My Confession

Whilst I was doing my awakened meditation on my stationary bike this morning, I mulled over what Spirit has been gently nudging me to see.

As the queen of fair and the champion supporter of the under dog, I had to take a look in the proverbial mirror and weed out some deeper undealt with layers of judgement and criticism.

Oh, I do love life and the way she surreptitiously offers us opportunities to reflect through the eyes of others and by discerning some sense of unease, nudges us to take a closer look within and find that very aspect of ourselves, so beautifully and carefully hidden.

The warning light that I have been detecting in everything around me, is just my centre of love calling for me to wake up and shed another layer of unlove, so that love can flow out of me.

We are all such masters of detecting those attributes we don't love in others. But how often do we spend the time to make the connect and fathom that the very thing that cries reject, resist, disgust, is housed within us? It is love's way of trying to offload the layers of debris it finds itself buried in.

Wow! This is such a simple and yet most profound message.

I now stand before myself and open my heart and what do I see?

I see years of discrimination and judgement, so entrenched by intellectualised justifications. And I know that the only way forward is to offload these outdated opinions thereby allowing the love of God to fill the newly vacated space.

I ask myself, "How in the name of God/Love can I justify any thought of judgement towards any other in how they choose to express their love?"

The answer is of course, "I can't"

If I am created out of love, in the image of love, then I am Love, as we all are. Then how can I not love every single thing about every other being, unconditionally. We all have the same God energy at the centre of our being. It may be that some of us have more blockages and deceptive layers shrouding our most valuable inheritance, but we all have at our core a huge dollop of God's love.

All we need do is start to see and experience life from this centre and not from the eyes of our egos.

So, after beating around the bush, I wish to spill my confession.

"I have been judging others religions."

What a relief it is to shed that baggage I've been carrying for an eternity. How blind I have been as I clung to my prejudiced self righteousness.

In my valiant quest for seeking one love and one God who is the master of all, I chucked the baby out with the bath water. I wrote off the individual pursuits of so many like minded individuals, whose only purpose like mine, is to seek closer intimacy with our creator. Through this arrogance, I created separation from my source and creator and therefore also between myself and others.

My challenge to me this week, is to return to the church of my youth and go and celebrate my new found connect with Love. If I am free of judgements and I am operating from my centre of Love, which I acknowledge is my inherent nature, then I am able to fellowship with and celebrate God's joy with every other person who's desire is the same. It does not matter what form that takes. It doesn't matter that the outer packaging is different. As long as the intent is to access love, then love triumphs and goodwill is done to earth and beyond.

I feel an outpouring of compassion for myself as love fills the vacancy created when judgement left. I have compassion for myself in the knowing that more opportunities will present themselves to unleash my prejudices as I journey to fully access my soul. I forgive myself my double standards and release myself from any attachment to guilt. I am free.

As I embark on this first second of the rest of my awakened journey, it is my intent to walk this Love into every situation, experience and chore I have set before myself this week. As I go about my daily doings I am going to be the LOVE that resides in me.

I am so excited to welcome what new challenges life has in store for me.

May you be blessed with God's richest joy this week

love
Nicolette

Satiate my Soul

What does my soul crave?

It craves intimacy with other souls. It seeks an intimacy, not with words, nor with the physical act of love, but rather a mutual seeing and being. It longs for fellowship and an unwritten understanding with others, a communion of being that is free of guilt or obligations or conditions. An understanding that surpasses cultural bias, education, class or upbringing. It is a connect, a communion without man made laws or prejudices.

What could be more comforting than the reciprocal sharing of unconditional love? I wonder if that is a fantasy that my ego has manufactured or whether it is a state that is indeed possible in this life time. I am convinced that it is this yearning which drives humanity to keep on seeking intimacy in partnership.

I ask myself why we humans seek partnership and the answer I get is "companionship". We try and find someone who is the same as us, but invariably find our opposite, because we're focusing on our outer attributes. We spend the rest of our time together trying to make that other a carbon copy of ourselves, fighting and struggling to align their outer character to ours, forgetting our true nature which is spirit and which is identical. Our egos battle it out as we challenge one another and the power shifts from one to the other. Relentlessly we continue the search for companionship. Often times we stick out turbulent relations just because of the fear of being alone in the material world.

It seems that so much of the stuff of relationships is shrouded by our over controlling egos. And yet somewhere deep down inside myself I detect a glimmer of fire. It is the yearning of my soul. My soul seeks fellowship, closeness, love. This companionship is far deeper than the outer layer of fulfilling loneliness with material gratification, group identity or human presence.

