(Un) healthy Habits

This morning was the first I'd woken up without the freedom to surf. I am far away from my beachside home in the country. I am hundreds kilometres from the ocean and without a computer or Internet access. In case you didn't know, I don't surf at the beach, I surf on the couch. It is the Internet surfing I missed this morning, the comfort of knowing that the world (wide web) is right there at my fingertips. They say that the first step to healing from an addiction is to admit that you have one first. I will do no such thing as to admit I am addicted to the Internet, I just find it difficult to go without it for long (a few hours).

This morning as I dealt with the cold harsh reality that I was without computer or iphone access all sorts of feelings and thoughts crept in. 'In this modern day how is it that there is not one single computer available to me?' my mind questioned. 'If I had brought my laptop I would never have landed myself in this situation' I thought feeling annoyed. This was followed by an uncomfortable sense of emptyness and slight agitation. I wished I could fill the void with Twitter, checking e-mails and blogging. I wanted to be able to distract myself from the feelings. Then a horrifying thought emerged 'I might have to sit with this feeling of emptyness because I don't have anything to fix it'. I also realised that my number one tool for avoidance of writing my morning pages had been stripped from me.

I recently wrote about morning pages and my intention to begin a creative exploration process with the book 'The Artist's Way'. I am officially on day 3 of the 12 week course. One of the main components involves the practice of writing 3 pages of uncensored stream of consciousness writing every single morning upon waking.  Not once yet have I undertaken this task in the AM hours.

Today, with nothing available to distract me, other than Mel and Kochie (let's be honest, that ain't any kind of excuse) I turned to my empty page and began to write. Once I had begun it felt good and I felt mighty proud of myself for acheiving the seemingly unnatainable- morning pages being written in the morning. Upon finishing the pages I felt a little bit inspired to consider my Artist's Date, which is the second regular task that is to be undertaken each week as a part of the course. This date is to be a date with your 'inner child' the playful part of you that enjoys new adventures, creative pursuits and just having fun. I came to realise that this date would need to happen while I'm here in the country, in a very small town. I wondered what on earth I could do, a few ideas began to flow about going fossicking through the op shops and antique store in town (I think there is still an antiques store). I'm not yet sure if this will be my date, I am wondering how I will fill 2 whole hours with the pursuit.

So I had completed the morning pages and still had no Internet at 10am, I decided to flick through some of my Mum's Country Style type magazines and cut out some clippings of the kind of elements I would like to have make up my own home one day. I found it really inspiring and alot of fun, I still feel the excitement bubbling up now when I think about my future balinese style landscaped garden.



My future garden

I quickly came to realise that thanks to my Mum's computer blowing up and her taking the laptop to work for a presentation I had been gifted with the opportunity to experience my morning differently. To take time out to nurture my creative self and think outisde the square (latpop). Doing things differently in the morning is something I've been thinking about for a while, but I was stuck, completely stuck in the rut of beginning my day online and unable to break the habit. I've been so aware of this for such a long time now, but the awareness itself of the habit had not broken it. Today I got a glimpse of what is underlying the habit, how this routine has served to help me avoid 'being with' my self in the morning and enjoying creative time. Tomorrow the Internet will be available to me in the morning, let's see what happens.

Synchronicity

In the past few days I have taken up the challenge of 'morning pages'. The concept of 'morning pages' comes from Julia Cameron's 'The Artists Way' book. The book came highly recommended recently from a very wise and knowledgable woman who did a sacred contract reading for me. 'A what?' you might ask, never mind I'd never really heard of such a thing either. However, when my naturopath mentioned that I might benefit from one of these readings I immediately recognised the words 'sacred contract', because I have been slowly reading Caroline Myss's book 'Sacred Contracts'. It seemed like synchronicity at play when the concept came up during my Naturopathy consultation. My naturopath, Donna, explained that the woman she wanted me to have the reading with had studied with Caroline Myss herself. By that stage I was amazed and convinced I needed to go for the reading.

