It is interesting for me to look at this process of divulging my journey to the cyber world.  Sharing the inner mechanisms of my world, making myself incredibly vulnerable, by revealing my past and my experiences of it.  People in choosing to read my blog, get to choose how they respond.  My hope that underpins putting my  ’inner work’ out there, the struggles and observations that I experience, is that it will help people in some way, some may be able to identify with parts of it.  And when I say ‘help’, in other ways I wish to challenge too.  Challenge people to be curious about their own personal responses, their own personal experiences, where are they not awake?  My guess is if you have a strong emotional response to what I write, then there is work there for you to do to.  Whatever that response might be.

If you want to heal the world, you need to heal yourself.  If you want to change the world, you need to change yourself.  If you want to ‘wake up’ the world, you need to ‘wake up’ to yourself. If you don’t care about the world we live in, what do you care about?   The more conscious we become, the more conscious our world becomes.

My experiences in my teenage years left me in a place of deep loneliness, with thoughts of suicide.  I longed for someone to see me, I longed for someone to rescue me, I longed for someone to love me, I longed to be special.  And that longing has sculpted the path of my life.  However that loneliness still creeps up on me today, and even at times this weekend I have felt deeply alone. There is no denying it, as a teenager I was alone.  I experienced these things on my own, I had no one to turn to for help, no one there guiding me, no one really with an eye on what was going on with me.  It is truly saddening to think about that.  And yet what  I really  love about this whole ‘digging’ experience, is that it has uncovered for me perhaps the final layer of mystery. I realize how things I experience today are so deeply set in the experiences of my past, the loneliness that I have felt this weekend, is the loneliness of my teenager.  This is a gift to me, because now I get to rewrite the past and have a different experience of my present. I can go back into those times of deep loneliness and I can show my teenager, that she is not alone at all.  AND I need never feel that loneliness again:   THE FINAL PIECE OF THE PUZZLE BECAME CLEAR WHILE MOWING THE LAWN YESTERDAY.   I need never experience that disconnection, from myself, from others or the world again,   BECAUSE  I am there, I understand her, I love myself, I see myself, I see and love my vulnerability, I see and love my heart. I see and love my soul.  I see and love my body.  I don’t need someone else to do it for me, because I am beautiful and powerful enough to do it for myself…  So if you noticed that the rain became glorious sun yesterday, you will know why!!!!

Now that really is a cause for CELEBRATION….

As much as I could pretend everything was ok, because from the outside, it really does look like everything is ok; there was always this underlying low grade pain.  A low energy, that makes doing things particularly at home an incredible effort.  It feels like something is wrong.  That the numbers don’t add up.  Its even more difficult to believe when perhaps in my outside world, I appear strong, happy, alive and excited about life.  In fact in connection I really do feel like that and it is genuine aliveness.  However when I retreat back to my home, to the monotony of the daily dross, a sadness or urghhh feeling comes over me.  It may take a few days or a few weeks even, but I will go to that place.  The voices say “what is wrong with you?”  ”can’t you enjoy what you’ve got” “you are so much luckier than the majority of people living in this world”  ”shut up and be grateful.”

The other part of this is that I had disassociated myself from any of the pain about those teenage years.  That is not to say that I haven’t dug into it before, or gone back and done work on other bits of it.  The rapes though had rather carefully or skillfully been avoided, to the extent that I thought they had been dealt with.  So they were a bit like a blind spot.  It might be staring everyone else in the face, if they know about that trauma, but to me perhaps I had so disassociated myself from them that they were dismissed as a cause for why I might have this low disconnected energy.

I also think that the idea of forgiveness is quite pertinent here.  I had created a story of forgiveness for all the parties involved.  Somehow I naturally saw events in the scheme of something bigger, but having put that story of forgiveness on top of the actual feelings about it, I had perhaps created a psychological barrier to it or a mask or a veil.  Rage and anger, at the vile abuse of events so awful, is the appropriate response.  And actually, either side of the rapes, were situations that warranted rage and anger.   We wonder about the recent rioting across Britain, but how many parents are absent?  How many parents are even aware that they are absent? Even if they are around, they may not be present?  How painful is it for young people to have no one there for them?  And what happens as a result of this?

