How I’m trying to change the world

So far I’ve shared with you the story of my awakening and the transformational process which followed.  In this post I’m just going to briefly share with you the causes I support and the little bit that I do to try and make a difference to the world.

My main reason for running this site and Facebook page and writing my blog is to promote empathy and equality and help others to find inner peace. I believe in equality for all regardless of age, gender, race, sexuality or species and I think the way to achieve this is through increased empathy and compassion for others. Empathy and compassion increase in people who are content within themselves and are in touch with their authentic selves, having healed their emotional baggage. The flip side of empathy and compassion are injustice and abuse, and I do my best through my internet communication to promote the former and counteract the latter.

I am particularly concerned about the way humans exploit animals and as such, I’m an avid vegetarian. I’m slowly heading towards veganism – which isn’t easy as I’m also gluten free – and try to have two days a week when I only consume vegan products.

I also support an animal sanctuary with regular monthly donations. I decided that I wanted to give my support to an animal charity but didn’t just want to give money to one of the ‘giants’ – I wanted to support a specific cause and to see what happened to that money. Last year I visited the Animal Sanctuary in Wilmslow and was really bowled over by the warmth and compassion I felt as we were shown round. The animals are so well cared for and all the staff clearly love what they do. I also like their ethos -  the sanctuary is part of the Humane Education Society,  a charitable organisation working for a more compassionate society through education and practical work with children and animals, and as such offers permanent and temporary homes to animals in need of some loving care, including cats, horses, hens, rabbits, ferrets and pigs.

However, probably the biggest way I’m currently doing my bit to change the world is through my work with young people. I decided to offer Empathic Guidance sessions to schoolchildren after discussions with my daughter and her friends about many of the usual issues which affect young people such as bullying, body image and sexuality. The support and guidance which I gave them seemed to make a huge difference to their self-esteem and what I found particularly heartening was the fact that the coping techniques which they learned soon became second nature to them. This resulted in a positive increase in their intrinsic self-worth and in their ability to deal with difficult situations and ultimately (and delightfully),  in significantly happier children.

I strongly believe that it really doesn’t matter how gifted and talented or academically successful someone is – if their emotional well-being has been eroded and consequently their  core sense of self is significantly diminished then chances are they’ll end up leading dysfunctional lives. I also feel that the emotional well-being of our young people isn’t given enough attention within our current educational system, so I thought it might be a positive contribution to our society to offer a service which might redress the balance a little.

A school Empathic Guidance session offers support, insight and guidance to the pupils  and is  a safe place for them to share any issues which they feel they cannot discuss with parents, teachers or peers. I began a year ago working on a one-to-one basis but am now working with Panda, the school’s youth worker, on group workshops covering topics such as assertiveness and confidence-building.

My dream is that Empathic Guidance will prove popular enough for us to offer sessions and workshops to other schools and that eventually emotional well-being will be recognised as an important part of our children’s upbringing and education.

Finally, like the famous Gandhi saying, I do believe that we should ‘be the change we want to see in the world’. So as well as the above, I do my best to be pleasant, amiable and polite to everyone I meet during the course of the day – little things like saying please and thank you  and hello and goodbye to people who serve you in shops, leaving tips in cafes, holding doors open for people can make a huge difference and hopefully has a ripple effect, so that the recipient of the amiable and courteous treatment will then treat the next person they encounter in the same way. It’s a really simple way of ‘spreading the joy’ and making a difference.

So that’s a little bit about me and what I do – how are you doing your bit to try and make a positive difference to our world? Do please share in the comments below – no effort is too small and I’d love to hear about what you do.

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How I changed myself…

In a previous post, I wrote about my first awakening experience and explained how this initial ‘waking up’ can be a little taster to whet your appetite for the fully awakened life.  However, before we reach this enlightened state, we often have to undergo a transitional period during which we strip back the layers of social conditioning and defensive walls, heal the emotional and psychological wounds and clear away the emotional and spiritual blockages which living a false life has created.