A sacred contracts archetypal chart is not an easy experience to explain. The best I can do in short is that it was very accurate and mind blowing. The easiest way to explain it is to say that it is based on archetypes and how they're playing out in your life. The archetypes are used as a metaphor for various aspects of the Self and the psyche and how they help and hinder your progress. The reading also looks at the lessons you're currently learning and the ways in which you might be doing so. Yes, ill health did indeed come up in the reading, Barb who was reading for me didn't know anything about me or my 'story'.

So upon completion of the reading Barb strongly suggested I open up more to my creative side, which would in turn allow me to hear my intuition more strongly. She told me to get Julia Cameron's book 'The artists way'. The book is a 12 week program/process for opening up to your creativity and exploring it, it is meant to help unblock the blocks. I have felt huge resistance to the process, which means that if I do follow through with it, it will most likely be awesome! It's just the saboteur or 'inner child' at play, resisting, because it's not sure what's going to happen- and that's scary for a child.

So I'm on day 3 of my morning pages commitment and I have done these 'morning pages' twice, once in the evening and once in the afternoon. Next step is to actually do them in the morning. The task is automatic writing, for 3 pages. It does not matter what you write, just that you do. You must write whatever comes to mind, just let it flow. It's helping to rid the mind of fears and blocks that come up, getting them out of the way in the morning, before they grab hold and take your power during the rest of the day.

I must say that once I get started I enjoy the process and have even had some great insights; the process truly does take you down paths you least expect. You can ask questions in the writing, allowing yourself to open up to your subconscious mind/intuition and hear unfiltered honest answers. I draw a parallel between the morning pages and exercise, I often resist putting runners on for a walk, but once I'm doing it I think 'tomorrow I will look forward to this, I don't know why I think I don't enjoy it'. Tomorrow never comes...in that sense. That may just be because (as Eckhart Tolle says) 'the time is always now'.

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The best place to see the light is in the dark

'Just when I could bear it no longer came something amazing- clarity, hope and a vision of something bright and wonderful, something that makes my heart flutter.'

I was offended a few weeks ago when a certain practitioner referred to my 'inner turmoil' during a session, which he suggested affects my energy flow and essentially my well-being. I didn't blame him for saying it, I was just confronted by the words. He said it so matter of fact, like it was plain to see. No one has ever said such a thing to me, well not so directly. It took about three weeks for me to come to terms with it; I didn't dwell on it, but it sat uncomfortably. The way in which I eventually came to terms with his comment involved my inner turmoil peaking to the point that I could hardly bear it any longer. I wished I had some drugs to make it go away, but Nurofen plus and anti-thyroid drugs hardly cut it and I don't do drugs anyway- apart from alcohol. Hours later I chose to 'do' alcohol. I needed some relief, space from the intensity of the emotions running rampant, hormones egging them on. I knew I was reaching a critical point, I was sick and tired of how things had been and frustrated, confused and scared. I felt overwhelmed with no real answers.

Before you ask, no I haven't been meditating lately...and yes I think I probably need to return to that practice. I'm not really trying to read your mind, you're probably not wondering about my meditative practice at all, it's just my conscience speaking loud and clear and perhaps it's mixed with some advice from my 'wise one' on my inner.

Anyway, I blew off some steam with organic rose and some loud music, oh and a few verbal blows in the direction of the boyfriend. Lucky for both of us he could withstand the force of the storm just long enough until it passed. Most women would understand that when the gales of our emotions whip up and combine with a hormonal surge that only a woman knows, that we're a real force to be reckoned with. The best that we can hope for in such times is that when the storm passes there's been minimal damage. Luckily I awoke yesterday morning feeling alot better and all of a sudden ok with the concept of 'inner turmoil'.

Perhaps that's not the whole truth, the rose and loud music did not make me feel all of a sudden ok, but I'd found a new story about inner turmoil and it had settled things for me. My new story goes something like this: Inner turmoil keeps things moving, it can wake you up when you're not seeing something for what it is, inner turmoil drives some of the best artists and creative talent we've ever seen. When we're stirred up inside we get restless and it moves us and those around us in different ways. Sure I'd probably prefer to be moved by something more fluffy, more pink and love like- oh how perfect it would be. But that perfectionism is not necessarily helpful, it's one of the things that I'll probably work with for the rest of this lifetime, when I say work with I mean 'do battle with' and try to keep in check. It's very sneaky and pushes and pulls to get it's own way, consequently it creates inner turmoil effortlessly.

