“The childish individual wants someone to save him; the adolescent wants to fulfil himself absolutely and independently. The true man simply serves good company and surrenders to Truth, the living God.”
This collection of ‘reflections’ spans different themes and styles, including poetry, and can be funny or serious, personal or impersonal. They often deal with spirituality and healing and often times may seem contradictory. Sometimes, that is because I am writing on the dual nature of the soul’s expression which can seem paradoxical. We have many different selves in one, our energy always changing and mutating. Please take what you want and leave the rest. I get weary, like many of us, of internet commentators who seem to want to stoke arguments or even simple debate. It’s our digital disease. I don’t go there and rarely get myself wrapped up in opinion. It really doesn’t matter. We are all at different levels of consciousness and come from different places. My words may not be for you and that’s perfect. But if they are, and if they enlighten and stimulate, I couldn’t be more pleased.
‘Give me someone who can talk about their in between places, not their successes, achievements and ambitions. Someone who has done the work of traversing the wild current of their own innards, their dark history; someone who has travelled and understood what appears to be the most insignificant cul-de-sac of their deepest being. I am not interested in those who can bang a drum, perform a ritual and look good. I am interested in the person who will tell it how it is, talk straight, disappoint me to support themselves, understand the simple value of kindness over spiritual trickery, clear with me by making an amend when wrong while looking me in the eye and speaking from the heart. Those people are few and far between in my experience yet I would take one of those, the person whose heart is true, over any number of do-gooders, pretenders or weekend warriors. It is interesting how deep psychotherapy has gone out of vogue, the slow pain-staking work of true self enquiry in favour of quick fixes and sudden shifts. I want you slow cooked or not at all.’
'People say forget the past but the truth is 'you' can't. For it is one of the great movements of the soul for the past to continually wash up on the shores of the psyche. Story and soul are intimately intertwined around the spinal descent of life, the dance of the divine into matter. What can happen, however is that the Self can be realised, though not by anyone, with time and universe utterly transcended. In fact, reality is always already the case, but 'we' obscure the view.’
‘Clients often get such bad news from me, and it is usually a version of this, delivered in ways that make it palatable. Therapy may not make you happy - almost certainly not at first - it will make you more authentic, more joyful, more open to your own and the world's pain; less willing to settle, more edgy, braver, more thoughtful. Finally, it will likely turn you into a human being, and eventually the light that lies behind that beingness. If you were meant to be a human doing it would say so on the tin. As the song says.......slow down, you move
too fast.’
’It seems to me in each situation we encounter in life there can be many truths and we must be true to each one, particularly in the knotty area of relationships. The mind likes to think in terms of black or white, presenting either or choices. Yet we are much more complex than that and if we are honest about our totality - all parts of us - then we can have loving exchanges with people despite us or them not getting what we think we want. Having used astrology for many years, I have seen up close how different energies combine in some synastry charts emphasising loving friendship more than romance and so on. If we follow the thread of the energies between us and another we end up with the form of the relationship that works best for those particular energies. The mistake people make is to have an agenda about the form of each connection rather than letting the connection find its own form. Conversely, the mind can also block the form of a connection. I like to let the heart and connection lead the way and have the courage to relegate the mind to the backseat.’
’The people I admire the most have been born into this world at great personal cost, often have difficult stories, and yet both despite of and because of this, are committed to helping others and bring more light to their little corner of the world. These people are strong and vulnerable, fully human, imperfect to worldly eyes. They live the paradox of being fully human, fully divine and are often judged by the less enlightened. These wise ones cannot explain what they have been through for who would understand? So often they have to spend their lifetime being misunderstood. These are the bodhisattvas.’’
‘One of the most terrible assaults on the child is envy in the family home with narcissistic parents communicating to their offspring, 'We think you are wonderful....and we hate you for it.' Envy conjures images of Oedipal fantasies and intense sibling rivalry, as if the incoming soul has clocked early the physical world is no picnic and it will have to fight to survive. Intense rivalry and envious attack also points to poisonous samskaras or past life battles and entrenched beliefs often surrounding the very soul who elicits such dark and deep feelings this time round. Envy is endemic to being human; we can all experience it, but what is destructive while unconscious can be transformed into healing tissue when made conscious. For when we see there is enough love to go around, focus on our own gifts instead of what we think we lack, we can see our envy as a case of mistaken identity: that we are investing in an egoic identity and that we are in fact far greater than such self-imposed limitation. There is little more joyous in being able to celebrate the gifts of others and for them in turn to celebrate ours.’
‘Certainty is a curious thing. How often do we give our power to those who appear sure of themselves and seem to offer the safety of certainty and with it direction? Yet power almost always lies in the hands of the 'wrong' people because those who are power driven are most often at the beginning of an evolutionary cycle where the developmental task is to build a strong ego. At that early stage there is only a tiny amount of light in the soul and it is this inability to see the full spectrum of life in all its varying shades which lends the power of certainty. Tyrants and despots everywhere do their worst under such limited insight. In 'spiritual' circles we can observe the same phenomenon: the need for egoic power masquerading as 'love and light'. Give me teachers of human frailty, compassion and self doubt any day; someone who is willing to be vulnerable and say 'I don't know' when necessary and someone who has seen enough of life to know their own failings. That involves moving around the wheel of life, experiencing many different facets of one's humanity, making mistakes, and being authentic rather than perfect.’
