None of us are ever alone in the path we take, nor in the circumstances of the path, however dire or distressing.
Love’s presence EveryNow
In the vast ocean of life, though we are billions, the number of common threads of humanity in which we all have a share is surprisingly small.
“Today is a long time ago”
My friend Bryan Alkins said on Friday 2nd October 2015 – “The past is the past! How far in the past doesn’t matter. Live in the moment. 🙏”
If I occasionally believe I am dangerously far divorced from “normality”, because all that matters is what’s going on now, I will beg my pardon and I will still defer to the moment.
I have long held the view (for near on forty years) that those who disavow the mystical and say there is no thing beyond the material and the provable, are trapped in a bubble of mystic magic divinity which knows and loves them, but which is sadly not visible to them.
These days I am believing it is simpler even than all of that.
Those who have not begun to bathe totally in the now cannot conceive of doing so. They believe it has no value to them, because what does not relate to their own lived experience appears to them as unsubstantiated evidence without the necessary confirmation of cause and effect.
EveryNow is that lived bliss of unconditional immediacy of experience without reference to past, future, or to labels of name or pertainment.
People who relate every present moment to its antecedent and who take care to measure it by its potential future effect make the mistake of regarding EveryNow as a state of instability from which no practical outcomes through reason and judgement are to be initiated.
After all, whoever thought it wise to choose to be a passenger in a vehicle driven by a person in a state of bliss?
Fear is sometimes taken to be the inevitable next step after identification with uncertainty. To see new ways of being as strange is to associate those who operate from this state as strange and then perhaps as people to be feared.
Nothing is more precise, more glaringly pinpointed with a sense of the absolute than EveryNow!
Long Live Love’s presence EveryNow
Here are reasons to be glad, to be grateful, because every giant effort of will we make to take just one step, every step we stumble at, every time we call out in agony, we unite with every human who ever endured, screamed and moved on.
Far too many of those I know have had to un-shipwreck themselves after being all but capsized by cruel storms of other people’s making.
I try not to make sweeping generalisations, or say things that cannot be proven by some investigation. In all truth, I cannot think of any person I have ever met who does not live with some heavy burden of pain. Can you look through the front doors of your own family, friends, acquaintances and say, “There lives a human with a heart free of all hurt?”
We are strong beyond any adequate means of describing our strengths. I believe no trauma, no setback, no block on our way can finally dim, disfigure or extinguish our inner light.
Yet there are two things we are definitely not suited to suffer. These are physical violence or isolation. These sorrows figure in the storylines of so very many people. I include illness or disabilities in such unwanted, unwelcome and insufferable tempests.
I am extremely fortunate to have avoided the worst of such crippling external influences.
It is not true to say I do not live with God in my life. It’s just that I am aware that by publicly aligning myself with a Western religious orthodoxy, I automatically draw down iron curtains from those I most care about and most wish not to be distanced from.
It’s a sad fact of life that such labels are capable of thwarting the transmission of exactly those truths that are universally recognised.
In my EveryNow blogs, I avoid direct reference to religious nomenclature in order to keep the channels of positivity flowing without distraction, and without the additional identifiable baggage that I see as secondary and non-essential.
This is my own Motto, the final words I most often use to place my seal on my writings…
“Love is present EveryNow”
You, or any reader, can readily replace the word Love with their own named deity.
My impulse to avoid any form of evangelical message comes from my distrust of organised religion, particularly the Western dualistic orthodoxies.
My adherence is to the present moment. This is where infinity and all the goodness therein lies waiting to be found, simultaneously to be consumed by us and to consume us with no diminishment!
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.
This world we have all grown up in together is now visibly changing. Global pandemic, violent destructive storms, World War. The ground under my feet no longer offers me unquestioned stability.
I weep for this wonderful world. I am deeply in love with this world of wonders.
I would do well to acknowledge the extent to which change is a constant. I notice the stories my mind tells me about the safety and comfort of the daily routine distract and mislead me.
The world I knew yesterday does not resemble the world today. It’s important to be conscious that change is deeply aligned to the reality of existence. There’s no existence without change.
These factors, change, transience, impermanence, are influences in so many ways on all our waking and non-waking moments.
What is it that prompts me to rely on, trust, and fully expect the daily routine to offer me stability and peace of mind? This is my mind. Whenever mind operates like a toy clockwork train on primitive single tracks, I see it is incorrect.
If I desire the fullest possible grasp on the blissful beauty of a deeply lived alive life, it is well to take on board that my mind, heart and body are subject to the transient, to the temporary, to the wild unpredictable.
I am a thriving flame that survives the silent violence of my storm
Awareness and acknowledgement all the time of the stark fact of impermanence is central to maintaining my healthy lifestyle.
The more I allow myself to live in transience, the more grounded I am. The more grounded, the more I’m content and at peace.
