I’ve always prided myself on being a fairly relaxed individual so it was no surprise that the life of a hippy started calling my name a couple of years ago. It all started with the first purchase of my favorite amethyst crystal and from there, many more, then came the incense, the oils, then I became a Reiki Master Healer & then a Seichim Master Healer started meditating regularly and just “chilling out”. This was all great, but the whole time I had a day job whilst venturing out into this unknown world of Zen and then one day, it was almost as if I forgot that I had a day job and before I knew it, had turned this new found Zen lifestyle into one of chaos and stress which then led to a third world breakdown but yet a spiritual breakthrough…some collision of the worlds there.
As much as I’d like to say that this came out of the blue, it didn’t, it had been there for quite sometime, sitting casually in the corner of my eye…rearing its head every now and again but as all intelligent beings do so, they ignore issues right? Right? Wrong…
So imagine this Zen like being who had prided himself on being the kind of calm laying on his lounge room floor in hysterics calling on every friend and family member known to man for the first time in his life for “help”. Can you imagine that someone who was seemingly so invincible would ever need to reach out to another for help? Shocking right. At the age of 31, do we not have it all together? Are we not masters of our own destiny and domain? Do we not know everything there is to know about life and the world we live in? Well, no, no we do not.
So naturally this caused a bit of a re-write of the script I was reading to myself daily and a few changes had to be made. We so often read or watch or listen to people talk about these revelations during their life where they have these so called “breakdowns” or “breakthroughs” as we must put a positive spin on everything these days, but actually enduring one is an entirely different story.
For all the Zen I had brought into my life, I had seemingly brought in more stress and chaos and I was hurtling every so close and so fast towards a complete and utter breakdown…something which we’ve all heard others talk about also. What happened to me is so symbolic of one underlying thing, sometimes the thing we are focusing on the most, can be the one thing we fail to focus on at all. I believed that I had mastered the art of calm so well that in the chase of getting and staying there, I had whipped myself up into a frenzy of stress in the process.
As I age, I am learning a lot of things about life. So often I am called back to so many of the simple sayings that the older generation have been rattling off their tongues over the years. Sayings such as “Do what makes you happy” and “Cheats never prosper” just as some examples and as we seemingly hear these continuously during our younger years, they almost seem to lose all meaning as we get older, they become white noise in our lives. Something I’ve learnt also is that as we grow and progress forwards in life, a lot of things change over time including what makes us happy and how we know when the things that are filling our lives are no longer serving us in a positive manner. It’s almost human nature though to not make a change until a crisis point, we’re given warning signs, the little nudges that we get along the way that suggest to us we should be heading in a different direction, not ever knowing what that direction is. We’re so often conditioned in society as we know it in the Western World to make all of our decisions based on our heads, and rarely, if ever, our hearts.
So on learning to relax again, sounds like such a simple thing right? I write this now as I am on an actual holiday, sitting in my hotel room for the first time in the 4 days I’ve been away so far having to actively convince myself that having a day on the balcony outside is ok, that it is what a holiday is about and that I do not have to be out and about doing activities. Let me tell you, this is one grueling process, as you can probably conclude by now that I am someone who seems to have a lot of plates in the air most of the time, and when we do this, well, this opens the gate for the possibility of a lot of plates to fall and smash. This happened, though it was not quite the devastating life-ending experience I had once thought it would be if it were to ever occur. It was actually a bitter sweet moment in time where I felt an enormous sigh of relief and the veil seemingly lifted leaving only activities from my childhood that made me happy that still do to this day.
Learning to relax again is not something that I just did in an afternoon. It is a daily process which begins as a conscious one and then seeps into that subconscious mind which we are all aware of to an extent, however I don’t believe many of us are aware of just how much of an impact it has on our daily lives, thoughts, actions and behaviours. It can seem like it takes forever to work out what it is that enables us to be happy and to be able to relax into that feeling or that moment, but then after a while, something wonderful happens. It just becomes a new way of being, and you wonder how you ever did it the other way. Just as all the famous people who talk about this stuff say. Amazing right? Well…yes it is but this is also as it should be. I’d encourage you all to take a look at the things you are filling your days up with and then write down what you’re actually required to do during a day in order to stay alive. Start there, and then begin to eliminate everything that is not serving your higher self. Get back to the basics for a while, sit here for as long as you can, you may choose to sit here for ever or you may choose to implement stricter elements of control into what you allow into your life in the future, this is one of the most satisfying things you will ever do and it is quite an empowering feeling also. Go ahead, I invite you to try it and then reflect in a short while on how you are feeling.
Until next month,
Jamie