Unsplash photography credits
John Towner, Joshua Earle and Eduard Militaru
‘Sometimes, the floor keeps opening and we just keep on falling through it to yet another rock bottom. Along the way, we pass through those feelings we spent a lifetime or more avoiding, until we reach the core of the conditioned mind - worthlessness and self hatred - only to finally discover that within us lies an invincible summer. Courage is required not to circumvent this process, and faith. If you just want 'love and light' in your life don't even begin, keep holding on to what makes the ego feel safe. But it seems to me, that for all of us, there comes a point when the only thing we can do is to let go and live our own peculiar passage through time until we land in eternity.’
’It is a great unwisdom to always be trying to escape our vulnerability, be positive at every moment, always to be on the up and on the make. For as David Whyte points out, there is no escape from it, we are our vulnerability. So the question is more about how we become one with it without letting it consume us, rather than trying to outrun it, control it, and allow pride to throw a veil over our humanness. The current idea that we must heal or fix everything is based, I believe, on a flawed concept of what it is to be a human being. Rather than always thinking of being better, we could simply keep opening to those pockets of unconsciousness we all carry, allowing their gifts to come forth. We are not static entities, but life unfolding, awareness awakening slowly, over time so we can integrate at all levels. There is no rush. We will all end on a breath.’
’The vital role of any therapist or mentor is to bring relief to the conditions on the soul of the person in pain, help suspend the sense of exile and separation, and provide both understanding and context that fosters a renewed sense of belonging. The greatest blessing is for one's uniqueness to be truly seen.’
‘Myth is something that never happened yet always is. It provides us with insight into the soul's longing for union and in a society, is the dream of the culture looking to break through to another evolutionary level.’
‘Some people like to think they will be immune from pain the more they mature in consciousness. But that is simply a ploy by a mind still burdened by the fantasy of its own power. The more conscious we become, it seems the more sensitive we are, not less. Shams, Rumi's master, moved away, in pain, from those whose unconsciousness assaulted his depth of awareness and Love. Isolation is, ultimately, preferable to a long bath in idiocy. ‘
‘Effective therapy drops a depth charge into the unconscious which shatters and finally dispels what is outmoded. Like all rigged explosions, careful planning is required and the person ripened to the point where enough of them welcomes a healthy and benign destruction.’
’Childhood is both container and clue to our karma. If we cast a forensic light into its dark corners and hidden places and see with an eye for initiation, everything is illuminated. Words, images, story and body open a window that reveals the soul's long journey through time, and finally the opportunity to discover the whole universe within.’
’’On this hero’s journey there is no gathering of laurels and accomplishments, wealth and titles, but rather the shedding of all we have known, the loss of all self concept. Small wonder it has been largely written out of history. The journey is both terrifying and deeply unappealing.’
’I think we all know how to surrender, it is just that we surrender to the wrong things - money, sex, power, ambition, food and so on. We all have some thing that hooks us in, binds us to the world. And that thing corresponds with a very particular wound or set of wounds. I have discovered that whenever I surrender to some thing finite I suffer, but whenever i take courage and surrender to what is infinite there is a victory. I was going to say that I win, but that would not be true, for when I merge with the infinite there is a little bit less of 'me' left to deal with. And anyone who has had to deal with my Leo Moon on full throttle knows that has to be a good thing.’
’’It seems there is a time for many of us - not least for those of us who grew up amid serious dysfunction and codependency - where we either equate drama and intensity or stupefying non-communication with love. Which helpless pattern we embark on seems to depend on what we saw. But neither over stimulation nor under stimulation satisfies the hungry heart because either pattern is a diversion and defence from the heart of the matter. We all wish to love and be loved but to get to this core we must first cut through the chaff of codependency, stop being afraid of our issues and learn to love our shame and need to control and be brave enough to out them to those we love.’
‘Infatuation is a potent impostor, an ersatz love, a sugar-hit for the soul, that simulates the real thing, a near miss that is a million light years away. It is the mind's version of what love looks like when it has had a failed, often devastating, experience of the real thing. It is so beset by desire, fear and projection it has little hope of peering out of the fog of its imaginings to see clearly. And yet somewhere, hidden in its dark and desperate recesses is the grain of something finer. There is no wanting in love and to arrive at this place, where the only desire is for the beloved's happiness, will excoriate the ego. To transform infatuation into love is one of life's true rarities, yet holds the seeds of greatest potential for true love and freedom. Yet it means a complete transformation in outlook and attitude with the ego no longer dominated by consciousness but sinking roots deep into the unconscious where all its repressed memory of failed love lives. This is the hero's journey which few can hope to make. But the one who does knows what it is to be a diamond.’