The unknown and the uncertain

A storm is coming here on Guernsey, highlighting this week’s theme around uncertainty and the unknown. What will the storm bring? What will happen when the winds hit 69mph and we’re all snug in our beds trying to sleep?

You can almost feel the trepidation in the air, because it’s unknown and uncertain. Yet we should be familiar with this now. Covid and Government’s response to Covid highlight how much the future is unknown and uncertain, despite our efforts to make known and certain. We have entire societal systems and structures and rules and regulations in place to give us a false sense of everything being known and certain. Then nature comes along with a curved ball and throws all that up in the air.

The spiritual path is partly about becoming comfortable with the unknown and uncertain, so that we are not thrown off balance when life pulls the rug from under our feet, when we are challenged to see if we can maintain our centre in the chaos. It’s actually those moments, the ones where everything is turned on its head, that we might later come to appreciate as the richest moments in our lives. But at the time, it can be a touch challenging.

Sometimes we have to pull the rug from under our own feet, because life has become stagnant and it is time to enter new territory. It can be scary though, causing our own stepping into the void and emptiness of not truly knowing what is next, of being uncertain about how things will turn out. We can find ourselves clinging, knowing we need to let go but being too fearful to actually go through with it, even if it just a letting go of a thought process as much as a letting go of a relationship or career.

Often we seek certainty, wanting to be sure that the place we are headed to will offer us what it is that we need, and we will obsessively look for signs, which might validate the choices we make. Sometimes we’ll put a foot forward, and then pull it back again. Other times we’ll do something new and then find ourselves trying to repeat more of what has happened previously, simply because it all gets too scary and we want the reassurance of what has happened previously, even though we know that it isn’t going to give us the joy that we seek.

I know all this because I have lived it. The rug was firmly pulled from under my feet last November with the bike accident and the cancelled Tantra trip that followed, because things had to change, but I was so invested in my life as it was then that the universe had to intervene, simply to make me see and indeed listen. I had no choice, my shoulder was calling out for attention and the attempted healing of that has taken me on quite an inner journey to realise the extent to which we burden ourselves with the past and power plays and with unnecessary responsibilities, simply because we don’t want others to suffer, even if we end up creating our own suffering in the process.

Furthermore, it has helped me to realise how tricky it can be for the mind to let go of its unhelpful and limiting thought processes that get triggered whenever we feel fear, about something unknown and uncertain to the extent that we can easily imagine ourselves into a state of anxiety, simply because of our patterning around safety, or lack of safety, and previous painful experiences which cause our mind to create these patterns in the first place.

I was trying to explain this to a client who I could see was struggling, simply because of her own thoughts that kept going around and around in her head and were causing her anxiety. The thoughts were of an imagined illness. There was nothing to evidence her imaginings. They were simply imaginings. Her mind had a thought about her getting ill and she kept giving that thought energy, to the extent that she was feeding it daily and the thought was becoming more ingrained in her mind and her anxiety levels were rising. She will soon be proving the well known fact that our thoughts create our realty, because she will think herself ill. Then she will have her evidence.

But really she doesn’t need to do this to herself. There is no evidence that she is ill. She has just let fear get the better of her. False Evidence Appearing Real. FEAR. The thought comes and she feeds it. So it starts to feel real. But it is just a thought. Instead maybe she could choose to think about a flower. Or a butterfly. Or a fairy. Or a tree bud. Or her good health. But no. The pathway was set and she chose to keep feeding the fear, letting the thought become even more established in her mind, like a car choosing the same muddy path over and over again so that the tracks become more deeply ingrained in the earth.

Maybe its helpful to liken thoughts to pieces of material. Some have super glue on the back of them and they get super stuck on our mind so that we don’t recognise the difference between the mind and the thought; it seems that the thought becomes our mind and we identify with it as part of who we are. Other times the material has velcro on the back and it attaches to our mind and we give it some sense of being part of us but then something changes and we rip it away and we realise it never was us, we were never that person, that thought was not part of us and we didn’t let it define us. Other times the material has no sticky stuff on the back, its like a butterfly, it flutters in and flutters out.

