Peeking through the veil

I have been debating within myself whether or not to publish public blog posts about the inner transformation I am going through.

There are quite a few reasons why I wouldn't want to, why I'd rationalise that it is not for "the greater good". Mostly it's to do with the wonderfully rigorous conditioning from family, culture and certain interpretations of faith. And my fears chase me round and round the garden, like an enormous teddy bear.

Some voices scream "Stay out of sight! Be unassuming, modest, in the background. You have nothing of value to say. You are no authority and you are in no way pious or one of the blessed Chosen Ones to even begin to share your insights with others".

Others whimper "If you tell other people, you'll jinx it. They have the power to take it all away and ruin your happiness. You must not share this sacred knowledge with everyone. It's akin to offering pearls to swine".

There is also the overwhelming and loud and clanky chatter which repeats: "It's all rubbish, you've entrapped yourself in an illusion, a fragile spider's web of your own creation, you're delusional. Stop before you go off the deep end and never find a way back to 'the truth'. If you don't, wait and see what happens when things fall apart."

Well, at least I can truly say I'm not alone in the world, if I've been lugging around all of the world and their opinions and disapproval in my invisible, energetic backpack!

So, then, why am I jumping off the precipice, slinking out of the shadows and into my Light?

A few reasons:

I feel compelled, the inner urge, to communicate this. I am obeying my intuition. I've been struggling to understand when I am being impulsive and when I am being intuitive. Someone told me to sleep on it, and if the urge is still strong, still makes sense, still resonates with you and you 'know' you must act upon it, then it's intuition or your guidance. But if you're in the throes of Ego and you're more attached to the mind and not the heart, sleep on it again. Or do nothing until you get an answer from somewhere.

So, I've slept on it. I feel peaceful. I'm still typing away, word after word, in a steady flow.

This, my dears, is Inspiration.

And, in the grand scheme of things, if you stumbled upon my blog somehow and are reading these words at this very moment, and what I have to say resonates with you, it shall resonate. You were meant to read this and open up to yourself and something vaster than that.

And if it does not, it does not. I hereby liberate myself from my persecution and martyr complexes ;)

Secondly, I finally came up with a title for this post during a funeral I attended yesterday. The funeral triggered a lot of insights and I could feel my stunted creativity and communication begin to flow once again. If you have been so kind as to be unaware of this, it has been a long time since my last personal post.

At the family funeral, I was once again smack bang in the middle of the East African/Indian/Pakistani Shia (or Shi'ite) Muslim culture I was brought up in. And I realised that I could no longer accept nor relate to a single thing.  The customs, the decades of conditioning that is still being promulgated as the way to salvation and inner tranquillity, the (dare I say it?) charade of a fulfilling and spiritual existence when all I could register was layers of automatic responses.

Yes, I think I can say this in a most compassionate and empathic and loving manner: what I have noticed in myself and in the cultural community that I was born into is that we are still reacting in our lives as a result of automated conditioning. We are, once again, forfeiting the dignity of free thought, exploration, insight, a true openness that recognises that all paths of inquiry eventually lead to God. We lack the certitude that even as we stumble and trip up and get confused, if we hold the strong intention and trust that He will gently and lovingly guide us back to our own truth, we will get there.

I shall, of course, greatly temper my loving observations and say there are many adherents to Islam who have leapt far beyond the place I currently am exploring, and whom I would greatly benefit by connecting with. Sheikh Arif Abdul Hussain is one. He's the head of an Islamic educational institute in the UK. As yet, I haven't been able to attract these key persons into my life in order to learn, grow, share, create and discover. Oh, well, "when the disciple is ready, the master will appear."

I suppose I had other learnings to master first, hence my teachers have come in different guises and forms, and up until now, pretty damned painful and spirit-breaking. And yet, "they" say that the most difficult people and the most painful situations and experiences are your most needed, valuable and even the most loving of teachers. They really challenge you to cleanse your soul and to reach deep within to find that little point of Light which allows you to truly forgive and love unconditionally, to break into your independence and your own truth, to truly be that wonderful, powerful, beautiful spiritual being you know that you are.

And these situations will keep recurring and these similar types of people will keep appearing until you experience what you need to and learn that which your Higher Self signed you up for. This can be changed, of course (but that's for another post!).


And this has been put into extremely harsh relief this past year.


