Who I Am and Bridging Into the Present

Who am I? It is a question I have been working on for a while now. How do I discover who I am? Since early on I naturally pushed against all the trappings that could comfortably define me. I have not had any particular profession that I could use to define me either. The role of mother, wife, social status, interests even, were not enough to define me. 

In short, I set myself up from early on to seek that answer within. But in the past two years it has taken on an entirely different dimension. As I began to awaken, I began to examine this in greater detail, indeed with more necessity. Who I thought I was no longer accounted for what I was experiencing and thinking. But how to go about connecting with the greater reality of my being? 

The first thing that was suggested to me was to rediscover what I liked as a child. It was about reclaiming parts of myself both wounded and joyous that I had ultimately left by the wayside. Both were powerful, but it was the joyous part that made me take the biggest steps out of the box. 

I began to remember how I used to play the piano. Simultaneously my son started piano lessons and at night I would practice from his book. I could only read simple tunes by then, but I repeated it again and again, deriving a sense of satisfaction, wholeness, a remembering that did not necessarily conjure up events, but rather feelings. 

I remembered how I used to love riding and then I lost my confidence after a few nasty falls. So one summer I took a couple of classes again. 

The key to all of this was that I did not dwell on what the purpose of all this was. Was I trying to play the piano again, was I to become brilliant at it? Of course I daydreamed, but I wasn’t really dedicated to it, it wasn’t something I intuitively felt was to become a constant part of my life and the same went for the riding. 

So my conditioning, my belief status leapt in with: “therefore there's no point in doing it! If you won’t be great at it, if there’s no reason behind it, why do it? “ But I was carried away just with the experiencing of it.

I have been told that we do not discover ourselves, learn so much through the process of earnest suffering (as I had previously believed!) as that of joy. By doing these things I reconnected with myself as a child, I get to play again and feel rather than know what motivates me, what animates me, what makes me feel truly alive. 

It was more about connecting with the feelings and enfolding my childish self and using her as a fount for further growth than anything else. And it worked.

I was told recently that we experience our lives’ through a particular aperture. Most have that aperture in a fixed, narrow and finite position and it is through this that we open to attenuate reality and draw our experiences to us. 

I see the Universe as an energetic soup and we, generating the frequency of our beliefs, are as magnets to that energy which then enters and manifests through our aperture in the images reflecting our beliefs. We will only meet what we believe. 

If I believe there to be greater dimensional realities beyond this, I will begin to have experiences that confirm and expand upon this. If I steadfastly believe that not to be the case then my experiences will match that too and I will have a wealth of data to back up my belief. 

The filter, however, what we attenuate, is not a reflection of the “world outside” so to speak. Rather it is a reflection of the world inside that acts as sculptor to the raw material that has the potential to take any form. 

I am reminded of the experiments in quantum physics, in which the atoms react to the scientific observer. It is impossible to remove the observer from the equation of the experiment. The observer in fact co-creates the outcome of the experiment whilst in themselves attempting to neutrally and detachedly observe an external reality. It is not possible to do so. 

We are all, down to the smallest sub-atomic particle and beyond, part of a whole and in constant conversation. The only limits we discover are really those that we hold within ourselves and within our beliefs. 

But there is no value judgement to any of this. It is not wrong to hold limiting beliefs, it is not better to believe in greater realities than what you tangibly have in front of you. I initially wanted it all quickly, I wanted my world to change overnight and thankfully that has not been the case though I have continued to move at a fairly brisk pace! 

But as with much of life it is the process, the journey that uncovers so much. If I had no limiting beliefs, I would not have the opportunity to grow in ways that have been necessary and very fulfilling. They then feed my creativity and so it is an on-going process. I need my limits and limitations if only to discover what they are. 

So ultimately the starting point for any great change, external or internal is within self. What beliefs do I hold that make me up? If I cannot access them, what do my experiences in the world tell me about my beliefs, treating them as a mirror to the world within? 

I remembered when I was a child how I set up a club about unseen spirits with a friend. They had access points into the earth that we could discover, we told stories about their motives, we searched the minutiae of daily life to discover the secret and on-going communication of an ethereal realm. This went on for years and I was happy with it, I dedicated time to it. 

But I never considered it much more than childish imagination. I later read it as dangerous escapism. But now I see it differently. If I reconnect with myself as a child, this was one reality I was spending time in and holding open. It is no wonder that after years of shutting the doors, sealing them tight, they would reopen onto that same, yet now different, magical world of my childhood.

