Fifty shades of good times

Tags

cycles of transformation, Energy, falling in love, Happiness, Health, inky silver highway of the universe, joy, jumping beans, moon glow, self-love, vitality

Of course there’s that old saying – and it’s apparently true – that the Sami people (NOT the Inuit, mind) have a vast array of words to describe snow.

Recently a certain reader of this blog (who never actually comments here and yet somehow, over the interwebs we’ve managed to strike up a friendship); wondered via IM, if my life must be going pretty well right now since I’m not blogging that much.

So I’ve been thinking about that idea that we only tend to write when things are not going well, or that we write less when we’re happy and life is great… I mean, when life is crappy, there’s a lot of material to work with, right? And when we’re happy, we’re happy. We tend to stop looking so hard when we’re in the zone of blissfulness. Right? Hmmmm…

I guess so. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest this could be a real phenomena. But I don’t think that that’s what’s going on for me.

Don’t get me wrong. Life at the moment is stupendously good. So good I’ve started wondering if I’m a little bit crazy because who the hell feels THIS good on a regular basis? Ha!

Instead, it’s more that I’ve been going through endless cycles of transformation. My health. My yoga practice. My yoga teaching. My work. It’s this whole thing of coming back into my own power (as cheesy as it sounds, right?).

A whole new set of mantras for me: Power. Health. Vitality. Energy. Happiness. Joy.

I’ve got that feeling you get (yep, I still remember even though it’s been an aeon so it seems) when you first fall in love. That rush of hormones and the way the world looks extra-bright-and-shiny. Nothing’s too much trouble. Life is just rocking-ly good in every possible way.

It’s like I’m getting to know happiness, as you would someone you’re dating. My own happiness – generated by my experiences in the world instead of being brought on by the close proximity of someone I’m dating (because readers of this blog know that I’m still 100% date-free, sadly).

And like the aforementioned snow, I’m finding that there are many shades of happiness to be discovered.

Like… pleasure to be alive that closely resembles a hive of jumping beans living just under my skin, grooving to the rhythm of their own funky tunes.

Or the way the moon glows and sends special secret just-for-you winks as it glints in the inky silver highway of the universe.

And how things I already enjoy that usually make me happy in that run-of-the-mill contented puppy kind of way (yoga, kirtan, being in nature, hanging with niece-lings etc)? Yeah, well now those things bring on all kinds of crazy highs.

I walk a little straighter. More and more, people stop me in the street to ask for directions as though I’ve got an “Ask For Help Here” neon sign blinking over my head. Strangers compliment my smile and I can’t remember the last time that happened before now.

Or this: one of my regular yoga students (someone I’ve felt a little connected to for a while now) suggesting we have lunch together and then refusing to let me pay. She made my head spin with compliments on my yoga teaching (I’m still such a newbie teacher you see) and tells me I’ve helped her so very, very much. We agree to hang out again some time.

I find myself asking: who is this person with all of this good stuff going on? She doesn’t resemble the reflection I’ve seen in the mirror for the past few years very much. In fact, my current reflection doesn’t resemble that old image of me at all…

This. This much happiness.

It’s crazy. As if I’ve fallen in love.

And perhaps I have. Only this time, it’s got nothing to do with the glory of some tall, dark ‘n’ handsome hottie admiring my many fine qualities. Or endless make out sessions that make a girl flush with glee. Or all the rest. You know.

What’ve I got instead?

Well, there aint no one else around to fall in love with except my own self.

Seems that 2012 is the year for developing a bit of self-love, eh?

Just ask Kerry or Nadine who are all up in the self-love business, too.

It’s good stuff people, I tell ya!

~Svasti

Belated blogiversary and self-expression

Tags

bare necessities, blogiversary, C’est la vie, Energy, Happy blog birthday, Love, mwah, self-expression

Strawberry tea in the teapot of love

First point of business for this post is to acknowledge that I managed to miss my third blogiversary date – 27^th May 2011. It zoomed right on by, as many things are doing at the moment (like writing more regular blog posts).

It’s because I’m busily living in a haze, trying to find my balance and I sure as heck don’t have all the answers yet. Of course, there’s also the excitement of having a brand new niece-ling join us in this world. There was much anticipation leading up to her arrival, and she’s been bewitching us with her cuteness and sweet-mannered charm ever since.

My general preoccupation is doing the bare minimum to get by. Going to work, teaching yoga, going to yoga, reading up on thyroid disorders, making sure I get enough of the right food, sleeping as much as I can, seeing doctors and specialists, seeing my acupuncturist and kinesiologist, getting blood tests and ultrasounds and generally just trying to make sure I’m functional.

I do all of this alone, with no one else to cook meals or run errands for me. It keeps me busy. I don’t always get it right, but I’m conscious of conserving/building my energy stores and keeping my stress levels as low as possible.