At some deep and fundamental level, you can be subtly aware that you're missing something essential, that you only have to read or hear or see or experience something that will unlock the vault, grant you the keys to the Kingdom and truly remove the rust from the heart, the fog glasses from around the eyes, the blocks towards accessing your intuition, your unity consciousness and your knowingness (the 6th, 7th and 8th chakras) - so that you can TRULY, TRULY see, hear, feel, connect, know and BE.

This causes great unease. When you try, you search, you struggle and yet cannot seem to break free. You cannot see beyond. You're missing that which would help you completely transform your life. You may read the books by Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, books on receiving angel guidance, books entitled "You Are Psychic", books like Tomorrow's God by Neale Donald Walsch which open up to the sentence, "Ask yourself why you picked up this book out of all the books and you're reading, and continuing to read this page right now." (Yes, the books are starting to talk directly to me - giggle!)

I have been searching for a very, very long time. I had to start from a very low vibrational level. And when you are unaware of the cage, you don't seek to break free. And when you begin to sense that you are not leading the life that would express the true You, the you that comes to the fore in your most humble and pleading moments with God, or whilst playing with the wisest of children or the friendliest of kittens, the most brilliant of mandala colourings, the most magical of romantic or platonic soul mate moments, the sense of connection you feel when visiting a mosque or cathedral or place of trees and water and duckies, when writing an email, letter or a blog post from the depths of the heart.... there are many more, but you get the drift.

And then, someone or something, or a chain of events wake you up. Brutally or gently - depends on how you made your soul plan.


***


And, now, the brilliant phoenix observes the gilded cage she is within. It's comfortable, familiar and she's managed to survive so far. But her wings have been clipped, and they want to grow a lot more than the space she has allowed herself. She may be regularly fed, but it's all manufactured food, having no real taste, nutritional value or imagination in it, whatsoever. Bugs and snails and other creepy crawlies in the enchanted forest are what really whet her appetite. She's heard they exist, she dreams they exist when she sleeps and she may have even seen a sparrow or parakeet flying outside, in the real world with one in firmly grasped in its beak.

And she pines and is wistful and, if I'm honest, envious: Look at this magnificent kestrel's shiny, healthy plumage, look at how large her wings are, listen to the lovely songs they sing and the wonderful acrobatics they perform in the still, blue sky. They fly like birds, as they should. I am a bird, too. I have my own destiny. So, why am I the unfortunate one still in this rotten, limiting, cage which confines me in every possible way? Boo to all the people who put me in the cage. And locked it so I can't get out.

But, wait. As her physical senses become more sensitive and receptive to all that is around her, she notices that there is a way out. Actually, there are several. The lock is ancient, ancestral and was not made of the best material. This is no impenetrable metal, it is easily malleable, shaky at best. And she spies the keys are actually, hanging on a tiny hook on the outside of the cage. She moves towards the keys outside her current sphere of influence, and what does she see?

She's been sitting on an egg the entire time. She had to move her butt in order to know it was there! And her first instinct is to peck the egg open. But she is again distracted by some birds outside the window and the keys glinting on the hook attached to her cage, just out of reach.

She sleeps on the impulse and when she wakes, she sees that, actually her sitting on her ass for so long was the right method and time duration in order to allow the egg to hatch of its own accord. Some outside help is definitely required, but she only does that after the chick inside has actually broken away most of the protective shell and has drunk the nourishment that nature provided it.

The chick flares into being, in a gorgeous red, yellow, orange, green, blue, purple and brilliant white sacred fire. It is such a sight to behold. The phoenix is speechless. She needs to remind herself to breathe. And, suddenly the memories of the inherent knowingness, wisdom, intuition and, most importantly, Love all come flooding into her heart, her blood vessels, her entire being.

She remembers.

She takes one step towards the mystical, magical and newly hatched bundle of spiritual joy and potential. It hops and jumps towards her.

She whispers tentatively: Are you who I think you are?

The chick gives her a fierce, glowing look of such love and acceptance and forgiveness that nothing else needs to be said.

The phoenix opens up her beak and the chick hops, skips and finally plops inside of her beak. No chewing, no effort is necessary. All is within.

And she is now alight. She is aflame.

She is burning, burning, burning.

And it's the most magical, wonderful and peaceful feeling in the world.

She is Abraham burning in the coolest of fires.

It is first a green flame for healing, then a pink flame for allowing herself to give and receive all that she was fearful of touching or experiencing on any meaningful level in the past.

And now it is a steady silver and violet flame. For complete transformation.

She opens her eyes, still surrounded by the Divine light in the form of an alchemical, catalytic, powerful, absolute, healing, loving and guiding flame.