It was as much a painful leap to shift from the old story, the forgiveness story to the anger.  It was a huge emotional leap.  I know that that sounds strange and almost incomprehensible.  It is so easy to feel anger at many situations in life, and yet to not feel any for your own.   In my old story, I was safe, I had survived.  When something like that happens to you, you don’t really have anywhere to go… or at least I didn’t.  No where safe.  My best friend knew about it, but she was 13 too, I am truly grateful that she was there for me but she and I didn’t have the skills necessary for dealing with it…  so either because of shame, fear, guilt, you learn a strategy for keeping it inside, or at least from potentially threatening people.  Ironically I really don’t like secrets…  So I didn’t keep it as a secret, I could talk about it later, as something that happened.  But no real association with it.

So the process I went through last week involved, making that leap to anger.  Quite simply that.  I think.  They say that depression is repressed anger.  And so the release, which will have to be practiced, allowed me to be present, it released me from a veil.  In a sort of Eckhart Tolle way,  the ‘pain body’ was standing in the way of me being fully here now.  I kind of knew that too.  I just didn’t know what the pain really was.  Perhaps thinking that it was my ‘lot’ in life.  In ordered to explore the rage I used an imaginary writing process.  There I could experience the anger, and express it.

The process goes on, because, NOW, I am experiencing a panic.  It is a panic, that produces all kinds of addictive behaviours.  Going to the fridge, checking in on the computer, smoking and drinking lots of coffee and tea.  It could be the vulnerability of exposing myself.  It could be a feeling of being cut off from source.  I don’t feel safe.  It could be back to the teenagers fear of no one being there for me.  It could be a fear of how readers are interpreting what I have written…  ( do they think I’m attention seeking, manipulating, do they believe me????).  Also what is noticeable is that there is an effort from this place to leave home, there is a voice inside that is saying “stay at home you are safe there!”    Actually while it is very uncomfortable, I understand at some deep level that it is actually part of the process, and another way I disconnect from being here now.  So it also has a level of excitement …. that I know I am alive.   Not sure where to go with this panic…. (perhaps not to the fridge!) … be with it?…  feel it?… not run away from it?…  AND BREATHE……

The last post rather ironically is ‘celebration’, celebrating all that I have in life.  And I have A LOT.  I’m blessed in so many different ways.  And yet, I so often feel disconnected from that.  My default place is sadness or a kind of urghh.. feeling.  That urghh feeling is SO prevalent in many of my posts.  Even possibly in the celebration one.

This was the subject of my last coaching session.  Helen said that her body and intuition were telling her that I was experiencing this disconnection because I was raped as a teenager.  When she said that my first place to go, was ‘haven’t I dealt with that?’ ‘isn’t that just a story from my past?’ ‘haven’t I forgiven those involved, understanding that it was nobodies fault really’……. SO I THOUGHT….  I guess I must have created a disconnection, a deep disconnection to myself and my life at the time, a kind of padding that prevented me from actually experiencing the trauma of those times, probably a survival mechanism.  I know that the first thought was when I was raped for the third time, this is my body, not me.  He can’t hurt me.  The first two times I was so young and naive I really didn’t know what was happening to me.  The third time I was still young and naive but I knew what was happening.

I was invited to go back with my teenager and a few ‘guardians’ to help me confront the demons of the past.  Who was I going to choose?  Who was really responsible for me being where I was?   Of course, absent parenting, was a massive contribution.  I reluctantly selected my mother.  I deeply love my mother.  I understand exactly why she was in the position she was in.  So what did I want to say to her…  WAKE UP…  see me.  Be there for me, see who I am, support me, guide me, help me.   Be my mother.   So I started this work with the aid of Helen, and somewhere in my heart it cracked and the emotion poured out, because I was SO alone as a teenager.  No one had the eye on that ball.

