cliodhna’s wave

…as it says on the title I am setting up a Toltec stalking group in Sligo town. Everybody is welcome even those who are scratching their heads right now wondering what on earth is a stalking group and what does toltec mean?

Stalking is technique perfected by the Toltecs ( who lived in Mexico many many years ago) for Self awareness and inner freedom. We all have limited patterns and beliefs about ourselves and the world around us that stop us being everything we could be. We live in a dream that is not in accordance with our higher selves and when we have limited beliefs about ourselves these are what we project onto the world and the dream we create around us is limited. Stalking is a tool to find these limited patterns and beliefs, change them and heal them and start dreaming from love. To create the world we want around us that is unlimited and everything we can dream of.

I have worked for the last eight years with a Mexican shaman called Don Luis Molinar. He is a nagual in the Eagle Knight Lineage and received the teaching from Don Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements, Mastery of Love) who in turn received it from his grandmother who was a powerful shaman and healer.

The meetings will be in Sligo town in the evening time for two hours every two weeks in the Yoga Centre on Castle Street (purple door!). There will be a charge of 5 euro per meeting. Contact me for further details, we are still deciding on a day but we will start soon. Text or ring me at 083 4014336 or message me on this post.

If you want to read more about stalking or the Toltecs then check out
www.ToltecHeartWisdom.com for Don Luis

www.MiguelRuiz.com for Don Miguel

love and light! x clio

I found these photos. They are from my window in mexico and the two doves hung out for ages on the branch, playing and preening each other.

We are six and two. Six humans and two caterpillars, who arrived the second day of our journey to Teotihuacan (the pyramids outside Mexico City), on the tree outside the salon and entombed themselves to die and be reborn. They were huge and furry and black with yellow stars down the length of their backs. We are doing the same, on an inside space we retreat into the layers of our beings and our pasts that we still carry to transform these slow caterpillar bodies into lightness and colour and wings.

As we enter the salon every morning for yoga and evening for talks I look at the two white bundles underneath the branch and I wonder what is happening to the skin and small caterpillar bones inside the cocoon. How are they stretching and pushing and forming and tightening. Is it painful for them? Or do they sleep and then wake with a new body and brand new wings?

My insides are stretching and reforming, new energetic muscles are testing their boundaries and there are butterflies in my stomach as I prepare to leave here and go to Tepoztlan for the second half of the journey. I find myself impatient to be home to plan my new life already and get things moving and change and tell my partner all my new plans but now is not time for movement, I am still the caterpillar in the cocoon and this journey is the tree with its roots in the earth drawing substance and sustenance from the earth and giving it to us, all six cocoons receiving the love.

I discovered that I have love for myself, I want to be happy, I want to create my own dream of happiness that includes everything I want for myself. My relationship with Paul, my life with him and living somewhere beautiful and also I want to be successful at my art and sell and make money doing what I love doing, creating. Find a balance between the two, I need to find an agent, someone who knows how to sell and promote so I can concentrate on making and creating.

Universe, I want all this! So now I can move forward and keep my eyes open for opportunities.

If there is one thing I have learnt for certain in doing this work is that you pull towards you what you hold inside. If you hold fear and limitation that is what you will find, if you hold trust and openness that is also what you will find.

We finish the journey with a marriage. A couple from Belgium decides to get married in Tepoztlan. We scurry round the town the day before buying flowers and a gift for them and wondering what to wear and the next day we gather in the small chapel on the property and listen as they speak love to one another. I think of my own wedding last January and smile and send some love to Paul where ever he is. We go outside and in a traditional Mexican ceremony shout their names to the four directions and watch as they feed each other cake and hot chocolate. Yellow flowers everywhere.

It is the day of the dead in Mexico, families watch vigil at graves all night and yellow flowers line the streets and pave walks. They celebrate death to welcome life, to honour those who have gone before to honour the life that is living right now.

I allow a piece of myself, the old self that lived in limitation, to die every time I do one of these journeys and it brings space for something new to be born, something new and fragile, that I don’t recognize at first but I watch it and shelter it until it is strong enough to walk on its own.

We emerge from our cocoons as butterflies, wings still wet and weak but growing stronger in the sunlight and colours emerge, reds and blues and silvers and golds…. And we fly.

I am getting ready for a craft fair coming up in Nov. Its in Marlay Park Dublin. I am busy busy making things for it and trying to balance the art part with the craft part.

Now, both are both, if you catch my drift, my art is a craft I am constantly honing and changing and tweaking and seeking new ways to get from the image/feeling in my head to the finished piece hanging in the wall. But in the context of this post let us say that ‘art’ is what I do purely because I love doing it and ‘craft’ are the cutesy small things I am doing to sell.

I find myself getting worried about the money end and plan heart patches and bird iron on patches and more hanging birds and although I do like making these, they are not my lifes dream. I get off balance into time based linear thinking sometimes of having to do more more more…. exhausting

Back to balance, heart based, eternity, we are here on earth to learn how to love and ahhhhhh, ok, I will make something special today, something from the doodles that are hanging on my wall stuck up with masking tape waiting for their time.

But first I will make a few bird patches, cause I haven’t made any yet and I want to see how they turn out. That is the other part of the balance, small versus large, silly versus profound…..

The pictures in this post are all part of a series of small embroideries I did. I wanted to make small jewel like squares of rich decoration. I layered cotton between gauzes and used metallic threads. They are all 4 inches by 4 inches and very cute! I changed the usual edging I do from lace to rough stiching round the edge of the fabric.

x cliodhna

Ok, just back from Sturges Bike Rally for the second time, this time on my own bike! Bike riding is fun! I am slowly learning my bike, corners, stopping, speed, freeway (still scary). Its amazing, 60 miles per hour on a bike is much faster than in a car.