In some ways, the word ‘change’ is a misnomer – I prefer to think of this time as an alchemical process, where all the past stuff is transformed into gold, with all the garbage dealt with and disposed of and only the wisdom remaining. It’s also a time when we declutter ourselves and our lives to reveal what was within us all along -  that golden nugget which is our authentic core self.

My first counselling experience, as referred to in the ‘How I woke up’ post, had a dramatic impact on my life. Through this work:

* I realised how much my past was impinging on my present.

* I began to look for answers within rather than without.

* I finally got a glimpse of the real me, beyond what society or other external influences expected of me, and to be true to this real self.

* material stuff didn’t matter to me anymore and I felt a great urge to get rid of most of my possessions and live as simply as possible.

* being ‘of service’ felt like the most important thing to me and I felt strongly that this was connected in some way to my writing.

All this occurred in 1995 and I felt sure that this was how my life would be from this point onwards. Indeed, these basic principles still form the basis of my life philosophy and I feel they are the cornerstones of the awakened life. However it was early days for my authentic self, and though I’d had a glimpse of life through awakened eyes, it turned out there was still a lot of work to do before this authentic self could be fully realised.

Over the next decade and a half, I’ve worked really hard on my personal and spiritual growth and though it’s been really tough at times, I’ve learned a lot, particularly thanks to my decision to train as a counsellor and through becoming a parent.  I’ve also read a lot of books, spent a lot of time writing journals and spent months having personal counselling to help me deal with issues which were just too great to work through by myself.

Below is a list of many of the lessons I’ve  learned, in no particular order, and the changes I’ve made – as I said, I’ve learned a lot and I’m sure there are some things I’ve missed out but here are the ones I can think of right now:

* I gained a much clearer insight into my motives and the motives of others.

* I reframed negative past events and, after learning the important lessons those experiences had to teach me, was finally able to make peace with them and let them go.

* I learned a lot about how I relate to others including how to be assertive rather than passive or aggressive, and how to establish healthy personal boundaries.

* I learned how to reparent myself and love my inner child whilst simultaneously silencing  my inner critical parent.

* I learned not to be a victim and not to take everything personally – it’s not always about you!

* I learned that sometimes we have to sit with the bad stuff for a while and that instant gratification is not the key to long term contentment – short term pain really can lead to long term gain.

* through my relationship with my child, I learned the value of commitment – that if you ride out the bad times, the good times often just keep on getting better.

* I also learned that if we’ve had a bad day and take it out on our loved ones, it’s important to let them know that the fault lies with you and not them, otherwise you may negatively affect their self-image (not doing so is a form of emotional abuse).

* through my bad relationships, I learned a lot about what I DON’T want from my life and the people I share it with; that I have no time for games and just want straightforward communication, and that the only people I want around me are people who enhance my life, not those who are detrimental to it.

* I learned that everything I really need, I can give to myself if necessary.

* I learned the value of solitude and independence.

* I also learned the value of true friendship and support and that when you find this, you should treasure it as it’s very rare.

* I realised that capitalism and its propaganda machine, the media, are influencing and damaging our world and that consumerism is not the gateway to happiness and fulfilment.

* I learned that putting one’s self first is not always a bad thing if one ascribes to the right values – that the sum of the parts makes the whole and if all the parts are healthy, emotionally and spiritually, ergo the whole will be the same – and that is NOT the same as ‘selfishness’, enhancing one’s own wellbeing at the expense of others.

* I learned that we only have the present and that living in the past or hankering for a better future means we miss an awful lot of good stuff on the journey (though it’s wise to be in the present with a nod to the past and the wisdom gained from this, and an eye on the road ahead, being aware of opportunities and possible potholes).

* I learned that there are really only two states, love and fear, and that all the ills of the world come through fear in some form or other.

* I learned that embracing your shadow rather than denying it makes you more of a person, not less.

* I learned that there’s no such thing as a negative emotion – all emotions have a message for us – and whether or not the outcome is negative depends on how you express that emotion.

