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

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So, when I was in Guanajuato, Mexico there was a guy… he was quite mad and would wander the streets of Guanajuato with a briefcase under his arm, muttering to himself, shaking his head and generally brandishing a shief of papers in his other hand. When I first saw him I wondered what he was up to, where he was going and what was all the fuss about, big meeting maybe… But then I realised as I saw him again and again that that was his particular madness. He was always on the way to or from a big important meeting. I thought at the time… what a good analogy for the human race, we are constantly on the run around from one place to another big important doings that really don’t mean squat in the bigger picture.

Thing is though I didn’t apply that to myself. Blind spots are wonderful things, they cushion us and protect us from things we would rather not face. I was recaping this morning about a time in Chihuahua when I was in denial about certain broken aspects of my life and it hit me I was doing exactly what this guy had been doing. Not so much.. I mean I wasn’t racing around in dirty clothes calling into businesses demanding to speak to the managers about a big important non existent projects but I was investing all my energy and self esteem into being successful and selling art. Anything to be doing something, I would chase short term goals with obsessive energy and be crushed when they wouldn’t work. I wasted time on circles when I could have been focused on long term achievements that would actually mean something and be achievable.

That’s self sabotage for you though. When we are in denial about some aspect of our life the rest gets affected too. It becomes a shield to protect us and keep us in oblivion and so nothing gets fixed and everything stays the same in self enclosed circles that we run on endlessly.

Now I have to figure out how I am still doing the same thing and stop doing it!

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.

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…..

We are subjective beings, even when we think we are being objective we are still looking out from a lifetimes store of experiences and assumptions and learnt behaviours.

I was thinking about this when I was trying to describe the Toltec teachings to people as I wander around putting up posters and leaving fliers and talking to people who are interested. Anything I say about it comes from my experience of having done the work and felt the changes that took place in me. I feel freer and happier and more at ease with myself and others around me. I can say that to people but I can’t show them. Except of course by being who I am.

I was making an ad for the irish independant this morning, small space, vital I choose the right words. At the beginning i put the fact that it is an ancient mexican teaching of warriorship for changing your life. Then I thought about this and I realised that this what appealed to me. I loved the history of the teaching, the fact it has been aound for centuries being passed down from generation to generation, changing and staying the same with each transition. Maybe that won’t interest others, maybe it will but I have to describe it somehow to grab attention in 10 cm of space.

Same with my art work. I was remembering from art college when they taught us to look objectivaly at our work and cut through the padding to get as close as we could to what we wanted to express. I can look at my work objectivaly to a certain point and I am very grateful to have received the training I got but still when all comes to all I am still looking at my own work and there are certain things I cannot see because I am still looking subjectively.

So thats the thing, I really don’t know what someone is thinking about until I ask them and sometimes I don’t even know what I am really thinking about until I sit down and really ask myself. Because as with the art work there are things sometimes about my life I can’t see because I am the one looking at them.

The birds in the photos flew over my head very close and very fast and I could actually feel the noise of their wings. A very cool, very subjective experience.

I was standing on a kerb yesterday waiting for Marie Therese to pick me up to go out to Ballyvaughen. A car passed by with a family who were black. Mother, father and a pile of kids in the back seat, my mind wandered off on little thoughts of immigration, and how ireland is changing and how I am never here either but living in another country to the one I was born in like these folks and then I saw another child in the back of the car and I remembered on long journeys when we were little the back of the car was the best place to lie down and sleep.

Then the next car had a young man in it and I thought about my brother who drives very fast and is trying to acheive something from his life.

The next car had an older woman in it who looked like my aunt and I wondered did she drive the same way as my aunt (my aunt constantly puts her foot on the brake so the car always seems like its trying to go but she stops it with little jerks of the brake)

A few more cars passed by before I pulled myself back and realised this is how projections work. I didn’t know these people at all. I had never spoken to them or met them or probably was never going to meet them but yet seeing them triggered a little story in my head which would change when the next one came into my range of vision. The story triggers an emotion and all of a sudden I am hooked on the emotion and the story and they have become my reality.

This realisation triggered a thought of ‘mm, must write a post about this’ the mind never stops trying to create the world, thoughts are like clouds they shift and change and move and dissapear and create shapes and illusions. They take us out of the moment and into the past and the future.

