Wholly knowing silence

Dear ones

I was just making some final edits to my intended blog post about packing lightly and living reverently when I accidentally deleted the whole edited post. I tried desperately to recover it without success. It is unretrievable.

I don’t think it’s a mistake that I deleted the intended blog post. Life works quite mysteriously at times.

I don’t have enough time to re-write the post tonight, so I sit quietly and wonder what to do..

Then I remember that what I have really wanted to offer you is a holding space of deep, healing silence, although I haven’t known how to offer that in a blog that requires words until now. Through mishap and silence, this is what spontaneously emerges….

My invitation to you is to take a few deep breaths and feel how life is supporting you right now. Maybe you are supported by a chair or seat of some kind, or the ground beneath your feet.

Notice how your breath moves in and out of your chest. Brining new life. Releasing what is old.

Maybe you can hear sounds, birds, traffic, voices.

I invite you to listen more deeply.

Beneath the noise is a container of silence all around you. It is protective and nourishing. Calming and soothing. Just listen and feel.

Take a few moments out of this often busy, rushing, noisy modern world we live in to feel rested and renewed and totally supported.

From this place of deep silence, maybe there is something that wants to be known to you, something that will serve your life and journey now. Or maybe it’s just the silence you need to know more wholly. Most of us do.

Whether you receive words or silence, it is all a blessing. You are held and supported right here and now. Breathe and rest here.

.All is well.

With love, courage and the peace of silence,

Kym xx

The constant inbetween

Dear ones

This week I recommenced a regular walking practice. I call it a practice because I don’t just walk for exercise, I walk to see the world around me slowly on foot, and to invite inspiration for writing as well as for inner knowing and guidance on my life path.

A few nights ago, I left the house a little later than usual, it was very late dusk but not quite nighttime. As I walked I reflected on this particular time of day where it’s not dark, but not light. It’s an inbetween time. And I remembered this poem that I wrote while I was walking the Via Francigena pilgrimage route…

You see the road

stretch long before you.

Just as you begin to fall

into despair’s embrace,

you are caught by grace,

set back on your feet,

to do the one thing

you know you can do;

take one step

then one step more.

You are here

where you have

chosen to stand.

The goal is never arriving,

which of course you will

then leave again.

Accept there will always

be a long road,

a coming,

a going.

That stillness you crave

only a temporary possibility.

Let go of the clinging

and the desire

to be other than where you are.

Learn to love this life

in the constant inbetween.

I wrote this poem on Day 15 of my Via Francigena pilgrimage while I was walking from Laon to Corbeny in France. While it was only a 27 kilometre walking day, I felt like I would never make it to Corbeny and that I would be walking forever. To distract myself, I decided that I would write as I walked. I asked for inspiration, opened up a writing app on my Ipad called Textilus and this poem streamed out. With it came a deep peace and acceptance of where I was on my journey and trust that I would arrive when I arrived as I had done for the 14 days I had been walking.

For me, this simple realisation (and re-realisation) of living in the inbetween still brings me much peace and acceptance in my life now. I am inbetween leaving a career and starting a new one but I am filled with peace and faith that I am being guided and supported by life no matter how slowly things seem to unfold.

I hope that this realisation serves you in your life too.

And if you are contemplating a journey such as Via Francigena, I hope you will trust the whispers of your heart urging you to go. The calling is sacred. The insights that are waiting to be revealed to you may continue to serve you for the rest of your life too.

With love and courage,

Kym xx

Are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

Dear ones,

I am still catching up with myself after returning from Italy last weekend and celebrating my husband’s birthday this weekend. I’ve never been one to suffer jet lag. Usually a long sleep when I return is enough to get me back in synch. But this time jet lag hit me hard with a lot of brain fog and disturbed sleeping patterns for the last week.

Last week, one of my favourite poets, Mary Oliver passed away. In case you don’t know of her, Mary was an American and prize -winning poet, having won the Pulitzer prize. Her poems focused on nature, her relationship to it and a sense of wonder.

I am so grateful for her poems. Reading them drops me into my own deeper relationship with nature and my soul. They remind me of what is truly important. And often wake something up in me, helping me look at my life and the world around me in a different way.

The beauty of Mary’s poems is that often they are a mediative container that opens you to the one line you really need to hear.

One of my favourite poems is, “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches.” Whilst I would love to share it with you here, copyright laws prohibit this.

In the three pages of this poem, there is one line that has always stood out to me as a guiding star:

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

Sometimes I breathe shallow to avoid deep feelings.

Sometimes I feel like I get stuck on the surface of life unable to dive as deeply in the outer world as I do in my inner world.

Sometimes I get distracted from what really matters to me.

To me, there is an urgent reminder in this question. Life is short. Don’t waste it. Don’t get stuck pursuing things that don’t matter.

Although the question has a yes or no answer, in my mind, it is really asking, if you are breathing just a little, how can you breathe a little more deeply? How can you take in more life? How can you be more true to yourself?

