Love!

Week 23

I wrote this Hub two years ago. Enjoy. Oh and my friend's list is now nearing 1000 lol

I love you! No really!

I love you. Three words that get said without being meant but which also scare the crap out of people so much, they run from them. What is wrong with telling someone that you have love for them? What can BE so wrong about being loved? And what about the many forms of love? Can we tar those three words with the same brush for such a magnificent feeling? No, well I don’t think so.

I for one have been emotionally retarded, unable to tell someone I have love for them or that I’m IN love with them. I source this to the fact we were not told as kids growing up, that is not to say we were not shown love but it wasn’t verbal. I shall leave my childhood issues there and move swiftly on to the now. Is it more acceptable these days to tell someone you love them? Scott Miles on BBC Radio One tells all his callers ‘love you’ and they say it back. I hear teens on the phone saying ‘love you’ after a call.... to me this is a strange thing. It’s not wrong, just a bit alien to me. I suppose I’m always afraid they may think I mean romantic love and that I want to ‘be’ with them, rather than just saying ‘hey you’re a funny sod, I love you for your humour and how you make me smile’.

Or maybe that’s just me and my underlying fear of rejection? Afraid to say those three words cos they might mean that person flees before your eyes. Been there, done that! This brings me to another poignant point – why do we give our love to the wrong people? At what point does the rose tinted glasses go on and we fail to see what that person is really like? Love like that is painful and dependant on the other person to validate you as a person worth loving. That’s not healthy love. That love kills the soul and pushes people over the edge – sometimes literally. We have all been there though and most of us are better people for surviving that kind of love. I know I have. I am faced with embarrassment the things I have done whilst being in love that in hindsight you recoil at the sheer cringe-worthiness of it all. Is that love though? It sure as hell feels like it at the time but once again, upon reflection it’s almost like an obsession party going on in your head and the other person isn’t invited! You know it’s true, be honest.

So how do you define love? It is the true meaning of life (or should be) in most spiritual and religious paths. I believe that love makes the world go round. Well actually it’s the gravitational pull of the Universe but metaphorically speaking, we all strive for love, we all want love, we all want to be loved - anyone who says otherwise is lying to themselves. And I’m not talking about romantic love either, although that is what most people secretly yearn for. If you look at any book on Inner Child, or psychology it all points to the part in our lives when we stopped feeling loved. That’s when we developed our neurosis, our inner demons that we spend years and lots of money in counselling trying to overcome. Simply it boils down to the fact that love was removed, abused or denied. Bad things happen at the hands of messed up people because they are part of a chain of events that damaged them. So they damage others and the circle goes on. At some point though, we have to break the chain of our cycles and free wheel into unknown territory. It’s scary as hell. Knowing that at some point ‘love’ has damaged your hearts and minds will make you wary to love again, to give love, to be loved, to feel you deserve to be loved. That’s where I find myself. I have suffered and survived that destructive aspect of love. But what I realise is that is not what love really is. Love is pure and without cost, it’s an energy that we can all tap in to – it’s Universal. Without it we die or feel empty and dead inside. Oh you know that’s true too.

We love our new shoes, we love our cars, we love our new gadgets and we declare it to the world. But why can’t we declare that we love a stranger for making us laugh when we were at our lowest? Why can’t we say ‘you’re awesome, you make me smile – I love you for that’? Why are we afraid to express ourselves with those three words yet tell the world wide web what we had for breakfast? We share such insignificant things on these social networks but we don’t really express ourselves do we? We don’t tell these virtual strangers that are now part of our friends list that they mean something to you. I tried to have a cull of my friends list the other day, at nearly 700 it’s out of control. But I couldn’t do it. Even though I have never met the majority of them, in their own ways, they have reached out to me, they have shared their lives, they have listened to my problems and rants on my status updates and they have liked my life, my images, my opinions and become friends. People I will never meet are not without significance and cannot simply be culled. I have discovered a rich and diverse culture of people with so many interesting variances that I am richer from the experience. I can guarantee that when I am down, someone will say something to make me laugh. I have done the same for others too.

I said on my Christmas Day radio show that we are all connected and we should all take the time to observe the world around us. People fall and need catching. I have fallen and been caught. By a virtual stranger I added on the back of a comment on someone’s status. I let that person into my life and out of the blue, she read my cry for help and rang me up. That was an amazing thing to do. I felt elated that a stranger cared to do that. I am that stranger too. I have love to give the world but strangely enough, I give little to myself.

