I reached out to Jacquie Forde the other week in the hopes that I could pick her brains.
She has expertise in an area I thought I might need help with in the future and graciously set up a zoom meeting for 11 o’clock one Monday morning. This small window of opportunity – sandwiched between my son’s regular hearing check-up and a writer’s workshop – was all I had.
An unexpected detour had me hefting my son’s pushchair up and down steps and up even bigger hills. I arrived at the hospital late; slightly wiffy and wet-headed, but thankful for the paper towels in the bathroom.
As a consequence, my homecoming was delayed. I rushed in for the meeting, barely stopping to pour tepid water over a teabag. I needn’t have worried. As the screen came to life, I caught sight of Jacquie making the most of the minutes. She was blow-drying her hair. “Brilliant”, I said, as we both burst out laughing. It was a wonderful introduction to her and a lovely reminder that dropping our veneer – cutting the crap, so to speak – can quickly lead to deep connection.
To be human is to be naked.
Stripped of our insecure thinking, how we appear to others matters not, which allows our raw beauty and power to rise up. There is freedom in this. Courage, too. It takes guts to trust that what we already are, in essence, is enough. That the heart of us is enough. When we care less about looking, as Jacquie says, “windswept and wonderful”, what is natural shines through. It has to. That is how we work.
Our true self always shows up when our thinking slows down.
I have spent much of my life as the walking dead. Listless, sapped by worry and fear, I lost hours as I wandered around in a daze of heavy thinking. Eyes glazed, I couldn’t see that life was living all around me. That life was me. It never occurred to me that my fears and worries weren’t something to be taken seriously. That they weren’t as real as they appeared; just a ghostly shadow of my thinking in the moment. It was only my thought full mind that was sucking me dry, momentarily obscuring my connection to the creative energy that births every living thing.
To be human is to recognise that when we fall out of our heads, we land in the eternal presence of Mind. Nothing can harm us here. We are free to be what we always were. Goodness, life and love.
“beyond your ego, beyond the personal self, lies a beautiful flower waiting to unfold, and it is the light of true knowledge that will make it blossom”
Sydney Banks, the enlightened gardener revisited (p.127)
Leave a Reply