So dear ones, I leave you with these questions. If you would like to share you responses with me, please feel free to email me or leave a comment below the blog post.

And to Mary Oliver, thank you for your wisdom, inspiration and teachings that live on in the legacy of poems you leave behind.

With love and courage,

Kym xx

On the other side of excuses

I’m back from Italy, which was a beautiful, delicious, love-filled, insightful, and at times challenging pilgrimage to my husband’s hometown.

The long flights back to Melbourne via Singapore were easy, but the jet lag is not.  It’s only 5pm on Monday and I’m ready for bed.

It’s also the day I post on my blog and I have a lot of good reasons (excuses) not to post: I’m so jet lagged. My brain is foggy. I can’t think clearly. I don’t know what to write about. I don’t feel like it.

But I also made a commitment to myself and to you to show up every week even when I don’t feel like it.

My heart is urging me to show up and just be here with all the scrambled messiness, the unknowing, the resistance, the imperfection and to offer what I can in this moment.

Our minds can justify, rationalise and explain anything but this can hold us back from what our hearts truly want.

Don’t let it hold you back. Listen to your heart. On the other side of the reasons (excuses) is the life that is waiting for you, the one you truly want to live.

With love and courage,

Kym xx

Go wander

[I am currently in Italy with my husband and his family for the Christmas holidays. This is a re-share and small update of a poem that I wrote a few years ago.
To create change in your life, you have to do things differently.
Open up space for nothingness so new inspiration can come through.
Step off your current path so you can experience something new.
Be willing to become lost. You will see new things. See the world differently. Strengthen your intuition and connection to your soul.
Be willing to let go of the life that you currently have. Be willing to wander and experiment.]

Let go of your schedule, your timetables, your calendar, your planning, your busyness and your need to make your waking moments productive.

Go outside, exactly as you are. Go to a park or a forest, a beach, your backyard or any space you have longed to explore.

Let your feet follow your eyes re-opened as if born anew and seeing for the first time.

Go to what calls your attention, to what flirts with your senses with its bright pretty colours or intriguing patterns and shapes.

Let your mind rest and your life force move you.

Wander without aim, without rules or constraints.

Wander with curiosity.

Wander with faith in its aimlessness.

Wandering produces nothing yet yields everything.

Wandering reclaims the instinct of your soul cut off the moment your life became ruled by your calendar and time, your to do lists and busyness, and the idea that you have to make something of your life for your life to matter instead of living fluidly as an expression of joy.

With love and courage,

Kym

xx

Staying close to the mystery and less planning

[I am currently in Italy with my husband and his family for the Christmas holidays. This is an update of an article that I wrote a few years ago. I hope it offers some inspiration and insight into your own New Year dreaming process.]

It is the eve of the last day of the year. In these peaceful days between the celebration of Christmas and new beginnings, many people in my circles are reflecting on the year that has almost completed, and dreaming and planning the year that is about to begin.

I notice some people have given themselves a hard time for all that they set out to achieve in the last year but didn’t. For all the “good” and “positive” ways they wanted to be in the world but weren’t.

If this is you, I want you to know that you are loved beyond what you have done or haven't done. There is nothing you can do or not do that earns or loses you unconditional love

There is time enough for everything your spirit needs to experience in your life. Our human minds live in years, months, weeks, days, hours and minutes. Our spirits live in an eternal moment.

As part of New Year dreaming and planning rituals, some people are searching for the word that will guide them in. Some are dreaming into what they would like the year to look and feel like. Many are setting their goals and intentions and planning the steps they will take to reach their goals.

I've seen a lot of beautiful and inspiring tools out there designed to help you plan out and live your most fabulous year yet. I love the idea of them but often they trigger a sense of overwhelm and resistance in me: There is so much to analyse and think about, and so many rituals and practices to do and think about doing.

Where does just being and experiencing life fit into all the intentions and goal setting and planning and rituals I could complete to make my year fabulous?

Do I have to plan for spontaneity and serendipity to make sure I have time for these experiences too?

This was yet another year that didn’t turn out as I had hoped. I started the year pregnant and in March my dreams of being a mother bled from me. I was swallowed by a grief bigger than I could have imagined. This coupled with extreme stress from my day job overwhelmed my nervous system and I struggled with extended bouts of stomach pain for most of the year.

While life didn’t turn out as I had hoped (again), there have been great gifts in my illness and healing that I may not have experienced otherwise: I have discovered the grace of Kundalini meditation and yoga, neurological integration system to support healing and rebalancing, the awakening of the most beautiful yearning to be a mother, and to have known and cherished the feeling of being pregnant, carrying life within me even with all the horrendous morning sickness despite the pregnancy ending with no baby to be held physically in my arms.

I would never have chosen this journey through grief and illness. I’m still grieving the loss of my baby and what feels like was my last chance to be a mum.  But I am open to the idea, as I have been before, that maybe the vast intelligence of this world knows a bit more about what I need to experience in life than I do, including things I would never choose, and it knows how to bring me experiences so I don’t have to go out of my way to make everything happen in my life.

