cliodhna’s wave

Love is such a misunderstood word I reckon.

Old Dream

I love you so because you make me feel happy and now if I lose you I will feel pain so I am never going to let you go and watch every move you make to keep you with me.

I love ice cream because it makes me feel ok about myself and lets me hide in my addictions instead of facing myself.

I love you because you give me the attention I need and look after me.

I love you so much if you leave me I will die.

I need you because I love you.

I love you and you love me so I am going to become who you want me to be so you will continue loving me.

If you really loved me you wouldn’t do that. If you really loved me you would change.

I love my country so I am going to hate everyone else who is different.

I love god so I am going to fear everyone who doesn’t.

I love coffee so I am going to continue drinking it even though it’s not good for me and I can’t sleep when I drink it. I need it to feel good.

I will love you if you agree with me.

I love my children and because I love them I want them to be how I tell them to be.

New Dream

I love myself so much I am not afraid to be who I really am and create my life from happiness and love.

I love you but I love myself and so I will not live in your fears. They are your fears to face and I will support you facing them but I will not change myself to make your fears happy.

I am in a relationship because it makes me happy, not because I need a man in my life to look after me.

I love you just the way you are and I let go of trying to control and change you to my ideas of how you should be.

I love my children and I trust that they are growing and learning exactly as they should be from their own path and lessons. I am here to hold and nurture them until they are ready to do that for themselves.

I love my family but I give myself the space I need for myself to be happy and fulfilled.

I love my country but we are all together on this earth creating this dream of life and I accept all life as sacred.

I love myself so I give myself food that nurtures and is good for my body. I face my inner insecurities and I don´t bury them under addictions.

On my recent trip into self-discovery/oh my, I can’t believe I have been carrying this all this time and I made a realization (No. 22356) that I have been carrying failure all my life. That I expect failure and prepare myself for it. I want success but expect failure… and guess what comes to me?

All the times when I was little and I (thought I had) failed and one of the fears about letting go the attachment to the failures was that maybe they were right. I wasn’t good enough.

Anyway, I learnt a lot from having ‘failed’ in doing what it was I wanted to do, I learnt about this attachment and I learnt that my mind was getting in the way, wanting to control and not letting go when it meets something past its comprehension. When I would be better served not knowing it wants to know and would rather keep me here in control than let me not know and be happy.

So, I remember a time a few years ago in Guanajuato when I decided I would offer Reiki. I had done Reiki level two and I figured I would face my reluctance to do it on people (in case it didn´t work, judgment, all that kinda stuff) and I would put up the posters and just go for it and see what happened. So, I put up the posters, had a space kind of organized, looking back now I think I wasn’t prepared at all. But the most amazing thing happened when I put up the posters, I was wondering about whether I was ready to give Reiki or do healing on people when it hit me that I didn’t have to worry about any of that stuff, that who-ever needed what I had to give would arrive to me and I would have exactly what they needed. It was out of my hands and the feeling was so freeing and very happy and I wandered around in a mini state of bliss for a few days.

Nobody did arrive so in one sense I failed but in another sense I was the one who got healed by making a leap of faith and putting up the posters, it didn’t matter that no-one came.

Fear is a shapeshifter, it has no concept of size or occasion and does not learn from new examples, once is enough and the fear has understood. Thereafter the fear always has the original example in mind and when a new situation comes up that is different to the first but maybe has some common element the fear changes shape to suit the occasion.

My dog fell into water when he was little, it terrified him and I had to find where he was hiding after he ran for his life when he reached the shore and comfort him until he stopped shaking and crying. Puppies are such babies, pure emotional response to their surroundings and they respond like babies or young children. Anyway since then Cubo (who by the way is now a huge heavy marshmallow of a Rottweiler) is afraid of water. Doesn’t matter what shape or form, a puddle, a small stream, a flow of water across the road, anything except his drinking water in his bucket.

It took lots and lots of visits to the nearby stream until he was relaxed enough to start playing in it and even then only up to his ankles. Lots of walks in the countryside and dragging him across streams to keep going and even now he stops and whines and looks desperately for some other way across.

