My Deepest Fear

Because I am paying greater attention and because I am consciously practising more patience now, I am more easily able to hear the answers to my questions.

My question: "Why do I find it so hard to have compassion for those whom I perceive to be unwilling to help themselves?" and "Why do these particular people seem to epitomise the matador with the red flag, challenging me to charge and confront?"

It's funny what a bit of reflection can produce. No sooner had I written the first question down, did the first answer jump out at me.

Who am I to say that these people are not willing to help themselves. That is my judgemental perception. Perhaps they are just in the dark with this particular impediment as we all are with our particular foibles. We can so easily see where others miss opportunities, but invariably we don't see our own missed opportunities.

On digging deeper, I find myself exposing 'My deepest Fear'.

Oh my Gosh! I am so terrified of ever becoming dependent, needy, clingy, helpless, that I have bound these fears up so tight and buried them deep within my facade of capability and independence and strength, blah, blah, blah...

Oh my word. How these things will continue to resurface and confront us until we awaken and look into the proverbial mirror and see the very thing we are terrified of acknowledging. Why didn't I see it before? Because I didn't want to consider myself as weak and terrified of anything. Wow! I have just exposed my deepest, darkest fear and that is terrifying.

So I ask myself: "What is the worst that could happen to me?"
Answer: "I could land up in a wheelchair and have to depend on others"
Question: "How would I handle having to depend on others?"
Answer: "With patience and gratitude and humility"
Question: "Would having to depend on others affect who I am?"
Answer: "Absolutely not. I am still me, spirit. If my earth suit malfunctions, it doesn't affect my soul. I would obviously have to adapt to different lifestyle choices. I would follow the path that then opened up for me. But would I give up? Would I become pathetic? No."
Question: "Am I still scared?"
Answer: "Not so much."
Question: "How does my new found discovery change my view of the above?"
Answer: "I don't need to stare at my weakness any more when I encounter a challenged person, because I have exposed it and it has diminished now. I am no longer controlled by fear. I no longer see the needy as manipulative, but rather as humble, patient and grateful."

Having confronted my fear, it already seems to be losing its power over me. There is absolutely nothing to fear except 'fear' itself. Actually my fear was more of the unknown and now that it is exposed it seems rather as if I had allowed myself to be controlled by a deception. Isn't it funny how when we try and resist something or hide it, it becomes a festering boil that wants to rupture and force its way to the surface.

Wow! I learnt so much from that little exercise of patience and reflection.
If we don't address our fears and root them out, they control us and they grow out of proportion.
We need to continually remind ourselves that we are much, much more than our physical experiences. We are the teacher/ observer/ spirit/ consciousness that prevails in the midst of all the fracas and chaos we sometimes create for ourselves.

Well, my reflection for awakened meditation this week will be to continue to remind myself that:
I am more than I appear to be
I am spirit
I am love
I draw from my bottomless well of love
And in the midst of all this 'love consciousness', fear evaporates
I am empowered by knowledge
I am free from silly attachments to feelings of fear, which don't exist except in my imagination as a suggestion of my ego.
I embrace consciousness and all it exposes

In deep gratitude and humility
I bid you an enlightened week

love
Nicolette

My Downfall

Today I recognised one of my Achilles heels, so to speak. I have been receiving messages about this particular irksome quality for quite some time and really, really not taking heed of the signs, even though I am a great believer in signs and messages from nature, even billboards and especially our friends and family.

A week ago I was listening to the playback on my digital voice recorder and discovered a message I recorded more than a year ago. The message was: "Why is patience so important? Because it makes you pay attention."

I can't even remember the source of that quote, but something must have resonated with me, for me to have recorded the message.

Now today I arrived rather agitated at a client's house, because the security guard had ignored me as I waited impatiently outside on the street until he deemed it appropriate to handle my request to be let in. On relaying the story to Stacey, I was tactfully informed that I am rather impatient and as is typical of a modern-minded, city person, I want results and I want them now. I couldn't argue the point, as I am guilty as charged and her comment which was completely honest caused me to pay attention.