There is magic in deep dreaming with your heart. It brings us closer to what I call the Divine but you may call God, Higher Self, the Universe, Love or something else. It opens us to possibilities that we could never think of. If we listen deeply and patiently we hear our heart's true yearnings and callings and we are shown a way through life that may be far different than we could think of with our human minds. Everything unfolds in perfect timing; it's just often not to our human mind's timing.

The group energy of this time is one of reflection and dreaming.  As one human year ends and another one begins, I naturally feel pulled towards reflecting upon my year as well, tenderly, kindly and with gratitude (where I can feel authentically grateful) for its blessings.

I am also dreaming into the possibilities of my life and wondering what magic and mysteries it has in store for me today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. After a year of feeling like being in the mud and muck and a holding zone, I am feeling like next year could be radiant.

I am inviting inspiration, for the Divine to create and express through me in its own way, in its own time. I am waiting and watching with open hands ready to catch and follow the thread as soon as it appears knowing that at any moment I may also have to let it go.

I am inviting in magic and mystery because I want to live a life beyond that which I could simply think or plan alone.

Staying close to the mystery of this world is the best plan that I can have.

With love and courage,

Kym xx

Grief at Christmas and the joy that isn't happiness

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[This is an update of an article that I wrote a few years ago. There are people in my life who have experienced recent loss and grief, and some who are struggling. I hope this post offers encouragement, support and a healing balm.]

Christmas is the time of year that is supposed to be filled with joy but for many it isn't. Many experience sadness, grief, loneliness, fear and anxiety and can especially struggle with those feelings during a season of expected festiveness. This I know.

My mum died on the 19th of December, 1996.  For years, my experience of Christmas was overshadowed by my feelings of grief and loss and aloneness. I not only lost my mum but also Christmas as I knew it.

As the years have passed, our family has expanded: when my dad remarried, we gained a stepmother and step-siblings, nieces and nephews have been born, and more recently I married adding a husband and his Italian family. The family has also contracted as people have left this world. My mum’s dad, my Papa, died the day after the third anniversary of mum’s death. Christmas was overshadowed by yet another loss and more grief and sadness. Death forever changes the structure of a family. For a long time I felt lost within my family and I grieved the loss of old way of traditions.

There can be so much expectation at this time of year by others and ourselves that we should be happy and festive and joyful. It can be even more painful when no matter how we try we can’t find that joy within ourselves. Pain, grief and sorrow cannot be commanded away.

Dictionary.com defines joy "as the emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something exceptionally good or satisfying."

But I no longer believe in that definition of joy because I have experienced something different. Joy is not the result of external experience and it’s not what we think it is.

In his book, The Presence Process, Michael Brown writes, "we confuse joy with the outer changing experience called "the pursuit of happiness." But experiencing authentic joy isn't just about feeling good. It's about feeling everything, which requires emotional inclusiveness." He also writes "authentic joy isn't an emotional state, but a state of being in which we accept all of life's offerings as required, especially challenging moments."

I first came to understand this a few years ago when I suffered lower back and hip problems after badly spraining my ankle. I was presented with many challenging moments. I shed a lot of tears as I lay on the floor struggling to cope with pain, frustration and helplessness wondering when the pain would end, when I would be able to move freely again. I wanted to be somewhere in the future where I was healed and healthy again. This year, I was presented with the opportunity to relearn this lesson suffering recurring bouts of stomach pain, the last two-month stint has just ended.

I realised that wanting to be anywhere other than where I was—fighting my reality—wasn’t helping me that it only made me more upset.

When I dropped my resistance and just accepted this is where I am right now I became peaceful because everything is allowed and included. I was also able to see the positives of my pain and injuries: becoming more embodied, exploring how I move in my body, learning a new way to hold myself and walk in the world, my strength and resilience.

I noticed how my spirit beyond my small self revelled in this experience as it revels in all of my life experience. This revelling is what I know now as a state of joy.

It’s only my mind that labels experiences and emotions as good or bad. My soul loves them all.

This Christmas season there are people I love who are missing from my physical world. Christmas of old is forever gone. And I am sad about this.

When I first wrote this article three years ago, I wasn’t feeling delighted, light-hearted or frivolously happy anticipating the approach of Christmas Day. I was open to the idea that maybe one day I would be, but how I felt right then was okay. We don't have to love Christmas. We don’t have to pretend to be happy.

This year it seems the tide has started to change. While I still feel sadness for what has gone and will never be again, I also feel my love for the magic, mystery and sacredness of Christmas growing within my heart, body and soul once again. I am so grateful that it is. I have missed it.

However you are feeling right now about Christmas and your life is okay. All feelings have their place in our human experience. It is all of our human life not just selective experiences or emotions such as passing moments of happiness that contribute to authentic joy.

Don't shun or resist the parts of you that hurt—love them. They are beautiful too. It is through experiencing all of life, all emotions that you will discover true joy.

With love and courage,

Kym xx