And because I am like a terrier, I couldn’t stop there.  I had to take it on to the others responsible.  My father. And the three young men involved.  Using an imaginary writing process, I had an entire crew of supporters or guardians to go into the past and challenge, change the story.  Of course memories of things like that, images haven’t left me.  They don’t have any particular emotional sting to them, they are just images, perhaps I cringe at the thought of them.  Is that shame?  And yet if I saw those images and watch that film of my own children or any other children/teenagers experiencing those kinds of things I would be deeply upset, and enraged.  So what does that tell you.  Stuff that doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger…. or perhaps it just makes you harder.

It was a really difficult emotional leap, to go from the ‘old’ story and feelings.  In the old story, nobody got to be wrong, my parents were screwed up because of their lives and their pasts, I was unfortunately caught up in that and desperately seeking love and wayward, and the boys were just doing what boys will do if they get a chance.  The new story involved other people taking responsibility.  Taking responsibility for a teenage girl, lost, vulnerable, lacking, and surviving in the way she could.

So I rewrote the stories, it was nigh on impossible even in my imagination for my dad to take responsibility.  He was so good at deflecting responsibility.  And then even with the witnesses in the room, the voices of dissonance came in….  ’Is that what you are making a fuss about?’ ‘that wasn’t really rape’ ‘where were the knives?’ ‘things far worse have happened to me’ ‘you were clearly up for it’.  Re-writing the stories, the interviews created a well of sadness.  It was a very tough day.  But with the bit between my teeth I carried on.  Later that day I tried to connect with my best friend.  He wasn’t available, and even though he knew something of what was going on, he still wasn’t available.

That was really the tipping point.  Because, it WAS NOT OK, that he wasn’t there for me.   Suddenly I was in touch with a rage, how could my best friend not be there for me, while I was suffering like this.  AND THEN I made the connection. RAGE:  IT WAS NOT OK, that my parents were not available for me as I was growing up.  IT WAS NOT OK, that I was ‘drinking in the pub at 13, and someone violated me on the floor of the pub toilet.   IT WAS NOT OK, that I was taken to the top floor of a multi-storey car park, not because I was going to be romantically shown a view from the top, but as I found out if I didn’t do what he wanted I was in danger.  IT WAS NOT OK, that someone took advantage of my vulnerability, with absolutely no interest or care about me.  Apart from anything else I was still a child.  IT WAS NOT OK.

I feel so much more connected to myself, and to my life, as a result of this process.  Its not finished I am sure.  And there is more..  The utter lonliness I felt during this process.. but that is enough for now.  I wanted to share it, because I hope in some small way it may help someone else.

This weekend I was invited to share in the celebration of a premiere of a musical in Reykjavik.  My friend had written and produced with his co-star a musical based on the characters they have been developing over the last few years.  It was a huge success, and although it was in Icelandic, there was so much to enjoy about the whole performance.  The impact, what you can pick up even when you don’t understand the language and the shear enjoyment of watching your friends achieve and enjoy and share their creativity.  And, there was a little celebration for me there too.  I was celebrating being a small and yet significant part of the process.  I asked the question which helped throw the pebble into the water.  What do you want this year to look like?  And if you could really dream about this year what would you do?

There was another celebration too, because the ‘after party’ was held in a bar, where I had done the same thing!  Asked the question or seen the possibility….

As a life coach I get to do this, I get to help people get things out of their lives, that are longing to be out there in the world.  That’s cool right!  Something to celebrate!  And I know that I am a light in many people’s lives, I am playful, naughty and fun.  And yet, and this is the glaring inconsistency I am rarely the light in my own life.  I rarely allow myself to celebrate me, and if I do a self-sabotaging thought will pop in almost imperceptibly and take me back to a default place of sadness or longing.  That I am not enough, that my life is not enough.

I see people, I understand people, I see their crap, (especially when they are trying to hide it.)  I have a radar within that is absolutely fixated on the truth.  It is my gift.  It is dangerous, because I tell the truth and in so doing can often throw people away.  When I was training to be a coach the leader of my course at the time, Helen, who is my own personal coach, said do you look for what’s right in someone or do you look for what’s wrong.  I naturally saw what was wrong, which isn’t very helpful if you are training to be a life coach.  And can also be very helpful if you are a life coach, because it is often the thing that is ‘wrong’ that is getting in your way.  So I trained myself to look for what’s right.  The absolute glorious potential of the human beings that come into my life, who they are and what they can be.

