cliodhna’s wave

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……

Paul has just quit smoking after 36 years. his body has gone into shock, I think, as everything the cigarettes were holding down is free and back with a vengeance. He can’t breathe properly and his throat hurts. He says its more than just quitting, he has quit before and this hasn’t happened but I think that maybe he only quit before because he had to and not out of choice and this time his whole mind/spirit/body is involved because it is from a choice to make his life better and more healthy. it is time to purge, the body cries with relief, lets get rid of all of it! i feel for him and I sent him some reiki to loosen some of the stuff.

I remember trying to quit for years, having just the ‘one’ and making myself feel bad about it and then starting again and saying ’some other time’ until I woke up one morning about two years ago and said ‘I’m not going to smoke today’ and I didn’t and haven’t since. A few pangs and my digestive system didn’t work right for a few days but that was that.

The thing is though, I had dealt with the reasons why I was smoking in the first place, my underlying emotional need for a crutch and the fear of facing a future without that crutch. I was staring into an abyss of nothing, an empty landscape where I was lost and forlorn and had no-one to help me. Cigarettes, I reckon, are the sneakiest of the addictive substances, they whisper in your ear and cajole you with thoughts of ‘just the one’ or ‘just a drag’ or they are like the vampire energy sucking ‘friend’ who always wants from you but never gives and uses emotional blackmail and guilt to keep you there.

Paul is also now starting to understand what I was talking about with the smell. Even when I smoked, (and I smoked roll your owns, which didn’t smell the same as ready mades,) I hated the smell of a used ashtray, or the acrid smell of a cigarette burning down on its own. Now that I have quit, I can smell cigarettes off people when they step onto a bus I am sitting in already, or when they smoked, recently or a while ago. I had to get used to it and accept it when I quit. careful not to go the route of the reformed evangelist espousing the cause of the newly converted. Paul has to travel today 8 hours to the mine with his son, who smokes like a chimney, so he will find out exactly what its like!

I still have the occaisional ‘just one’ thoughts, like the other night a friend was smoking the brand of rollies I used to like and I had a moment of wanting and thinking I could just have one, but it passed. I am so glad I don’t anymore, I hated being addicted and depending on them, now I feel so much freer and stronger.

… is a very old art that I have great difficulty in coming to terms with in the moment yet when I look back on situations I realise they happened at the perfect time and I couldn’t have made it any more perfect. This applies to little things like catching a train or going for coffee and to big things like when to travel to mexico.

Yesterday wandering around dublin doing posters I am waiting for my friend to come and collect me to go to her house. I think she must be getting close, I move towards the curbside and who do I see cycling towards me but a college friend I completely lost touch with. I smile at her and she sees me and her faces changes to puzzlement for a second and then she smiles and she stops the bike beside me.

Or I wanted to go to galway today to do posters and then the woman who was going to give me a lift out to a hotel calls and says she can’t so I rethink my plans maybe leaving galway open maybe waiting till friday and I ring a friend to say hi and it turns out her dad had died on sunday so I am going home instead to go to the funeral. If I had gone to galway I wouldn’t have rung her, but it turns out I am exactly where I need to be.

I get worried about not doing enough or in time and life constantly shows me that things happen exactly when they are supposed to happen and the more time I spend struggling against it then the longer I will suffer. The fear comes in when my mind thinks it wants certain things and thinks that if I stop working towards those things then I won’t get them and instead of seeing a future filled with other wonderful possibilities and happenings and achievements it just sees a future of minus the things it thinks it wants. A future of lack.

kind of like the state of the economy in ireland at the moment… everyone is seeing a future of lack and poverty…

also, the posters I am putting up refer to these workshops. I will write some more about them in a bit but here is the link to check them out right now Toltec Self Mastery Workshops and if you want an email with more info on prices and locations email me and I will send it to you

I looked in the mirror yesterday and what did I see? I saw lines!! On my face and on my neck. Eek! Age check. I guess I was indulging the well known phenomenon called ‘the arrogance of youth’ without even knowing it. It will never happen to me, I think smugly, I am not going to get old, and then even if the remote possibility arrives that I look a bit old I will never do those silly things women do to keep age at bay like expensive creams and plastic surgery.