* I learned that true beauty is within and not necessarily without.

* I learned that you will never find contentment unless you are true to yourself.

* I learned that a great philosophy for life is ‘keep it simple’

* I learned that pretty much most of what society tell you is the way to live is wrong and that most of what we are meant to aspire to is a trap to keep you stuck in the rat race and keep you lining the nests of those at the top of the tree.

* I learned that self-responsibility is the key to holistic healing – to achieve healing, only you can do the work. Others can offer you guidance but the real work is down to you.

*I learned about my Highly Sensitive nature and how I have a gift for empathy, an awareness which has allowed me to take care of myself and use my traits in a positive way, rather than chastising myself for not being able to be out there in the world and deal with life in the same way as non-HSPs/empaths.

* I learned to listen to my intuition and follow the ‘nudges’ that the universe gives me through signs, symbols, dreams and synchronicities.

* I learned about energy and how Universal energy connects us all and how powerful a resource this can be if we learn to utilise it properly.

* I learned that sometimes you just have to let go and hand over whatever you’re going through to the Universe or whatever Higher Power you believe in.

* I also learned that although you’ll still go through difficult times, once you’ve found and strengthened  your authentic  core self, it becomes so much harder for life to knock you off your feet (even though you may find yourself wobbling precariously for a while).

So as you can see, my awakening has prompted a lot of personal change and made a huge difference to my life. I now know who I am and what I want and need, and I’ve healed and unblocked a lot of emotional, psychological and spiritual baggage, making me a clearer channel for Universal energy and increasing my empathic connection with the world.

Of course, personal and spiritual growth is a lifelong adventure and I’m still learning – currently I’m working through ongoing issues related to my most intimate relationships and am wrestling with the concept of money as an energy, something which many people who follow a spiritual path struggle with. But my reconnection with my authentic self means that I never feel that existential despair which used to dog me and even when things are tough, life never feels meaningless as my purpose is now so very clear.

In my next post, I’ll share with you how all this personal change has led me to my life purpose and what I’m doing in my own small way to help change the world. In the meantime, do please share your awakening and personal transformation stories with me in the comments below.

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Groundhog Day

 I’m currently working on the second part of my mini-series about my own transformation process. However as today is Groundhog Day, I thought I would share with you a post which I wrote a few years ago, which uses the film Groundhog Day as an analogy for awakening. 

At the start of the film, the protagonist, Phil Connor, played by the fantastic Bill Murray, is a cynical misanthropist. For some reason he ends up caught in some kind of time loop, where he is doomed to experience the same day over and over again – and no-one else is aware this is happening, only him. At first he is baffled by this, then amused. He decides to use his predicament to satisfy his ego, buying an expensive car one day, gorging himself stupid another, and pulling unsuspecting women using knowledge he gained on ‘prior’ days.

However all this is ultimately unfulfilling, and he fails to win over the love interest who sees through his pulling ploys and recognises him for the narcissistic shallow self-serving creep he is (I’m not one to mince words). Initially he becomes angry, throwing tantrums at not getting his own way, then drifts into depression at his hopeless dilemma and eventually becomes suicidal. When the suicide attempts fail to work, he begins to move into acceptance but thinks that he must be some kind of god, as he seems to be immortal.

His failure to save the life of an old homeless man on consecutive days soon disabuses him of this egotistical belief, and at last he fully accepts his situation. He makes a difference in the areas he can actually have an impact, changing the flat tyre on an old lady’s car, catching a boy falling from a tree, saving a choking man with the Heimlich manoeuvre. He begins to savour the little things in life, finding true beauty in his humble surroundings. And rather than faking his cultural interests just to impress women, he begins to genuinely appreciate poetry and takes piano lessons until he’s practically a virtuoso, and finds that by improving himself in such ways he also brings joy into the lives of others. And so on and so on, until we reach the cheesy Hollywood ending where everybody loves him and he finally gets the girl.