However, my default place with myself is to look at what I haven’t got, and that makes me sad.  It locks me into a spiral that I can never be satisfied or enjoy what I have.  On Friday I got an email from Tut: The Universe which said “If you want a miracle to happen, don’t focus on the miracle, focus on what you would like the picture to look like after the miracle has happened.”

I sat in a cafe with the Sun blazing down at my body and I felt my heart healing.  That I was no longer prepared to look at my life for what I don’t have, for what I do have is a gift to make me whole.  I have everything that I need.  Yes I have a deep emotional body that can feel great depths of sadness, and aren’t I lucky that I have a capacity to feel. However I don’t need to burden myself with always feeling that pain.  That is a choice because I also have this extraordinary capacity to create, receive and give love and light in the world and that is special.  That is to be celebrated.  So where I can create laughter in the world, I am now going to give myself the gift of creating laughter within, for me.  To celebrate and be grateful each day for who I am and what I have and all those people in my life who have helped me create this celebration.  And the difference is the language I train my thoughts to create.  I can be this or I can’t.  And actually I just can.

Cool huh!

It was hard for me to let go of some of these commitments because they did give me pleasure and value.  And yet the one place that I struggled to be, was home.  Home in me and home within my home.  I have talked about the drudgery before, the yearning to escape, and yet at New Year, I made a commitment to place my focus right here, on home and all that that is to me.  Struggle would be one word that springs to mind, as I describe the experience of home.  It is very hard to be present here.  It is a beautiful home, gorgeous yet challenging children (who’s aren’t?) and a wonderful, fully supportive husband.  So what was ‘wrong’ with me that I struggled to be present here?

And what I have found, like a vortex, that when you gather all your energies in, and you are left with you, your thoughts, your emotions, is that action is the path to acceptance.  I can sit all day and wallow in how awful the drudgery is, it is very easy for me to get stuck there.  Or rather than looking at the weed that needs to be pulled up, or looking at the pile of clothes that need to be put away, and looking at all these things that I ‘need’ to do, and then thinking about how much energy they will require to do them at some point in the future: if I mindfully take action, the struggle and resistance is superceded by an energy that can purposefully get it done AND set the struggle at bay.

Whilst I am not particularly proud of how ‘small’ my life has become for now, I am delighted that I have found a meditation that enables me to be at one with the struggle.  Leadership and Self Deception by the Arbinger Institute describes this process far more fully than I am here.

So what to call the blog?

I was asked yesterday well what do you want to do about this?  I didn’t want to do anything, I was stuck and yet the only thing I could think of doing was going through the mountains of paperwork that have built up over several months.  Strangely enough this was exactly the process I needed to do.  Eight different piles of paperwork,  I am a starter, so in fact it was easy to get going on this, gradually sifting through the piles and putting them into various categories.  Then I got bored, heaps of different papers, and some obscure piles that I didn’t know what to do with, overwhelm, and the last thing I wanted to do was finish the job.  Arghh… can’t someone come and finish this for me?   With a little encouragement I stayed to finish the process off.  And once again the paperwork was clear.  It was a relief, something about staying to finish what I started, and yet it didn’t seem quite complete.  Of course, there was a mountain of papers hidden in my desk that needed attending to, if I was really going to call this job complete.  And of course, in amongst those papers were perhaps the very thing I had been avoiding.  Photographs and letters from my Nana.  As I started to sift through my drawer, the tears just kept pouring and pouring down my face.  My Nana, died six months ago,  my father two years before that, and tucked away in a file somewhere near my stomach is the file named grief.

