March 28, 2013

What next…?

By Alice

Bertie (a whopping 6 years old) is… well… I guess boisterous is the best word to describe him. A little like Bagpuss (do you remember that kids’ programme?), when Bertie’s awake, the rest of the house is awake. He wakes up hollering, goes to bed hollering and does a fair bit of hollering in between. There’s no volume switch, no brakes. Bertie hurtles, headlong, through life, stopping only when he meets resistance, and even then only if he has to. And his demeanour is almost invariably one of noisy cheerfulness.

But just of late, as so often happens at around this age, he’s pondering the bigger questions. I guess Easter throws this up a little for children – they’ve been talking about it at school – death and resurrection. And it got me thinking about how confusing, and a bit scary, these big questions can be for our smallfolk.

“Can you ask god to give you a new body, when you die, so I can see you again?”

You see, one of his favourite bedtime stories just now is “The Mountains of Tibet” which is a rather surprising choice for one so apparently oblivious to the deeper potentials of his surroundings. “Gumboot’s Chocolatey Day” is far more up his street, you’d think. But the Mountains has obviously struck a chord somewhere. Resurrection at school, reincarnation at home… It’s beautifully written and illustrated, and provokes rumination on all sorts of levels… for an adult at any rate, I’d thought.

After all, his previous command had been far more in keeping with one his age:

“Be a boy. Then you won’t have to lay babies.” ;)

I’m not afraid of death. I don’t want to die, you understand. But I’m not afraid of it. For myself. (My feelings around pain are much more ambiguous…) I have young children, so naturally I have concerns about their well-being were their mummy not around to look out for them. And I see and feel compassion for their fears when they talk about it themselves. I want to tell them not to be afraid. That it’s just a transition. That it’s all part of the design. But I know they’re a little young for all that, and that they’ll have to work it out for themselves a bit…

“I don’t want you to die, Mummy” said my 8 year-old at breakfast this morning. One introduces a theme, another runs with it…

“I don’t want to die either, darling.” I tried to explain that these days people tend to live a good long time, although we can’t rule out accidents or illness. We can’t know when we’re going to shuffle off. And I tried to tell him that if I did, I hoped he would be thankful for the time we had together, and would show me what a good job I’d done being his mummy by living as full and happy a life as he could. At that he nodded, and smiled again for the first time since the conversation had begun.

But by now I was worrying. I had this terrible vision of a young man slogging his guts out trying to be happy, to prove to his dead mother that he could be, that she had been a ‘good mummy’! :)

It’s a minefield, death, life, happiness, spirituality, purpose… And it’s a sticky wicket when it comes to sharing it, too. I don’t subscribe to the theory that I have the right to tell my children what to believe. I can tell them what I believe, but to my mind they have no obligation at all to feel the same way. What they do believe, they will work out in their own good time. When they are ready and the time is right. They will, most likely, embrace, reject, struggle, and make peace with all kinds of channels of thought.

And that, as it is for the rest of us, is simply their journey.

2 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Acceptance, Buddhism, Love, Mindfulness, Motherhood, Right Motherhood, Rites of Passage

March 22, 2013

Eureka… ! (Phew)

By Alice

I just had an epiphany. :)

I’ve been in a shocking grump since yesterday evening.

Yesterday morning, the sun was shining for the first time in what feels like forever. I was beginning to think we had moved to Narnia – the land of interminable winter. But the sun didn’t so much stream as positively gush through the window and I stretched into it and felt instantly energised. I was positive, buzzing, happy… But by the evening, the grump of the previous day had returned.

I can list my grievances: the cold is back, it is snowing again, I have two very poorly people at home and feel rather run ragged, I’m tired (when my alarm went off this morning, I was more asleep than I have been in an age). And on a bigger scale, my family situation is more screwed up than any I have heard of, other than in books giving extreme examples of how wrong families can go…

So, I was hanging out the laundry this morning, with that catalogue of disaster running through my head. On loop. Again and again and again. And above it all I clearly remember these two sentences registering:

“I feel like I’m on a fucking rollercoaster. I hate it.”

“So get off. “

Now I read and listen to people I admire and respect speaking about the power of thought all. the. time. And intellectually I get it. I totally understand that your thoughts can change your life. That what you think is what you become. After all, the man in my life had begun to cower in a corner as I quite literally became my grump. My head was aching, my brow knit, my shoulders slumped.

