About

~~It began as a feeling of uneasiness that something was off. Way off. I was 25 and beginning to feel compelled to read more spiritual books, turning my back on the world of fiction which I'd loved. For the next ten years, through ups and downs and riding some bumpy terrain, it was the spiritual books (and occasional experiences) that mostly pulled me through. A sense that we are more than just a bunch of random atoms. That if there is no God, there is certainly a positive and loving force that holds us all. That we are all connected. A spiritual epiphany was to follow, when reading the second of Neale Donald Walsh's trilogy 'Conversations With God'. Occasional visits to a Reiki healer gave me a sense of psychic experiences opening up.

Experiencing the Munay-Ki rites gave me a sense of a powerful and wonderfully wild element dancing right alongside me. It's becoming increasingly hard to live in the material world, such as it is. One night I was listening to some Native American music, and the feeling I had of connection with this music, of kinship with a way of life I have never personally experienced, was so powerful, it inscribed a sense of yearning into my bones which I have never been able to shake off. I suddenly realised the inadequacy of the life I was living. I felt a very real sense of loss that I would not be able to connect more deeply with nature, to sleep in a teepee under the stars.  To be able to sing a part of me into existence.

I look around me, and feel a huge sense that mankind has really lost his way. I am confined to a house that prevents me from marveling at the stars at night before I go to sleep. It prevents me from inhaling the scent of newly blossoming flowers in the springtime, of listening to birdsong, of hearing animals softly padding round my garden at night, or hearing the wind whispering through trees and bushes. It keeps me from much interaction with neighbours. It's a cage that has not been successful in trying to tame me.

Inside this house there lies a television, a big, black, commanding, monolith standing in the corner of the living room. We switch it on to amuse ourselves, often for several hours at a time caught in an almost hypnotic trance, watching garish, fictionalised accounts of how we might live, or the 'news' whereby we are told what to think. The television teaches us that qualities springing from the ego are the ones worth cultivating, that fame should be something to collectively strive for. Television glorifies youth and beauty, encouraging comparisons drawn and feelings of inadequacy for many. It discards those deemed too old, those with faces lined like maps with crows feet crinkling around the eyes, with laughter lines, faces that tell a story of how a life has been lived.

When we get older, any desires we have to travel, to take risks, often become dulled. Sometimes this is because life has zapped our strength, perhaps through trying to process difficult emotional situations or by becoming encumbered by financial difficulties. And health problems also make us cautious. The idea, handed down from generation to generation, is that we pair up and marry --keeping many people trapped in loveless existences that further serve to disconnect them from nurturing their own development and growth as individuals. ~ We often think of ourselves as incomplete, waiting for our 'better half' to come and make us whole~.

So life often becomes mundane. People who don't have spiritual rituals can find their passion for life becomes nonexistent. The sheer magic of things like the fact we are alive, of the fact that scientists still can't tell us how consciousness works, of marvelling at the sights of nature, all of these are often forgotten.  This on a planet teeming with mystery, spinning around a sun in a galaxy with 200 to 400 billion stars, a galaxy that is one of perhaps 100 or 200 billion other galaxies (maybe many more). How can we be be so self-absorbed to have forgotten to wonder at the vastness of all this? To me, what passes for civilized society is sheer madness, often a real waste of human consciousness. To allow ourselves to only dwell in the mundane, or become absorbed by warfare when we should all be striving to work together.

I know with a certainty I want to deepen my spirituality. I want to go within and I want to dance with other people doing the same, to dance with life and Spirit. I want to take risks, allow my own intuition to be my guide. I want to feel awe, and a sense of wildness on a regular basis. And I want the freedom to be able to travel where I please. I want people to be able to live a nomadic existence without stigma; but to be celebrated, instead.

This isn't a passing fancy, it's a call that is becoming louder over the years, coupled with a yearning that is ever-present. To me, so many of life's problems would melt away if we all turned, en masse, to a more spiritual way of life. Towards meditation, shamanism, spiritualism, reiki. Towards vision quests and sweat lodges, pagan rituals, fire ceremonies; simple acts such as cooking together over a log fire. Every night we do not know if we will wake up the next morning, let alone if we will survive the next day. Uncertainty and change are the only certainties of life, yet we choose to ignore this when we should be embracing it, and using it to enhance the life we have.

A simple way to begin right now, would be to see all life as sacred; every moment of it.  A beautiful and mysterious gift that will open up to you more and more if you allow yourself to explore deeper truths within yourself. ~~