 I’m sure you’ve worked out for yourselves where I’m going with this, but I’ll clarify it anyway. Like Phil, our lives appear to be stuck in a rut and in an attempt to find fulfilment, our egos/inner children drive us to seek out material goods and physical pleasures. And this child within us throws a tantrum when we don’t get what we want, and ultimately becomes depressed when we realise how unfulfilling these goals actually are.

Then we start to wake up – we begin to see that maybe there’s another way to live, but in our excitement at this new awareness, we fail to see that our egos are still in control and imagine ourselves to be greater than we are – now we’re spiritual beings, surely we’re ‘superior’ to others who haven’t yet become enlightened? But life has a way of bringing us down a peg or two and confronting us with reality, and after a lengthy transitional period (which can take us to hell and back, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually) we finally get what it’s really all about and kick that ego into touch.

We embrace authenticity and simplicity, appreciating the beauty in who we are and what we already have in our lives – the joy of simply being. Rather than being ‘childish’, we become ‘childlike’, feeling wonder and delight as we see the world through our hearts instead of our egos. And by appreciating ourselves and the magic of life, we begin to appreciate others and give to them not only in conscious ways – making a difference where we can – but in more ways than we can probably even imagine, simply through radiating love. At last, we are truly ‘awake’.

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How I woke up…

In my previous post, I shared the philosophy which forms the basis of this site and my work. For my next three posts, I’m going to share with you my own experience of the awakening process and the changes which this has brought to my life, to demonstrate how this works in practice and also perhaps to demonstrate that I practise what I preach! I would love to hear your personal awakening stories so feel free to leave a comment or contact me via the link in the right hand corner of the screen.

Growing up as a HSP (highly sensitive person) and empath in a culture which frowned upon any emotional display was a traumatic, confusing and demoralising experience. Any expression of anger, sadness, fear or indeed, any emotion construed as ‘negative’ (however justified that emotional reaction may have been) was immediately stamped on and derided. Being an empath, I also had the problem of picking up on everyone else’s repressed emotions yet had no outlet for this maelstrom of feelings which conspired to make my inner life very intense and distressing (and later resulted in some very unhealthy acting-out).

As an extremely bright child, there was also huge pressure on me to conform to a particular life path  – stay on at school and get good A levels, go to university and get a 1st class degree then have a financially successful career.  Taking time out to explore the world and find myself after school  – something which I desperately needed to do – wasn’t even an option.

Consequently by the time I reached adulthood, I was stumbling around in the dark with no idea of who I really was or what I really wanted or needed. Years of repression and suppression meant that I’d completely lost sight of my authentic self.  I can remember looking at my wardrobe full of clothes – none of which were of the same style and all of which were trying to convey a particular image – and wondering ‘which of these outfits is really me?’. I tried different careers and different courses, moved house several times and lived in different cities, made new friends and started new relationships but nothing seemed to fill that gap where my authentic self should have been.

I continued struggling to follow a path which had been prescribed for me by other people and society’s expectations and had very little to do with who I really was until finally, in April 1995, everything changed. Though it felt like some kind of wondrous miracle had occurred, with hindsight I was able to recognise the series of encounters, opportunities and synchronicities which lead to my awakening at this time:

* I’d tried every possible way to make the path I was on work but it simply wouldn’t gel for me. By April 1995, I’d literally reached the end of the line and was primed and ready for a momentous change.

* In the previous couple of months, I’d encountered a rather enigmatic character who came into my life for a very short time and vanished almost as quickly as he arrived. He was something of a free spirit who lived on a combination of his wits and his creativity, and he inspired me to start thinking outside the box and recognise that there was another way beyond the one I’d been programmed to believe was the only route.

* On 10 April 1995, I lost my job. This was an early instance of manifestation for me – it was a beautiful sunny day which felt to me like the first day of summer, and as I walked to work, I wished with all my heart that I didn’t have to go and waste my day doing that dreadful job. Half an hour later, I was walking back home, having been laid off the minute I arrived.

