportunities, thereby sacrificing the livelihoods of others. These powerful people were assisted in the pursuit of their business interests by governments whose sole concern was self preservation, and by a culture which has become innured to corruption and material self interest.

While there are individuals within government; within corporations and institutions who uphold a high moral code, it became practically impossible for those people to effect change to a system they saw spiralling towards wrecking havoc on the lives of the masses. The web of collusion in croneyism and hubris amongst their colleagues, and the media, effectly silenced their protests and most of them either shut up, resigned their positions or continued pressing warnings against deaf ears. The fat farce rolled on until it smashed up against a wall of it’s own making. Some simply sidled away unscathed by the ensuing fracas, others, remaining in power hide behind a new wall of spin, and most of us will spend the rest of our working lives paying for the latest measures hastily put in place to safeguard the interests of the economic elite.

HONOUR IS A GIFT YOU GIVE YOURSELF

“Honour is a gift you give yourself.” I remember reading this a number of years ago. I don’t remember where, but it struck me as being so true. Sometime later, I heard Ricky Gervais repeat it in an interview, and thought, there goes someone I’d like to meet. Integrity is something we need to foster in ourselves, and, no matter what happens around us, it is up to us to keep checking with ourselves whether our thoughts and actions match what we know to be the best option for us to take. If we can’t look in the mirror and like the person we see, we become diminished in our own eyes and, ultimately, will have no one else to blame. No one can take away our honour but ourselves.

There was an article in The Irish Times recently in which a priest spoke of the culture of The Victim. He maintained that people in the church didn’t speak out about the abuse they witnessed because they were indoctrinated to believe they were powerless to do anything about it – they had become victims. It wasn’t their place to do anything, they didn’t feel they could. This is so sad.

This same attitude applies now as it did then, and not just to the clergy, but to the community as a whole. We all wait for someone else to do something, it’s the classic “Somebody get help!”

Not everyone is a political leader, a mobiliser of change on a grand scale. But we are all capable and indeed supported, to live our best lives for ourselves. By that, I mean to pursue a level of Self interest which supports what will nurture and nourish us on a soul level. When we each commit to honouring our true Self, we make it impossible to dishonour another. This is a challenge we each meet everyday and in almost everyway. The question always is:

DO I LOVE MYSELF ENOUGH?

When I love myself enough I will safeguard that self esteem and won’t risk diminishing it by actions which will damage it. All of us, responding to our souls calling to Love can create an environment of change which will benefit all. In this, if we but realise it, we are totally supported by our souls essence which holds us in infinite love and compassion. Everything which occurs in the external world, the everyday life in which we engage, exists to provide us with opportunities for growth.

Those opportunities often appear as challenges in the form of other people who ‘get up our nose’ or threats to our financial or physical wellbeing. In order to respond to these challenges from a place of awareness and integrity, rather than from a defensive kneejerk standpoint, we need to be in touch with our True Nature or souls essence. There are many ways of doing this. Spending time quietly with ourselves, or walking in nature will help us to gain a fresh perspective on matters. Writing out a list of our deepest values helps to clarify what is truly important to us. Practising Yoga, , Chi Kung and Tai Chi is an excellent way of replenshing our energy and maintaining health on all levels from the physical to the spiritual. Meditation helps us to connect deeply with our Soul Self, that essential root from which we project our energy enabling us to learn over lifetimes in the slower vibration of the material dimension. This is where we will find the support needed to face life challenges from an honourable and authentic perspective. It is from the place of our Soul Self that we realise we have the strength to form our own opinions and follow through on them. It is through strengthening the realisation that we (each and every one of us, without exception) are pure at our core that we are enabled to walk an enlightened, more responsible path in the everyday.

I collected this image a while back and can't remember from where so haven't credited the author - if it is yours please email me your web address, I'll check it out and credit you for your great artwork.

Friday, March 5, 2010

SLOWING DOWN AND SEEING

I live in a beautiful place and enjoy the forty five minute drive to and from work (twenty five outside of rush hour). The light is constantly changing and I often yearn to spend the day photographing instead of teaching in a darkened studio, lecture theatre or darkroom. As I am also a mother, am always a student: of psychotherapy, of philosophy, shamanism, Tai Chi and Chi Kung; of writing and entrepreneurship, and, first and foremost, of my own spiritual journey, I can often miss the entrancing details of that almost daily car journey.

The other evening as I drove towards the orange and mauve streaked glow of the Western sky, my attention was drawn upwards to the birds perched on their nests in the tall bare branches of the winter trees. Every now and then the silhouette of a lone bird caught my eye as it's dark shape traversed the sky in front of me, now carrying a twig, then carrying a tuft of lambswool or dried grass. The age old movement of the bird population signaling Springs arrival and the portent of new birth, in a visual synthesis with the natural environment of budding blossom and spring lambs. Something about the beauty and depth of the changing scene, as each bird made a different shape swooping poetically across my path carrying its building material, enriched me with the prompt, You and I are One in Life and Nature.

Later, slowing down behind a trailer, packed high with organic matter whose pungent aroma filled my car, I spied an almost angular pocket of mist, hanging spectral like, alone in the graceful dip of a large darkening field. Wondering at its presence, I traced its source, barely discernible; a thin trail of smoke wafted silently across some fields, river, and road, towards the chimney of a large farmhouse quite a distance away. Somehow, this quiet scene, of smoke and landscape in the twilight palpated with the pure elegant presence of Being....

The tractor and trailer turned off and I pressed on the accelerator, my thoughts gathering apace and projecting into the future once more, towards dinner and further list of the demanding To Do's of the everyday.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

JZ Knight Interviewed by Alan Steinfeld on New Realities


JZ KNIGHT TALKING TO ALAN STEINFELD

In a very eloquent interview JZ Knight talks to Alan Steinfeld about her life as channel for Ramtha, a more developed Being guiding us on our evolution through teaching us the nature of ourselves (our True Self and Personality Self) and of Reality as an eternal evolution of consciousness and Divine Creation.

The video begins with excerpts of JZ Knight channelling Ramtha at the Mastery School, then proceeds to the interview between JZ and Alan, in my opinion worth waiting for. It is evident from the comments on You Tube that most of the viewers are unable to grasp the concepts she articulates.

After about 3 hours of unsuccessfully attempting to load this video, I'm posting a link here instead: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXHtjb44qyA

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

THE GUEST HOUSE



copyright Gillian Treacy January 2010




THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes,
Because each as been sent as a guide from beyond.


copyright Gillian Treacy January 2010

Jelaluddin Rumi.
Translation by Coleman Barks