We all have common sense in place, basic survival instinct, don’t stick your hand in fire it will hurt or don’t eat that plant over there you will die, but the fear in us takes it all one step further. It becomes like a guard dog who won’t let you out of your own house because you might get run over (ever see the movie I Robot?) it parades as for your own good but really would prefer if you climbed into a box and threw away the key.

Fear has no sense of size. A little fear is the same as a big fear, open the gate just a little and it all comes rushing out. A fear of death becomes a fear of dogs, spiders, water, losing our partner, whatever is our own personal fear, and it takes a hundred or a thousand examples of something is ok to erase the original agreement of fear.

The interesting thing also, watching my two dogs is that the younger one is also learning to be afraid of water. She learns from Cubo and when he won’t go near the water she won’t either.

So I ask myself how many of my fears have been passed directly to me by my parents or peers without me even assessing them or deciding whether I want them or not and I ask myself what am I afraid of that does not serve me anymore? What agreements made long ago now hold me back from being who I am?

I am currently writing my letter of intent for my life and, as always, have made some realizations about myself and how I ask for things.

There are a few rules which have to be followed when writing this and the main one is that all negativity has to be erased and the intention stated in only positive terms. You can’t say “I will live without fear” because that still holds fear, you are still connecting to fear by saying that. I also wrote one that was too vague, that had no concrete attachment to my life and so was easy to write because my mind is finding loopholes and ways to control the outcome.

I knew this one was going to be hard to write because I was feeling a bit (ok, still am) lost as to how to state exactly what I want in life because in truth I am a bit vague in what do I actually want. My mind knows what it wants and I discovered I was trying to control the outcome of the asking by phrasing things in particular ways. My mind saying I want this, now what words do I have to use to get that and still maintain control and hide? I am stuck because I think I have always done this and now when I want to state it differently I can’t imagine what to ask for because I am not sure what is past the mind exactly. I have a feeling of freedom and peace but then to put words on it my mind is putting up resistance and not allowing me to get past it and put the words in order.

The one thing I did come to a shocking realization was that by saying “I want to do/be this” make it so’ to the universe I was attracting ‘the want’ instead of the goal. It is a very subtle but at the same time big difference. Try it… think of something you would like to achieve/have in your life.

Say “I want to be able to do this/to have this/to be this”

now try “I am able to do this/I have this in my life”

feel the difference? It’s amazing… words have such power and the words we speak have such power on our minds and how we program our lives. I was just increasing my want and also therefore my frustration when I couldn’t do what I wanted to do

I reconnected with a big intention I lose sight of sometimes. Simplicity; the reason why I ditched the tarot, numerology, astrology and all mind based information-rich systems designed to ‘understand’ the universe and our place in it. I am sure they work as good tools for others but I got lost in filling my mind with information and trying to control my world that way. I knew there had to be a better way, of direct, unlimited connection to source. I suppose Star Wars is always the best analogy… join the side of light and feel the force baby! The drawback, according to old fear based system of control is that you have to give up control to gain this knowledge. Give up all ideas of who you thought you were or wanted and go with the flow and see what happens.

First though I need to know what I want to ask for, to manifest in my life, can’t ask if I don’t know. Forget asking myself is this possible or can I do this or how would this work and just ask. The universe will take care of me after that. Will probably be nothing like what my mind thinks it will be, but you know what, it will be better, I am tired of my mind trying to tell me what I need with its limited ideas of what is possible and what is not.

The picture above is about writing these letters and sending them out there to the universe.

Alrighty, better get back to writing the letter so…

X clio

My dogs make me happy. They are such pure emotional beings unfettered by reason or what ifs or any of the other things that stop us from being truly happy in the moment.

I have a big slobbery Rottweiler called Cubo who just wants the love. He comes over, barges in between my legs and then with a sigh collapses slowly down onto the ground at my feet. If I move away a few feet and stand still he slowly gets up comes over and does exactly the same thing again.