After spending some wonderful time catching up and lunching with my friend, Nianell, I picked up a book I had lent her some time ago, and opening it at a random place, I read Osho's words from 'Yoga The Science of the Soul', "Yoga says that the more you are impatient, the more time will be needed for your transformation. The more you are in a hurry, the more you will be delayed."

O.k. NOW, universe, you have MY ATTENTION!

Osho goes on to say: "The less you are in a hurry, the earlier will be the results. This very moment the thing can happen because it is not a question of time; it is a question of the quality of your mind. Infinite patience... Simply not hankering for results gives you much depth. Hurry makes you shallow... You have to drop into it, not to reach anywhere. And the dropping in is possible only if you are totally patient. The modern mind is constantly obsessed with the future, with the result, not with the here and now. Wherever you are, in that moment enjoy it without asking for the future. This is patience, absolute patience!"

Well, I don't know about you, but I am always dancing somewhere between overly excited about the future and in fear of running out of time to do all that I still have to do. I seem to most often be "asking for the future" as Osho puts it, instead of really being fully present in the now. I constantly find myself rushing the present because there are perceived more important issues to be addressed at a time, that as of now, doesn't exist except in my imagination.

I am rushing the present and producing inferior quality instead of slowing down and sinking into my presence and finding the stillness and depth of my being.

On examination of the statistics, I find myself trying to be the dancer, instead of allowing life to dance me. I am so busy looking for opportunities to help people, that I probably run them over in my haste.

I am now laughing at myself and the absurdity of the above statement which is not a joke at all.

I am listening now. I am still. I am paying attention and I know that the universe will now highlight for me every opportunity to notice myself when I repeatedly fall prey to this pattern and I will most likely start to observe the pattern in those around me as I have become sensitised to this lesson.

My dance for this week is patience and surrender, because I believe the two go hand-in-hand. And as I know myself so well, the lesson is going to be: To have patience with myself, for not getting it right the first time around. Ha, ha, ha...

Wishing you a week of hearing your messages and surrendering to your highest will.

love
Nicolette



















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There is no time like the NOW.

 

You're Not in Heaven Yet

Darren brought up some questions at my talk on Wednesday night and I thought them deserving of further expansion and elaboration.

Question: “Do we have to identify every incident of guilt and shame in our lives and forgive it to be free of it? Or do you have to do it collectively? I do it all the time but I don’t feel that I have really forgiven myself. Why?”

Answer: “No, you don’t have to itemise each and every incidence, only if it is causing you to remain fixated in self recriminations and self loathing. If it is robbing you of the pleasure of living in presence and truly experiencing the freshness of every never to be repeated moment, if you are stuck in the false belief that you are somehow attached to your resultant emotions and feelings that were initiated by a past event, then you need to go back and address the issues and bring them to the light of consciousness. You need to sit with the guilt, name it and understand where it is coming from. You will see when you bring it to the light and expose it for what it is, that your judging yourself as guilty and shameful is self-imposed. There are no wrong or right choices. We get to choose, like or dislike our choices and make different choices the next time around. It’s as simple as that. The ego will con us into believing that our stories, our guilt and shame somehow serve us, which we know when we confront it, is the biggest lie.

We need to die to the past and leave what happened behind us. We need to live in the present. We don’t want to take this baggage with us on our journey going forward, do we? We want to be free.”

Question: “So we just determined how crafty the ego is. It’s going to keep us in bondage. Dying to it? The ego’s not going to let itself die?”

