A Travel Essay from the Inner Journey

Reconsideration
The power of re-examining our decisions and adjusting accordingly

This week, we have moved into the Radiance sphere in the Sage’s Golden Path Retreat with Richard Rudd and Team64. I was excited to read what my Sage word and line would be.

I just had to laugh when I read them. The timing, as it always seems to be with this Gene Keys work, was impeccable, for I feel as if I’ve just made a huge decision … a reconsideration … that could well change the course of my life.

For over a year now, me and my husband had abandoned all those ideas we used to hold of moving further south and west, closer to Devon, closer to the sea, because I felt like I had to cling to the so-called security of a well-paid job.

But what good is security if I’m not in the right environment for me? What good is security if I am not living my passions?

The sea calls to me. The pull is strong. And I want the river of my life to take me there. I want to live close enough to the sea that I can go to the water every week. I want to be in the countryside. I want nature all around me and, just in case you hadn’t got it yet … I really want the sea close by.

Two days before the Sage word, “reconsideration”, was dropped in, I had said to my husband that I wanted us to reconsider our decision. That I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to stay close to this area just because of my job. For in truth, is any job actually “secure” these days?! And, more importantly, is security more important than happiness? I think not.

What is “Reconsideration”?

So, along comes the word, which of course I had to look up in my Thesaurus.

Reconsideration … to bring thoughtfulness, enquiry, reflection, deep thought, contemplation, absorption, self-communing, attention, amelioration, enrichment

Reconsideration is about bringing close attention to my life and asking, “what needs adjusting, am I going in the right direction, is there another path I could take?“

This is not about changing my mind and my direction at the drop of a hat. This is about me, deeply considering my life, then seeing where the flow wants to take me.

Do I just stick to this known, controlled channel?

Or do I allow the great river of life to open up new channels for me?

A Mind Like Water

I love the sutra for the Gene Key I have here in my Radiance … “A Mind Like Water” … GK21.3, the Shadow of Control, the Gift of Authority, the Siddhi of Valour.

I feel as if this is exactly what is happening right now.

What is the point in having a mind if I can’t change it?

Oh. That is a scary thought, and I can see exactly why this fits with this Gene Key 21.

Control is a hard Shadow to have. I spent many years feeling as I were controlled by external circumstances and people. I fought and worked hard to gain autonomy and control over my own life. And now, I want to control outcomes. I want to control, so that I will feel safe.

So, I shore up the banks of my river, set the course I think it should take, and work like crazy to keep it in the straight line between the banks of control I’ve built.

I think that by locking myself into a path that I control, I’ll be safe, I’ll be secure.

But Rivers Do Make Sweeping Turns

But rivers, when left to their natural state, without man-made controls inflicted upon them, will make those vast, sweeping, unexpected turns. A river will always find its way to the sea, but it is never a straight line. It meanders, it sweeps, it creates a lush ecosystem wherever it goes. The mountain spring doesn’t know where it will flow, it simply knows it must flow; gravity, the pull of the sea, and the tides and the moon, take it forward. If there’s a mountain in the way, the river will flow around it (or maybe under and through it!).

Changing my mind is scary to me. I can get fixated on an idea of what something should be like, and I can push and bend myself out of shape because I think I must stick to that original idea.

I’ve found myself in situations, stuck for far longer than I should have been and far longer than was healthy for me, because I thought that changing my mind wasn’t an option.

Changing my mind might mean I had been wrong.

Changing my mind might mean I’d lose control.

Changing my mind might mean I’m a failure.

What If My Heart, and Not My Head, Were in Control?

But my mind is not in control. I used to think it had to be. But now I know that my mind should be serving my heart.

My heart should be making my decisions, and my mind should be supporting that.

My heart doesn’t want to stay here just because my current job gives me financial security. My heart wants to be free. It’s my mind that is scrabbling for the security that this job gives me. It’s my mind that believes I need security from the external world. But I don’t.

I know in my bones that all the lessons that I have been learning on this journey are telling me that I am safe, because my safety lies inside me.

It’s not the job or the money that make me safe.

It’s me.

Loving myself, believing in myself.

Giving myself the love and attention I need.

Reconsideration

Reconsideration is telling me that my heart should call the shots, and my mind, which I know is sharp and smart, can make the course correction that needs to be made for me to come into alignment.

I am allowed to change my mind. Look at how my life has turned out. Who knew that the decision to contact my husband, whom I hadn’t seen in twenty-five years, would lead me here? To this life that I love.

Life brought opportunities and challenges our way, and we’ve changed direction again and again to get here.

