I’m a very visual person, especially when it comes to media like movies or images on the computer. I find hours can disappear fast as water down the plug-hole as I become totally immersed in looking through photos and artwork on the internet. Ask me to find an image on a theme I like and I’m kept entertained for hours, especially if it’s nature! That’s what happened when I had decided I needed a new website for my tantra work, One Heart Tantra. I was currently using a theme of a woman holding a red rose but wanted a change whilst still using a floral theme. I had settled on Orchids as my main theme, as I find them so exquisitely beautiful.
I LOVE nature and am constantly inspired by what I see, feel and interact with, whether that be trees, rocks, pieces of dead wood, stones, plants, water, animals, insects and of course, flowers. My task for the site was to find several orchid pictures. I’d already located the main picture, but I needed these for the 8-10 individual pages on the website.
So here I was, trawling through Google searches for Orchid photographs for hours over a three-day period. I knew it was obsessive behaviour; I could have been far more efficient with my time but I was totally hooked on these orchids. Continue reading →
“If your flame of awareness is burning bright, you will know that sex is not just sex. Sex is the outermost layer; deep inside is love, and even deeper is prayer, and deepest is God himself. Sex can become a cosmic experience; then it is tantra.” – Osho
Beyond our mind-made labels of who we think we are as sexual or spiritual entities, beyond our concepts of sexuality of straight, bi, gay or any other identification we have, is Love. Osho knew this and elegantly shared it in the quote above.
To know thyself as Love, both as an individual and as the One, is the realisation we long for, even we do not yet know it.
It takes a lot of self-trust and courage to really let go into ecstasy – and someone to hold their own heart-space as they give unconditionally to you. Continue reading →
In July 2004 I was staying on Bainbridge Island, WA as part of a 2 week trip I was making to be with my new partner Isaac. My mother had shortly passed and this trip had been postponed a couple of weeks so I could go to her funeral. It was my first time on Bainbridge and we stayed a couple of nights with a dear friend of Isaac’s, Sara, who he had met in serendipitous circumstances. They hadn’t long known each other and yet were old soul friends who felt a familiar and loving connection with each other at a far deeper level than the few times they had spent together would normally suggest. Between Sara and I there was a deep connection too which beyond the personality level that I was open to knowing more about. Continue reading →
“There is a fountain inside you. Don’t walk around with an empty bucket.”
Truth expressed beautifully.
Yet I notice that we don’t actually walk around with an empty bucket, for that is far too painful for most people to do. In fact, we so hate that feeling of emptiness we will do anything to avoid it. We find anything and everything to fill ourselves up with – and if we can’t find something that works, we will invent it! How creative we are at a-void-dance!
Addictions are birthed from this compulsion to fill ourselves up, to avoid feeling the void we believe is within us. Yet rarely does it feel good for long; that portion of chips on the side used to fulfill us for far longer… that new phone should have made us feel much happier … now we are like spoiled children at Christmas or birthdays and our gratification is very short lived.
Gratification is not as gratifying as it used to be!
Life experience!
We have begun to realise that our buckets have a hole in them and no amount of effort to fill from outside will provide lasting fullness (fulfillment). We are facing a hopeless situation as no matter how we try to fix things we find we are thwarted at every move. Eventually we begin to understand that there is no real workable solution to this ‘problem’ – there’s a song that describes this well.
“There’s a Hole in My Bucket” is a children’s song. The song is based on a dialogue about a leaky bucket between two characters, Henry and Liza. The song describes a deadlock situation: Henry has got a leaky bucket, and Liza tells him to repair it. But to fix the leaky bucket, he needs straw. To cut the straw, he needs a knife. To sharpen the knife, he needs to wet the sharpening stone. To wet the stone, he needs water. However, when Henry asks how to get the water, Liza’s answer is “in a bucket”. It is implied that only one bucket is available — the leaky one, which, if it could carry water, would not need repairing in the first place (from Wikipedia).
Sooner or later the pain of hopelessness will dawn upon us and the frustration of trying to fill the bucket will cause us to stop and take account of what is happening in our lives; we find ourselves in a place of not knowing, of surrender to the situation and circumstances of life that we are unable to change by our own mechanisms. Without this pain we are rarely motivated to look inside. Unless we feel it deeply we continue to look outside ourselves for salvation, be in relationship with another, food, more toys or a better place to live… etcetera, and to the point of ad nauseum! This is the point where we can choose though – we can choose to turn our gaze inwards and look within to fill the need for that gratification. It’s not a quick fix though – we won’t find any instant gratification because that is the realm of the subtle and imaginal so it will take some adjustment and process to appreciate the gifts here. It’s like having tabasco chili sauce on all your food and then stopping and eating your food without it. In the beginning you are not going to taste much and it will take a while for your taste buds to appreciate the natural flavour of food. Or having fireworks in the sky every night and then one day the fireworks stop and we are left with nothing but natural sounds and sights. It would feel strange and empty but sooner or later your ears and eyes would begin to notice things we couldn’t hear or see before and that increases day by day – we would soon notice that even those sounds and sights you thought were subtle and gross and you become aware of finer and finer sounds and experiences in the still quietude.
