Tag: integrity

COLOURS OF MY GRATITUDE

The blueness of sky simply releases in me and in my fellow family of humans an abundance of unconditional gratitude

COLOURS OF MY GRATITUDE

VIOLET is on the edge of the spectrum visible to humans. After and before the electromagnetic spectrum we humans know as “visible” exist vast energy-matter-probability fields we can visualise as our home, the Universe.

My gratitude is VIOLET for daily and constantly recognising my place in the Universe as a valid and valued entity gives me my identity, reminds me of the vital necessity for humility and helps me to keep my integrity in perspective and in balance with my aspirations.

My heart, my body and my mind, in that order, are my three best friends. My gratitude for my intuition is INDIGO. Indigo is near the limits of my human visual capability.

Intangible, formless and shapeless are my abilities to know without being told, to foresee without a person to guide, to read the heart of another without one word being exchanged, to imagine with no limits of any kind, internal, external or temporal. My gratitude for these gifts and graces is Indigo

My gratitude for being able to speak, be heard and understood is BLUE. Like the watery moisture on which all life depends, blue reminds me that life speaks through our thoughts, words, songs and stories. It reflects our identities on this Earth, from which we are formed and to which we all return.

GREEN! I am grateful for the ever visible reminder that life begins with growing things. Green grass, trees, seaweed, moss offer up their living aliveness to all eyes with no preconditions and no questions. Their greeness generates unquestioning love in my heart. The flow of energy from the cycles of green things growing makes me humbly grateful.

YELLOW is the colour of my gratitude for the harmony in my conscious decision-making.

When I remember how valued, loved, wanted, nurtured, nourished I am by ancestors, loved ones, family, friends and all of Humanity, I experience a falling away of disturbances, such as fear, anger, frustration, impatience or confusion.

Negative emotions flow contrary to life’s natural flow of blessings. Yellow is my gratitude for the falling away of the restraints of negativity when I touch into and activate my own loving kindness

ORANGE is my gratitude for children and their existence as reflections of the universal desire for the continuance of the flow of life.

I am a creature of desires. I recognise I am one pixel of humanity. My humanity recognises how my identity is constituted as one active cell in a membership of cells. My balance preserves and maintains my life and my life is made meaningful with the blessing of my offspring. Those of my fellow humans serve to justify and validate my existence, too.

Whenever I go deep into my being, deep RED rises in me. My body, my bones, my soma, my blood, but mostly my blood and flesh, come to my awareness.

I experience a recognition of red in gratitude that this is my blood, and with my recognising, I hug my fleshly self, and quite spontaneously, I am boundlessly grateful to be alive in a beautiful ocean of life!

BLACK is the outline of the holographic visions I summon up at will when my spirit takes wing. From these unlikely ponts of departure, from out of nowhere, my magician mind can engender images on the wheeling whirling stage of my creative wishing!

As I dance, I reach up into purple skies and with both hands I draw down nebulae, galaxies and whizzing showers of exotic particles to partner with me!

I ask the horizon, and the horizon beams to me gold and silver crepuscular rays, jewelling the scented wavecrests from here to forever.

I say, “Come clouds, burst into rainbow coloured music, and shower the fields of joy with flower petals of blue and white” and so it is.

And so it is! My freedom to choose from all the world’s libraries of Gratitude brings me bliss and ecstacy in uncountable plenitude.

~ Love’s presence EveryNow makes no demands on us. The blue of sky is simply blue. What blueness triggers in me and in my fellow family of humans is unconditional gratitude

Life that is more heart♡centric?

Not invisible indivisible

How to have life that is more heart-centric?

A friend may answer the question like this, “By being more present – for others – and in the course of this, for myself.”

I say a life more heart-centered in the terms described, “for others”, may derive from an imposed, expected, socially acceptable requirement.

I didn’t seek to live my life from the heart. It happened that my heart was revealed to me, in a sudden and shocking way. This was mediated through the extraordinarily powerful joining of prolonged eye-contact one-to-one, during wordless partnering in Biodanza.

I was briefly invited to share with another person our most sacred innermost spaces where the heart dwells. This can elicit a response in both people. I saw the shining integrity (non-judgemental, undifferentiated wholeness) in the soul of another. I saw the purity of the shine which the soul emits.