A new direction just opened, a new sweeping turn in the river. My son has finally left home and I am free to just be me, not mother-me, just me! At 29, he’s finally left the nest. Now I get to dive into the river of life and let it take me where it will. I want a mind like water. I want to be fluid. I want to see opportunities and step into them, without having to have it all worked out in advance. I want to be the river, making its sweeping way across the land towards the sea.

Reconsideration … the Herald of Great Change

Reconsideration … everything changes with this move from 30 years of motherhood, into the life of the crone. The Crowned One. The woman who sees far. The woman who walks alone. The woman who follows the river, both back to its source and out to meet the sea.

I can do anything.

My mind is like water, it can flow in any direction, it can absorb new ideas. It can drench me with joy. It can hold and sustain life.

My mind is like water, it is soft and it flows easily from thought to thought.

I must release the tight control and allow my mind to flow. I must let my life flow.

The Radiance sphere is all about flow. How perfect that I am now flowing into it.

A mind like water. Water gives life. Water holds memories. We bless children with water.

No water … no life … we are made mostly of water in our physical bodies.

Why not be like water in my mind?

Why not surrender to the flow of life?

Why not go with the flow and allow the flow to shape me, instead of me trying to contain and control the flow?

Why not flow like water?

Why not surrender and see where the next vast, sweeping and unexpected turn takes me?!

The Contemplation of Reconsideration

Richard Rudd says that this dynamic Sage line, as the title of the sutra suggests, is about flow.

Flow! All of my contemplations, all of my inner work, all have been about flow in one way or another. All of this inner work I’ve been doing for the last 3 years with the Gene Keys and 30 years with my journaling, all of these deep contemplations on acceptance of life exactly as it is, have been about stepping into the river of life and going with the flow.

“Go with the flow”, a trite saying that’s been bandied about since the rise of hippie culture in the 60s, but I think it’s much more ancient than that.

I think it’s a primal understanding that if one surrenders to the flow of the current, one conserves energy, and one can be more at ease. Going with the flow, instead of constantly fighting against it, frees up so much of my natural dynamic energy, to be poured into what I love. Like this work, like my writing, like loving, like creating, like sucking the marrow out of every precious moment of life.

Flowing with life becomes a dance.

And I become fluid.

Reconsideration … I can flow into new decisions, make choices dynamically, dance with life.

When a Blockage is also a Wider Part of Flow

If I look at the biggest blockages in my life … my lack of self-worth, or my failed relationships, or my ageing body, to name but a few … and I see them as wider parts of the flow of my life, then I am able to let go of the need to either fight against them or fix them.

If I allow them simply to be there, then I immediately feel a release of tension in my shoulders.

If I accept that these blockages are simply part of life, then I can take a deep breath and loosen the constriction in my chest even more.

If I can embrace these blockages as wider parts of the flow of my life, then I can become fluid, like water, and flow around them, taking from them the nutrients to feed the ecosystem of my psyche … the lessons, the acceptance, the surrender, the evolution, the light … and I can flow onwards, not restricted by these blockages, but replenished by what they had to teach me.

Not afraid of these blockages. Why should I be afraid of them, they are part of life, and they help me to grow?

When a Mistake is Part of a Wider Rhythm we Haven’t Yet Seen or Felt

When I was in the throes of, or the aftermath of, my “mistakes” (the relationships, the friendships, the jobs, the circumstances, the whatever the fuck it was that wasn’t good for me), when I was in the depths of the suffering that was the harvest (or so I thought) of those mistakes, I couldn’t see or feel any sort of rhythm apart from the resounding death knell of parts of myself.

When I was in the depths of despair, before I started on this path of the inner work, all I could see and feel was that I walked to a different rhythm from everyone around me. That song … you and I travel to the beat of a different drum … that was my life.

And it wasn’t just that my rhythm was different … it was just plain wrong.

I thought that I was just plain wrong.

I made mistake after mistake, bad choice upon bad choice. I couldn’t see or feel a wider rhythm because I felt as if I were swimming upstream in a river of rapids and rocks.

I couldn’t see or feel the rhythm until I had moved beyond those rapids. I was years, decades, into this inner work before I saw the pattern of my mistakes, before I saw that there even was a rhythm … the rhythm of constantly repeating the steps of the dance where I hand over my power, I am crushed underfoot, I retreat … only to hand my power over to the next person who pays me the slightest attention.

Over and over, a rhythm of missteps and mistakes.

Until now. With this work, with the depths I’ve gone to with the Gene Keys work I’ve done, I see that all my missteps and mistakes lead me right here. To this life. To this work. To this moment. And frankly, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Even if I could go back and undo the mistakes, I wouldn’t, because every step led me here. Now.

And here and now are exactly where and when I am meant to be!

All of the photographs I have used in this essay are ones where the sun, or the effect the sun has, is the main feature of the photograph. If you’d like to see more of my photographs, you can find them on my Flickr page.