I have a rescue puppy called Pala who is the dancy dog. She wiggles and turns and dances her way over to me her tail going in circles and her happiness overflowing. I am trying to train her a little but to get her to sit is an impossibility. She collapses onto her back legs in the air, smile on her face. She follows Cubo everywhere and sleeps curled as close as she can to him.

They are happy when we are there and they wait patiently for us to come back when we are not and, except when the kitchen is cooking lunch or breakfast (we live in a camp at the moment for miners) they are my two shadows. Of course when there is food available at the camp kitchen they are a permanent fixture at the door and selective hearing comes into play.

I have been given a gift of solitude. Two days alone in a house in Chihuahua city. It wasn´t supposed to be this way, my partner having promised he would be there to collect me. I was pretty annoyed I tell ya when I first read his email but then I realized I wasn’t actually really annoyed, just thinking I should be annoyed and I calmed down and you know it is actually good to have this time to catch up with myself and let myself rest and have silent time for a day or two before properly diving back into the fray of life and all its attendant madness.

We are driving to the border to change our visitor status and then we drive to Guanajuato to collect the rest of our stuff. We are getting a new house here in Chihuahua city and I am organizing my English language lessons for when I return to Palmarejo.

I am still coming together after two weeks of emotional intensity, whether mine or other peoples and when you are in a group like that it doesn’t really matter whose it is. After two weeks I could feel my hold on my inner calm wearing, which of course just means I have more stuff to look at, but it is a longing to be alone again, without the constant friction of being aware and present in every moment. Makes me realize how much time I spend not being present when I go to these journeys. All the stuff comes up. It comes up in me, it comes up in somebody else and triggers something in me, I compare and judge myself for it, I make mistakes and judge myself for it. I come clean and tell all and it feels so much better until the next stuff comes up and I have to do it all over again.

What did I discover… well if it can be put into words. Here is the biggie; I had an epiphany about how I have resisted my parents trying to teach me things all my life. I had always thought it was about music, or school, or the Irish language (when I was six I told my mother this was a stupid language and I am not learning it… I didn´t) but I had a feeling then that it went way back before that. I think, possibly, that I was just resisting… full stop. I was not going to be who they wanted me to be but I didn’t really have anything else to be so I daydreamed glory and being amazing at something, anything, so they would have to think I was great. Combine dreams of glory with passive resistance and an insecurity complex about not being good enough and what do you have? Stuck.

The thing is I realized was that it wasn’t about them trying to make me into what they wanted or whether they were or not. I was in resistance even before they tried to teach me anything. I think I was born resisting being here. I know that sounds stupid but it made sense at the time it occurred to me. I don’t even know if it’s true or not, doesn’t really matter, what was great for me was the fact I saw it as mine, not theirs and so now I can keep it and own it.

So, I am going to stop resisting. It will take practice I am sure, I spent the last three days of the workshop with a tight band around my stomach. Pure resistance, my mind in a last ditch attempt to hang on, and I am sure it will use wily means and old tried and tested patterns to hold me here. But I have seen past it now so in the end it will have to let go and learn how to float.

There was once a beautiful woman who wanted nothing more than know love and to love and be loved in return. She wore her best clothes always and make up and surrounded herself with jewels and the finest most expensive objects and love did not come to her. She was cursed.

If any man looked at her with love his heart would turn to stone and he would turn into a statue. She did this to them with her eyes. If she looked in their eyes and saw the love there that was the end. She would have them taken away and put somewhere in her gardens and soon the power of the curse became known and no more suitors came with roses in their hands and love in their eyes.

She lost hope and her wiles became desperate. She would have her picture painted and hung in palaces around the country in the hope of finding her love. She spent longer and longer each day on her toiletry to keep her looks and her beauty but to no avail, she grew older and began to grow ugly.

One evening, just as the sun was setting, a young man arrived at her door. He knocked politely and, when she beckoned him in, entered quietly and kept his face to the floor. He did not look at her. She anyway, did not want him to look at her, she had come to hate herself and believe she was the ugliest foulest creature on this earth. Nothing would love her ever and she had come to accept that bitterly and that knowledge and bitterness turned her evermore inwards and the lines on her face grew deeper and her eyes smaller and pinched.