During those same shared moments, I felt my identity melt away. It became airy, then transparent. I felt dizzy, as when there is a sudden absence of old familiar coordinates to rely on. I teared up, because what I was seeing clear as daylight for the first time were these fine human characteristics. Integrity, honesty, and trust.

The greatest of these is trust. So much of the foundations, scaffolding and structures of functional society and of the wholesome individual are based on trust. Where there is trust, hope, growth and love can flourish.

I felt the avalanche of an emotion which was not love for another person. It was non-attached love. Love not disembodied at all, but grounded, real, rooted deeply and from time immemorial. I did not fully recognise it at that time (early 2013).

What I later grasped was that I had touched into, or received, a taste of the original life-force which keeps my life alive and guards both itself and myself with the power that comes from the place where I was born, and to which you, I and we all are returning, yes, each at our own pace, but as one human Tribe of sentient beings.

It has a well-known effect, this shared time of eye-gazing. Only it so happens that I was at a threshold when my heart, which I had been cloaking from even my own view for 66 years, shone reflected back to me from the heart of another. I was not “blown away”. I was literally blown open.

Firstly, I’m lucky that this awakening occured at all. Many may live and end life without this sort of revelation of the one-ness of all existence. This vision of one-ness is too powerful to frame in words. It is to be experienced, to be lived. It’s like electric current present in a copper wire. I know it’s there. Once my hand touches the wire, the shock through my body transmutes my knowledge into pure experience.

Secondly, my heart remained and remains open. My personal impression is that a heart opened can never fully close again. Some may arrive in a space which is heart-centric, abide there for a while, and then in some way or other they deny, discount or disregard their experience, simply because they lack sufficient first-hand knowledge of the life of the living heart of life.

I am incredibly lucky on two counts.

After all, when living is and always has been plain sailing from day to day, what useful purpose can be served, disturbing the expectation of the routine, by placing a hand on a live wire? I thought I knew what ecstacy is. It is like a cause and effect, isn’t it? And when the cause is absent, ecstacy vanishes.

My ecstatic experience of being alive does not depend on an external cause. For a long, long time I had been seeking to understand what causes ecstatic experience. I made strenuous and continual efforts to get under the skin, to get into the mind, to attempt to MELD with the living aliveness I see is present in every other life form around me. This process of enquiry resolves itself by reforming itself into a process of self-enquiry.

How is it possible that I am both alive and life is living me?

I am alive and life is living through me as well as in me. This is sufficient cause to be swirling, pulsing with the ecstacy of life lived all of the time, day and night, in fullest possible awareness.

I am alive and not dead. This alone warrants lusty songs of gratitude. Yes, I am grateful I am not dead!

My heart is beating. It is beating like every heart that is, was, and will be. This force that keeps the beat from embryo to this very moment is not mine alone. Mine is a share of the same life force whose origins are traceable along the whole route through scientific investigation (and common sense) to the Big Bang

🎼 I make noise 💡

The noise I make, I make by being alive. The footprints of the sounds I make are small.

I breathe, I talk, I cry, I sleep. I never stop making sounds. The sounds I make have small footprints.

I make sounds. Most of the sounds I make as notations in music are rest notes.

The sounds are the sounds of not making sounds. My silences are my companions. My companions are usually invisible.

I know them, my companions, from the first moments I made sounds to and for myself. I heard them with the ears of my ears, outside in the brightly lit, open green fields of my youngest childhood.

The sounds I make can be put down in musical notation. Most are rest notes with limited significance. These rest notes reach my ears. I process them, interpret them, hold hands with them,

The noises I have made throughout my life is a musical score, indiscernible as music. I have produced a few grace notes, which rise above the score. They have a wider footprint. I hang my grace notes on twigs. They sound pretty as I pass back and forth through the forest.

My musical score is like all the other music produced by my fellow beings. My fellow beings are mostly small winged insects. They outnumber human beings. The sounds they make with their wings are their constant companions. These sounds are mostly inaudible to me.

My fellow human beings move. The sounds they make alert me to the Sun, to the Moon, to the seas, to all the things growing in the wide open airs under the vaulted blue skies.

All my days, the music I have made, I make without desiring to create anything. The noises that issue from movements in and from my body are reminders of the energy I release through breathing, thinking, feeling.