Answer: “What is ego? Isn’t ego just a branch of our minds, an assumed sense of self which is based on how we measure up to others? We measure ourselves by the clothes we wear, our possessions, how well we perform, whether we are liked, praised, respected by others and even ourselves. We need to go within ourselves and be the presence that we are as the backdrop to our lives. We need to get to the root of our essence which is spirit and that is pure, without blemish. Our spirit is not concerned about what car we drive or job we do. We need to derobe ourselves of all our earthly clutter and realise that we are perfect just as we are.  We need to manage our egos with our minds. Our egos are like unruly, ill disciplined children. All we need do is constantly expose the ego’s misperceptions. Our ego doesn’t rule us. We don’t need to heed the constant barrage of misinformation it projects. We are way above that. We have the power over our minds and whether we choose to buy into the ego’s lies or not. You’ve personified the ego into a kind of ‘devil’, who is going to fight us to the death. I perceive ego as the negative side of our minds. We get to die it off by our choices, by facing our truth and ignoring its constant barrage of fear-based perceptions and constantly challenging ourselves to focus on the here and now. You can’t have the negative and positive portals of the brain open at the same time, so by focusing on the positive we shut out the negative. By focusing on the present, we shut out the voice of the ego.

I firmly believe that we need to be focusing on training and disciplining our minds and stop entertaining the advertorials from the ego department. We should start to skip over them like we do with the TV remote and focus just on the main movie which is our journey.”

Question: “Is it o.k. to feel angry at times, to feel rejection, to feel these human elements?”

Answer: “Absolutely! We are spiritual beings having a human, physical experience so that we can entertain, feel, express all range of emotions and as a result thereof, make choices to work these emotions into a place of better comfort for ourselves. No kid ever experienced what hot was until they felt the burn on their skin. You can study every manual on raising a child, but you only learn life’s lessons when you actually have a kid of your own and have to face the puke, the shitty nappies, the battles of will, the pain of watching them learn it for themselves. How can you not feel pain and sufferance when someone you love is injured? It is all part of the process. When we feel anger that someone close to us has been hurt, it is our opportunity to address whether we choose to allow our emotions to rule us or whether we take responsibility for other choices. Our negative emotions and feelings are as much a part of the sum total of who we are as our positive emotions. Our shadow side is what balances us and gives us substance.”

Question: “If you’re living in the now, then you don’t know what anger feels like, you don’t know what rejection and all those feelings are. The fact that you let it go in the past, means that you don’t know what it means, what it feels like?”

Answer: “I absolutely disagree. Our evolution into the now was a process. It is built on our very experiences. That is the foundation of what we have become. The fact that we have become aware of our choices to live in the present and die to our pasts is testimony to the fact that we have visited with anger, rejection, etc. and decided that these emotions no longer serve us. We go through the motions of feeling and expressing anger and then we make the conscious choice to discard it as it doesn’t serve us to carry it in our hand luggage.  When we forgive our pasts, we don’t forget them. We choose not to dwell on them and continue to revisit a time that no longer exists except in our imaginations. By living in the ‘Now’, we are making a conscious and educated choice to experience fully the live show. Why would we choose to watch our whole lives via PVR? That is exactly what I was referring to in last week’s blog about living proactively or defensively. Living in the now is about empowerment through awakened choice. You cannot be empowered if you only have half the emotions available to you. Living in the ‘Now’ is an awakened state of conscious living, being empowered by the freedom of choice and making that choice out of garnered wisdom without fear or judgement or guilt.”

Well, all that said, I wish you a prosperous week of self discovery and growth, refining and fine tuning your choices as you evolve on your path to enlightenment.

Love you lots
Nicolette
www.nicolettelodge.blogspot.com

The Game of Life

I watched the movie, 'Red Riding Hood' last night which was a wonderful piece of fantasy. I love fantasy because it gives ourselves the chance to expand reality to way larger than life and almost analyse it through a magnifying glass.