Grief is such a strange beast, because it seems to me it doesn’t necessarily present itself as a longing for, missing of, the person who has gone.  Naturally when someone dies, life doesn’t stop, and so you get on with the world that you are in now, not the world you were in, when that person was alive.  And, sometimes you don’t or feel you can’t get on with your life… I guess we all have different strategies.  So when a sadness or low level energy comes in, you don’t necessarily associate it with the loss or grieving process.  Perhaps you think that you have been through that process.   Perhaps you don’t want to use the grieving process as an excuse for why you are not feeling on top of the world.  Perhaps you are guarding yourself subconsciously from ‘going through’ the pain of loss and bereavement.  At Christmas I realized that you can set intentions to do things differently for all those things that you may be less than satisfied with in your life, but you can’t do anything about loss, you have to be with it.  And so yesterday, the file was opened.   And in a way as I opened that file, I actually created more space for myself.  I wasn’t consumed by more pain, but some was released.

It does look beautiful, and there is always more to notice.  If you keep looking there is always more.  It didn’t look beautiful to me this morning.  I couldn’t see it.  I was locked away in a familiar place, stuck deep in the labyrinth of my emotions.  They are deep and I am grateful for that, I have the capacity to feel deep grief and emotions.  I give myself permission to feel those consuming emotions of despair, hollowness, emptiness and pain.  A year or so ago, I thought that this was me.  Destined to go through life consumed with a tragic pain and destiny that was worthy of a Greek Tragedy.  Me and the rest of the world!

So what is the difference… well sometimes it takes a while for me to realize that I am stuck or disconnected.  Feeling so very connected to my feelings and the story I attach to those emotions.  And yet I can not connect to the world around me, I am consumed and my feelings or emotional body is owning me.  So there is a difference between owning and being owned by emotions and I think this was where I got to this morning as I travelled around in my mind and body and the world outside me, looking for other perspectives.

Billy my dog invited me to bathe in the warm sunshine with him.  It was enticing, and yet from drowning in a sea of emotions, I felt the sudden shift that had me, say pull yourself together, you are far too distracted, and you’ve got too many things to do to sit around and bathe in warm sunlight with your dog.  A different perspective and a different feeling, certainly a ‘better’, more comfortable, feeling than wallowing in the deep stuff. However it had a frenetic, tense flavour to it.  It wasn’t possible to stop and pause there, only to start spinning off into the place of ‘doing’…. urgently.  Another uncomfortable feeling.

Last week as I spent a great deal of time with good friends, I noticed how there is always a flip side to ‘good’ feelings…  the joy of having intimate friendships, means that you are open and vulnerable to other stuff coming in.  And that doesn’t feel ‘so’ good.  Its almost like I have a longing for feeling constantly good, and if I don’t, if something comes up that is uncomfortable I want to run away and hide, retreat within my crab like shell.  Of course, authentic intimacy, authentic relationship doesn’t always ‘feel’ good.  Not in any relationship… and yet ‘love’ and ‘friendship’ is ‘supposed’ to feel good.

So there is waking up that is happening here.  And there is a slowing down.  Connecting to self, others and the world.  And it is good.

There is a story here…  I have some great ideas…..  AND I am very good at enrolling people into the idea.  However I can never find people who will pick up on what I can see and help me get to where I want to be. I underline never because that is a very ‘telling’ word for me.  It highlights a story that I am making up, or a struggle that I am wanting to hold on to!  Anyway it feels like that… and its not true because I have got loads of people who want to help me, in their own way or in their own time.  The frustrating thing for me .. controller / critic / judge is that it is never enough.  I want ‘exactly’ the right person, and ‘exactly’ the right help.  And in many ways I want ‘exactly the right person to take my idea and run with it exactly the way I want it to look’!!!!!  .. So … smile….  and see the world you are creating here!!!!!  It sounds like one of the tantrums my daughter has.  Her way, NOW.   Funny, in a way as I write this I know that one of my deep held beliefs.. a nasty little root that taps me to the ground is that ‘I am not enough’.  So here we have a little internal struggle.  I am not enough, and because I have these great ideas I want to implement some of them…  then I will be enough, and because no one else is enough, no one else can run with my ideas!  What if its enough to have the great ideas?  You have great ideas Emma… thats great…..  AND is it enough to have great ideas.  Surely unless they are acted on they are just thoughts or dreams?  Is it enough to just have thoughts and dreams?   It is certainly fun to have thoughts and dreams… I like living in that world. And yet there is a huge frustration that they don’t turn into something else.   So.