I see now there is a music composed of rest notes, white noise, the occasional pure musical tones. These sounds, my constant companions, remind me of my responsibility to try and make harmony out of random.

If I know it, or if I know it not, I have a sacred duty when I open my mouth to hum, or whistle, or speak, or when I look across in silence into the eyes of another. 

My responsibility is simple. It is to be in harmony with the energy I draw on when sounds issue from me.

When I am walking on the grass, among trees, on hillsides, on uneven ground close to streams, with the wind in my face, and my feet are placed and placed by my own volition, the energy of my movements is as the energy of light from the almost imperceptible dance of fireflies.

The footprint of the light I create as I move through the natural world is not large. My light is my companion and it is my sole responsibility.

All my long life, it is my light that silently accompanies every instant of my waking thinking dreaming existence.

If I know the light, or if I know it not, now I understand it is with me always. It asks nothing of me, because it is me.

The light is my legacy. I must know that the light I produce has unlimited impact. My light will reveal my purpose, my integrity and the extent to which my harmonious self makes music in my heart

~ Love is present EveryNow

🔻Hyper media mania🔺

I found a way through and past all of this dark stuff many years ago. It is not a system of belief based on blinkered wilful selfishness.

For millenia, smallish communities lived together in agricultural subsistence. What happened among them stayed between them. The only form of new transmission was by the voice. Shouts, words, gossip, storytelling. All during these thousands of generations, we might guess at, but we were only very seldom if ever directly aware of fatal wounds, diseases, poisonings, plagues, floods, fires, famine, intrigue, rape, pillage, war, gratuitous violence.

We had plenty of work to be getting on with merely in order to feed and house and clothe ourselves.

We found ways of assimilating terrible life events, and – for most of us – we had a lifestyle of mutual support, and this helped us to remain healthy in body and mind.

Comes the advent of industry, technology, printing, mass literacy, radio, and god help us live broadcasts by television and streaming handheld smartphones.

The exact same Tsunamis and Earthquake types of destructive and dread events continue to affect human communities.

The major difference today is the gigantic burden of excessive awareness of human tragedy in every part of the world it occurs as it happens.

The media brings every one of us into virtual face-to-face with the plight of those caught up in tragic circumstances.

The circumstances offered up to us are mostly explicit and graphic, and almost invariably embellished, embroidered and hyped for commercial advantage by the complete range of high tech media, assisted closely by scientific applications of various disciplines of psychology.

What’s more, the Media are in competition to outperform against each other because of their need for financial gain.

Return for a minute to an ancient agricultural or craft village, where the worst noise pollution is birdsong, farm animals, strong winds. And where the rather strict rules of communal life tend to be set up for self-policing. Here hard work is among the top requirements expected of the average inhabitant.

This activity leaves not a lot of time for rioting, revolt, manslaughter or mayhem.

It will have been obvious to everyone that the miseries that do befall them are common to every person in every village throughout time.

What they did to keep going involved close reference to accepted tried and trusted ways of getting through the seasons, with room for empathy, compassion and altruism.

What we need in this period of the Anthropocene is exactly and precisely the same focus of time, effort and attention to the same preoccupations for ourselves and the people we live together with.

If we, or “I”, take on board an excess of attention to the woes and wherefores of people geographically very far distant from us, we are eventually bound to suffer seriously destructive imbalances to our naturally frail spiritual framework.

As my Mother would frequently point out, too much of anything is not good.

So I take no longer any notice any more. I don’t say, I do not care. I say I am bound to care more about those whose lives affect mine, about the paths of the lives of those who cross mine.

“May all beings everywhere be happy and free.
May my thoughts, words, and actions contribute in some way to happiness and freedom for all.
May I keep faith with this heart’s truth
~ Love is present EveryNow”

As long as I abide by my integrity, I share, I love, I help, I stay connected and at peace!

What point am I making, you ask as you stir impatient on your virtual bar stool.

I say we are being called upon by newly formed mass media influencers to  needlessly take notice of the entire panoply of all the ills and evils in the whole worldwide human community.

This suits those whose profits flow from the uninterrupted viral forcefeed of bad news. But that’s where any measurable advantage terminates for us as individuals who go about our daily lives.

