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What do I want?
I struggle to find happiness in the day to day.  I suffer loneliness and dislocation.  This melancholy has been with me all my adult life.  It forms a big part of what my ego likes to define as “me”.  Persistent dissatisfaction brings only weariness.  But, it is also the motor for all my most persistent and faithful delvings into the spiritual life.  When we are awake enough to perceive our own slavery, it is inevitable that we will rattle at the bars until we glimpse freedom.  The great trick of modern social organisation is to enslave everyone in its machinery, but make them delight in their drudgery.
Today, my friend listened a while to my longstanding list of grumbles.  Then she asked:  “what do you want”.  Well, Naty, here is your answer.
I want to connect with others on the path of change.  I want to surround myself with a community of like minded believers – a loose association of free thinkers.  I want to work towards the betterment of womankind, mankind, humankind, in concrete, daily ways.  I want to better myself deep in my core, so that I can shine that same light out into the world.  I want to see clearly – without the clouds of deception caused by drugs, alcohol, television.  I want to be one of a tribe of lovers-healers-dreamers-thinkers who truly believe that a safer, stabler, more honest and free world is possible – and doable – now, within my lifetime.  I want to teach my daughter to think big, to dream beyond the boundaries of tradition, location and education.  I want to sit still in group meditation, solitary contemplation, with others and feel the spirit rise and fall in my breath.  I want to look into the unguarded eyes of other adults and know that within lives true Love.
I can’t do this alone.  This is something so big, so beautiful and so dear to me that I have to share it . I don’t hate Altea.  I just despair that amidst such glorious natural beauty, can live people so fearful, suspicious and stuck.  I miss the modern world, where ideas, creativity and faith mix to build new shapes for living.  I don’t dream of escape by any means.  It’s the opposite – I am so completely alive, so completely aware, that I need the comradeship of others on the Path, all too aware the change is hard, painful, but infinitely worth it.
Most of us had big dreams when we were young. Life taught us to give up our dreams, finish school, get jobs, earn money, save up for holidays and retirement and…oh, forget about those fanciful dreams.  I never stopped dreaming.  My teenage angst is still with me, torturing me with questions like “why is the world so unfair?” “why do we spend more money on arms than on schools?” “why is the world run by grey-haired men?” and “why are so forgetful of our divine birthright?”.
Why am I not happy here?  Because this angst is with me, wherever I am. I practice yoga and meditation and I focus-re-focus-re-focus on my inner light.  But I am not going to retire to a cave or an ashram.  Krishna taught that the yoga of action is the path of the true seeker.  When your karma (action/work) and your dharma (path) unite, you achieve liberation.  I know that my own healing journey is only to make to strong and resilient to face whatever it is I have to face in this world.  I know that my karma is to effect change, but not alone.  That, I know.
For now, I am on the road of humility.   Humility, vulnerability, honesty, deep faith.  Idealism.  That’s it, in a word. I am an idealist.  I will never stop believing.  But, it is crushing to dream alone.

A friend posted this on Facebook. I was going to share, and comment, but the space there seemed short, for what I wanted to say.

Where to start?  At first, I thought, yeah! a true friend who is there no matter what, non judging always loving blah blah blah.  And then I thought, who’s that person in my life?  And then I thought – I myself am not a true friend to myself.  I hate it when I am broke.  I castigate myself when I am a bitch.  I flog myself for a messy house, OK, my car is fine, but I over-analyse my past and my oddball family. So, why am I not my own true friend?  Could the answer to my persistent loneliness be befriending myself?

Maybe it’s affirmation time?  (watch out cynics!)

Rachel, you are fine with or without money.

Rachel, you a fine a little thinner or a little thicker.

Rachel, your past is your past, you are here because of everything you’ve chosen, learned, dared and allowed to enter your life. Accept it, cherish it, love it.  Love the family you’ve created here and now, don’t worry about the rest.  So re-post, Rachel, you have a true friend.  Yourself.

I think I just made a New Year’s Resolution, no?

As autumn draws inexorably towards the Long Cold, we, too, draw inwards. Observing the inevitability of change, and loss and dying off, melancholy tugs at our hearts. Autumn is the season of the Lung, whose emotion is grief and sadness and whose element is metal. In Hindu thought, Shiva rules the moribund phase of things…that which must be left to die, so leaving space for that which is yet to come.
Last night, we built a mandala of autumn fruits and leaves. We then, privately, chose and noted the thing whose release is nigh. Next, our papers were thrown on the roaring fire and transformed to ash. Afterwards, tea and biscuits and free dancing.
Thank you.
Tomorrow, yoga@Prana, Benidorm, 9AM, 2PM…AUM

Tri-color juice on Simone’s new colorful table…

One of the curious things that we come up against time and again in healing work is resistance to change.  I say it’s curious because even people who are “formally” on the road of transformation often butt up against an innate resistance to change.  This is the dastardly work of the ego, keeping the status quo, telling us tall tales and keeping itself on top…of the True Self.
I started this post after reflecting on the attitudes of some of the clients I work with.  I don’t hold myself back in  transformative work.  I tend to move quickly, push past the discomfort zone and realise results, or at least steps forward, with some rapidity.  Being a Canadian living in Spain, I realise that many if not most of my clients and colleagues are not only not open to such rapid change, they are positively mistrustful of it.  In my yoga teacher training, we study Viniyoga.  This system’s motto is “the yoga adapts to the person, not the person to the yoga”.  Well and good. Except when you translate that to mean “put in no effort, you’re fine as you are”.
I often recount, with decidely black humour, my various experiences of training in Spain.  For example:  I went up to Valencia to do parts 1 and 2 of Yanardana Das’ Cuencoterápia course.  We were 15 in the room. In London or Toronto, that would have meant 13 vegans and 2 raw foodists, all teetotal.  In Spain it meant lunch at the local restaurant, fish, meat, BEER etc.  I mean, in the middle of a tibetan bowl course, you go out and have a beer?  Yes, that’s how it is round here. OK, so I concur that on my yoga teacher training course we are pretty abstemious, but….but….the predominant onda is one of permissiveness.  I find it hard to square.  But also, as a person who seeks stimulation, I find it hard to maintain my own good habits in the midst of such lassitude.  So perhaps my great complaint is that I miss the support of a community of seekers who understand the pull of the grape or the bud, but who choose with heart and might to put it off, one day at a time.  I look at my friend Suki’s Facebook posts and yearn…
Then I go to thinking –  maybe it’s living in the “Olde World” that makes everyone more resistant to change?  I am resolutely “New World” in my thinking, convinced that change is necessary and positive, inevitable and desirable.  Perhaps the pushing back of frontiers is in my blood?  Perhaps the reticence that I rail against comes down to the keeping of traditions.  After all, in Spain la fiesta is of supreme importance.  Anyone who works the brutal “doble turno” (two shifts) or in a firm that observes siesta knows that almost all waking hours are consumed by the workday.  The rewards for such dilligence are pitiful – Spain has some of the lowest salaries in the Eurozone.   But, as most will tell you, a fiesta at the end of it makes it mostly tolerable.
I think that the Spanish permissiveness to alcohol and other drugs is down to a deep resistance to change (traditionalism) and avoidance of reality.  I am not saying this in a judgmental way – I am just trying to make sense of the world around me.  It’s been a long time since I lived in North America…What might it be like over there?  Are you more open to change in the “New World”?