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Ellen’s World Category
A big hello to all my readers. Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been absent for quite a while. Unfortunately my site was caught up in the sophisticated North American hack that affected many web hosts, and I was hacked not once, not twice, but three fricking times!
During that time I’ve been laying low, as my mother died in mid April. The loss of a parent, especially a daughter losing her mother, is something many of you have been through, or will go through. No matter the type of relationship we had with our Mom, she’s still our Mom, and our identity as a woman is often tied closely to her.
So for me, it’s a gentle time of contemplation, of walking by the water, of enjoying and working in my lovely garden… of giving myself the time I need, not rushing through this as we rush through so many experiences in life.
One day as I walked by Gibsons harbour, on the Pacific Ocean, I met a woman, Laurel, who was one of the first women I was friendly with when we moved here to the West Coast in 1990. Although we don’t hang out together any more, we are connected, and I knew she would want to know that my mother passed away. This is what she wrote to me a few days later. I’d like to share it with you:
One of the things I enjoy about counselling and coaching is that there is no rush. For how can we tell our story, tease out and sort out our truth, if we hurry? Sessions are meant to proceed slowly, to take on a life of their own.
It would be wonderful if we could pace all of our days this way, so that we have time to breathe, to ensure that we’re coming from a place of energized calm.
It often feels like I’m not moving fast enough, that not much is happening in my life, but if I look back at what I’ve accomplished over the past 3 months, it is considerable. My coaching partner, Jan, helped me see that in our session the other evening.
Much of the work I’ve done has been internal. After descending into that deeper part of myself, and just being there a while, I began to ascend and tiny shoots of creative ideas began to emerge. Slowly, slowly, each day, more came into existence. This pleased and excited me, and gave me much food for thought.
In the midst of my healing crisis, I always felt completely confident that this would happen. That after a time of slowness, of unconscious as well as conscious contemplation and processing, I would begin to emerge and the energy being used internally, to heal, would be more available externally for out-in-the world projects.
During the last 2 months it I’ve been actively pursuing new business possibilities through networking, enjoying my daily activities, my dance and stretch classes, coffee or a glass of wine with a friend once or twice a week and the ongoing weekly visits to my mother in her care home.
I believe many, perhaps most of us push ourselves hard to accomplish a lot in a short time. We’ve been conditioned to do this, it’s a societal thing. But we don’t really get there any faster, we just become more stressed.
It takes time for things to evolve, to yield fruit, whether it be completing our education, raising our children, developing our career, or processing our spiritual and emotional concerns. For myself, it’s important to remember how far I’ve come in a short period of time; I’m the same, yet different, beginning afresh with new passion and excitement for my life.
Keep taking your own version of turtle steps, and enjoy the journey.
I invite you to send me your stories about your major changes over the past year or two. Hopefully they will become part of a book about the current consciousness raising many in our society are going through. (All e-mails written through my ‘Contact Ellen’ are completely confidential.
“You’ll get tired this very day: Use it. Surrender to the peace at the heart of fatigue, the Wordless mind awakens.” —Martha Beck, Daily Coach Tips
Something has happened to me. The transformation began in Dharamsala, India, the home of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. It was the fall of 2009, and we spent six weeks there, volunteering and making new friends, enjoying the light, spiritual atmosphere of this small town set in the foothills of the Himalayas.
It’s difficult to express in words, but simply put, my spirit was happy there. I felt that anything was possible. We lived in a monastery guesthouse, right in the midst of the Kirti Monastery, very close to the Dalai Lama’s temple; each day we were surrounded by what I liked to think of as the “monk energy” as monks of all ages went about their daily business.
We made many friends at the Hope Center where we volunteered, and tutored students in our apartment as well. When time permitted, we visited with our Tibetan doctor friends and their family down the hill at the Dalai Lama’s Men-Tsee-Khang Clinic.
My connection to McLeod Ganj was, and is, very powerful. It seems clear to me, and some others I’ve spoken to, that I’ve spent many lifetimes in this area of India.
I took the energy of this amazing place back home with me, and felt inspired to make small changes and begin new projects, both in my personal and my work life. Over the summer we attended a couple of Buddhist events at home and in Vancouver; the powerful energy of the teachings and initiations, and the Tibetan medicines I took also changed my energy system.
This fall I entered a different phase in my process, a quieter, deeper place. I began to look at my life in a different way, to realistically examine what was and was not working for me, what was making me happy.
