Good-bye

Hi Folks,
I am back from my retreat and have decided to stop blogging, I,m not sure if its forever, or just for a while.

The reason I started blogging, was due to certain problems with my partners film business, I had to leave what I had been doing for 15 years ( intuitive counseling)and put all my time and energy into changing the structure of the existing business, and also branching it into a new one.

I have been working on this full time for about 2 years now, and it is now stable, and the new one is ready to roll.
I also had to drop my prison rehab programs, my Indian orphanage program, and various workshops and groups I used to run.

This again isn't a whinge, just what had to be done.

So I felt very lonely.The world of SFX, and the military, whilst very interesting, didn't really have a lot of "me" there..So I started reaching out to others through the Internet.
It was a medium for me to express the parts of me that weren't being expressed in my day to day life.

The 'others' I met are a diverse bunch of people who have stunned me with their awareness, kindness, intelligence, humour, spirituality and compassion ( yes, You Guys) who's loving support I have felt and treasured from across the miles that separate us, and I have also made some deep personal friends along the way.

However the cyber world has been gradually taking over for a while now, and its time for me to withdraw from it and get back into what I need to do.

To all my much, much loved blog buddies out there, email me if you feel like it, and I want to say thank you, I love all of you, and if I am ever in your part of the world, or you mine, lets meet up and "do lunch".

I wish you all the very best this life has to offer,
Love Enigma

A Foxes Tail

I am going away for a few days, to work on getting a few more tails.

I leave you all in the safe and wise hands of Gingatao.

The Law

The sun may be clouded, yet ever the sun
Will sweep on its course till the cycle is run.
And when into chaos the systems are hurled,
Again shall the Builder reshape a new world.

Your path may be clouded, uncertain your goal;
Move on, for the orbit is fixed for your soul.
And though it may lead into darkness of night
The torch of the Builder shall give it new light.

You were, and you will be; know this while you are:
Your spirit has traveled both long and afar.
It came from the Source, to the Source it returns;
The spark that was lighted eternally burns.

From body to body your spirit speeds on;
It seeks a new form when the old one is gone;
And the form that it finds is the fabric we wrought
On the loom of the mind with the fibre of thought.

From cycle to cycle, through time and through space,
Your lives with your longings will ever keep pace.
All that you ask for and all you desire
Must come at your bidding, as flames out of fire.

You are your own devil, you are your own God.
You fashioned the paths that your footsteps have trod.
And no one can save you from error or sin
Until you hark to the spirit within.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 1850-1915

A Miserable Life (back as a reminder)

Here are some handy tips to guarantee that your life is as miserable as it can possibly be

*Constantly think and talk about the past, preferably all the negative things. Even the positive things are a great way to make you feel miserable, they are gone, who knows if they will ever happen again.

*Define yourself by your age.

*Always be right.

*Never inquire into your thought processes, that would undo being right.

*Have most of your conversations revolve around what someone else did, and don't forget to judge them accordingly.

*Take everything, absolutely everything, including the weather, personally.

*Use the expressions "it isn't fair, and this shouldn't have happened" whenever something goes wrong and always find something to blame, including yourself

*Compare yourself to other people, positively or negatively , it doesn't matter which.

*Learn to react quickly , subjectively and emotionally to whatever happens .

*Cultivate the philosophy "if your not with me, your against me".

*Never forget who has hurt you, the first tip helps enormously with this.

*Treat your children and your partners as extensions of yourself.

*Expect people to think and feel exactly like you, and react with justified anger when they don't.

*React with even more anger when they do all of the above.

*Always do what you think is expected of you, never tell people how you really feel and then blow up in justifiable anger at how they are abusing you.

*Get into the habit of generalizing and putting people in boxes

*Expect people and life to never change.

*Use as your favourite expression "this is the way I am and I cant help or change it".

*Be defensive and evasive, after all if your honest, you, ll give the game away.