It’s the same when we turn our gaze away from the distractions. It is a deep alchemical process of self-care; – a journey into the unknown, through which we begin to understand and know ourselves as our own saviour. Many times we will circle around and make this journey and each time we go deeper into ourselves we find our blocks and patterns repeating themselves and have to let go again and again, and usually this process is not pain-free but because the pain of resisting is now greater, we choose the sensible option and become sensitive to our self. Interestingly, the Italian word for’ sensitive’ is ‘sensible’. Language reveals so much if we just look at it from a slightly different slant.
All this looking outside and looking inside can be exhausting! We are swinging from one extreme to the other as balance will happen. It can help to make the swings shorter so that the balancing act does not create so many wild roller coaster experiences. Developing a daily practice of taking time for relaxing, for being quiet, meditation or time alone is essential. Remember, meditation does not have to look like the traditional way of sitting down and trying to still the mind (something I’ve struggled with for years). Meditation can be active and this would be far more effective than getting frustrated with failure at lotus position ‘I’m so peaceful’ type of thing when you clearly aren’t. Try breath exercises if you are like this.
Simple things work best and you are far more likely to continue with them if they are not onerous. Taking 5 minutes to simply breathe and tune into your heart (Spirit) can be done anywhere, anytime, I find it helpful to do this when I get into my car and before driving off – even something so short will lead to a deeper and more peaceful existence. Connecting, walking in nature, especially around plants and trees has far more benefit than most people would give credit for. The effects are incremental and so if it doesn’t feel like you’re getting much benefit from it, try doing it for a few weeks and then stop and you will soon notice how less good you feel about yourself.
Nature is the best ways to remind us of our nature. Obvious really yet so many dismiss it because it doesn’t fill that void, it is too quiet and silent without enough distractions – maybe just plug the ears with music instead of feeling that emptiness! If we can just bear the discomfort for long enough we will become so much better at being human. We need to stop trying to avoid the un-comfortableness and just do something for ourselves – even 5-10 minutes makes a huge difference.
It is not what you do or how good you are at doing it. It is doing it that counts.
Seriously, a lot of folk get caught up with the perfection thing and give up in frustration because it’s not working the way they think it should. But that’s a common mistake because it’s not what or how well you can do your meditation or relaxation or breathwork that’s important as the most powerful part of doing it is the pure intention for self-care and carrying through with the physical doing-ness of it. That is by far the greatest part of any self-care practice. Once you start to practice self-care, the Universe shows up and creates more self-care and love for you, so it doesn’t matter in the slightest how perfect you now are at your breathwork exercises! The benefit is from your intention, and from your attention to whatever pulls you out of the present moment. Within this is the key to understanding our true nature, to knowing oneself.
There is also a deep wisdom to understanding that we do not need to repair our bucket, that we do not even need to fill it because we are never empty, we do not have a bucket, nor are we something to be filled, for it would be closer to the truth to say that we are simultaneously both the container and the water that fills it. We are not here to go with the flow, but to BE the flow. To know ourselves as the flow itself. There is not a moment when we are not the Source of All, so there cannot be a moment when we are empty of that – it just seems to be so sometimes. “There is a fountain inside of you” – well yes, because you are the fountain itself! Cease the activity of trying to fill up something that does not exist and you will know thyself to be the existence of All That Is.
I think we are meant to have a hole – we are holy (whole) exactly as we are.
As a dolphin once said to me “Turn yourself inside out Lynn”. We could not do this if we were not a hole. We are designed to be constantly turning inside out and outside in. There is nothing to fill. This is a source for contemplation, perhaps something to ponder on during a nice walk through the woods.
Be in peace, be in Love.
Blessings, Lynn.