The business I’d pinned my hopes and dreams on for the past four years was not developing in the ways we had intended, so I began to let go of my attachment to it. This was a painful process…depressing. But after a few weeks I felt more peaceful; letting go of my high expectations brought a certain level of peace and contentment.
Then, one week before Christmas, our daughter’s friend, a beautiful, talented young woman, like a younger sister to our daughter, committed suicide. Tortured for eight years by a serious bipolar condition, her latest medication transition was too much for her to cope with, and she ended her life in the waters off Slahkayulsh Rock in Vancouver, leaving everyone connected with her and her family in shock.
On January 3rd recent and ongoing events seemed to come to a head in me, and I had what I refer to as a chakra meltdown. Few people know what I mean; my psychic friend agrees that’s exactly what it was, and my chiropractor has some understanding of it. It felt like an implosion in several chakras and in the master point, (so named in Asian medicine), in my left shoulder.
It took me deep inside myself. I could function from this place, but my thinking was slow, heavy, at first. Instinctively I knew I needed to be, to do as little as possible, to conserve my energy for the healing I knew was taking place at a core level. The process felt intuitively like “active waiting”…waiting and trusting that something was germinating inside me, new aspects of myself. Some people call this “sacred waiting”, an appealing term.
After about three weeks slowly, slowly, my creative juices began to flow, and my energy began to increase, and come up, out into the world again. Like tiny shoots in the garden in spring, each day I received small creative guidance about what to do next.
I’ve emerged from this experience feeling different. Now I’m taking action again, in ways that please and enthuse me, though sometimes I move too fast and anxiety begins to rear it’s head, a healthy warning sign. Then I remind myself to slow it down, that’s only my “pushing brain” talking. I need only relax, to check within to see if I’m going with the flow, and to take a measure of whether the project I’m working on “delights me” as my friend Alma suggests. Now I hurry less; I trust that things will unfold. I’m redefining the idea of what success means to me personally.
Many Westerners are going through a process of change now, as we move into a higher level of consciousness. Some people term this a shift into the Fifth Dimension; even physicists at Harvard and Johns Hopkins are studying it. Our stories are different, yet there are commonalities in them. Some of us embrace this body-mind-spirit transition we’re going through while others may pretend it’s not happening and work towards “getting back to ‘normal” a.s.a.p.
The concept of personal growth is big in our society. Thomas Moore believes we talk about the process “lightly, as if we know what it means, and as if it’s a positive, progressive development.” We fail to realize that the soul’s development requires a “descent as well as an ascent” he says. He refers to the process as “The dark nights of the soul”.
Moore suggests that when we are in a transition such as this that we do not pretend we’re bright and carefree when we know we’re in the dark, but that we “weave the process into our life”, while at the same time pulling back some. I’ve always believed that our intuition will instruct us wisely, if we allow it space.
My recent transition was not my first surrendering, and it likely won’t be my last. It can be a scary process if we are unfamiliar with it, and we may feel quite isolated going through it…disconnected from our life, from things and people that formerly gave meaning. We may be in an unfamiliar emotional place…uncertain about the the sense of emptiness we feel, the impression of waiting for something. Having at least one person in our life who understands some of what we’re going through helps tremendously. We then feel supported. If we honor our darkness and our not knowing, slowly, slowly, after a time, out of this place will come a calmness, a hint of creativity and joy.
What does your spirit need? It may be different from what you thought. Archangel Michael says: “You are no longer moved forward along the “tracks” of career and work that once supported you. Now it is the energy and movement of your creative passion that will take you forward.”
Trust your own unique process of unfolding. Talk about your concerns with like-minded friends and family. Don’t be afraid to get input from a trusted doctor, counsellor, coach or spiritual advisor. Pulling together in unity will bring us to a new, delightful, place of joy.
What changes have you noticed in yourself and your life? I am gathering stories for a new book about changing consciousness and invite you to contact me through my website.
If you enjoy my blogs you can receive each blog post in your e-mail box simply by filling out the “Subscribe to Posts via E-mail” box in the upper right hand corner of the home page.
In keeping with the theme of my Summer Newsletter, When the Living is Easy, I thought the idea of summer reading would be a good way to kick back and spend some enjoyable time.