I struggle as I try and put this feeling into words. You see, I don't believe that the loneliness I feel when I am surrounded by people is solely a feeling of separation caused by my ego. I intuit that this loneliness is my soul's inherent need to connect with other souls, the soul of the universe.

I believe we have more than one fellow soul or soul mate. I also believe that the intimacy we seek need not be sexual or physical. Our souls seek to connect with and relate to and merge in union with others who frequent the same space of love and passion for being.

We all seek a significant other or others whom we can confide in about matters close to the heart, someone who won't judge us or feel threatened by our opinions, someone who sees us, who really gets us, someone who doesn't need to convert us, someone who meets us on our spiritual path. We seek company for our soul. When two souls merge, the result is a feeling of warmth and comfort, a sense of relief, a feeling of contentment like when you arrive home. It is like finding your family.

It is this yearning that I believe is at the core of our quest for intimacy with others. It is a pure spiritual need of our souls, which are small portions of God energy. We yearn to anchor ourselves to other pieces of God energy. It is a way of finding ourselves in the collective by piecing together all our souls like a great big puzzle and in so doing, realising our identity which is God. When we gather in union with other like, loving souls we gather power and it feels good. It satiates our souls.

We need to reach out and connect with all our soul pieces. It is not that we need just one intimate soul connection. We need one another. We need us. All our relationships ought to be love relationships and then.....we will feel like we have found our family.

I see you, I feel you, I know you fellow soul

blessings and love

Nicolette

Men Don't read this!

Here's something I just read this morning from Deepak Chopra's 'The Daughters of Joy' -
"Feelings are the echoes of past reactions, which live in us until we call for them."

Well, that provoked a bit of reflection, as I am fully aware of how these past reactions can become the theme of our lives rather than an echo from the past, which would be the correct place for them.

Feelings are like our receptors that help guide us through our sometimes turbulent journeys. I like to refer to them as our navigational systems. Women are brought up and encouraged to express them whereas men are taught to suppress and bottle them.

But whether you find yourself in a male or female body, I am sure you'll identify with what I'm about to say.

We all hide our feelings. We fear expressing them too openly, because we may be ridiculed. We may be judged as too hard, too soft, unprofessional, inappropriate, you name it.

I believe the real job of our feelings is to awaken us to our surroundings and our fellow beings, so that we can better communicate and interact in an interdependent way. We really are all interconnected. We are not independent as we may like to think.

The more I reflect on our ability to hide our feelings, the more I realise that hidden feelings have a way of surfacing in a rather peculiar and yet predictable pattern.

Let's take for example the man who doesn't want to express his feelings of sadness because of his own fear of seeming weak. He is quite likely to develop a pattern of expressing anger as his way of unleashing his emotions. Of course the reaction he is met with will most often then be the opposite reaction to the one he's seeking. It would take someone with intuition to read his fear and offer him the comfort he so desperately seeks.

How often do we repeat the tough love we were taught by our parents, denying ourselves a smidgen of sympathy for self or others. What about those of us who wrestle with self esteem issues and who wear a mask of 'people pleaser'? How many of us have felt the need to put others down to make ourselves feel better? Why do we laugh hysterically to hide our feelings of inadequacy?

We put on a facade of control and self discipline to hide our low self esteem. We wear a mask of anger and warrior to hide feelings of fear and weakness. We wear a happy face to hide our sadness. We show the world our 'devil can care' attitude to hide our feelings of neediness.

Isn't it time we throw off our masks and play with our real emotions and stop trying to second guess  each other's motives?

Wouldn't it be a lot easier to be REAL? Imagine not having to entertain the world with your happy mask or your competent mask or your angry mask or any of your incompetancies.

I'm sure that as we start to discern the masks that others wear, we'll start to recognise the masks we wear.

Anyhow, as I sign off, I wish you a week of listening to your emotions, not the ones on the surface, but the ones lying just beneath, the ones which are calling you to wake up and take note.

Have an awesome week

love
Nicolette

The Jester and the Mind

I've been wrestling with an issue and can't seem to quite get my mind around it. My question to myself is this: "What is the order of superiority between Spirit, personality, ego, mind and emotions?"

Well, there's one thing I am sure of and that is Spirit/consciousness is top of the list. Spirit/love is the non material essence of which we are all made. It is the God essence, our Divine presence which is the parent figure in the relationship or our higher self.

But which of the other four intelligences ranks next? I know that in Yogic theory Ego ranks next, but I wrestle with this because I know that when my ego has me by the little finger, I always manage to rein it back in with my mind. However, I have been reading a new book called 'Emotional Intelligence' by Daniel Goleman and he splits the mind into two; the rational mind and the emotional mind.