But I’m not kidding – when I heard those words (which I guess I thought to myself anyway, huh?) “So get off.” it was as though a lightbulb had switched on over my head.

I got off.

The headache lifted that instant.

I straightened up, smiled. It had gone.

I remember reading both Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie talking about moments of total turnaround. I suspect theirs were much more profound and life-altering, and permanent. I’m not claiming for an instant to have cracked it.

But for today, at least, my world has changed.

And isn’t today all we have?

7 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Byron Katie, Love, Mindfulness, Right Motherhood, Victim Consciousness, Wayne Dyer

March 12, 2013

Give it away

By Alice

I came across this today:

startliving

It made me laugh.

I sit here, surrounded by my family of seven and the seas of ‘stuff’ we possess, with more tidal waves coming into the house every day, and dream of a minimalist, non-cluttered life.

But that’s all it is. A dream. Because with five children (and a terrible yarn habit), I have resigned myself to being surrounded by these oceans for years to come.

There is a pertinent observation to be made, though – when the decks are clear(er), the energy flows much more creatively around this house. It takes an enormous effort of will; one that I don’t often possess, preferring to focus instead, rather myopically, on the work in progress and feign ignorance of the chaos around me. But on the rare occasions that I actually do it, I confess to feeling much more positive about life and much more energised.

Nor is there much difference between the physical and the mental junk we carry around with us. I sometimes think of it as a kind of Marley’s Ghost of a situation, with ropes and chains dragging around from our ankles, each lugging some past incident; with present anxieties flapping like Hitchcock’s Birds around our heads, and with future fears throwing tree trunks across our path, slowing us down and distracting us from where we are in this very moment, from making the most of now.

It’s a neat trick to let it go, to ‘give all your shit away’. But in the same way that a physical clearing of the decks makes way for an unfettered focus on what is here, and important, a mental and emotional letting go is the quickest way to take the first step towards actually living.

2 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Right Motherhood

February 15, 2013

A Light in the Darkness

By Alice

Destiny

I saw this text the other day and it struck a chord.

And got me thinking.

I’m not a believer in ‘fate’ as such, in its simpler definition. I don’t believe that on a certain day at a certain time you are destined to meet a certain person. Nothing quite as prescribed as that.

But I do believe that we are all here with something specific to learn in our ever-onward quest to be the best we can be, heading toward that ever-elusive enlightenment, following our path. And each of us is born into this life with specific challenges to overcome and learn before we can take the next step, climb the next ladder-rung. But I should make even that a little clearer. It’s all about energies, really. You’ll be born into a particular type of family, with a particular type of energy, in order to figure it out. And in not figuring it out, you’ll carry it with you into the world, where you will attract more people and situations who will challenge you to figure it out. And in avoiding those people and situations, you’ll encounter yet more who will challenge you to figure it out. Keep avoiding, keep encountering.

Until you figure it out.

And it isn’t going to be easy. In fact, shining that light into that dusty old corner will probably be one of the hardest things you’ve ever had to do, because you will find your own ego there, staring back at you, and you will have to face it, and then let it go.

But however hard it is, it is made all the harder in the avoiding.

Fear, too, has been pottering around my mind the last few weeks. The way it prevents us from taking the next step, following our hearts, evolving as human beings, as souls. And, of course, the two go hand in hand. There are, I believe, two types of fear that stop us taking the action we need for our souls to evolve. The first is the human fear: what will everyone else think? And the moment you stop caring what everyone else thinks is the moment you are released from that fear. The second is the soul fear of what we will find in the dark that stops us shining the light in there. But if we don’t shine that light, then we simply continue to live in fear. And only the development of faith in the process, and then taking its leap, will drive out that fear.

So, to live without fear, your light must be shone.

First inwards, where you can face yourself, and then outwards, for the world to see.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Buddhism, Integrity, Love, Mindfulness, Personal Responsibility, Right Motherhood

February 12, 2013

Detachment: Let it go!

By Alice

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February 8, 2013

Beware the Honey Trap…

By Alice

I am disappointed in myself.

I know that’s not the Practice. I know that if you fall off the horse, you get back on, and don’t berate yourself for falling. Instead, you learn the lesson about the fall, and sit a little tighter, or to a slightly different angle, or readjust the saddle, or… You get the point.

