37 Things

Dear Friend

In honour of being alive for 37 years, here’s 37 Things I feel immensely grateful for.

1. YOU!!! - and my human family - I feel so incredibly blessed to exist amongst such a wonderful community of friends. Thank you for being alive at this time with me!

2. My birth family - for their endless patience with my weird and wonderful ways.

3. Life -  thankful for being here and inhabiting this crazy body vehicle and for the basic fuels that enable it to stay on the road - breath, food, warmth, shelter and, of course, tea.

4. This AMAZING Planet - and the infinite beauty of Nature - particularly Trees, Water, big Cats and Roses :)  My little spot of earth that I rustle about in here in Crystal Palace.

5. My senses - having grown up with a grandmother who was deaf and having worked with those with sensory impairments for over 20 years, I am acutely aware that being able to experience all the tastes, touches, sights, scents and sounds of life is very precious.

6. Movement -  learning to understand my own physical backtofrontwardness has given me a huge appreciation of now being able to move, dance, cycle, yoga and shimmy.

7. Passion - the dynamic energy that propels us to create, birth, bond and unite.  The ability to feel deeply and feel for others - compassion.

8. Deep Connection - and the dance of intimacy.

9. Power - the sunshine of strength, courage, confidence, independence, individuality and self-determination within all of us.

10. Freedom - to make choices and the responsibility to make them wisely.

11. Money - as a form of exchange that saves a lot of time that would otherwise be spent doing the ‘how many beans for your cow?’ routine.

12. Challenges and conflicts - and what they teach me.

13. Difference - diversity brings so much colour, texture and spice to life.

14. Love - in all its magnificent manifold forms.

15. Play - the joy and delight of being very, very silly and laughing until its beyond silly.  

16. Community - I’ve had so much fun, work, play and party time with the most truly extraordinary creative people.  It was so amazing to celebrate the 4th Birthday of The Garden of Roses at Inspiral last week - 46 events featuring over 100 artists at InSpiral - all made possible by love and generous collaborative community spirit.

17. Communication and creative expression - in all its forms - writing, poetry, art, music, dance.  I am acutely aware of the power of words to reframe our perceptions and also conversely the limitation of words and the value of non-verbal communication.

18. Music - essential medicine which transforms the vibration of every aspect of our being.

19. Singing - for me, it’s the direct line to heaven (aka ecstatic meditative experiences).

20. Chanting - mantras could be described as the dial up code on the direct line to heaven.

21. The Big Om - the sonic big boOM of creation - huge Big Up for the beautiful Barefoot Doctor - and his truly life changing Big Om experiences.

22. Musical instruments - piano was my first love and I now have a family of sonic beings who travel around me - gong, singing bowls, flute, tampuri etc.

23. Composition - birthing pieces of music and albums is one of my life’s big adventures. I feel particularly honoured to have composed a piece for Road to Peace, a film about the Dalai Lama. Big shout out to my producer Scott Turner at Spiritual Studio.

24. Choirs - the exquisite sound of voices joining together in harmony gives me shivers, tingles and frequently brings me to tears.  Particular thanks to Croydon Intercultural Singing Project & my Forest Hill Singing Group.

25. Sing for Water - being part of this amazing project which features huge amounts of people singing together to raise funds for WaterAid has been so immensely life-enriching - the power of song in action.

26. Supporting others to sing and sound - I get such a huge buzz out of seeing people reclaim their voices - whether one to one or in groups - its so amazing!

27. Imagination - meditating and journeying with clients has revealed to me that our lives are beautiful tapestries with intricately perfect strands of meaning and symbolism.  Our imagination enables us to re-weave and re-vision our worlds and to create new pathways, choices and perspectives.

28. Learning - it goes on and on and on - I am forever grateful to my teachers, mentors and guides - and the amazing sources of wisdom and knowledge I have accessed.

29. Healing - so many amazing modalities exist for us to transform our awareness - my particular loves are coaching, reiki, massage, reflexology, tarot, kabbalah, meditation and acupuncture.

30. Travel - inner and outer voyages to places known and unknown.  It’s so important to keep stretching beyond the familiar.  I’ve experienced the grace of adventures to many far flung places, of which Turkey and New Zealand have impacted me most deeply.. so far...

31. Solitude - is the deep soil in which I grow my ideas, reflections, creations.

31. Silence - stillness, peace.

32. Darkness - the womb of creation.  Death and the space it creates for more life.

33. Miracles - they happen all the time!

34. The Ancestors - and their legacy of gifts and challenges.

35. Angels - we are all angels and angelic energy is always available.

36. Spirit - the effervescent energy that enervates the great symphony of existence.  The great numinous spirits that have inspired devotion throughout time across all spiritual practices.

37. Mystery - As Socrates said ‘As for me, all I know is that I know nothing’

It’s been magical writing this, thanks for reading - beaming over huge amounts of love, appreciation and gratitude to you!