The more I resisted the imperfectness of the turmoil and the prickly abrasive feelings on the inside the stronger they seemed to get. They say that what we resist persists; it sure does! So I made peace with inner turmoil, rather than berating myself I simply found a new perspective, a more compassionate and realistic one, my new story about inner turmoil tells me that some of the very best creative work ignites from this place. The main thing is not to keep it inside for long so as to avoid an explosion or implosion of some kind. It's essential to find a way to make it ok, tell yourself a little story about it that makes you feel better, normalise it and find strength in knowing just how human you are! This applies to anything you're judging right now, you get to choose the story, throw out the old book and write a new one. The new story and acceptance meant I became open to a shift, divine intervention.

Through a sudden infusion of charism, your inability to make sense of life's challenges, coupled with the emotional weight of feeling as if you are living without purpose or direction is transformed into the knowledge that each movement in your life is divinely ordered. Myss 2001.

Just hours after my acceptance of the 'inner turmoil' concept being applicable to moi something shifted. Just when I could bear it no longer came something amazing- clarity, hope and a vision of something bright and wonderful, something that makes my heart flutter. It was something I'd known all along, but had been to afraid to believe in, to know. In order to find it I'd had to get lost, I'd had to face the fear of not knowing in order to know how amazing it is to actually 'know', to understand that I must not give up on what I want and  need. This month I wrote a post suggesting that 'I don't know' is the new black, in recent times I have donned the black attire and gone deep. I've felt the pain and sadness and wished for the old and familiar, for something I could know for sure and wrap myself in to feel safe. I felt like I was living in this dark space of nothingness, yet filled with vast potential and it was out of necessity, not choice. It was thanks to the scary, lonely and confronting darkness that eventually I was able to see the light. When it appeared it shone out as clear as day and I recognised it as truth because tears began to fall. The greatest sign of a beautiful truth, of real love, is that it can move you to tears.

When your life plans are suddenly interrupted, you can choose to view that event as a 'contract intervention' rather than a crisis. What symbolic vision gives you above all is choice- the choice to see events as arbitrary and antaganostic, or as blessings that are part of a plan in which you have some say. Myss 2001.

When I was counselling women that sometimes happened, one or both of us would get a tear in our eye or a shiver down our spine when a significant 'truth' had been realised. Another amazing thing about the presence of truth is that when it comes it can appear in the simplest of forms. For me it started with the title of a book at the library leaping off the shelf at me, which then became books...which evolved miraculously to become a story in itself, a story of the future and the past that showed me something real in the present moment. I'm talking about my future direction here, I hesitate to use the C word, let's call it Vocation for now.

Vocations can be many things: They may be calls to do something (become self-employed, go back to school, leave or start a relationship...) or calls to be something (more creative, less judgmental, more loving, less fearful). They may be calls to or away from something; calls to change something, review our commitment to it, or come back to it in an entirely new way; calls towards whatever we've dared...ourselves to do for as long as we can remember.... Gregg Levoy (Myss 2001).

(I can not believe just how accurate this explanation of Vocation is in the context of my life right now).

I guess that the dark and the inner turmoil has it's purpose. Although I said earlier that it would be nice to be moved by pink fluffy love rather than the tragic 'inner turmoil', it leads me to ponder if they're not one and the same? I suspect that the love and light was wearing a dark black cape, it was disguised and I didn't always know what it was, but that's the whole point of this illusionary world. Right? Once in a blue moon we have this kind of an experience, where we go swimming in the depths of darkness just so as we will be able to recognise the light for what it is, lest confusion gives us a break..

The above quotes are referenced from Caroline Myss's book 'Sacred Contracts'. I have just begun reading this amazing book and each and every page thus far is full of wisdom so relevant to my life and recent experiences. As I read I was excited to find several passages that further explained what I had written about in this blog post yesterday, so I have added them in where I think they fit best.

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Is 'I don't know' the new black?