The movie tells the story of a village which is being rampaged by a werewolf and wherein the villagers go about hunting the wolf and killing other innocent real wolves in the process. Many of the villagers are killed, but when one of them survives the bite of the werewolf, they are tragically sacrificed by their own, for fear of the attacked inheriting the traits of the werewolf and becoming evil like him, thereby perpetuating the cycle. The werewolf turns out to be the heroine's father and in the last few minutes of the movie, Red Riding Hood slays her dad only to discover that he has bitten her lover. She is faced with the choice of whether to kill her lover and lose her love or let him be. The movie ends with Red Riding Hood letting him go free and her moving to the outskirts of the village where she lives a semi reclusive life.

For me, the resounding feeling at the end of the movie was one of awakening to the fact that humankind is so preoccupied with eliminating evil from their midst, that so much quality, innocence, peace and love is lost in the process. Evil is thought of as a contaminant that must be weeded out and destroyed for ever. So much energy is given to the illusion of a world free of crime and evil, that the total reality is we land up living in a realm of fear, judgement, revenge seeking and justice.

We live in a world of crime prevention, corporal punishment, laws and legalities.

I question myself; "What war was ever resolved by fighting war with more war?" "How could we ever perceive of a perfect society which contains not even a trace of evil?"

Evil will remain because it creates so much opportunity for personal growth. Each of us needs the opportunity to choose the paths of selfish desire, self fulfilment, etc to discover the consequences of our choices.

To expect a perfect world, free of evil, would be to expect a child to follow the advice of their parents and never touch the hot plate, only eat healthy food, wear sensible clothes, never try cigarettes or alcohol. I think you get my point.

I was wondering if we gave as much energy to LOVE as we do to the resistance to evil, what would be the effect on our planet?

I kind of see life as a great game of rugby. You can play an attacking game or a defending game. Which game do you choose to play? I certainly prefer to watch a game where the ball flows and moves with lots of passing between the players and positive energy. Those games in which the defending side buffer one tackle after the next and the whistle is blown repetitively for penalties, are frustrating and painstaking.

The attacking game is like sowing love and trust and courage. The defending game is like the walk of fear, judgement and second guessing everyone else's moves. When your team go out there with momentum and courageously duck and dive between the walls of defence, with the intent of getting to the try line, the crowd is jubilant. Love is in the air.

Somehow, when we witness our team playing on the back foot, and just going for tackle after tackle, the game has a negative connotation to it. No tries are ever converted in a game of defence only. You have got to have the intent and the accompanying energy and commitment to get up there and put it over the line.

So I conclude that in the 'Game of Life', more good would come of earth if we were to focus on LOVE. If we just stopped giving so much time and energy to resisting evil (which is negative) and focused our attention on loving (which is positive), war would eventually run its course and lose its meaning. After all war can't perpetuate itself unless it has resistance. And with resistance and the butting of heads we're never going anywhere as the human race.

So, I say: "Make love not war!"

Have a great week
and remember loving starts with SELF

lots of love and oodles more
Nicolette

Just a reminder of my next talk on, ‘Forgiveness – The Key’, at Lisa Heath’s ‘The Heart of Yoga’, next Wednesday night

If you are hanging onto revenge, bitterness, unforgiveness or any unresolved conflicts, then this empowering talk is the one for you.

I will share from my own personal life experience and teach you a step-by-step approach to practically remove the shackles of unforgiveness once and for all from your life. 

Yes, we all know that we have to say; “I forgive you”, but for how many of us does that become a reality? It is easy to talk the talk, but I will show you how you can walk the talk and move forward with your lives.  I will show you one of the keys to unlocking unhappiness and banishing it from your life forever. 

If you are called to be there, drop me a mail to confirm your place or you can contact Lisa on 082 565-8033

Talk                                          Forgiveness - the Key

When                                      Wednesday 9 May

Where                                    The Heart of Yoga

                                                  258 Kessel St

                                                  Fairland

Time                                        18h45 for 19h00 til 21h00

Cost                                         R 70.00

What to bring                      Cushion or yoga mat and blanket (We’re sitting on the floor, so be warm)

See you there 

Love

Nicolette

nickel@global.co.za

083 690-9698