This is what I want…  I want to create a fundraising scheme for the community museum/visitor centre which fills an information gap in the community.  This would enable all the different societies and attractions in the area to partner and work together, which in my belief will raise the profile of those different societies AND be of benefit to the community.   It is a great idea…

I want the Glastonbury Festival to launch the Four Years. Go Campaign at the festival.  Three days of the video being played in between sets with U2 and Coldplay and other bands endorsing the Campaign to awaken people to the urgent need to take a stand to make the world an environmentally sustainable, socially just and spiritually fulfilling place for future generations.  I know these are the values shared by the founder of the Glastonbury Festival Michael Eavis, so it seems to me to be an obvious connection to make.

I want the Olympic Games to run the Campaign.  Where 15% of the Worlds Population watch the opening ceremony,  where potentially love rather than money could be one of the key values that we promote, as the world comes together to celebrate sport.  Why can’t the values of love be promoted at the games too?  Love of the World we live in, Love of our fellow human beings,  Love and respect of belief systems.  And why not?

And I want people to get healthy through play.  At every level, I want them to reconnect to their hearts, minds and bodies and their world, with a reconnection to the simple child like thrill of playing and letting go.  I want to create giant playgrounds of adventure, quest and challenge for adults and families to play together.

Of course in amongst these great ideas, I have other jobs to do…  and I am not enough to get all these things done!  And this is where the struggle takes over….  because it doesn’t seem to be enough to just hold the vision… I am longing to make these things happen.  I am longing for someone to come along and say, I know how to do all these things… let me help you!!!

So yes I am smiling…  smiling at the way I complicate things… smiling at where I get stuck… and smiling because I know when I let go, and open my eyes, usually the telephone number I need, or the path I need to take, becomes blindingly obvious.  So really smiling at this incredible universe we live in!

I haven’t written for a while.  I haven’t had one in me, or if I have it was coming from a critical, judgmental place.  A default place where my shadow lives.  ”How can ‘they’ build a nuclear power station on the edge of a fault line?”  ”Why do we think we can interfere in the Arab states revolutions? Is it Oil? Why do the leaders resort to Warfare?”  There is this place in me that relishes sitting in criticism or judgment.. and the feelings of resentment, anger, powerlessness and rage that spring from this place are very unpleasant.  I too am creating the dissonance and disconnection, I too am mirroring the place of strife in the world: here there is right and wrong.   Where someone gets to be right, another gets to be wrong.

This process is then followed by thoughts of “Who are you anyway to think you can change the world?”  ”You are not intelligent enough; you are not eloquent enough; you are not enough.”  This too is a sorry place to work from.  ”Who are you to think that your voice matters?”  This also leads me to disconnect from myself, my own power and creates frustration and sadness.

And once I have sat in this place long enough.. the voice of the elder within arises … “Who are you not to?” emerges… “be the change.”  Transform internally this place of judgment and bitterness and create a space within where anything is possible.  The shift comes:  ”My voice is as important as all the rest, my voice is powerful and I believe I can change the world, change my world.”  And when I operate from a place of awakening, I awaken others too.  I am passionate about seeing the light in others eyes, helping them to discover their specialness, believing in them.  And how much more powerful we can be together, when we are working together to change our worlds.

So I wonder what you are passionate about?  What stand do you want to take?  What do you think is possible in this world?  What is the leap that you want to take?

At the moment I have stands to take in all areas of my life.  My own personal health, my families growth, developing community, uncovering gifts, awakening spirits and consciousness, raising funds, raising the status of the arts, challenging the education system and creating a world that is environmentally sustainable, socially just, and spiritually fulfilling.

And with the bursting forth of a new Spring, blossoms smothering the trees, birds singing in glorious delight and buds sprouting on the trees, everything seems possible.

Take a stand :

Four Years. Go