Nonetheless, I am disappointed in myself.

I allowed myself to be dragged into a powerplay, from which I know there is never a happy extraction.

I believe the kind of situation in which I was, once again, embroiled is called a ‘Honey Trap’. The sort of thing where, whilst repeatedly punching you in the face (metaphorically, you understand), you are told “But I love you!”

You can explain a situation from a thousand different angles, from a thousand different perspectives. The problem is not that you don’t understand that you are being punched in the face. You can wax positively lyrical about the ways in which you are being punched in the face, and indeed therein lies the problem: if I explain it this way, they will surely understand… There is great temptation to keep trying. But the problem  lies in the fact that the person punching has absolutely no awareness whatsoever that they are bloodying your face. I choose face-punching as a metaphor quite deliberately, because it is that obvious to you. It is so obvious to you that you are almost entirely unable to understand how the person punching cannot see what they are doing.

And, of course, the problem lies also in the hope that if you can just get them to see, then they might stop.

I could go on, but there is little point in going into detail. After all, this is not a lesson about victim consciousness. I no longer feel a victim of this behaviour. I no longer feel the need to ‘tell my story’, or to have people feel sorry for me. I am not interested in pity, or victimhood. What I am interested in is steering a course through adversity that causes the least emotional and spiritual damage to me (and my family, and indeed my aggressor), whilst maintaining my own integrity and equilibrium.

And, you see, that is where this kind of situation drags you off kilter. My equilibrium was not kept intact. I took my eye off the ball. I allowed myself to be bent out of shape. I lost my cool, half-burned the children’s tea, gave them a fraction of the attention they deserve, spent almost 48 hours being sucked back in. It leeches your life. And, in the simplest of terms:

It is not worth it.

Because, at some great cost – of time, energy, emotional stability and presence – I have learned over many years that there can be no other outcome than an escalation of frustration and a very unsatisfactory parting of the ways, that leaves you feeling less than, and a little poisoned.

The way it works is this:

1) The hook.
Maybe a little message, perhaps of ‘love’, perhaps of guilt, something designed to draw you in.

2) The conversation.
During which you can plainly see that nothing has changed since the last time you communicated.
By now, your warning alarm is going off like crazy in the back of your mind. It is, most likely, shouting “Run away!”

3) The position.
Which usually means ‘I want to keep punching you in the face whilst telling you I love you’.

4) The argument.
In which, in the gentlest terms possible, you try to explain that being punched in the face doesn’t work for you.
This escalates, as the aggressor continues to insist on their right to keep punching. But they love you.
And your frustration grows, as you try to explain that love is not punching in the face.
And they fail to see it.
And you become angry.
And ask repeatedly for it to stop, and to be left in peace.

5) The kicker.
The tables are turned, and suddenly the aggressor is the victim. “I see I have made you furious, when I just wanted to tell you I love you”.
Followed, even after your repeated requests to be left in peace, by “Let’s just leave it there.”

And you sit, stunned and dazed, flummoxed and furious, with nowhere to go with it all, having to process the poison and try to regain your equilibrium.

So, you see, I am disappointed in myself. This pattern is not new to me. It is dyed in the wool, tried and tested, and has worked for years. But, until this last experience, I had begun to master sticking to the solution.

Because there is a solution:

Don’t engage.

It is enormously difficult at first. It feels rude, cold, uncaring. But it isn’t. It is a healthy boundary, and self-protection. When you have experienced the same situation, more times than you can count, and the outcome has never been different, in spite of the many different approaches and angles you have brought to it, then it is sheer madness to expect it ever to change.

Walk away.

Register the sadness that arises in you out of the situation. Recognise that your wishing it could be different is simply a denial of reality.

And then, with a few deep breaths, focus on being here now: cook the supper properly, cuddle your children and hear about their day, tuck them up with a kiss and focus on what you do have, what you can do, the person you can control.

And let the rest go.

1 comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Acceptance, Integrity, Mindfulness, Personal Responsibility, Right Motherhood

February 4, 2013

Who do I think I am? Time to challenge!

By Alice

I realised something not very long ago. It wasn’t a comfortable realisation, but the kind of observation that can only come from being very mindful of and paying close attention to your own actions, reactions and motivations. Which is something that, over time and with varying degrees of success (and otherwise), I have tried ever more to be.