*Think that if someone loves you, they know what you are thinking and feeling.

*Spend hours trying to work out what someones motive is , come up with your own ideas, and treat them accordingly.

*Make sure that you are never kind or purposely back down from a fight with someone you don't like, it shows weakness.

*Cut people out of your life who don't agree with you.

*Blame everything in your life on external events, and when someone refuses to treat you as a victim, get really angry and call them unsupportive.

*Never learn anything new or meet different people.

*Surround yourself with people who actively practice these tips as a way of life, this helps perfect it . Remember misery loves company.

*Expect people to do things on your time frame.

*Pick unavailable romantic partners , be with them for years, use all of the reasons above why you cant leave them, and then do it all over with someone new.

*Regard every new relationship as "The One'.

*Have set rules, regulations and expectations on the relationship, if they don't fulfill them , ditch them , they weren't "The One", this nicely validates all the other techniques.

These are just a few handy hints, but even if you only do a few of them, a miserable life is guaranteed. And the beauty of this is it can only get worse.

Try it for two weeks, and if you don't feel like total shit by that time you can get your money back.

Enjoy

My brothers keeper.

This is not a sob story, I wouldn't change my past for the world. Actually I very rarely think about the past, but I had a family gathering today, and it got me thinking about the different things we learn from our lives.
(I am writing in italics the things I wouldn't change, and what I learnt from them)

I was aware from a very early age that there was something seriously wrong with my older brother, the dark feeling of it seeped into everything like a fog.
This taught me awareness of emotional undercurrents.

The doctors said that he was autistic, then they changed it Aspergers.
I believe it was an extreme reaction by a sensitive soul surrounded by the madness of our family.
This taught me what the soul will often do to be able to cope and survive the best it can.

My mother was bi-polar and manic depressive, and would disappear for weeks into Callum Park Mental Hospital , my father was a violent alcoholic.
We would be farmed off to various relatives, not actually ever told what was going on.
This taught me that things and people can change, as my father gave up drinking just before he died, and we had a reached a loving understanding of each other, and now my mother is one of the most spiritually aware people I know.

When we were kids, we thought Mum was just volatile because she was Maltese, and dad violent as he was Irish, and where I grew up, it was a standard thing for the father to come home drunk and beat up his family.
This showed me the shame and secrecy children feel when this is happening, and how easy it is for others to say"not my business', and the ways we learnt to hide it from others.

My younger sister dealt with the family madness by being chronically ill.
This taught me responsibility, how not to get upset with lack of attention, and how to look after people when they were ill.

Even though domestic violence was a standard accepted thing in our neighbour hood (housing commission, very poor), something in me snapped one day when I was 10.

No longer could I sit huddled on the bed with my brother, listening to my mother scream as my father beat her, as we did night after night. So I took a knife to him , and told him I would kill him if he touched her.
This taught me courage, in the face of the worst fear I have ever felt, and gave me the strength to fight for the weak, no matter the personal outcome.

He never hit my mother again.
This taught me that standing up for what you believe in can make a change, even if your small and seem powerless.

I dealt with all this by madness becoming more and more introverted, withdrawing into a fantasy world, talking to the trees, surrounding myself with animals, calling the wind, and having endless conversations with imaginary people (who weren't imaginary to me) and spending all my time drawing.
The only time I came out of myself was to protect my mother or brother.
This taught me how to tame and love animals, how to always have a cooling breeze handy, a love of making things, the ability to be alone, to hear the silence between sounds, to see the space between the shapes, and to see how alive and extraordinary the ordinary things were. And to show little children the fairies hidden in the flowers .

My mother was intrigued by my phycic leanings and decided that apprenticing me to a witch coven at age 8 would maybe help her strange daughter utilize her gifts better, so for the next 5 years, instead of hopscotch and marbles, I learnt how to channel the dead, read auras, run seances, tell the future and the past, read peoples jewellery, their minds, hypnosis, phychic healing, numerology, astrology, runes, tarot, blah, blah, blah...
This became very handy in my later career, when I would charge $500.00 per hour for readings. It also installed in me a deep love of the practical and tangible, and an abhorrence of new age mumbo jumbo , if the phycic circus didn't have a practical application to help someone in life, it became meaningless to me.