Anyway, some photos of some amazing bikes we saw there . The bikes are a mix of ones on the street and ones from a competition for custom bikes.

paul in his bike.

a custom chopper from the competition tent, called Pink Lady.

a dragon bike! so cool….

a futuristic machine.. some of them I wasn’t sure how they would actually work on the road

one from the street

main street in sturges

a chopper

I bought this bottle of beer to see what it tasted like. its not often really interesting beers arrive in the local wal-mart.

I poured it into a glass, half for me and half for paul and then took a sip. I was immediatly transported to winter, Ireland, a cozy pub with soft seats, the real traditional kind of pub with carpet on the floor and fixture of old guys sipping their guinnesses and holding up the bar. I had to give it its own post! It was the stout flavour of course but then the extra depth and spiciness of the chocolate gave me the kind of memory recall you get with an old familiar smell.

oh, and Paul hated it! but then the first time he tasted guinness he said it tasted like bananas.

an old doctored picture i found. I think I sent it to him, I don’t know if he found it funny or not. I think its hilarious!

It has been raining pretty constantly here in Galway and I finally realised yesterday why mexico is so dry. Because all the rain is here in Ireland! I am looking forward to going back to hot dryness now.

It is one thing I have learnt doing this work and seeing myself more and more clearly, that women keep themselves small so that men will love them. We blame the men but really it is us that need to stand up and reclaim our power. No more victims, no more ‘poor me’.

I have also been asking myself why I write this blog. Does it really help what I want to achieve in my life right now? It has been really good for me to do this, public expose of my inner doubts and fears which I have always kept secret but now I need to re-evaluate why I write here and what purpose I want it to serve. I think I will keep it ticking along until I figure it out.

What else, I talked to my mother about doing this work, the Toltec path, which I had never done before, fears of their judgment I suppose which is really my own. Also stuff about how we take on things from our parents and how unsaid emotions go to the person who is saying them and if no one is saying them then they rattle around looking for some sort of a release. I was happy afterwards I talked to her about it but there was also a part of me really worried she was going to be angry, and I could feel myself wanting to run and reassure her.

I need to reassure myself. I cannot change or fix someone else. Old dream, look after everyone else first and give all your energy away so you have nothing left. New Dream, heal yourself first then you will have energy to give to others from love and not from limitation.

So with love, from a surprisingly sunny morning in salthill, galway…..

What is it about confrontation I find so scary. Especially angry males who use their authority to silence me and prove they are right. I had a bit of a confrontation today and I walked away before it became a shouting match where he completely changed the story and flatly denied my question.

It made me a bit shaky afterwards but I thought about how I could have handled it differently. How I went in on some level expecting anger and that this would have made me be on one level on the defensive and so attracted that anger. I thought about how I could have remained calm and asked him calmly how he intended to handle the situation, got the information I needed and once I saw that he was being a bit of a rock in hard place, I could have said thanks very much, left and then taken it to a higher level.

Of course all problems are solved with hindsight and I can only make a lodgment in my energetic body that the next time I come into a situation like that to remember this one and the lesson I learnt from it.

Of course the answer to the question above as to why I find it so scary is because I have anger in me and I turn it on myself and so when I meet with someone outside of me who also carries that anger I connect with my own fear. My fear of my own self judgment and authority figure I spend my life trying to appease by being good and non-confrontational.

I suppose we learn everything from when we were little and to a child an angry adult is a scary thing because the child has no defences and is reliant on the adult for everything and so begins to act in a certain way to make the adult happy and so love the child. My parents weren’t especially angry with me and my childhood was happy and secure but I suppose we still fear this loss of love and a child learns to control its environment in the only way it can.

Time is speeding up, at least that what it feels like. The more I take my time and do things slowly and conciously and methodically the more it seems to zip past. Its kinda scary in a way. One of my issues is impatience. I don’t feel like I deserve success so I do things fast and then they don’t work. A cycle of failure which perpetrates itself.

I make a desicion a while ago to really go with the flow. Allow myself to slow down and breathe. Take the time I needed to do the things which make me feel good, do my yoga and my recapitualtion and excercise and plan my next act properly. The upshot? I am sitting with my oatmeal, its half twelve and I am meeting my mother in about an hour to go shopping with her in the dundrum shopping centre. Day is gone.

I do want to meet her, no problem there but I am noticing that the less I try to hang onto time and the less I worry about getting things done within a certain time frame the more it seems to slip past my fingers like water. I suppose I spent a lot of my life worrying about the fact that I was wasting time, I wasn’t young enough anymore to be succesful, I attached succesful onto age and I had failed that, worrying about if I don’t do something NOW I would lose the chance and I would never get another one, if I don’t get something major done everyday the day was a failure. I was really chasing my tail round in circles, agonizing over the moment and feeling like I was failing each one. Getting nowhere very fast.

It is scary to let it go. To say, ‘the gallery can wait till next month or next year when I have something to show them’ or ‘the printing of promo cards can wait until next week until I talk to my artist friend and get some advice on what might be the next best step’ or ‘ I am going to spend my time now getting together a professional proposal together for galleries’. I face my fear of being left behind and forgotton about. I am not as fast as others, not as good.

So now, that time seems to have got loose and taken on its own momentum I am concentrating on letting go and not thinking about it. Go with the flow. I am viewing each day less as 24 hours and more like a heartbeat. Badum Badum Badum……