And the cage is no longer made of metal. That was the illusion, a super magic trick of the analytical mind.

It is a veil. It is a veil of shadows and light and sparkly bits. It's not structured at all. It's not overwhelming at all.

Most of it was made of distorted love, confused ideas of security, protection, guidance and uprightness.

The ideology has congealed into idolatry.

In a certain sense, it never existed.

And, so, she slowly opens up her wings. She sees green and gold and pink feathers are swiftly growing in all the places where she had once plucked them out herself, or where someone had clipped them with an opinion, a disapproval, an outdated and monolithic belief system or a non-acceptance of the evolutionary, ever-changing, ever-growing and ever-accepting Divine within.

The more she spreads her plumage, the larger the cage of shadows and lights and nothingness grows.

And the moment her feathers touch the walls of the cage, it is no longer.

She sees that the room is also an illusion.

Ethereal azure sky is everywhere. That is all it is. That it is all it ever was.

The phoenix dares to lift up those brilliant wings....

She flies.

Fearlessly trusting in herself and in God. That is all that is needed for the flight to the Heavens.

***

At the mosque, as we performed all the death rituals for my father's uncle, I once again didn't belong in that paradigm.

This, of course, is not the first time I have felt the sense of separateness. I've felt it for aeons, since I was 8 years old, perhaps. But in the past, it was hugely unsettling and disconcerting, because I and the people around me kept assuming there was something "wrong" with me.

I suppose society at large can, on a subconscious level, accept rebellion to a certain degree, because the underlying presupposition is that, on a subconscious level, you are attached to and you validate the majority culture and its belief system. You only rebel and formulate a subculture of your own when you feel threatened, betrayed or unappreciated.

But yesterday, as a result of all the self-work and the shifting and the releasing I've been doing in the last two months - it was perfectly OKAY.  I didn't feel attacked, or self-conscious, or left with the urge to be judgemental and condescending about that which my fellow sisters in faith did or said or believed. It was all as it was. And I allowed it to be so without an inner, automatic reaction.

This is quite liberating, once you find that place of beingness.

I didn't censure myself, nor did I censure anyone else for being or acting the way we did. I was in my space of being, and they were in theirs. I could completely connect with them, show them love and compassion and yet maintain my uniqueness, and I made sure they did the same.

I was really glad to be able to contribute by creating an energy space where true healing and releasing and cleansing could take place. This is thanks to all the learning and wisdom I am gaining from learning about Energetic NLP, my first step on the journey in this new phase of life of mine.

Another reason for my sudden outpouring of all that is within:

Yesterday, I recalled this part of Marianne Williamson's oft-repeated passage:

Your playing small does not serve the world
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other
people won’t feel insecure around you
We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us

It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone
And as we let our own light shine we unconsciously give
other people the right to do the same
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others

This stuff is not unique to me: I am not the creator of it, nor am I the sole recipient of it. We all have this inner wisdom, we all have this wonderful Light within. When one person finally awakens and begins to navigate themselves and their lives from their inner wisdom and spirit, it's the sole catalyst that is required for others to recognise their own true essence. And they will probe, and seek and perhaps one day, they will awaken in their own unique manner.

In my personal relationships or when reading the books of certain authors, I am acutely aware of those who are ahead of me on their personal journeys and how they inspire me. It is unusual for me to agree or follow every single thing that they say, do or become, but just the fact that they are courageous and brilliant enough to be the very unique expression of who THEY are.... makes me think,

"Hmmm, maybe I, too, can harness that confidence, that courage, that complete TRUST in self and can at least try this new way. I can try trusting myself. I can try expressing the person I may be at this time and see where it takes me."

I also came across the following angel cards yesterday:

Be grateful for those who have opened the door before you, for they have shown you new possibilities.

Healing, when properly understood, merely means casting a firm decision in the direction of your higher self's priorities.

And, so, here is the result.

I am peeking through the first of many veils that envelop me and can see that it is time for me to lift it and move ahead.

My life coach has set for me a 21 day writing challenge in order to facilitate my cellular reprogramming. I have to write certain phrases 21 times daily for 21  continuous days.

And, so... 

♥♥♥

I lovingly forgive myself for failing to love, heal, honour, respect, cherish, trust, value, validate, support, care for, empower, liberate and awaken myself in the past.

http://www.pocketonline.net/g2engine/d/17445-1/Baby+Phoenix_001.jpg

I AM DOING THAT NOW, NOW, NOW!

♥♥♥