Most days of the week, it’s all I can do to get out of bed and not because of depression – every cell in my body is exhausted. It’s often mid-morning before I’m really awake and my system blinks into life.

This is partly why I haven’t been writing very much. My mood and energy levels are so up and down that when I do feel normal, it’s very pleasurable to do nothing much at all and just enjoy feeling somewhat stable.

Then there’s this: right now I get overwhelmed a lot. I regularly feel weak and sad. When I’m not those things, I’m doing what I can to be strong, optimistic, pragmatic, and believe that I can get through all of this. It’s hard not to feel like life really sucks sometimes when I’m facing off with yet another massive hurdle to jump.

Other times I feel blessed. I know in my heart that my path as a teacher is as someone who can share with others from first-hand experience. I know what the dark night of the soul is all about. I understand depression and grief and trauma, body and self-image issues, and I know the hard yards it takes to heal body and mind of dis-ease and imbalance.

Sometimes I go through all of the above in a single day. But then, mood swings are a common symptom of Hashimoto’s. C’est la vie, right?

I don’t want this blog to become the place where I endlessly whinge and moan about what’s going on and how I feel. I could write a lot of very intense and poetic posts on feeling like crap and hoping against hope that I’m going to get better. They’d be full of vivid imagery (two days ago I was actually feeling like my own self-sacrifice on a funeral pyre – dramatic, right?) and you’d write me lovely, supportive comments.

However, I think that’d be a doing myself and my readers a disservice. That’s not to say that I won’t ever write about my bad days any more, but just not all of the time. Because something is shifting in my perspective on suffering – more on that when I’m better able to articulate it.

Anyway, you guys…

Can you believe I’ve been blogging now for three years??!! That aint half-bad as far as milestones go, right? So, hooray!

I was reading about 10 year old Eli Knauer the other day. I realised that had blogs existed when I was ten, I totally would’ve had one.

For me, blogging began right around the time I was diagnosed with PTSD, when I was finally getting the help I needed, or at least I was beginning to. Instinctively, I also knew that self-expression was important. Trauma brings up so much stuff – and not just surrounding the actual trauma itself.

So what am I saying here?

I think being heard and having a place to express whatever needs to come out is an important part of the healing process.

Last weekend I was visiting my sister and nieces, and my eldest niece gave me one of her latest coloured squiggly line drawings. This time she’d written her name in shaky yellow letters with the Y turned upside down (not bad for a four year old!). I praised her efforts and thanked her for making me a drawing. The look on her face was beautiful – she was bursting with pride and happiness. Self-expression. Love.

I think that the suppression of our feelings is where dis-ease with life begins. It’s something we learn to do very early in life – especially if you’re a “too sensitive” type – and our emotion-hoarding grows as we do. It’s unhealthy.

As such, I’m very grateful for my original impulse to start blogging. Sometimes my urge to write burns holes in my fingers and other times I need peace and quiet, even from my own words.

I continue to be awed and amazed by the friendships I’ve made as a result of blogging (and Twittering). People that I now love just as much as any IRL friend. You folks know who you are and if you’re not sure, let me know and I’ll tell you! 😉

And just know that if I ever win, inherit or otherwise obtain large sums of money, I’m gonna fly you all in to a private tropical island for one heck of a blog meet up. There’ll be yoga, meditation, good food, rest, massages, music, walks in nature and cheesey DVDs to watch (Buffy, Charmed, Gilmore Girls, Supernatural, True Blood etc etc).

Until then, I’m sending virtual group hugs out to one and all. Thanks for reading and thank you for becoming a valuable part of my life.

*mwah*

~Svasti xxx

Over the rainbow bridge

Tags

After death state, Cancer, death, Energy, Grandpa, Mantra, Om Shanti, Strange dream, Yoga, Yogis

One of my yogini sisters has been duking it out with cancer for many years now… she’s young, and vital and yet… cancer kept up its slow inevitable march forward.

Being initiated into the same yogic lineage (and I don’t give a toss if you think it’s a load of crap) means energy connections between me and my fellow yogis (as well as family and some close friends) I feel more easily than others… and word came down the line today that she’d passed.

But not before I’d spent most of last night almost comatose on the couch from around 7.30pm, weirdly tired, and completely falling into a deep, deep sleep during the twilight hours…

And this morning before awaking, dreaming a strange dream:

You know those photos where someone’s arm or feet or another body part is in the shot, but that’s all you see of them? The main person who’s featured appears to have dismembered body parts floating in their general vicinity? In my dream I met a man, of Asian appearance, with incredible Photoshop skills and he was systematically removing the unattached limbs from several photos. They looked like they’d never been there. I was amazed he could do that so well…

Morning arrived, I was still exhausted, and inexplicably I felt unwell. So I stayed home from work and around 1.30pm local time, received the text message of her passing.