So I decided it's about time I blogged, apart from the fact that I feel like writing, I also think it's about time I did. I have been out wandering in my local suburb, enjoying the sun, stopping for a bit to eat and feeling increasingly inspired. As I sat at lunch, on my own, which funnily enough has become one of my favourite things to do; I observed two women sharing some documents that had patches of colour on them. They appeared to be doing some kind of creative business, they also seemed to be friends. I liked how it looked, two creative women having a really good time and doing business. I observed something inside saying 'I want some of that', I also recognised that it's something I have experienced before. I like how it used to feel, spending time with a friend/colleague sharing ideas and inspiration, I like how it feels when I think about it being a part of my future.

Perhaps my opening paragraph seems general or a little vague, but that's ok, right? It's ok to sometimes just sit with thoughts, feelings and impressions without having to summise or make conclusions. This is one of the ways we can allow things to unfold organically, rather than forcing, pushing, over thinking. This is exactly how my blog posts are written, it's why I often begin with a pretty vague and open paragraph, because I really have little clue what I'm going to write, I just let it flow and at the end I am often surprised at what I've written. I usually think, oh ok, not what I thought I might write, but obviously what I needed to. I think they call it automatic writing. I've been practising this 'allowing' lately, just allowing myself to experience things as they are, to do a little research and then just sit with it, go with the flow. All of this is about how the next little while is going to unfold for me and the direction I'll take when it comes to work, to life. I'm starting from scratch, I've recently moved to a new suburb, I have no job and my health is not yet strong enough for me to look for work. What am I to do but dream a little?

I don't have any definitive answers to the question posed by others which is something like 'what now?' or 'what will you do for work?'. I'm glad to only have ideas though, rather than being freaked out by the unknown I am truly embracing it. Consequently others might be a little freaked themselves. I recognise that they themselves would be worried if they were in my situation, but what they don't know is that this is how I roll...or at least how I'd like to. It's sort of hard to explain this to someone who's never really contemplated this type of an aproach to their future.

I have some visions and impressions of how things could be, they're developing as I write- as I stroll in the sun and as I speak to inspired people. I have ideas on how I'll make my visions become reality, but I'm in the brainstorming phase right now, and we can't rush a creative process. My intention since I've been unwell is that my life will never be the same again, that things won't look or be the same. It's no surprise that a creative process is essential to support my intentions to come into fruition.

I won't deny that it would be nice to give a confident and concrete answer when the question of 'what are you going to do?' is posed because that would make things easy in the moment the question is asked. But it would also mean disregarding my wise one and disappointing my heart, consequently dampening my Inner Beam; which in the long run just creates sickness and misery. So I think that 'I don't know' just became the new black, and we all know that black can be dressed up or down depending on the occasion.

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Doodling

I've been told many times that doodling or drawing would be helpful for me; to tap into my creativity and be able to express it. Apart from writing it could be considered my only other creative pursuit. I have never been good at art, infact my drawings look like an 8 year old did them. I think my drawing development may have been stunted around then? By that age I had definitely discovered my love of words. In fact I remember being in prep and writing a story about a butterfly. My teacher said it was so good that she wanted me to make it into a book, with book binding and all! She sent me to the Grade 6 room where they had a computer to type out my story, illustrate and bind it. Obviously I felt very proud, because that experience is so memorable. Interestingly I have noticed that when I am doodling I prefer to write words rather than just drawing.

As far as art goes though; I think the following story says it all. I was in Year 8 and my teacher, Ms Cody, had taught me since Year 7. I tried very hard to make something decent in art because I wanted to be good at it and I wanted good grades. I had been working hard on a particular piece for a week or so and upon completion took it to the teacher for marking, I wasn't satisfied with it but it was my best work. She looked at it, sighed and said 'Ah well, at least you are a nice girl'. I think she gave me a good mark on it for effort and the fact that I wasn't one of the terrors of the class who painted their faces with the paint and put pin tacks on class mates seats. I was one of the ones who fell prey to sitting on pin tacks thanks to the boys in the class.

So anyway, I have been doodling, and I'm being brave and sharing it here. I'm enjoying it and that's all that counts! I get and A for Artistically Challenging Myself :-) I dare you to try it!