So many of our thought are like this. they come and go. But there are lots of our thoughts that stick around and some that stick in there for the long haul so that we identify with them and believe that they are us, we are them. Like thinking we’re useless at technology or with money. Or that we’ll get sick. if we think it enough, we’ll start identifying with it and if we’re really clever (or really silly) we’ll actually start creating it, we’ll think ourselves useless at technology, poor or even worse, sick. But if we are cleverer, we’ll think ourselves competent at technology, amazingly rich and well instead. We do have that choice!

Last night I dreamt all my toes had been cut off. Apparently this indicates a lack of balance and stability in my life. Also a fear about moving forward. This is true. Moving forward into the unknown is indeed scary. But staying stuck is also scary. In my dream, I stuck my toes back on again and I was so pleased to have a pair of shoes that helped to keep them stuck on, black shoes, like ballet pumps. My well called to me too. I went to visit it today. I also made sure to place my feet on the earth and spread my toes. Face my fear. Step into the unknown. Isn’t the subconscious a funny thing.

Meanwhile Elijah has been thriving on the back of his diagnosis. Some say a diagnosis is not helpful and a label even less so, and there was a time when I wondered if that might be so, but he has found it validating, helping him to understand more of himself and make better sense of his world. I spoke to the autism support lady yesterday and she said that studies have shown that those being diagnosed are always grateful for the diagnosis, that it does make a difference. I have spoken to a number of you navigating the assessment and it is worth the wait - we were in the queue for a year. I believe there is a timing to everything.

As for Eben, sadly his hearing has deteriorated over the last six months and we have been finding our way with this, discovering that he has an allergy to dust mites (all those HUGE cuddly toys filing the bedroom have had to be banished to the corner and all bedding changes, rugs removed blah blah blah, can’t escape a dust mite though) and a marginal one to the cat, who isn’t going anywhere for now so we have to manage that. We’ve been exploring homeopathy, Reiki and Bowen as holistic support while we await further allergy testing to see if this is creating an inflammatory response. We’ve also been considering our parenting given that the ears are all about being heard and listening…

And this has inevitably caused us to make some changes at home to quieten things down (no pun intended) to see where we can reduce stress and create a more harmonious environment for him, to reduce his frustration at not hearing properly. It’s so true that if we let them, our children can really show us another way, that might just help us too in the process. Not that it’s easy. All this letting go without any certainty of where it is headed. How life has changed for us and so many since the pandemic! It’s taking a while to adjust to it, to let go of the old identities and accept our current reality.

And of settling into the unknown of where it is all headed, this process of simplification has created changes at Beinspired, as some of you know and I have no way of knowing where it is headed but knowing enough that the changes have to be made, the being more honest with self (yikes), the saying no and then saying yes and then no again because sometimes it isn’t certain, and the tightening of boundaries, the not pushing after a lifetime of doing exactly that, and the trying to do it again and noticing and pulling back and messing everyone around in the process (sorry!) and of trying not to focus on outcome either and doing whatever we are doing for the love of it, it is the love really, in the quest to be more compassionate to our children’s individual needs and to our own needs too and to the bigger picture, which isn’t clear until much later on when it has been lived.

It’s all a work in progress, no beginning, no end, just moment to moment, some days more easy than others, some days more challenging too, it is what it is in this world and in this life as a human - full of possibility and potential, if only we can get out of our own way and unstick ourselves and set our minds free from any of the limiting thoughts that stick it in an old reality and with outgrown identities.

At the end of the day we are just human and we are doing our best, and sometimes we need to just let things go and other times we need to stand our ground, and sometimes we have to take a risk and step out of the comfort zone and into the unknown and other times we just need to retreat and let the world go on. And often we need to change our minds and be open to it too, let the butterflies come and go…

It’s a week until the full moon, I have a feeling it might well be an enlightening one.

With love

Emma x