...I set about reading and experimenting and researching all sorts of alternative practises. I dread to think of the money I invested in books and oddments of kit. Luckily, I belonged to a discount book club and I’ve always been one for sniffing out a bargain in a sale. Anyway, I read about EVERYTHING! Some things I read very little about because they immediately struck me as being utterly bonkers and nothing more than a lightly veiled excuse to partake in dodgy substances in order to achieve ‘enlightenment.’ You know, like lots of musicians and artists in the Sixties, who created their works under the ‘fluence of basically being smashed out of their brains on drugs? Either that, or they involved a lot of posturing and chanting and I’ve never enjoyed looking or feeling like a right tit.
(N.B I should like to point out at this juncture that I have NEVER partaken of ANYTHING that has made me hallucinate or given me a sense of being a superhero. Blimey, I don’t even like alcohol and I’ve never even tried a cigarette. Plus, I am too much of a control freak to ever want to wake up in the morning having not a clue about what happened the previous night. But is that being a control freak? Or just being safe and sensible? You choose. I can declare my brain and psyche remain undamaged by dodgy substances. Damaged by cheese - maybe. Cannabis et al - never.)
But other things I felt a resonance with. I do like things to make sense. If something makes sense to me, then it has value. And if it has value, it is worthy of the investment of my time and energies. The therapies that dinged a useful bell were : aromatherapy, reflexology, Indian head massage, crystal healing, feng shui, Tarot and, of course, spiritual healing.
They all have interconnections. They have a calmness, a gentleness about them. They involve touch and smell and vision. They require being grounded in Nature and the history of Earth. They connect us human beings with our physical origins. You know, all that stuff about ‘we come from Earth and to Earth we return.’ That our atoms are constantly being recycled into something else, ad infinitum, because we are part of a single Universal energy.
During the years following that first healing circle experience, it started making sense to me that in our life time we have several homes. We have our Universal home. We have our planet Earth home. We have the physical bricks/ straw/ canvas/ hollowed out tree/ cave etc that, hopefully, keeps us warm, safe and dry which we call ‘home’ and we can decorate with pictures and furnish with probably too many cushions. We have the space in our heads where we can go that can be any home our imagination would let us have. And we have our physical bodies, the home of our soul/ spirit/ essence.
And the harsh thing of life is that we all have responsibility for these various homes and generally we attend properly to only two or three of them. The ones that become neglected or we seem hellbent on trashing are the ones we seem constantly to be running around in circles seeking remedies for.
What has really struck me in the last few months, though, and which put me in a right stodgy fug at the beginning of this year, is that we make this act of living so very, very complicated for ourselves. And it doesn’t have to be, does it?
And then I got the nudge I needed to set me on my next pathway...
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KJ