I cannot hope to take notice or accept responsibility for every single horrid happening reported constantly. If I take a step away, I see that the best interests of my well-being are served by my being well informed about my own circles of family and friends.

Other distractions, should I choose to let myself fall prey to their melodramatic Media blandishments, provide me with only a noxious and dangerous mix of highly-charged negative emotional stimuli. I can and I should do little or nothing that allows them to erode my sense of my Original Self.

My Original Self is that inner child, that new born angelic heart, whose sacred centre is an integral part of the peace and love from which it came, and to which, collectively, we are all returning home.

Nothing has to be changed for me as a good community member. It’s the same as it would have been for me in that little village in the countryside so many Moons ago!

If I am leading a good life as a productive and caring member of my peer groups, I must consciously take leave of the flow of dystopian Media hype which concerns other people, whose responsibilities and influence concern their own local communities.

Meaningful choice

What choice is there in the geometric single point?

Only refer

Choice is always predicated on a point of reference. Reduce reference points to zero (not that this can be done) and choice virtually disappears. Here we are operating at the level of micro-organisms.

Meaningful choice involved with interactions initiates from a point of reference. With no point of reference, no meaning can be apparent, and visible colour and the inspiration to initiate are at their perigee.

If I am at peace in my most sacred space, if my relation to the me I call myself is all compassion and respect for the integrity of my identity, I can act from a position of trust.

This is the trust to which I am beholden because it allows me to deploy from my innate centre of power. This place is blind to action, yet all-seeing. This place is stillness of unimaginable breadth and depth, yet it remains sensitive to the tiniest movements of sentience in the web of life.

My power revealed is my self returned to the womb.

If I am able to access the ataraxia of my original self, the place where who I am is far less of a motivator than to whom I am beholden for my connectivity, then I can act with security to make choices which accord and harmonise with the source of boundless love from which I came, and to which I am to return.

~ Love is present EveryNow

The Biodanza effect. Do I dare to hope?

The Biodanza effect. Do I dare to hope?
For those who regularly practice Biodanza – and I am one of some few hundred thousand every week in dozens of different countries – there is a sense of coming home attaching to the word Mindfulness.
From way back, when I began to reflect on the big questions, up to today, I will almost daily catapult my mind into the Now by reference to the notion of my own death. It is a cleansing act which sharpens my gratitude and my wonder for being me being alive in this moment – right here now.
It’s with my regular practice of Biodanza that I am becoming accustomed to the practice – not only the idea – of living my daily life more and more ‘in the Moment’.
That’s to say I am going about the business of my days without tripping up over selfconscious self-referential thoughts. Less and less do I feel the need to question my motives, still less do I bother to direct my thoughts in at myself, where there’s a treadmill for thoughts with nothing better to do than trudge around and around.
What takes my mind away from mental closed circuits today is my gratitude for the pleasures of inclusive warm comradeship I feel from my fellow Biodancers.
Yes, I might still be lonely in my days and nights, but my friends in the Dance of Life have reflected my natural inner joy back to me from their integrity and respect and trust.
In Biodanza, something as simple as feeling joyful can be revealed as depending on nobody around me. I can see that the joy in the eyes of a partner in the dance spells out happiness all by itself. His or her joy doesn’t depend on me. It arises between us in the shared act of dance. We recognise it is our naked flame of humanity which each has made possible to reveal to the other in the unguarded intimacy of our moments of communion.
Biodanza to me is a spritual reawakening and a growth in potential of the whole person through wordless self expressive freestyle movement, mediated through music, under expert guidance and in the companionship of others whose integrity and trust is strong, explicit and bonding.
I have not dared to hope that Biodanza will always continue to reveal more subtleties of innerscape, more outward expanses of conscious joy, more awareness of the same upward spiralling awakening in those all around me.
I had not dared to hope until I asked Natasha, who has some eight years’ Biodanza. She says it’s perfectly clear that the beneficial effect goes on getting higher, deeper, broader both on the inside and out, and it will never end.
I’m reminded of the illusion of those lonely parallel tracks. In the experience of Busy-busy living, when I think I am alone on the path, I blink, look around and see others on parallel paths. As we face the horizon, all our different divergent paths converge, merge and blaze together in a revitalising sunrise. Or sunset.
Glory glory!