Come to think about it, how often when faced with a difficult decision, do we wrestle with following our heads or our hearts? Now I ask you: "Which one most often wins?"
I think you'll agree with me. It is our hearts. So we tend to favour the decisions made by our emotional mind over our rational mind. It seems therefore that these two have a very close relationship. We know that whatever we focus on with our minds determines the emotions that we feel.

Now, my next observation is ego. Ego is the false sense of self, the self that deems itself separate from the soul. Through this perceived separation which is a lie, the ego experiences fear and then searches to complete itself by sourcing love, safety, power, self esteem, etc. from external means. This searching for what inherently lies within all of us keeps us in a constant state of trying to reach the mirage on the horizon. It keeps us in a constant state of emotional neediness.

So ego and emotions are also very closely linked. Well then, which comes first: mind, emotions or ego? And where does personality come in? Personality definitely flavours our thinking. Perhaps it's the wardrobe of the mind or the creative department?

O.k. I think I'm getting somewhere. I know that when I think of a happy memory I can trigger all kinds of happy emotions and likewise when I recall a sad memory I can sometimes induce tears, so my mind would appear to rank before my emotions. In fact if I focus solely on a happy memory I temporarily block out unhappy memories because it is impossible for the mind to focus on a negative and positive thought at the same time.

Now for the confusing one, 'Ego'.

Ego is controllable by utilising the rational mind to realise it's perceived attachment to the emotional mind. Wow! I think I may have got it.

Ego must be part of the mind. It's like the jester. It sits and juggles between the rational and the emotional minds, constantly tipping the scales, Perhaps the three: The rational mind, emotional mind and the ego form a triangle just beneath the Spirit. Let's face it the mind and ego and emotions all seem to be in constant activity and are rather challenging to silence. It is only when they are in Spirit presence that they are silenced. And unless you are a regular student of meditation, your success in stilling the mind, ego and emotions will be quite limited.

Well, those are my thoughts on the matter, I'd be interested to hear what you think.

Hope you have a week of discovering some little gems and sharing them with me

lots of love
Nicolette

Messages from the Matriarchs

I have been reflecting on some of the wisdoms passed down to me by the Matriarchs in my family and thought they were worth sharing.

My late grandmother on my Mom's side, who died at the ripe old age of 102 and a half, almost 2 years ago, was the epitomy of youth, fun and living life to the full. She was a risk taker, living for the day and letting tomorrow take care of itself.

Remembering back to my teens and a conversation I had with my gran, I recall her words of advice. She was telling me that she never felt a day older, even though her physical body was old, but that she cherished the wisdom that came with her maturity. She taught me that although my physical body was going to age, as will all of ours, the maturity and wisdom that I was to gain was something to prize and look forward to. I certainly haven't been disappointed in this regard and eagerly seek more knowledge at the price of my ageing body.

On a separate occasion she shared with me her sadness that she had only ever known one man, sexually speaking, and that was my grandfather from whom she'd been divorced for many years. She envied me growing up in different times where young people were allowed to experience getting to know others in an intimate way before settling down to marriage with one partner.

I could only be grateful that I was not born in the Victorian Era. I am so grateful to have been born into times of equality, democracy, financial freedom, freedom of the press, freedom of self expression, etc. and glad that we no longer have the creed that children are to be seen and not heard. I know that humanity has a long, long way to go, but we forget the origins of our ancestors and we assume the freedom which is now ours.

My late Mother-in-law used to have a favourite saying: "Slowly, slowly, catch the monkey." her words of wisdom were cautioning me to slow down and have patience. I never even heard her whilst she was alive, but now her words hover over me and sink into my psyche and I acknowledge her wisdom.

It's amazing how we are so busy rushing around in our self made dramas, that we often miss the pearls of wisdom in our midst. We record the messages we're hearing for a later time, a time when we are ready to hear them, perhaps for a time when we've weathered some more storms and emerged a bit wiser from our own experience. Why is it that we are unable to learn that which we are taught, prefering to learn it for ourselves?

My late Mom left me with some of the most valuable life lessons. The most profound and true was that we need to listen to our inner voice and always follow its lead, as then we will always know what the right course of action is. Our hearts never lie.

She shared that it was always best to be flexible and let each day unfold in its own way, without trying to resist and control it, allowing oneself the pleasure of the adventure. When we learn to accept each day as a fresh new opportunity, we become more intuitive and are able to read the signs and can access greater peace.

I am ever grateful to these beautiful women for their mature wise words. I know that part of them resides in me and that I too will have opportunity to impart wisdom to my children and their children in time to come.

What a beautiful gift the circle of life is.

Wishing you a week of insights

love
Nicolette