I shall leave you with a quote from Joni Mitchell

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It’s cloud’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all

I am off to Galway today to put posters and leave fliers for the workshops I am organizing. It’s funny doing this, It is reminding me of all the times I would have done it for gigs we were doing. Book the venue, do the radio interview, put up the posters, tell everyone we knew and then when the night of the gig arrived we would do the sound check, and then sit back and wait for people to arrive. Sometimes they would arrive early and we would relax and enjoy and sometimes nobody would come for ages and we would have visions of playing to three people, but eventually they would trickle in little by little and we would always have a full house to play to.

Same feeling here, putting the fliers out and spreading the word and waiting for the response. I am feeling responsible for getting people and a part of me wants to push and control it and thinks that if I don’t do it right nobody will come and I will be to blame. This is where, I think, doing your best comes into play, that if I do my best and give it the energy it needs and deserves then no matter the outcome I will know I did what was to be done and I couldn’t have done it any differently, where-as if I had skimped on time and attention I will always wonder what if?

Of course the other side of that is my wonderful judge who will try to make me feel bad no matter what I did but I try not to listen to him.

I remember putting up a poster for Reiki in Guanajuato and having this wonderful realization afterwards that I didn’t need to worry about it or try to control it, if there was someone who needed my energy they would find me so I could relax and let the universe do its stuff. Nobody did arrive but I figured I had put up the poster for me to have that revelation, to not be attached to outcome and then I can take the risk of doing something new.

… 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

The first is from a film called ‘Ghost Dog’ where the main character is living the life and ideals of a samurai warrior. He reads from his book during the film the following quote

~ In the words of the ancients, one should make his decision within the space of seven breaths. It is a matter of being determined and having the spirit to break through to the other side.~

I think its to do with the fact that when faced with a difficult decision we already know which way we will choose but fear prevents us from making ourselves sure. The answer is in our hearts and in our inner being.

The second is from a carlos casteñeda book. When Don Juan tells him a warrior never regrets a decision. Once the choice is made then there is no looking back, only forward.

Both such simple pieces of advice and so hard to follow!

I went for a massage recently and got the knot in my shoulder worked out. She is really good and knows what she is doing and sometimes when she has my shoulder blade and is pushing and pulling it out at the same time the pain is incredible but oh the relief when she lets go and the pain that was there beforehand is there no longer.

I think I identify with this knot I have in my shoulder blade. The constant nagging ache makes me frustrated and unhappy and uneasy and then, because I know it is there because of some unease in my emotional body I judge myself for having it and think oh why oh why can’t I get rid of this, I must be stuck with some block in my energy I can’t get rid of.

So, getting rid of it by massage I know is a short term solution but how nice not to have it and I realized yesterday I actually felt a peace with the world and with myself and only later thought that maybe it was because the knot had gone. Me without the knot in my shoulder. I guess I will go more regularly to her for a massage and let her heal my physical body so I can feel happier and more able to look at the emotional parts I can heal in me. A balance, I know sometimes I don’t want to go and get a massage because I am pushing myself.

I had a revelation about what to say to Paul too while I was getting it, it all seemed so simple. I was being frustrated with him too, wanting to push and not knowing where I wanted to go and I suppose by way of an apology and by way of accepting my own stuff I realized I just actually needed to tell him I was a worrier and a bit neurotic and my mind made me wrong all the time and made me feel bad about myself (no matter where I was or what I was doing) that from the heart I really wanted to be with him, that I was working on it, but that’s who I am. What a relief.

Is there a term like clinical depression that applies to worriers? People whose mind makes them wrong and judges them all the time? Because sometimes it’s like there is two of me, one part that goes with the flow and is happy and knows what she wants and is going there one step at a time and lives from the heart and then another side who I feel I have to fight all the time to stay on the first course, who is fearful and frustrated and extremely angry at what? I don’t know, life in general I guess, the two year old anger that she can’t control the people outside of her, the fear that she might get forgotten or ignored. The part that pushes me and says not enough or not fast enough or not good enough.

I feel she has got smaller. Maybe something to do with the dream about the evil head I had a few days ago. Maybe I have got stronger and am not listening to her and lately how I have been feeling is like a last temper tantrum trying to stay I control. Hope so. I don’t want her anger anymore, or her fear, I know it’s not real. I choose to be happy and when all lies and manipulation and control and fear have been left behind there is only truth and nothing can change that. My truth, who I really am.