Now that’s another can of worms! How many of us have self-love? How many of us deny ourselves love because we don’t think we are worth it? How many of us don’t love ourselves? Now come on, be brave. Chances are if you are overweight you don’t like yourself much. True enough for me. But I know that love myself, I will feel better about myself, I will lose weight. But I don’t. I look at myself in the mirror and think ‘yuck’ why would anyone want that? And that vicious cycle is what keeps the weight on. And you know what? Love put it on. It did, honest. When I was in love and happy with myself, I lost weight. When that person extracted and denied that love to me, I turned on myself and gained weight. That weight is emotional baggage. And it’s so hard to lose, maybe I should take it to Heathrow, they lose luggage all the time.

You know you don’t need someone to make you feel validated, to feel loved but it helps. There’s no feeling in the world more euphoric than being in love. We shine and glow with it. And then it’s gone....here we are back to co-dependence love. How do you break a habit of a lifetime? How do you banish those demons that haunt you? How do you go on to survive a broken heart – romantically, betrayal of a friendship, rejection? All of these are ugly things. Yet we are reminded in Universal love when we stand in awe at a glorious sunset, at a babies smile, at an impromptu hug from a friend ‘just because’, a phone call from a stranger when you are down..... this is love at work.

I love you because you are you. I smile at your words, laugh at your humour and inspired by your life and what you do. We are all unique. Love is Universal and fills us all. Pass it on. It’s just three words and world may just stop spinning if we forget that. The best thing my sister Rachael ever told me is that ‘you get the love that you think you deserve’ – truth hurts. If you don’t think you are worth it you will continue to attract negative relationships. Love yourself – go on give it a try. I will if you will.

Let yourself be loved. Until you do, the weight won't shift, you won't find your true love and even if you do, you won't feel you deserve it and wil repel it. The hardest thing to do is to break the habit of a life time. It's ok, you are only human after all. Was that an 'aha!' moment? I wrote this from the heart. I put it out to the Universe. Lets see what happens... thank you for reading this. I'm great at giving advice, I just need to heed my own - don't we all!?

Love really is all around. Look and you'll see it.

Fear

Week 11

Fuck it!

Fear
One of the reasons I didn't write my blog leading up to the operation was fear. I was going through one of my phases of being consumed by my fears.  The operation involved general anaesthetic and I had it in my head that I would go under and be lost to it.  For weeks, I had my Will going around my head, who would I leave what to and who would raise my son.  I even spoke with my friends about it.  It wasn't the fear of dying, it was the fear of what I was leaving behind and how it would be without me.  So I did a video Will and posted it on my desktop, I made sure all the passwords and log ins for the websites, emails etc were all written down.  I bust my arse getting jobs finished before I went in for the op.

The evening before my op, I told myself that they wouldn't operate if I was at risk and if anything did happen, I was in a hospital and they'd be monitoring me and not to worry.  It's daft... fear. It grabs you and then digs in deeper and sets all kinds of insecurities off.

A few years ago I had a t-shirt made up to remind me:

FEAR? 

MEH!

FACE IT...

FUCK IT! 

Fear of the event is usually worse than the event itself as they say.. working yourself up, getting anxious... and then it's never as bad as you thought it was going to be.

This obviously doesn't apply to real fear - of violence and other such traumatic things. That kind of fear cannot be dismissed. It's justified.

For all those other fears, anxieties, things you have no control over... try this:

"Saying Fuck It is like massage for the mind
Relaxing you, releasing tension, giving up on things that aren't working.
John C. Parkin argues that saying Fuck It is a spiritual act:
That it is the perfect western expression of the eastern ideas of letting go, giving up and finding real freedom by realising that things dont matter so much (if at all).
This is The Fuck It Way.
It works very simply: if you're feeling stressed about something, say Fuck It you feel instantly better."

FUCK IT! 

Yep, I feel better already

The other thing to consider is that you can call your fears to you, to make them manifest into reality. This is told in the story of rabbit in the medicine cards I use.. in my words.

One day Rabbit was eating grass and spotted Eagle flying high above.
Rabbit was afraid 'oh no, it's Eagle, what if he sees me and eats me'
Eagle hadn't seen him.
Rabbit shouted out louder 'oh no it's Eagle, he's going to eat me'
Eagle noticed something below and went to have a look
Rabbit ran 'shit, Eagle is going to eat meeeeeeeeeeeeee!'
Eagle swooped down and got Rabbit and ate him.

As this story shows, Rabbit medicine people are so afraid of tragedy, illness, disaster, and "being taken," that they call those very fears to them to teach them lessons.  The keynote here is: what you resist will persist! What you fear most is what you will become.

If you pulled Rabbit, stop talking about horrible things happening and get rid of "what it" in your vocabulary. This card may signal a time of worry about the future or of trying to exercise your control over that which is not yet in form - the future. Stop now! Write your fears down and be willing to feel them. Breathe into them, and feel them running through your body into Mother Earth as a give-away.