I knew it was coming; we’d received an email just a couple of days ago.

Those in our yogi school had been asked to send the energy of our practice and prayers to help her through this time… passing of life into death… through the bardos where images clung to as reality in the world we believe to be solid and permanent show up again… and where, if we so choose, we can reside ever after in a dream-like state… much as we do anyway… just another possible way of existing… Who says it’s all ‘like this’ or ‘like that’ anyway?

It’s the after-death state(s) that some yogis and yoginis practice for throughout their lives.

We practice not just to live here and now as humanly and humanely as possible, but to navigate the various stages of letting go – slowly unfurling and shrugging off corporeal shackles to grasp the wider view of what life is and how death actually, isn’t separate, but part of it… beyond the tangible with its rules both societal and physical.

In this world, we humans grieve for what has been, fixating on something that after this moment ‘right now’… no longer ‘is’.

My paternal grandfather’s passing a couple of years ago was like that. With my own father so angry at him for not calling the ambulance (or anyone) when grandpa had clearly felt heart pain for several days before he died alone in his home with the blinds still drawn and his bed not made.

There was a viewing before the service where I was to speak as a proxy for my father who’s voice was not reliable (neither was mine). I slipped in early, before anyone else arrived.

In an impossibly small coffin at the end of a narrow room lay his shrunken form, no longer my twinkly eyed grandpa, so gentle and sweet in his silent ways. He was no longer an inhabitant of this form, if he ever was. If any of us ever are…

Right there is a good philosophical argument for cremation, which is certainly my preference…

As I offered prayer and mantra, I knew I wasn’t praying to this lifeless inanimate flesh but to the surrounding environment… where I felt him to be more real and present than this frozen grandpa-like shape.

Do you start to wail and cry if a person goes to another room in the house? This death is inevitably connected with this life. In the sphere of Immortality, where is the question of death and loss? Nobody is lost to me.
~Sri Anandamayi Ma

Aum
Shanti, Shanti, Shanti!

~Svasti

Child-like wisdom – part 2

Tags

Child, Energy, Healing, Inner child, Love, Photo shoot, Raunchy, Repression, Scotch, Sushumna, Wisdom