It stems, I realised, from the fact that I meet life with the the expectation that people won’t care very much about my happiness. Until very recently, this has been an unquestioned assumption, and upon reflection it couldn’t really be more wrong.

But with some investigation, it isn’t terribly hard to understand. It comes from decades of experience and conditioning from those most closely related to me. Which, in itself, is not a blame statement. We are all the result of our upbringing, however we experienced it. And I am only too aware that even siblings can experience their home life, their families, parents, schools, wildly differently. Nonetheless, what we are left to work with is the result of our own experience. We cannot work from anyone else’s. Nor is there any point in becoming distressed by someone else’s reality. It is their journey, just as much as yours is your own. Parents react to different children differently, just as different children react to the same parents differently. It is part of our remit, our hard-wiring, our Path.

The way I understand it is this: our conditioning, from childhood, ‘trains’ us to interact in certain ways, in response to the circumstances, functional or otherwise, in which we find ourselves learning about the world. And again, I’ll stress, different children will be trained in different ways by a similar set of circumstances, because so much also depends on the way we are made individually. If you have a high threshold for pain, or for pleasure, you will tolerate more of either than someone with a lower threshold. The same, of course, goes for integrity. Or dishonesty. Anything, really.

We carry those methods of interaction that we have learned into the wider world, and, unchallenged, they dictate our relationships with those we meet and with whom we surround ourselves. If we have grown up in a safe and secure environment, trusting those around us, we will be naturally more trusting of those we meet outside that circle. We also, as a natural consequence of that conditioning, tend to gravitate towards people with similar methods of relating to those with whom we grew up. This, if our upbringing was healthy, will generally provide us with a healthy mode of interaction as adults. If, on the other hand, our upbringing was less functional, we are likely to collide with folk who challenge us to either fix it, or become ever more dysfunctionally entrenched. And adversity, as I have mentioned before, will throw those possibilities to their furthest extremes. It will teach you who you are.

On a lighter note, though, I began this piece with an uncomfortable realisation. Like so many people, my expectations of the world dictate my interaction with it. And my interaction is, I have begun to understand, an attempt to control or manipulate it to exceed my expectations. Put more simply, because I don’t expect the world to care much about my happiness, I struggle to allow my happiness to show. Because if I am happy, then the world can stop trying to make me happy. Do you see?

“Are you all right, darling?”

“I’m fine.”

Fine…? Only two minutes earlier, I had been gazing out of the window at the reddening evening sky, sun setting over the cobbled-together fence and ploughed field that form the picturesque view from the kitchen. And I took the deepest breath of contentment and smiled to myself. I even registered my own gentle happiness with delight.

And then: “Are you all right, darling?”

“I’m fine.”

Each day is a lesson, eh?

8 comments | posted in Integrity, Personal Responsibility, Right Motherhood

January 31, 2013

Keep going…

By Alice

I heard this today:

The person who is really on the way, falling upon hard times in the world, will not as a consequence turn to those friends who offer them refuge and comfort and encourage their old self to survive. Rather, they will seek out someone who faithfully and inexorably helps them to risk themselves, so that they may endure the difficulty and pass courageously through it. Only to the extent that a person exposes themselves over and over again to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found within them. In this daring lies dignity and the spirit of true awakening.

Karlfried von Durckheim

Food for thought.

If, like me, you subscribe to the understanding that 1) everything is as it should be and 2) everything happens for a reason, then it follows that, if you are going through hell, the fires of the forge will leave a new, purified you upon your emerging.

In the simplest of terms, adversity teaches you who you are.

I have long loved the maxim:

If you are going through hell, keep going.

Don’t turn back and decide it wasn’t for you; you’d rather sit and stagnate where you were. Don’t berate the universe for your terrible lot. Don’t run for the cover of old, tired, fruitless patterns of behaviour.

Remember this: Nothing is permanent. Everything changes. Life is a journey, with all the requisite bumps in the road: sometimes it takes you through the roughest part of town, and sometimes through breathtaking scenery. Joy and sorrow each have their part to play.

So, if you’re going through hell. Keep going. Don’t lose sight of your true self. Don’t sacrifice your integrity. Stay focused, don’t attach to the story, believe in yourself, believe in the bigger picture. Hold onto love, don’t give in to hate.

And one day, basking in the light at the end of that tunnel, a little older, a little wiser, the sorrows assimilated, the joys welcomed, you’ll look in the mirror and recognise the you that has always been.

