We shall not cease from exploration…

I’m 65 years not old, sitting in a little lighthouse cottage on the tiny island of Erraid where the Findhorn Foundation has a small community of seven, deeply embedded in nature and its cycles.

I am here to take a break and just ‘be’, to tune into the pulse of the universe. I’m here to explore all that is left to be explored about myself and my contribution to this world as its crazy systems unravel at speed.

How can I help my human family create a lovelier world? What have I learned and what have I to say to the world? What is my voice and how do I introduce myself? Are an open heart, a curious mind, a wild spirit and dancing feet enough? Not to mention inexplicable joy…

It’s raining so I have no excuse not to get on with this exploration – too wet to ramble and be distracted by exercise; trying hard not to eat my feelings; not enough bandwidth for Netflix. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. Perfect…and not so…

There is such a sweetness to looking out the window, past the window box nasturtiums and marigolds, through the misty rain to sheep on the island of Mull, also with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Can I fully surrender to the flow of life as they do…and also know when to take decisive action?

There are so many Yvonnes within this bodysuit I wear – body suit after bodysuit from infancy to womanhood. Over the last three years of concentrated self-reflection I have reinhabited each one, unzipped and peeled them off, one after the other, rewound back through the years, until I arrived where I began.

Feeling into that moment of conception I have cried tears of compassion for my innocence, for the innocence of all of us. And then as I fast forwarded through my life like a Netflix movie, I observed the times of fear, bewilderment, hatred, courage, compressed anger, love, recklessness, creativity, adventure, hard work, romanticism, selfishness, joy, shame, wonder, vulnerability, resilience, defiance, happiness, confidence, disintegration, expansion, self-compassion…and always, always an irrepressible life force and an impossible-to-ignore impulse to evolve.

And I’ve been asking questions I imagine many of us ask.

Have I been ‘real’ in my life? To what degree has my behaviour been a pattern, a survival strategy or a result of family and social conditioning?

How much has been a desperate ‘acting out’, or a mad distraction so as not to hear the scream from unattended pain deep within?

Is my love of exercise and my insatiable wanderlust merely part of this unconscious distraction strategy?

How and why did I create and then stay in unhealthy relationships?

What fears or weak inner structures caused me to abandon myself so often?

Are all feelings an illusion?

After two years of trauma therapy complemented by shamanic practices and an exploration of plant medicine, I have answered some of these questions. The months of lockdown created the spaciousness for me to integrate as I tended to myself in the kindest, most loving way ever. I howled, I sat in dark places, I brought my bewildered little girl home, I did breathwork and bodywork and released cellular tension. I knelt with my forehead on the earth and howled some more. I howled for my own lostness, for humanity’s lostness, disconnection and loneliness, for such wasted energy and blindness to the suffering of my own making, and for the beauty of life.

So where am I now?

I am evermore aware of my shadow and my light, and of the essence beyond all my questions. I like myself…mostly I observe myself. I notice where I am needy or numb, where I am too afraid to stand for myself and under what circumstances I can still so easily crumble. I feel my heart soften and expand more often. I am evermore aware of my antics. I smile. I laugh. Such foibles!

The divine spark that is in all of us shows up in my life more and more.

I vow never to be out of alignment in my actions again…watching this one with interest!

How I function in the world as a being of light is improving. I trust myself more.

I continue to explore what being a planetary citizen really means for me.

And what tales and insights from my life can help others?

My longing is to be of service.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

T S Eliot