To sustain us we need food, water, shelter, air to breath and blood in our veins. If any of these start to fail us we perish. When I sit with the final eventuality of all life I feel a great sense of surrender. In life we all adhere to social and cultural norms. When and where we were born, and to whom is a major player in who we are. I can distinctly remember the look of disbelief on my university lecturers face when I told him I was not proud of my English heritage, that I considered myself to be a human being born on Planet Earth, and I might have well been born to any nation or tribe - and that still would not define me.
So what does define who I am?
My journey through life has not been greatly affected by the passing of family or loved ones - in 36 years I have been to only one funeral. At fifteen years of age I had an energetic/spiritual experience which began to open up for me a new side of life.
By new side I mean a flipside - death and spirit.
At the time my mother was off work with stress - she was a social worker in a residential home for some of our towns most deprived and broken families. She had embarked on her own healing and met a man whom she recommended I should receive a treatment from. He was a hands on healer. This gentle man was Bruce and throughout my teens, early twenties and to this day is one of the most influential men in my life, helping me remain stable when things get rough. Upon our first meeting I witnessed his tears - he was overwhelmed at what he felt whilst he gave me healing. He said I could do the same as him. I had no Idea what he meant, what he was even doing or how. For me the 20 minute long interaction, laying peacefully on my back with my eyes closed was like flying down a kaleidoscope of colour. I was comfortable and warm and it opened a whole new world to me. The questions I had then as a 15 year old boy were mind-blowing. I began to question everything and I delved into lots of quiet study. My life suddenly had a duality. A frontstage - the lad, the guy at school, the me defined by my life so far and now a backstage - a soul, discovered in a body and trying to make sense of the colours, the heat, the light, and the overwhelming sense of something else.
The journey through life has many twists and turns, the guide posts are always there to help us, sometimes they are too close to see, sometimes too far away and we feel lost in space with nowhere to go.
No matter where we are from or what we are doing it is undeniable that we are on a gigantic rock hurtling through space, we each have red blood running through our veins and the only physical force acting upon all of us right now is gravity.
Other stuff is a kind of consequence and conditioning and becomes the content of our experience and life story - what each of us has is life. We exist in an incredible age of expansion and communication - we are slowly, constantly evolving.
Some of us receive tools to help us move forward, brief encounters that speak to us on a deeper level, experiences that change us forever - whenever this happens it's natural to raise questions which then guide us to a fuller understanding of who we are and where our definitions come from.
From one human to another we are all sisters and brothers.