And head off into the next unknown.

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Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Acceptance, Buddhism, Integrity, Love, Mindfulness, Personal Responsibility, Right Motherhood, Rites of Passage

January 26, 2013

A few more thoughts on forgiveness.

By Alice

Today, I have been listening to the dulcet tones of Jack Kornfield. He has the most soothing and calming voice, which helps a lot, but it is the content of his talks that is the most enlightening. For anyone who hasn’t heard of him, he is the author of such excellent books as “A Path with Heart” and runs the Spirit Rock Meditation Centre in California.

I was pottering about my kitchen, everyone else in the family occupied, listening to his guided meditations. Possibly not the best way of meditating, but better than not at all, to my mind anyway :)

And, in his inimitable fashion, he fed me some gentle food for thought.

The way it works for me is this:
I’m washing up, listening, drifting away, my mind snags on something. I stop what I’m doing and focus better. This is what snagged me:

“Stand up for yourself.
Tell the Truth.
It will be okay”

Which was just what I needed to hear at that moment. (Another fabulous way this universe works).

But he went on to do a lovingkindness meditation, which led me down the forgiveness route again.

I often write about the same theme many times. Sometimes I worry about that. About repeating myself. But here’s the thing:
These themes are things that we, as human beings, can struggle with our entire lives. I can’t write about it once and just ‘get it’, like flicking a light switch. It is tidal. The tide comes in and you have it. It ebbs away again and you struggle to hold onto it . But the difference here is that it never goes out quite as far as it did the first time, and eventually, instead of a turbulent and stormy ocean, you find the water has stopped at the shoreline, and you have a still, peaceful lake.

You have it.

So, forgiveness.

Forgiveness is vital to the healing process.

But it isn’t a sticking plaster. You can’t paper over the hurt with it. You can’t force it, even. And this is important.

You cannot force yourself to forgive.

It is a process.

And there are many stages to this process, not dissimilar to the stages of grief. For those unfamiliar with the five stages of grief, the Kubler-Ross model is this:
1) Denial
2) Anger
3) Bargaining
4) Depression
5) Acceptance

And anybody who has been badly hurt will experience most if not all of these stages. My understanding of it, though, is that it is not until you get to the Acceptance stage of the process that you are able to forgive; it is not until you have worked through it all, and truly understood and assimilated, that you are able to let go.

I have said before that we have this perception that forgiveness lets your aggressor ‘off the hook’. In fact, the person being let off the hook is you. You no longer have to dwell in that world of holding on with hate, of clinging desperately to your injustices., of being locked into a cycle of vicim consciousness, which is disempowering to say the least. You are free to move on, unshackled from the ball and chain you’ve been dragging behind you for too long, empowered and in charge of your own life, responsible for your own happiness, no longer at the mercy of someone else’s responsibility for your unhappiness. From victim to conqueror!

Many victims of abuse become angry at the suggestion that they must forgive in order to move on. It has often taken such an enormous effort of will to stand up for themselves in the first place, that they fear that forgiving will set them back into a vulnerable position, that they will have to go through this all over again. And at that stage you are not ready. Your anger fortifies you, stiffens your resolve not to allow such things to happen to you again. It is natural, healthy and in the order of things that you feel it. But it is not a place you can live healthily in forever. The time has to come when you have strengthened yourself enough there to shed the anger and move on with your life, the lesson learned, the boundary strengthened, your happiness lying ahead, and not behind.

Anger, hatred, all those negative emotions are a chain around your heart. They may be protecting it from past (or present) abuse, but they are also preventing you from letting love in, from future happiness, from freedom.

So, when the time is right – and only when the time is right – cut the chain and let your heart fly free.

You cannot lose.

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4 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Acceptance, Buddhism, Jack Kornfield, Love, Meditation, Mindfulness, Personal Responsibility, Right Motherhood, Victim Consciousness

January 13, 2013

Pillow Drops – New Website

By Alice

After much interest and some fairly disastrous attempts with hosted websites, I am happy to announce the launch of a website dedicated specifically to Pillow Drops (and forthcoming Pillow Drop products). Please feel free to visit, and note that there is free postage to the UK. There will also be a permanent link to the site to the right of this post.

http://rightmotherhood.co.uk/

Thank you for your interest, custom and attention :)

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