* Having manifested this opportunity, I now began to contemplate taking a break from the rat-race to explore the other options that were out there. However I was nervous about stepping off the path – I’d been indoctrinated to believe that the path I was on was the only one to follow and that any other choice would be foolhardy. I was also concerned about what I would do for money without a regular wage.                                                                                                                         About a week after I’d lost my job, I’d arranged to see an old schoolfriend. This friend lived a life which seemed anathema to me, stuck in a dull marriage and a dull job, and the thought of ending up in the same position as her, however safe it might be, filled me with horror. In a wonderful piece of synchronicity, this friend arrived on my doorstep at the exact same time as the post arrived – with a completely unexpected prize cheque for £100 from a premium bond gifted to me by my grandfather 25 years earlier. The message to me seemed loud and clear – the universe was letting me know that if I took the plunge and diverged from the safe but dull path (the one which my friend was trapped on), the money would come.

*  The day I lost my job, I met a man who had just moved into a house across the road from me. I ended up dating him for a while and he introduced me to the world of spirituality, which until that point, I had rejected in favour of what I believed was a more ‘realistic’ view of life. I began to realise that there was more to spirituality than organised religion and eagerly began to explore this new world which had just opened up before me.

* Even though I knew I didn’t want to take yet another ‘crap job’, I still wasn’t sure what it was I actually wanted to do. To remedy this, I signed up for counselling at a local employment and learning advice centre. Though I initially attended because I felt that I was at a crossroads in terms of my career, the experience was far more intense and in depth than I imagined it would be and turned out to be the first step on a lifelong personal development journey which would completely transform my life.

The counselling helped me to recognise that what I really wanted to do was write so I decided to take a sabbatical from the rat-race and spend a few months working on a novel. The experience was a revelation – I had never felt so fulfilled and so free. And that summer, somthing truly amazing happened. For the first time in my life, I had a strong sense of inner peace which ran alongside an equally strong feeling of being ‘at one with the universe’. People who met me at that time told me that I literally glowed – my inner radiance was literally flowing from me – and I effortlessly drew people of all ages to me wherever I went.

I also remember feeling really comfortable in my own skin – the only words I can find to describe it is a ‘humble confidence’. Though I felt confident about myself, it felt different to an ego-driven confidence and I now recognise that it was because this confidence emanated from the depths of my soul.

The other really strong – and at that time, completely unfamiliar – feeling I remember having was a complete loss of fear. Nothing fazed me anymore, not even the thought of death. In fact, I couldn’t understand why anyone would be scared of death as I knew without a doubt that it wasn’t the end of everything, but that we simply moved on to another plane.

I wrote in my previous post that I belive that often we’re given a taste of the awakened life to show us how life could look if we were free from our baggage, whether it’s the stuff imposed upon us via our environment or stuff we’ve amassed ourselves. This initial awakening experience is just the beginning and in my next post, I’ll share with you the transformational process which  awakening triggered and which proved to be a bumpier – and ultimately more enlightening – ride than I would ever have expected.

Have you experienced an awakening? If you’d like to share your story with myself and others or have any questions about the process, please leave a comment below.

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Welcome! Wake up, change yourself and change the world

Welcome to the new Empathic Guidance site! 2012 is going to be a highly significant year for many of us, so I decided that now was the time to relaunch the former ‘Inner Simplicity with Empathic Guidance’ site. Over the coming year, we’re going to see a lot of historic changes which will affect us personally, socially and globally (more on this in future posts), and I hope that my words on here will offer you support and inspiration to guide you through the months ahead.
To give you some idea about the theme of this new site, here’s the blog post which prompted this change. It’s a piece I wrote a few years ago now and have published previously on myspace and on my Inner Simplicity blog where it has resonated with many readers, and I feel it’s still relevant today in terms of offering a succinct summary of my theories.