It also taught me, that above and beyond anything else, the force that some call God, others call consciousness, is the basis of everything. All else is just a fun party trick, used to amaze and excite the ignorant.

The result of this education was that I became totally fucked up. I had this insane fear and loathing of myself, and would cover every reflection in the house with a cloth, so I couldn't see myself. I always wore dark glasses so no one could see me, and vary rarely spoke to anyone.
This, above everything else, has given me huge empathy for people in pain, who feel different from others, and to show them how to love themselves.

Then I discovered that heroin helped relieve the feeling of wrongness and loathing and made me feel safe .
So I took more and more of it. But feeling safe was very expensive, and soon the safety would wear off, so I did whatever I had to do to get money for it, and the ways of getting this money created a viscous cycle of loathing myself even more.
This has taught me that people will do anything to try and fill that dark hole, and addiction is just a misguided attempt to love and nurture yourself. Its that simple.

Eventually Gods Grace stepped in, and I ended up in hospital age 18, close to death, a fantastic way to get clean.
This taught me endless gratitude and the realisation that there is a greater power always looking over us, if we but let it.

I got clean, moved into a Siddha yoga ashram, studied the Vedanta's and Upanishads and had my son, my reason at that time for living.
This was the start of living.The ashram gave me acceptance, and a proper education into the ancient philosophies, and I blossomed . My son gave me a reason for living , and showed me a love I had never known I could feel.

This period taught me unconditional love, and bringing my son up , meant I had to relate to people for him, so this gave me confidence and helped me come out of my shell.

My father then died of alcoholism when I was 21 , my sister left home and as a backlash against her strange upbringing became extremely straight and rigid with the need to control everything. My brother joined me in studying Siddha Yoga and moved in with me, and became a surrogate father to my son.

He flourished and all his disfunctions seemed to disappear . I had never seen him so happy and free.
This taught me that having that spiritual energy around us, and a loving family, is really necessary at times in our life, and sometimes we just cant do it alone.

20 years on, and my brother doesn't do any spiritual work of any kind. He is on medication, cant work, deeply depressed and all his symptoms are worse. My mother told me today she is worried he may kill himself (which he has tried before).

This has taught me that no matter how desperately you may try to change something and help someone you deeply love, sometimes you cant. And the irony is that I have helped so many others in this situation, but am powerless with my own brother.

This I would change for all the world, if I could.

The Kitten Gets It!

Who will save Table Wabbit?

This is the last of the rescued kittens, we have called her "Table Wabbit" as she is really soft and fluffy like a rabbit. The other 2 went to good homes together a few weeks ago.

We are making a poster up saying that the kitten gets it in 2 weeks if we cant find a home for her.

The feral mum had another litter last week, 6 of them.
I will be de- sexing the little tramp as soon as possible.

Mother and babies are doing well, I'm rather frazzled with 10 cats.

My Immortal

I'm so tired of being here
Suppressed by all my childish fears
And if you have to leave
I wish that you would just leave
'Cause your presence still lingers here
And it won't leave me alone

These wounds won't seem to heal
This pain is just too real
There's just too much that time cannot erase

[CHORUS:]
When you cried I'd wipe away all of your tears
When you'd scream I'd fight away all of your fears
I held your hand through all of these years
But you still have
All of me

You used to captivate me
By your resonating life
Now I'm bound by the life you left behind
Your face it haunts
My once pleasant dreams
Your voice it chased away
All the sanity in me

These wounds won't seem to heal
This pain is just too real
There's just too much that time cannot erase

[Chorus]

I've tried so hard to tell myself that you're gone
But though you're still with me
I've been alone all along