He said, “I have seen your picture my lady and I thought it sad and lonely and I have an answer to your problem”

She did not believe him and was about to kick him out, angrily she hissed at him “how do you know what my problem is, and how dare you think you can fix it”

He did not move but, still with his face to the floor, said “Please let me try, what have you to lose? Let me try”

She was suspicious but agreed to let him try. He took a small round mirror from his bag and gave it to her. “It is very simple but very hard” he said “It will hurt a lot, are you sure?”

The woman was still suspicious but something in her really wanted to try and so she took the mirror and said “What now?”

“I want you to sit and look at yourself in that mirror until you look at yourself with the love you wish to see from someone else’s eyes” he said

“Easy” she snorted and he said nothing but just smiled at the floor.

“I will be back tomorrow” he said “It will take a little while, be patient and you will know when you get it right” and he left and closed the door softly behind him.

She went and adorned herself with her favourite necklace and earrings, did her hair just the way she liked it, she used rouge and eyeshadow and blusher and lipstick and when she felt she was ready she sat down and held the mirror up in front of her eyes.

At first nothing happened, she began to get bored and her arm began to ache, she looked at herself and looked at herself and she looked at her hair and her eyeshadow and her lipstick and her jewels and she thought how good she still looked despite her age and her lines around her mouth.

Then she began to see imperfections, this line too deep, this line too long, her mouth thin and bitter, her teeth yellow and that gap that she always tried to hide with what she always thought was a winsome sideways smile. Her eyes were too narrow and deep-set, the eye shadow only served to accentuate their positioning. She began to look at her make-up as ridiculous, who was she to try to beautify herself? It made her look like a doll or a clown. She put the mirror down and thought “this is stupid, I have never thought like this before, why am I doing this” and she went to get up but instead something made her sit down and she found herself looking at the mirror again. She looked so ugly! Her eyes like black holes with all the eyeliner, her mouth a hideous dark purple colour that stained her teeth, her nose too pointy, her skin pasty and caked with the paste she used to make herself fashionably pale. She remembered her skin when she was a child, how brown and smooth and clear it had been.

She got up and went upstairs and removed all her make-up and jewels and undid her hair and washed it. She washed her face completely clean and went downstairs again where the mirror was waiting for her. She sat down and again lifted the mirror to look at herself, this time with a little trepidation as to what was waiting for her. She sat and looked again and this time saw herself as old and pasty and wrinkly and bitter and lonely and she started to cry that no-one would ever love her. She had been living a lie all these years, how everyone must have laughed at her; seeing her look for love when she was so plainly ugly and desperate and unlovable. She wept and wept and she said to herself, “I will never leave this house again, I will stay hidden till I die, it is my fault all those young men are dead, they looked at me and I was so ugly they turned to stone in fright, I was selfish”

She cried for a while and then she began to get angry. It was not her fault the men had come looking to her for love. It was not her fault their hearts had turned to stone and they had become statues still adorning her garden. How stupid their faces looked, with their puppy dog eyes gazing at nothing adoringly, their hands outstretched that once held flowers or a gift for her. So much hope. Some had the beginnings of fear in their eyes where they realized what was happening to them but most were too stupid she thought. Stupid men. That was her stupidity, she thought, that she wanted to find love in the first place. Well, never again! She hurled the mirror in the ground where it smashed and she went round the house looking for other mirrors to break. Soon all of her mirrors lay in shards on the ground and she had to be careful where she walked so as not to cut herself. She sat down feeling pleased with herself. When that young man came back with his eyes to the floor she would give him a piece of her mind, how dare he come and upset her like that!

She sat there for a while lost in thought and then a great emptiness opened inside her and she felt she was looking into an abyss of nothingness. All her clothes and jewelry and hard walls and make-up and opinions could not protect her from that abyss and she felt herself fall into the darkness, a nothing, a spark of light extinguished by the oppressive blackness. She began to cry once more. I am nothing she thought; it is only me and nobody else to help me. She felt sorry for herself, she had been abandoned by the world and forgotten and rejected by it and it hurt her in every cell of her body to think that she was not worth the slightest bit of attention from the universe. I failed, she thought, I am a failure.