Wake up, change yourself and change the world

Ok, so the first thing I want to make clear is this is MY reality, no-one else’s. What is true for me may not be true for you, and I wouldn’t want anyone to mindlessly take on board everything I have to say. The whole point of this stuff is ‘personal empowerment’ and giving your power away to anyone or anything, be it a bearded man in the sky, a bearded man in a kaftan or any type of self-proclaimed guru, or even false gods such as ‘mammon’ is simply counterproductive. So have a read, explore the parts that interest you and reject the bits that don’t.

The second point to make is that the basis of this theory is energy. I’m no physicist and this is a brief summary of my ideas, so I’m not even going to attempt to explain the laws of physics, though I can tell you that there is plenty of scientific proof of my basic belief if you want to check it out. For now, in a nutshell, my belief is that everything is made of energy and that all this energy is connected, hence ‘one consciousness’.

So the whole planet is energy and the whole planet is currently living in a state of ‘duality’. This duality causes people to become judgemental and afraid, judgemental of things they label ‘bad’ and afraid that they may themselves be labelled ‘bad’.  Everyone is competing to be the best or certainly better than the next man. And as most people are never going to achieve this, they end up feeling bitter, disillusioned, disappointed, and often looking for someone to blame as to why they did not receive the promised treasures. As for those that do ‘succeed’, they too are afraid – afraid they will lose it all tomorrow and no longer have their ‘power’, hence using this ‘power’ to keep the little man down, be it through creating fear or creating apathy .

The reason for this is that the energies of the planet are currently imbalanced in favour of the masculine. This is why there is so much emphasis on acquisition and aggression; why sex and ‘stuff’ are overrepresented in the media. Masculine energy, in its positive state, is a ‘doing’ energy – but for it to be used for the good of all, it needs to be balanced with the feminine energy, which is nurturing and creative. When I talk about moving away from duality, I do not mean that there will be no more ‘black/white’ ‘happy/sad’ etc – I am talking about finding balance between two apparently opposing states. So an ideal state for the planet, in my view, would be using the masculine energy to manifest the creative and nurturing ideas of the feminine. So far masculine energy has been used to manifest more ‘stuff’ but only to satisfy the ego – the development of technology should have worked as an agency of freedom, allowing us time and energy for ‘giving’ using the feminine energy, but instead people have become focussed on the ‘getting’. This is why I think we have lost our way. Everything has become a commodity, how ever well-intentioned at the start (the Green movement is a prime example).

So that’s the overall picture. How does this affect the individual? The individual is like a microcosm of the planet, and at the moment most of us are being ruled by our masculine energy, in the form of our ego. The ego is also the basis for the ‘inner child’ – imagine the ego as a toddler in the throes of the terrible twos and you get the picture. As well as the tantrum-ing toddler, there is also the ‘critical parent’ – that voice that tells the toddler that s/he’s never going to get that flash car/gorgeous figure/ great career/hot lover because s/he’s a piece of shit and doesn’t deserve it, and anyway, everyone is better than her/him. So this is the battle – or some variant of this – that most of us have going on in our heads at some level on a daily basis.

But one day something happens to us – we realise that we have been sold a lie and that the things we were told would fulfil us – the job, the house, the car, the holidays and gadgets -  are just traps to keep us compliant. In fact, everything in our lives has been about raising us to maintain the status quo – our education has quashed our individuality and turned us into obedient drones and society tells us that the only way to be a ‘good, respectable’ citizen is by working your arse off 40 hours a week to pay for all the stuff that you good respectable citizens are meant to have, otherwise you’re simply not good or respectable enough. Either we come to this realisation slowly or we undergo a major crisis or some kind of positive spiritual experience which is the catalyst for this change. For me, it was losing my job and, after the initial panic about how I was going to survive,  realising that I didn’t want to take yet another boring, underpaid/overworked job just to satisfy some work ethic drilled into me by the powers-that-be. This was the summer when I caught a glimpse of how life could be, a little taster of how it feels to be awakened, and the true beauty of recognising that we are all one consciousness. This seems to be something that many people experience at the beginning of awakening,  perhaps so that we stick to the path when it starts to get bumpy.