Wishing you a wonderful August

Love

Garden of Roses 4th Birthday Party
Gayatri & Cate Mackenzie 

Mantra of the Month - THANKYOU How many truly madly deeply loving expressions of gratitude can we share this month? Let’s make August the Month of Augmented Appreciation!

The Raw of ROAR

The Raw ROAR

 Having had some wonderful experiences in workshops and 121 sessions this month, I wanted to share some insights I’ve gained through witnessing the roar in action.

By roaring I mean the liberation of our truthful, primal, creative voice which is often suppressed and compressed into the neat and tidy, polite voice that says ‘please may I, perhaps, maybe, could I possibly, I was just wondering if...’

It is the rawness of our roar that contains the key to both its power and its vulnerability.  So the key to reclaiming our roar requires the ability to get raw with ourselves, to be able to be present to the full technicolour glory of our existence.   So where does our roar get lost and how can we recover it?

Conditioning

Compounded emotions of centuries of familial, social and cultural conditioning can come to greet us when we attempt to open our voices.   The intent, the willingness is there - but like a goldfish we may end up just blowing empty speech bubbles instead of saying those all important words - ‘I’m leaving’ ‘This isn’t working’ “I love you’ ‘I’m sorry’

Patriarchal concepts have defined emotions as being a ‘woman’s thing’ - which has resulted in the torture of women who were considered hysterical and the massacre of men who were told ‘big boys don’t cry’ and sent off to kill each other.  Traditional forms of education teach children to compete for knowledge of facts and figures but very little about healthy self-expression.  Newtonian scientific thought defined the body of the earth as something to be conquered and dissected, priveleging rational proof over intuitive, ethical or emotional responses.

Religious dualistic thought further aligns the feminine with the body and the masculine with the mind, the sword of truth. Detachment, ascension and liberation from the messiness of life becomes the goal.  Self observation can of course can yield invaluable insights and changes in awareness. However we cannot observe something effectively if we are busy pretending that it does not exist.  We must first allow the intensity of our emotions to be present and acknowledge that we are inextricably implicated in the rawness of life.

It is no surprise then that our ability to communicate effectively can feel immensely stunted and that our media is full of horror stories of those who have felt driven to express themselves violently.  The glamorisation of gratuitous behaviour in movies reflects a distorted longing for a depth and intensity of authentic emotional expression.

Denial

Keeping us on the run from rawness is denial - which is the attempted suppression of the intense emotions we experience on the life ride.  ‘This isn’t me. I cannot possibly be feeling this.  It’s irrational.  What would my mother/father/partner/friend think?  I just need a drink/ cigarette/ bowl of icecream/ spliff/ internet surf.’  Denial is the partner that gets us dancing to the tune of addictions - which are substituted behaviours we have developed to survive the force of our most intense traumas.  As such they to be treated with compassion and then offered to the fire.

Denial fuses with our conditioning to form a decision, belief, or deal we have made with ourselves in order to survive.  A woman whose father beat her decides, ‘It’s men, they’re just like that’ - and finds herself in an abusive marriage.  We justify behaviours based on beliefs we have formed.  A man stuffs down the anger he felt with his dominating mother, tells himself ‘all women are bitches’ and punishes his partners by cheating.  We stay hooked up on the same old drama, because it has become inextricably tied to our sense of identity and reality - the woman whose partner continually lets her down says - ‘I told you so, men can’t be trusted.’

Claiming the Freedom to Roar

Roaring propels us off the sofa of denial.  It connects us with the explosive force of our deepest felt emotions. And that need not be externally noisy. That one tear that rolls down the cheek, that one pained smile, that one quiet admission - ‘yes she beats me every night’ - is the opening of the door to living beyond denial.  

It’s raw to roar, no doubt about it.  Living without our belief systems can feel very exposing - ‘Who am I if I don’t believe that all men are losers - I might have to become someone who loves men.’ ‘Who am I if I no longer believe that I am small and useless  - I might have to take action and fulfil my dreams.’  ‘Who am I if I don’t talk down to women because I believe they are stupid? - I might have to give up being right about everything.’

The rewards of raw is that we get present and we get to speak authentically instead of from a conditioned script.  We get to choose who we want to interact with instead of letting our programming determine our dancing partners.  We get to be real and vulnerable and be someone who gives others permission to do the same.  We get naked in the fire of our creativity and passion for life and are able to sing our song, paint our pictures, write our books and dance our dance.  We allow ourselves to play, to explore, to make mistakes and to roar with laughter.  We become connected to the raw source of power that throbs in every single cell of our body and we recover our vivaciousness, vitality and verve.  We begin to welcome and make peace with the rawness of life. We ROAR!!!

Wishing you the joyous freedom to ROAR

Ready to Roar?

Please join me in the Voice Garden to discover your own Roar

or at this month's special roaring events