She lay on the floor looking out the window at the stars in the night sky. She began to feel something else strange to her, something she had never felt before in her life. She began to feel truly alone, but not in a bad way, she realized she was enjoying this sensation. Nobody else was here; she did not have to ‘be’ anything, not pretty or clever or dressed in the right clothes or, horrors, that anyone should see her without her make-up and jewels and with her hair done correctly. She felt peace, she thought, I can look after myself, I have been searching for someone else to look after me for so long, maybe I just have to look after myself from now on and not need anyone else in my life. She sniffed again, she could feel the tears of self pity starting, no-one would love her, but that was ok, she would love herself. She sat up and picked up a shard of mirror that lay close by and looked in it. And how strange, she thought, that a piece of a mirror shows the same thing as a whole mirror, maybe it is the same for us, that one person reflects the same as the whole thing, that we are all just shards of mirrors broken up into pieces yet we still reflect the whole. She began to see herself as part of everything and to look at herself differently. She saw her faults and they did not bother her, she saw past her outside into her real self and she cried for all the years she had spent avoiding herself. She whispered ‘I love you’ and smiled at her reflection, I will never again turn a heart to stone she thought.

But thinking this thought, her mind became fearful and doubt crept in, how can I love myself after all those years of turning hearts to stone, think of the harm I have inflicted, they must hate me!

Her fear came to the defense and with the same power she had used to turn to stone the hearts of the young men who had looked at her with love it used the mirror to turn her heart to stone and her last thought was it was too late, she would never know love, and love someone and be loved in return.

The young man came back the next morning. He did not knock, as if he knew what he would find. He stepped over the shards of broken glass and came across the statue of the woman lying on the floor with a piece of glass still in her hand, still staring that direction with one tear frozen on her cheek. He smiled gently and taking a small hammer from his pocket he took careful aim and hit the statue hard, once, over the heart. It cracked and the cracks spread and spread until the body was covered in a fine layer of cracks. He stood then and went to the garden and took a bowl of water from the fountain and carried it back inside. He stood over the body and sprinkled a little at a time over her until she was wet from head to foot. Then he leant down and whispered in her ear “come back”

She sat up in a shock. She was wet and covered in mud but alive and happy and feeling lighter than she ever had before in her life. She laughed and the young man in front of her looked at her straight in the eyes and laughed back. She had a moment of fear that he would become hard and still like all the others but it passed and he didn’t and she stared in wonderment at him

‘thank you’ she said,

he shook his head ‘I didn’t do anything, I saw your picture and thought you were beautiful but I had heard all the stories and I did not want to be turned to stone like the others, you had to break the curse, you and nobody else”

He took her to a mirror and there she saw herself young again, clear skinned and clear eyed and smiling, happy and free. She cried a tear of joy at the feeling of release it gave her.

He took her out the back and she freed the statues out the back of her garden and apologized to each one in turn. Then she turned to her new found friend and said “What now?”

He smiled “Now is just the beginning” he said

so, out the other side of one journey, quick rest for a day and then off into four days of dreaming.

These journeys are so intense and so fulfilling to do. Anyone who has done this or any other work like it knows the futility of trying to explain to friends and family what you went through. It is so personal and inside that words just don’t do the depth of the experience or the inner release and gifts of awareness justice.

The dreaming is changing inner perception. Going deep into my personal story and changing it for a new one. You do this on a near sleep level which is where the mind has no control and you literally rewrite your personal code. Better explanation here Dreaming a New Reality

The photo is of my nephew, taken by his dad, so cute and so open to the world around him He has no masks between him and the world yet, he is open to see and be seen. That is the goal of this work, to strip the masks between who we really are and who we think we need to be to survive.

x clio

How do you explain to a fish what water is?

You take him out if the water and show him the air. Then he will understand better than a thousand words what water is.

How do you explain to a person what life is and what we have surrounded ourselves with?

You take them out of it and let them see eternity. Then they will understand what life is better than a thousand words.