A couple of weeks ago I read Fresh Air by Charlotte Vale-Allen, and found it upbeat and refreshing with well-developed characters. It’s the story of a reclusive woman who by chance meets a young inner city girl on a two-week home stay through the Fresh Air Fund.
Also on a light note, since I’m into mysteries, I just read Murder in Montmartre by Cara Black (Aimee Leduc Series #6). What I especially liked about this book was the rich and vivid descriptions of Paris and its famous focal points.
Part of my summer program is to touch nature – really touch it – by spending a few moments lying on the ground under a tree, walking on the sand and in the water. This was a suggestion by my friend Pema; I later found out that Ayurvedic doctors advise this. If you like this idea, you may find The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram right up your alley. The author speaks about his travels to cultures that are well connected with nature and of how we have lost that intimate connection in Western society. My daughter gave the book to us as a gift.
What are you reading this summer? If you have something that really speaks to you, please share in with all of us.
Thank you!
Monkey on our clothesline
Here is something different – it’s for the child in all of us. I wrote it shortly after returning from Thailand. Hope you enjoy it!
On the tiny island of Si-bo-yaa, in the Andaman Sea, there are hundreds of monkeys. They come in all sizes from small to large, and they’re young and old, male and female. They live in trees and are called arboreal monkeys. Mostly they like to eat coconuts, sometimes they catch a few small sand crabs to add to their diet.
When the monkeys get hungry, they climb up a palm tree and bite into a coconut, pulling a few strips off it and throwing them down to the ground. After they’ve opened the coconut enough, they drop it down and you’d better not be walking under that palm tree when the heavy coconut thuds down like a rock!!
The tribe of monkeys move around an area of a few acres so they always have fresh food available. There’s plenty for all and they have lots of time to do other things…like play together, fight with each other (that’s the male monkeys!) and to tease the humans living on the island.
They make nuisances of themselves by swinging onto the porches and into the empty houses of people who are away from home for a while. If you’re lucky, they don’t break too many things, they just make a mess, rip magazines, throw things onto the floor and leave a few tiny poohs behind on the steps.
When we washed our clothes we would hang them on our front porch or on a clothes line down on the front lawn. One day when we came home from breakfast down at the restaurant all our clean clothes were gone! We couldn’t believe it. We were quite annoyed that those mischievous monkeys had the nerve to steal the clothes we liked so much.
The next day, we were walking along the pathway by the water, and looked up into a palm tree. There on one of the branches sat a large male monkey, wearing Don’s yellow T-shirt! As we went farther along, we noticed one of the female monkeys hanging from a branch wearing Ellen’s beautiful white T-shirt with the bright coloured beads on it. All over the community there were monkeys wearing our clothes.
Soon word spread by the “monkey grapevine†and other monkeys heard about the fine new clothes the others had. They all liked the look of them, and decided that they wanted some for themselves.
Soon no house in the community was safe from the monkey thieves. There was a big, macho looking one in Johnny’s blue muscle shirt sitting up in a tree near Johnny’s house, one wearing Pa’s lovely long pink blouse, even a monkey with Mr. Chung’s beautiful scarf wound around his neck (the one Chung wears when he has a cold).
Soon Mom, Dad and baby monkeys could be seen all over the island wearing the latest in fashionable T-shirts. (They didn’t bother with the pants because they were too long, and the sarongs the Thai people wore were much too hard to tie on and tripped them up dragging on the ground).
The people of the holiday resort and the native Thai people of the island all began to say to each other, “We must do something about this or we won’t have any clothes left to wearâ€. So the Head Man called a meeting of everyone who lived on the island, and asked them what they thought should be done.
“Let’s get big water pistols and shoot water at them†said a teenage boy.
“We should lock our doors and never ever leave our laundry outside again†said another person.
“Let’s ask them nicely to leave our clothes alone†said someone.
But everyone wanted a solution to the problem that would last so they wouldn’t have to deal with it again. Finally, one of the elders, an older woman named Ma-ma said “Let’s make each monkey an outfit, one that fits them just right, with their name on itâ€.
Everyone liked this idea a lot, so they got to work designing, cutting, sewing and knitting little shirts for every monkey on the island. They became so enthusiastic about the project they even made little hats for them too.
The monkeys were so happy with their outfits that they gave us all back our clothes. They even brought coconuts and left them on everyone’s front porch as gifts. And the monkeys and the people of Si-bo-yaa lived in harmony from that day on.
Copyright Ellen Besso    2009