Because it does get bumpy for a while, really bumpy. That ego/inner child/critical parent combo is not disappearing without a fight.  Depending on how much shit you have to work through, the next few weeks/months/years will be spent understanding and placating this part of yourself – notice I don’t say obliterating, because this is about balance. A healthy ego, a playful inner child, a nurturing parent – this is what we are aiming for. The ego is there for a reason – it’s the ego which keeps us alive and safe and well – but it needs to know that it is not the centre of the universe. So treat your ego in the same way you would treat that petulant toddler –  let it know that  you are willing to respect it, so long as it respects you – give it boundaries, listen to its stories and acknowledge its pain, but don’t allow it to use the pain as an excuse for negative behaviour, either towards itself or others.

While you are working through this stuff, be it alone or with a counsellor/guide (I would recommend both ways), you will also experience some physical symptoms. This goes back to what I said about everything being energy – everything is connected, and that includes the mind/body connection. As you begin living through your heart/soul instead of your mind/ego, our thoughts change to those of a higher vibration which impacts our feelings, and our body is also affected by these changes. An example of this is the stress reactions our body has – who hasn’t felt sick with nerves, at some point? Or found themselves physically shaken by bad news? Or on a happier note, felt your heart soar when someone you love tells you they love you back?  The body is full of energy points (the chakras) and you may feel some of the changes most strongly in these parts. I’m working on a comprehensive list of all of these changes, but probably the major ones are fatigue and various aches and pains which appear in some part of the body only to mysteriously disappear and never return. Many of the symptoms also sound like the menopause – hot flushes, memory loss etc – but as these are appearing in men and also in people of all ages, it’s actually a sign of hormonal changes taking place, as hormones regulate just about every function in your body including emotions, weight, body temperature, libido, mental activity concentration, sight etc.

And meanwhile there are other changes taking place. Your excitement at recognising this new way of being could lead to you reading everything you can lay your hands on to make sense of what is happening to you.  As you begin vibrating at a higher level, you will also find your tolerance level for things of a lower vibration diminishing . You may find yourself feeling angry at the world for a while. You become increasingly isolated and your home becomes your sanctuary as you feel out of step with everything and everyone ‘out there’.  Your senses become more highly tuned and you may find yourself craving foods you never wanted before and turning your nose up at previous favourites. Loud noises, bright lights and heaving crowds become unbearable and you may want to spend more time in natural surroundings. You no longer value material stuff anymore, as you realise that you already have everything you need (and more – you may even begin to give stuff away). As you become increasingly sensitive to energy, you may also find yourself having what people consider ‘psychic’ experiences – you know things you couldn’t possibly know and your intuition becomes more efficient. Some people feel that this is the voice of your Higher Self, or your spirit guides – my personal view is that we are tuning into a higher frequency and becoming more aware of the subtleties in the environment. Synchronicities increase as you tune into these energies more and more and life begins to ‘flow’. Your relationships change – some may even end as you realise you are on different paths and simply have nothing in common anymore, or you may become less tolerant of the ‘energy leeches’ in your life, as your self-respect increases. You care less and less what other people think (a major sign that the ego is losing its stranglehold) and instead of wondering what people can do for you, you start to look at what you could do for them – and do it.

It’s at this point that you know you are ‘awake’ as STO (service to others) rather than STS (service to self) is the cornerstone of spiritual awakening. You recognise that you are powerful already, that it was only your ego (and the egos of others in the collective unconscious) that gave you the illusion that you needed something more to prove your power, and that the divine spark, what people have labelled ‘God’, is something within you, within all of us, not just ‘somewhere out there’. You take responsibility for yourself and you no longer just want to talk the talk (or read the books), you want to walk the walk. And underlying this is a feeling of ‘all-rightness’. You feel all right in yourself – you’ve accepted yourself for who you are and embraced your ‘shadow side’ – and you feel all right in the world. You change what you can and accept what you can’t, be it in you or out there. And so what began as an individual change, begins to change the world, like that proverbial butterfly flapping its wings.

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2012, awakening, spirituality , , , , , , ,