What did we daydream about as children? What did we yearn for as children? Was there magic that we sought? Why should it not be in the here and now any more?

I am not suggesting that we all leap into a completely fantastical realm, I have not done that at all. I do not see things visually i.e. spiritual forces walking around, but I open to possibilities. I do not walk in the realm of spirits as in a science fiction film, but I walk in a world that is alive, which speaks to me through signs.

For example, this summer I went for a run on the beach. At one point I began thinking about why we are all here. How many people perhaps, are here now, working towards bringing to the fore a more archaic wisdom, a deeper sense of connection. I felt it coming through in the arts, in the books I read. I felt how it is seeping through into popular culture.  

I felt how I have been here before and have been at these junctures before. I felt so happy to be here on earth again at this time now and it was so strong and tinged with a sadness too that I began to cry. I felt how I was not at all alone and many are working towards the same thing both of the earth and beyond it. 

I felt the absence of judgement. It did not mean that the process of separation and disconnection were bad or what I wished to bring in was better. I just felt it was all as it should be and that made me cry. I really began to sob. I looked at the sun, at the waves, the sky, the gulls, the sand and I felt with it all. 

Through my tears something caught my eye on the wet sand. It was a tiny yellowish stone in the shape of a heart. I bent down and picked it up and it was translucent, part crystal. I held it and I felt so taken care of. 

The message I felt was one of thanks, I was being thanked for being here and reminded of the love that surrounds me at all times. If I have my eyes open I will always be communicated with and the Universe will give me stones or whatever it can, whatever it thinks me most amenable to at any given point, to pass on its message. I shifted immediately at that reception.

But all of this has the tendency to veer off on the overly spiritual. Much of my greatest epiphanies have come from more “normal” daily life, living the tasks and responsibilities that make up my existence. I have three small children and so the majority of my day is made up more of very grounded elements than spiritually ecstatic ones. But even as I write this, I am reminded how there is no real distinction. 

My children get me to work on my beliefs like nothing else. They keep me grounded and that is why I am here. I am not here to experience more and more expansive moments in meditation to the point that I practically fly away. 

It is about discovering this and bringing it back, letting it settle and inform the fabric of my daily life, of incorporating this so that it flows and expands my experience in the quotidian world. It has been hard. It is hard to sit and look at trees, feel their energy, feel almost sublime and joyous, utterly connected and then come straight back to three screaming, fighting children, homework to do, dinner to prepare.

Part of the difficulty was in not being able to bridge this. Again it was an issue of separation. My more meditative, spiritually expansive experiences were separate to what I saw to be my responsibilities and living of my other life. 

I guarded it as uniquely mine and the "me" in daily life as something else. I needed to do this for a time in order to continue to discover who I was. But now I need more to bridge it, to bring it more into the present. 

Now when I “go off” I send that energy and the light to those I love, I think of making a bridge with it, to bring them into where I am and to send where I am to where they currently are. By doing this it is not so jarring. It is starting to flow.

I was told that it is about bringing more of who I am into my present space, but first I have to go off quietly and find out who I am. Once that begins to consolidate then I am able to bring it in, mostly with no premeditation or planning. It takes on its own natural rhythm.

Over the past couple of years I have felt the need to go away, to be with myself. I have loved the feeling of starting out, sometimes for a few hours and sometimes for a few days and knowing that the time is my own and not knowing where it will take me. I love the feeling of taking a step into an adventure. 

But this has been mine, it is not something I wished or even considered sharing. The other day I got the idea to take my children on a day trip, an adventure. I hadn’t previously even considered this to be possible. But once I opened to it, I realised how much one could do, with a car and a picnic, you can transform a day, you can go anywhere, explore anything, the world became vast. 

It turned into a real adventure, I had a vague concept of where I wanted to go, but none of it was as I had foreseen. The roads were far harder to drive, pitted dirt roads, mountain passes, often vertiginous, the landscape was thrilling and breathtaking, the children were on the verge of vomiting! 

But we enjoyed it, we went for walks, had a picnic, discovered ruins, made up stories, climbed up mountains (tiny hillocks!). We went to a lake with no way down to it and thanked God or the Sky Spirits as they called them, for the shocking downpour which was a gift for our very brave attempts to find a path to swim and having been thwarted. We scrambled over rocks, sat in the natural dips of stones like thrones and ate wild blackberries. 

We had an amazing day. We had an adventure and it was the natural extension of myself. It was what I seek in my own time away from everyone, but I no longer had to be so separated. I was able to draw more of me into my present and we could communally take off on the adventure of which we are already a part.