A diagram of a tube torus – said to be the shape of consciousness itself. For more on that visit:
I’m currently taking a longish break away from home and at the moment I’m on Bainbridge Island which is one of the islands in the Puget Sound and close to Seattle, WA. It’s stunningly gorgeous here, a little gem of an island far removed from the usual mainland USA despite it being very close geographically. It’s a little sanctuary, and in fact, I was told it was only used by the native Indian women and men did not set foot upon the island as it was deemed to be the place where women would go for their menstruation periods, and other feminine transformational & transitional experiences.
Apparently the only time men would come upon this island was for their first sexual initiation, which was a sacred rite conducted by elder woman for the young men. How true any of this is I’m not sure, though I must say the island is certainly having an effect on me; I feel very held here and have deepened my appreciation and gratitude for our Mother and all the She represents to us.
Although this is not Eugene, he looks just like this.
As I’m writing this at 2pm on a sunny afternoon, there is a young male deer in the garden at the home I’m staying in – he seems quite unperturbed by my presence and I am able to go outside and just sit observing him. I’ve called him Eugene in honour of an animal totem vision I had many years ago in which I was approached by a young fawn, and on asking his name, he replied Eugene – which at the time I did think was rather unusual!
This is my second visit to Bainbridge Island, I was first here back in 2004 when I was over from Scotland visiting my beloved Isaac in July of that year. We were doing a road trip, meeting some dear friends of his that he wanted me to meet. One of those was Sara. We visited with her for a couple of days and on our departure day we were sitting having breakfast at the Streamliner diner in Winslow, the main town on Bainbridge.
After we had eaten, Isaac and Sara were chatting away and I allowed myself to drift off into a lovely soft state of consciousness (this was easy as I was almost constantly in a state of bliss the whole time on that that trip). My eyes settled on a photograph picture on the wall of an American bald eagle. The photo was a close up of the bird’s head and shoulders, in semi profile.
This picture here is similar in energy though the pose is different – the one in the diner showed more of it’s shoulders and that gave me a different perspective. I’ve always loved eagles and hawks, and whilst I see a fair number of hawks, my sightings of eagles have been limited to once or twice in Scotland where I’ve golden eagles, and also on a skiing trip in Nevada. I once saw a sea eagle which was amazing.
Awesome Bald Eagle!
The photo drew me in and I was totally absorbed. I began to feel that the bird was actually right there in the diner, and the sounds of the diner and that of Isaac and Sula chatting faded into the background. I began to experience myself as the bird. I could feel the haughty magnificence of the eagle, its detached attitude, or more like, its non-attached nature. I could feel the way my head moved on my neck, like stretching your head up and shoulders down and swivelling the head around. Not a human body awareness but an eagle’s. I felt the eagle’s strength and its ability to fly so powerfully and see from such a great distance. Again, I felt the non-attached sovereign regal haughtiness; not from it feeling superior to anything but simply its non-emotional nature, and it was not a cruel feeling. I could see from such a high perspective, so totally non-attached to the land, so far above it. I felt incredible power course through my body and felt my eyes shoot out intense lightning like energy that was so piercing in its crystal clear clarity.
At the same time, I was also observing my experience and was totally amazed at it all, it was so fascinating to be able to experience even a little of what it was to be an eagle. I was literally awestruck and as I came out of the experience I was not able to share it with Isaac and Sula so intense that it was. I had to take some time to myself in the washroom where I shed some tears at the sheer beauty of this bird and thanked the Source of Creation for my experience, and for gifting us the incredible diversity of Earth’s nature.
Eye of a young maleRegal attitude
I had another eagle experience later on that road trip whilst we were driving down from spending a few hours up Mt Shasta in California. I was on the look for chipmunks (my God, how cute are they – I want one) which we don’t have in the UK and so didn’t notice a golden eagle soaring above. It swooped down and flew right over our car; Isaac saw it and said it was no more than a few feet above us. Though I didn’t actually see it, I could feel it’s HUGE presence and looked up and over at Isaac and said in awe “What on earth was that?”
To this day, when I tune in or see eagles, I can still feel some of that ‘eagle-ness’ in my body. My understanding of what happened was that I ‘merged’ energetically with the eagle or spirit of eagle and that anyone can do this with practise and intention. It happened spontaneously for me at that time and has not happened since with eagles, though it has with other life intelligence, such as flowers, or animals, insects etc. and this has happened in various differing ways, but always from a sense of total absorption and love, of what I now call “Beholding the Beloved”. I wonder also if there was a memory of shape-shifting in this experience, and if you wish to know more about what I mean I invite you to read the next part of the story which happened as we travelled down the Interstate 5 to Oregon. Animals; Merging and Shape Shifting ~ July 2004 ~ Pacific North West USA
Where Angels Fear to Tread? 