Now its safe bet that I will never get plastic surgery for cosmetic reasons but I actually found myself wondering about a cream I saw on telly. Does it really work I wondered before I saw sense and laughed at myself for even going there. The thing is though in society women are supposed to stay young. Look at the pressure on Hollywood actresses once they pass thirty and enter into that indefinable space known as ‘old’ and then look at aging male actors still getting parts wooing 25 year olds and we are supposed to believe it? I had a problem with Woody Allen after a while as he got smaller and more wrinkly and more grandfather like and he was still writing parts for himself which involved young women falling in love with him and I saw the old Sabrina a few days ago where a very middle-aged Humphrey Bogart falls in love and is fallen in love by a barely past her teens Audrey Hepburn. I enjoyed the film, the old sets, the acting, the story but I just didn’t believe the love paring.

I guess it annoys me because I still invest in it personally. Because I am a woman and I don’t want to get forgotten or passed over when I am old. I judge women who get plastic surgery to stay young looking but there is a part of me that understands it also. It’s a battle that we have constructed for ourselves. In the search for eternal physical youth we maintain the myth and the struggle, we buy into the myth and if we still buy into it and uphold it when are the men going to reject it? We have to reject it first.

There are plenty of women who have rejected it and I admire them and I hope I can too. I am sure as I get older I will have all the fears of growing old and facing death and losing time and so I guess I can just deal with them as they arrive. No point in worrying about who I am going to be when I am 50. I can’t compare with any other 50 year olds I know because I don’t know who I will be when I am fifty. Right know I can deal with looking a little bit older than I did last year.

i went to see the new jim carrey film ‘Yes man’ and its actually really funny, you have to say yes to everything regardless of what it is. of course he gets it wrong and thinks he literally has to say yes to EVERYTHING but sure that’s comedy.

The lesson learns is he has a choice and he has to decide whether he really wants to do it or not. He has to ask his heart if he really wants to do this. He was living in no and changing to yes changed his life and it is true that what we put out into the world is what we attract back to ourselves.

I was thinking of all the times I said yes to things and no to things. I remember saying yes to joining a country band and then putting the phone down and realising I had a week to learn how to play country music or the time I had an opportunity to go play music in a bar in Thailand or someplace close. I turned it down because I was saving to go to spain and I knew I didn’t really want to sit in an irish bar playing tourist irish music for six months no matter how beautiful the location. That was the time of the tidal wave, I missed it cause I didn’t go. It had been hard to turn down too.

I thought about other opportunities which seemed a sure bet and I turned down and wondered had I done the right thing. I generally find out later that if I followed my inner instinct then everything worked out fine and of course there are times when I realise I was saying no from fear. I am pretty good about saying yes though. If I reckon the only reason I want to say no is fear then I push myself a little about it and say yes.

I remember a job offer which freaked me out because it meant a commitment of a whole year! I said yes to that.

I think though the bigger yes’s actually come in smaller packages. Am I ready to live right now? how do I want to live my life? do I want to be open to the people around me? make friends? right now this person is annoying me do I want to keep judging him/her or do I want to see past my stuff/their stuff and see them as they really are and love them regardless? Do I want to be open to Paul right now and tell him what is in my heart or stay closed. Do I want to stop and just look around and see where I am or stay lost in television and work or whatever my adiction is? Yes to life or no to life? That is the question and it comes every second of the day every day of our life. The choice… follow my heart or follow my head… it is the only thing which is truly ours… our ability to choose.

I have created a new store at cafepress.com. It can be found here at www.cafepress.com/cliodhnaquinlan

They do all the printing and shipping and packaging and I don’t have to worry about any of it. Very Cool. That was the problem with Etsy, just so hard for me to get to a post office and forget about decent packaging supplies and then even finding a good printer to print high quality copies of my work. Now its all done for me! hooray! I can also order promo from them at wholesale prices.

I have a section specifically for clocks with words instead of numbers. I use the image to inspire the words and I love doing them. If you have any ideas or might want a specific image with your own words let me know!

I am getting some publicity together but finally the shop has some sections and blurb and looks like how I want it. I am sure I will tweak here and there over the next few months but I am getting very close.

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I missed one world one heart!!! I had this post written with this magnet below to give away and went to the site to get the link and low and behold the entries were closed because so many people had signed up.

Here is the link if you would like to go check it out and see the list of people taking part. You can leave comments on the posts to be entered for the draw on each blog. Its fun.

xx clio