Peace of mind is the starting point for all the honeyed delights of communal sharing. Simply because we might never see each other again, family, friends, acquaintances, strangers I meet, are all brilliantly illuminated by the shining peace in the heart of this moment together!
Be glad that we, you, I, like the dust, the very ground beneath our bodies, are made of impermanence.
Is it the fleeting face of loneliness I see between the laughter and the smiles?
Yes, let it have its day in the sun.
Plenty of time, oh, there’ll be time enough I say, one day to pine for the weeks spent without a hand to hold, after your life has reached an apotheosis and you have so many hands within arm’s reach of your love-filled heart.
There is no book nor physic to spirit away loneliness.
In an inevitable plurality of beings, loneliness is a fact of human arithmetic. It sleeps at the footstool like a stone lion with its eyes open!
Two things our bodies are not naturally made to tolerate.
One is to be afflicted by violence. While the other is to be afflicted by loneliness.
Steer your course oh so safely, dear Shining Soul, between this Scylla and that Charybdis.
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” says Julian of Norwich.
There are large helpings of power and strength in those words! You have sole responsibility to make them so.
You will go out tomorrow into the noisy crowds. And with you, you will carry an enormous cathedral-like and most noble silence.
And you will smile, because your silence is ‘grand’, and you know it is as full of hospitable welcome, as the urging daydreams of your distant distant descendents.
Since March 2014, out of curiosity more than from an acknowledged need, I started working with a wonderful shamanic healer.
I had no inkling I had endured ‘that childhood’ until it appeared clearly in front of me.
These traumatic strata, though buried and covered by scar tissue, I know now from my own experiences, can be identified, visualized in an adult context, lifted out of ancient hiding and, when seen in the bright light of my adult recognition, taken in both hands and dissolved forever.
This is hard work. It demands courage and determination to confront emotions which are painful and at first not easy to identify or understand.
Some who are shaken by the rise to the surface of fears and sadness, long forgotten or long since buried out of conscious sight, may not be ready to continue the work of bringing them into the open.
Their life journey has not yet reached those stations where the refreshments of friends and family have bolstered their understanding. Some may never, in their whole life, begin or accomplish the work of healing.
The work sometimes summons up nameless distress from within myself, like a child’s nightmare.
I carry my child inside me, but the difference is that it is I myself who has to show myself compassion. I have to be the one to cup my own distressed heart in my own healing hands and guide myself out into the openness of ever-present light.
At the time I began this work, the presence of “EveryNow” was becoming more familiar to me by the day. EveryNow fills me with the absence of longing, because it is a state which contains all sufficiency and all fulfilment. My way of characterising this is in the phrase, “No question; Answer is before”.
I recognised that the state of EveryNow represented the place of sanctuary, the changeless place of ultimate trust and reconciliation.
Had I not already gained an understanding of the over-arching and underlying principle that all existence is a reality not objective but encompassing both itself and me as the experiencer, I could not have successfully continued this Shamanic work.
With my Shaman close to me and questioning and inviting me to place myself in close touch – literally – with my previous selves all through the years of my life, I use a combination of two skills to power myself on with this work.
I exercise my curiosity to discover more about where I have hidden my painful past, and why, and with what ‘devices’ my former self so deliberately interred the pain.
With my intellectual reason I try to find out how effectively I can use my analytical skills to make valid connections between my adult autonomous self and my younger, unformed dependent self.
I seek out and befriend again the little person I was, who constructed all kinds of protective defences in the face of major hurt of which I as a child could have had no objective understanding and over which I had no control.
I can do all of this seeking, confronting, refriending and healing of myself because I can trust and completely rely on my guide, my Shaman, to be at my side every fraction of an inch of the way.
I continue with this work for the simple reason that it works. It is swift, effective, and the major immediate result is that it gives me is of lightness of heart.
I begin see my way of developing survival techniques to negotiate unknown fears is not unique to me and my life journey. I see clearly and with great relief that none of my difficulties, not one of my traumas is unique to me. I am not alone, not stuck on some lonely summit, or wandering in dark places. Suddenly, very suddenly, I am able to look around at last, and I see we are all beautiful doves in a flock of humanity.
One valuable certainty I have discovered from this guided work is that my body holds all the answers. If I want to know the answer, I directly address this physical repository of wisdom.
It is easier to enter and explore the body’s frames of reference while hearing the steady, quiet rhythmic beat of the Shamanic spirit drum.
There are two extremes our bodies are not naturally made to tolerate. One is to be afflicted by violence. While the other is to be afflicted by loneliness.
The strict limitations on the reach of my self healing are imposed by the needs I have as a human for other meaningful loving human contact, because my survival is all bound up with my gregarious, even tribal nature.
I willingly acknowledge with gratitude that it takes a person of rare quality to show such love as to dedicate a life to becoming a Healer in this way.
Shamanic Healing has been and continues to prove to be for me a uniquely valid and valuable vehicle for releasing and empowering a life of more abundance every day.
The View at 72+ 