Makes perfect sense to me.... face your fears and say FUCK IT... don't let them bind you, enslave you to them or depression surely follows, inability to act and all those things you feared, will come to you. Best to face them honestly.  It's not easy to do... you'll get there though, so don't give up.  Takes a strong person to see these patterns, face them and deal with them.  Don't beat yourself up, have faith x

Death

It is a subject that has kept cropping up this last week and last night, a beautiful old lady died at the age of 110.  Maybe my blog was late because I needed her words to inspire me.  Who knows.

The one thing certain in life is that you are going to die.  Morbid? Not really, it is a reality. I have found this last year, I have been very conscious of my own mortality and are times when I constantly think about me dying and what I'm leaving behind.  It's not constructive or healthy but it is natural considering I am going through the grieving process.

I lost my estranged brother to cancer last March. I also lost my ex-best friend Lorna to a heart attack. I lost a brother Knight Ghyll to cancer. I lost a friend and colleague Gail to a bike crash. The one year old boy called Ryan who I'd been sending healing to, died of the same cancer my brother did and another biker mate Tom died of pneumonia. All within a couple of months.  By July, I was a total mess. I was laying on the table at my osteopaths (he is also a reiki master and acupuncturist and clairvoyant) and he was sorting out my knees with acupuncture and talking about why I was upset.  He asked me why it was that I believed in the after life and spirit contact but was upset about death.  I replied that it wasn't the dying, it was what I left behind that upset me.  What would happen to my son, my home, my possessions, my cats... what would people say at the funeral, to my son, who'd raise him, would me cats be put in homes .... you get the idea. The thought of all of this ate me up inside.

As time has gone on, this fear has eased off but it's still there. Depression amplifies this fear and I'm up and down with that due to my current physical state. I'm due to have general anaesthetic next month for an operation on my knees. I have been sedated before but not totally under, that deep sleep could be a wonderful thing where I travel or it could be the death of me. I think it's the thought of the needles that's doing me in the most and the loss of control over my body.  So now getting my Will in order and going to do a video telling people what I want/don't want at my funeral.  In a non-morbid way, I've been planning my funeral music for years... music is such a big part of my life and when I've been to others funerals, the music played at them represented who they were.

I think it would be a good idea to make sure your family and friends know what you want to happen with your remains, the sort of funeral you want and what you represent. I've been to too many where the funeral was the last thing that person would have wanted and it was more what their family wanted. That's not right.

Yesterday the oldest survivor of the concentration camps died aged 110.  You may have seen her on documentaries about people living active lifestyles well past their 100th year. Alice was the lady who played the piano. Her music kept the spirits up in those retched places and gave some hope to those who had none. She continued to play until the day she died. It will be easier for me to copy and paste the news article about her life. It's worth sharing.

"I think I am in my last days but it does not really matter because I have had such a beautiful life.

"And life is beautiful, love is beautiful, nature and music are beautiful. Everything we experience is a gift, a present we should cherish and pass on to those we love."

Ms Herz-Sommer recalled "always laughing" during her time in Terezin, where she and other inmates put on occasional concerts.

She said the joy of making music had kept their spirits up.

"These concerts, the people are sitting there, old people, desolate and ill, and they came to the concerts and this music was for them our food. Music was our food. Through making music we were kept alive."

Life IS beautiful. Love IS beautiful. Nature and music ARE beautiful. She never lost sight of this and this resonates with me hugely.  I see the beauty in everything around me... even when I'm low.  So thank you Alice for reminding me that inspite of the horrors you face, life can be good.  What an inspirational, beautiful person.  Rest in peace, you've earned it x

Naked trees

Bare blue skies

Last years leaves

Litter the ground

Cold winds blow

A mighty chill

Rain turns to snow

The sun climbs higher

Daffodils and crocus

Snowdrops and catkins

Life has burst thru

The cold hard earth

Life is imminent

It's waiting to bloom

Green shoots and colours

Birds return home

Colder weather will come

Life still breaks thru

Defying frozen death

Under frost and snow

New life breaks thru

Winters death begins to wane

Sunny days and blue skies

Wake us up within

New life in Springtime

The lambing season not far

Cold winds may blow

Spring has been announced

written by me =o))

Edited to add that, life is about death. As a pagan, you observe the season changes.. when the world is reborn (spring), when it feeds us (summer) when we harvest (autumn) and when the world dies (winter). It's all about life and death cycles.  For some, death is just the next big adventure. Every culture, faith and religion in all corners of the world has their own version of what happens when you die, where you go and what you do.  As a medium, I know spirit goes on... death is only a transition. But by gods, it's a painful one, especially for those left behind.  As a healer, I try to make the transition as peaceful as possible but that's another story.  Thanks for reading x