Perspective. A very little used tool in our army of rationality. In fact most of the time it is ignored, abused, shoved under the bed into the far corner where dust balls come to rest and forgotten about. We lose the perspective on our lives in a thousand moments every day. We don’t take the time and space we need for ourselves and we surround ourselves with things and responsibilities, and deadlines and bills to pay and all important things that make us think we HAVE to keep going and going and going like a hamster on his wheel.

If we don’t take the time we need who will give it to us? If we don’t give ourselves the space we need who will provide it for us? We get ratty with partners and people we love because we don’t look after ourselves. Nobody else can do this for us, we have to do this for ourselves. We have to give ourselves the love and healing we deserve and not wait for someone else to do it for us, not wait to be looked after and then get annoyed when it doesn’t arrive.

I get annoyed and frustrated and cranky when I feel I am not being looked after, but when I honestly look at my life it is because there was something I wanted that I didn’t do/ask for/ go and get because I was waiting for someone else to do it for me. It is an ego battle too, I WANT the world to pay attention to ME! My spoilt controlling child self takes over the reins because she reckons the grown up me isn’t cutting it, I am not giving myself what I want/deserve so she steps in to get it for me.

Perspective is about standing back from your life and your emotions that rule you and breathing fresh air for a minute. Away from the drama of the minutiae of daily life. Away from the soap opera that hooks us in, feeds us its never-ending looping circles of storylines, keeps us caught on what is going to happen next. It doesn’t want to let us go, we have to escape from it ourselves. It wants us to stay caught in its current, because we give it energy, without our energy it dies, cut of its head by taking away our attention and it dies.

Our life is our own responsibility. We shape our lives as we want to, and this includes knowing when we are being dependant on others and also knowing when it is time to ask for help, when we can’t do something on our own. Balance and perspective.

I love writing. I love putting words together and making a story. Sometimes the story comes first and sometimes the words come first. Sometimes it’s just a name and an idea. My problem is finishing it. Not an unusual problem I know. I can never figure out exactly how to finish the story. I have two finished long stories to date and lots of little ones. One children’s novel which needs to be rewritten (again) and an idea for a book that I could never quite get together involving a man named Winkle Ferrydinkle who left the shores of the faraway sea to go past the mountains of forgetting to find out what is on the other side.

I actually think writing a children’s book is harder than writing for adults. There is a simplicity to well written children’s books that is so difficult to achieve. They also have a shorter attention span and you need to catch and hold them, keep them in the world of the book. Look at Tove Jannson and the Moomin Books, it’s like taking a dip in a cool mountain pool reading her stories. The water is clean and pure and feels soft on your skin and so refreshing after the hot sun.

It has taken me a long time to actually learn this simplicity and to see it in all of the great novels and story books. We only really notice it by its absence. A book annoys us because it is too intellectual, or wordy, or opinionated, or we can feel the writer lecturing us through the characters. One of the best pieces of writing advice I gleaned from my travels was the phrase ‘Show, don’t tell’

Show us through language what is going on. Build the picture in our head of what the character is feeling /doing/seeing. Avoid ‘he was sad’ and instead remember the tempest scene in King Lear where the storm outside reflected perfectly the turmoil that was happening in the kings head. We only have words and they are tools that can be manipulated and controlled just like any other medium.

The other thing that daunted me was conversation. Man, how I avoided it. But, know what? I avoid it in real life too. I am not very good at talking to people. I am a bit of a closet recluse that only now this late in my life am I coming to really recognize that about me and accept it. I avoid people I don’t know very well, they make me uncomfortable. I am never sure about the intricacies of conversation and communicating with people. It takes me a while generally to open up, and thats fine, I am not going to push myself or feel bad about it. Thats who I am.

But… this translates into my art and my writing. This is where I push myself to be open and reveal myself. It means I hate writing conversation so it is the part of writing I need to practice most. Or maybe find my own style that doesn’t rely on conversation. Find my own way of telling things. I can think of a few authors that are dreamwriters, that write a strange world of shifting space that the people say almost nothing in. Also anybody see Belleville Rendez-Vous? Beautiful cartoon and I think there is about five words said by the characters all the way through.