Read part 1 first

~~~~~~~~~
Who was this girl, I wondered? I simply didn’t recognise myself. It wasn’t the costumes. This girl seemed confident, relaxed. She looked good. No, she looked great. Sexy.

She doesn’t look how I feel about myself. Who is this person? Did taking off most of my clothes liberate something? So carefree, so in love.

I could see… invisible layers of protection that I usually wore, were missing. Why?

Suddenly wracked with pain, sobs bubbled up from the depths. It was very confusing, I had no idea what was going on.

And then came the voice. Calming and knowing. As though someone was in the room speaking to me.

Go and lie down on your bed said the voice. Do it now. Get comfortable. Its time to look within. That girl in the pictures is you but to be her, you must let go. You must wake up.

Who was I to argue at this point in time?

I surrounded myself with cushions and pillows, like an island.

Here’s what you’re going to do. Close your eyes. Turn them inwards, down. Take them from your head and send them down inside your body. Find the pain. Once you’re there, you need to look at your life from your body’s perspective.

That might sound completely nuts to anyone reading this, but it made some kind of sense to me at the time. So I did just that.

I visualised my eyes coming loose from their sockets and travelling down my spine. Unsurprisingly, they settled in my belly region. Ah, so this is where repressed emotions live (kinda knew that)!

Perhaps I was in some kind of trance by this stage, but I “met”, well… a five year old version of myself! Or something like that.

We held hands, and we replayed the events of my life to date. Not the pleasant things ofcourse. We were here to look at the pain. The things that made me feel small, less than.

They flashed up one after the other. But this time I felt it deeply within my body. No suppression, no isolation. Fear and pain unplugged.

And the five year old me howled. The way a child cries when they think they’re truly alone and abandoned. She was scared and sad and no one heard her cries. Not ever.

I knew it was my job to help her. To make her feel better. To look at each event and say sorry for not noticing before. But I see it now, and let’s get through it together.

Every new scene brought hysteria closer to the fore. There weren’t too many, but enough: heartache, betrayal of trust, fear and disappointment. From each episode, an unresolved piece of the hurt had lodged itself deep within my body. I might not have been aware of it, but five year old me was. Until now, it had been her burden to carry in silence.

Hours went by, but eventually the pain subsided. From the top of my skull to the base of my spine, I distinctly felt like a wind tunnel had been erected. Sushumna. A sense of spaciousness pervaded.

But more than that, I now knew that deep within resided my child-like self, perpetually young and trusting. Wanting to be known, to be heard and loved.

Awe and wonder filled my waking moments, aware I’d experienced some kind of spontaneous energetic healing.

By the way, those photos were a hit! Originally I was going to post them to my love, but soon afterwards I was given instructions to go and pick up a plane ticket and get my ass over to the UK! To deliver them in person and share the last few weeks of his trip whilst his mate did other things.

Interestingly, this experience had a much further reaching impact. A little shy, the first night after arriving, I handed over my pack of photos and an accompanying letter and went to have a shower.

No surprises there – he loved them! But on a deeper level he got it – he could see the transformation I’d told him about.

For as I cast off the buried pain through that night, it seems my heart also grew lighter. More free.

With fewer layers of protection, it was easier to connect to the man I loved. Whilst, erm, sex had always been a good thing, I now seemed to have a whole new level of sensitivity and feeling. He noticed the difference too.

Poetically, I guess you could say my inner castle walls came tumbling down…

I’ve since come to believe that we all have this “inner child”. They represent who we are at a very basic level. They are our innocence, our trust, our belief in good things.

When our inner child constantly deals with repressed pain and suffering we start to close down and feel the need to protect ourselves. In doing so, we cut ourselves off from the world and even those we love. A vicious circle, but one we have the power to do something about.

Ofcourse, after I was assaulted, I had to go through a similar journey. Well, perhaps somewhat different. But nonetheless, I’ve had to shed the accumulation of emotional and physical pain stored in my body. To free my inner five year old once more.

~Svasti

Perhaps mania?

Tags

Change, Energy, Mania, Manic

This was meant to be posted on Thursday night, but somehow it didn’t…sigh…

———————————–

Okay, I think in my last post I said something about a surge of energy.

BUT, I’m beginning to suspect that there’s a whiff of mania in the air actually.

I don’t drink coffee, except for medicinal purposes. But right now I feel as though I’ve got a caffeine IV plugged into my body.

I’ll admit, I don’t know much about mania other than the term ‘manic depression’. I don’t think I suffer from that, but a good friend commented today that I seem to be speaking awfully fast at the moment. Everything is going by in a bit of a blur and I feel so good I’m a little scared.

Thinking back to my last therapy session on Tuesday of this week, that’s when I think this change started. It was a pretty interesting session, where I learned a couple of cool things – like, that it seems I judged myself as an over-reactor. I decided on some level that my response to being assaulted was too extreme. Too much. How very interesting. And liberating. We also briefly touched on the ‘why’ – as in, why I might have had a more intense reaction than perhaps was warranted. All stories for another post.

But I did notice that I started feeling a great deal better later that night, and now two days later I feel wired.

Of course, there’s a huge amount of change going on in my life at the moment too, so perhaps that’s a contributing factor? As in:

• I’m moving out of my flat because my landlords are being capitalist bastards and I can’t afford their bastardry
• In a month I’m going overseas for my yearly yoga retreat (I’m committed to a 7 year program of study in yoga and meditation)
• I’m putting all my stuff in storage and temporarily moving back home with my folks whilst I’m away and then for a short while after I get back
• My work has refused to give me the time off I need for my yoga study retreat – so tomorrow I’m QUITTING

Whilst all of these changes occurring in a short period of time could have left me in a quivering heap in the corner… instead I feel liberated.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t really want to leave my job. But I’ve also decided that my yoga studies are way more important than my job. I have some money saved so I’ll be okay financially. And as a professional in the ‘internet industry’ (I hate that term), I won’t have any trouble getting a new job when I get back.

Resigning from my job has, I think, also contributed to this high energy state I find myself in. Why? Because I’m still paying off some debts, and I’ve always had this plan for managing that. And taking unpaid time off and in fact voluntarily being unemployed didn’t figure into that plan.

However I’m rather excited about this step, because I know its the right thing for me to do – for myself. Thankfully I have a great sister and some great friends and my therapist – who are all supporting me in this step.

Oh, and my good friend L and I did a reading of some funky cards she owns. I think they were called “Ascended Masters” cards or something like that! Anyway, so I pulled three cards and they were all related to change, new projects and basically throwing everything up in the air. I like little signs like that, things that give more affirmation that I’m not doing something insanely stupid.

Anyway, I’m not sure if the way I feel is just a result of liberating a bunch of energy that’s been trapped, or the beginning of a new phase of dealing with depression?

I think a check in with my therapist is probably a good idea!

———————————–

Update (on Saturday)

———————————–

So, I resigned. And it does seem that my mania was temporary and very much related to that act. It was much easier than I thought it was going to be… probably because I have a strong sense that I’m doing the right thing for myself (and just trusting the universe will be there to support me).

After a big sleep in this morning, I feel much calmer thank goodness!