2020 – is our vision clearing?

If our vision is clearing, then what are we seeing? After our early stages of dependence and independence, the need for interdependence has rarely been stronger. It is, without doubt, a clear sign of maturity based on equality and understanding.
But where are the living models to guide us into this stage? At first, it seems there are none.
But wait.
I can see and hear influencers who are quietly and insistently bringing to a wider audience an updated reality of our biological, mental and emotional life which supersedes the understanding of yesterday.
Adopting the lessons of these people, we can first imagine, then understand and eventually lead ourselves into a different future vision, starting now. Time to become a vision holder, just as the small number of imaginal cells within a caterpillar hold a vision of the butterfly.
Who am I referring to?
People like Bruce Lipton, Gabor Mate, Tony Robbins, Eckhart Tolle, Charles Eisenstein and Brene Brown, for example, all of whom are easily searchable on any of the internet’s search engines.
Each in their own way showing us the importance of creating a life based on certain core beliefs and values that we hold dear and how to change those that limit us.
Let me add Hilary Cottam and Kate Raworth, Mariana Mazzucato, women who have created enabling and empowering models and proven methods that place people and relationships at the heart of communities that seek to thrive not just survive.

Our hunger

We always have had a hunger for a connection to each other that is respectful and caring as well seeking to connect to that which is beyond our understanding and ever present.
Ineffable is the word that has been lost for most of our vocabulary associated for so long with religion, something that for many has become a dead and deadening experience.
If this article is about anything, it’s about taking the path to integration rather than polarisation. Of inclusion not exclusion. Of accepting or at best celebrating difference. Difference of age, race, skin tone, belief, gender, sexual preference. This is the way to true equality from which flows interdependence. Without this acceptance, this tolerance and this celebration leads us to continue along our path of poisonous thinking and behaviour. With it, we can pursue a path of peaceful empowerment and mutual growth.

We need to belong, to know in our heart of hearts that we matter and we have something of value to offer to each other and to the wider world.
By which I mean pursuing a path that changes our world, our life for the better.
And who better to decide what’s better than each of us exercising our autonomy?
But just what is it that is calling you?

The Soul’s Calling

In a different age or with a different belief, I might call this asking God.
I have a negative reaction to that word as a result of my obediently attended daily worship at school that carried little or no meaning for me.
In later life, I have become much more comfortable with listening and taking notice of my soul’s calling, a much quieter ‘voice’ which I may not hear as an actual voice at all.
I listen to my body.
Listening for what Richard Wilkins called ‘a ding (yes) or a bong (no)’. Yes, I know, it’s a highly complex set of instructions to follow!
There were three doubt inducing thoughts I had in following this practice which you may be experiencing too:

• It can’t be that simple (my mind loves to complicate things – yours too?)
• ‘Reading’ the signals of my body to interpret and differentiate what was ‘a ding’ from ‘a bong’
• Trusting the signals themselves

And of course like any new habit, as hypnotherapist Marisa Peer advises, it’s important to make the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar.
I’ve found the best way to do this is by repetition and noticing the results.
You might be more comfortable calling this ‘following your intuition’. What we call it is less important than listening to, taking heed of and acting on it.

I’m remembering Einstein’s encouragement about how best to solve problems by going to a different level of thinking. But sometimes certain types of thinking create problems.
What if the true malaise is at a soul level, a barrenness, an emptiness that we are continually seeking to fill in the material or egoic domain, which inevitably fails to truly fulfill that hunger?

What feeds my soul?

An important question to answer then is, ‘What feeds my soul? What truly answers my soul’s longing?’
My answers are not intended to answer yours although I suspect there will be similarities:

• Expressing my creativity
• Surrounding myself with beauty, that which uplifts me, brings me true joy
• A sense of belonging, by which I mean giving and receiving the experience of being deeply known, cared for and cared about.
• Growth: a sense of growing into the person I’m called to be by my soul, my true compass
• Believing I’m part of something that is bigger than my personality, an ‘eternal artistry’ handed down to all of us over millennia contained in ancient practices such as meditation, yoga, tai chi, sacred dance, prayer, spending reflective time alone in nature

Surely now is a time to combine timeless wisdom and practices with current understandings of the effective workings of body, mind and emotions.
Why? In order to truly feed a deep hunger we all have as part of our intrinsic make up, the path to personal peace and the joyful life that flows from that state.
And if we fail to embrace this opportunity to reconsider, to reset, to change?
I can only foresee a continued quest to satiate our true hunger by the tried and failed substitutes of material succour (stuff) and unproductive activities, leading once again along a tragic path to obsessions and addictions.