A Travel Essay from the Inner Journey

The Siddhi of your Radiance is an emanation that breaks through from the essence of your being. These are states of consciousness beyond what we refer to as genius. Genius is a manifestation of the activation of your Gifts. Beyond your Gifts lies the realm of the Siddhis, which we might refer to as Divine Gifts.
Richard Rudd, The Sage’s Golden Path Retreat

Oh! “Divine Gifts”!! That is a hard concept for an old atheist like me to wrap my head around. So, let’s start with some Thesaurus work! You know how much I love my Roget’s Thesaurus, you know how much I love words; so the perfect place for me to start to contemplate a concept which feels almost alien to me is with some basic definitions.

Divine … perfection, deity, godhood, oneness, unity, presence, omniscience, wisdom, timeless, truth, transcendence, majesty

Gift … power, potency, ability, potentiality, virtue, prize, benefit, grace, favour, offering, devotion

Valour … courage, bravery, valiance, gallantry, boldness, self-confidence, heroism, knightliness, hero, warrior, unafraid, intrepid, dauntless, mettle

These are The Qualities I Want to Embody and Emanate

Are these the qualities that break through from the essence of my being??

When I wrote about being the author of my own life, I spoke of myself as the hero, as brave, as my own knight in shining armour.

So, perhaps Valour is the perfect Divine Gift for me to have.

“Divine Gifts” … isn’t this what all of this Gene Keys work is leading towards? Am I not trying to tap into perfection and oneness, unity and presence, timelessness and truth?

Am I not trying to access my own power and potentiality? Am I not working to transcend my Shadow bravely and become the devoted warrior monk?

Isn’t this the whole damn point?

Not so that I can receive praise or accolades for being valorous, but rather so that I can live a valorous life, emanating confidence and potency, and engendering that in others.

Inner Light or Radiance

In the notes for the Siddhi of my Radiance, Richard Rudd alludes to stories from history of human beings who have “shone with an inner light or radiance“.

That is what I want! I want my essence to shine out of me. And I want it to be pure. I want people to see my light shining out of my eyes. I want them to feel my light radiating from me.

My Radiance is my love of life.

My Radiance is my love of this work.

My Valour manifests as me being brave enough to share it with everyone I touch.

I can’t force Radiance. But if I live a true and honest life, if I walk bravely through life’s suffering, then I do have a chance to access my Radiance naturally. The light is in there, it’s just been obscured by the challenges I’ve faced in life, and the protection I’ve built around myself in order to feel safe.

And that last sentence there … “This alone will help raise the frequency of your aura.” … is why I wrote the whole paragraph out in my journal!

To bring this into my consciousness … that it is possible for people to see my Radiance, if I can come into perfect rhythm with myself, with Gaia, with life. If I can strip away the obfuscation I have built around myself. If I can stop judging myself and trying to be something other than my completely natural self … then there might just be a possibility of light coming through.

I want people to feel my light when they are with me. I want my words to resonate with light.

I do hold these states as possible. I’ve felt it. When I fell in love with my husband, I told him that I felt as if “stars were falling out of my eyes”. And he got it!! He could see the beam of love, like a lighthouse shining through fog, like stars on a clear, moonless night. He could see my light. He still talks about how much I beamed with light on our wedding day. I was literally alight with love.

So, I have experienced this. And it has been witnessed by others. I have the capacity to shine. I have the potential to bring light into the world. I am not “showing off” (hold your tongue, Maureen … she’s my inner critic, who speaks with the voice of my mother!!); I am talking about something divine that lives in all of us, if we but have the eyes to look.

My Siddhi of Valour

Richard Rudd describes Valour as “nobility in action”. He says that it is the expression of virtue, wisdom, love, and sacrifice in the world. One of the most beautiful things he says about Valour is that it is “courage plus love”. (Thank you to Dr Kevin Preston for reminding me of this, when you had a most delicious and enlightening conversation with Richard as part of the Sage’s Golden Path Retreat!).

Our Siddhis ask so much of us. They ask us to be noble, even in the face of difficulties, especially in the face of difficulties.

This Siddhi of Valour demands that I don’t just write stories about being the brave knight in my life, but rather that I live it.

Valour is selfless. That word “sacrifice” is in there because a person of Valour is prepared to let go of everything, including themselves, in order to serve the greater good.

And that, my friends, is rather daunting. To be prepared to let go of everything, just when you’ve done so much work that the light of the Siddhi is starting to break through in you. But perhaps that final breakthrough, when you know you must sacrifice all, comes right at the end of this life, and you want to leave it, entirely naked and innocent.

Before that final breakthrough and that ultimate sacrifice of life itself, we can catch glimpses of this Siddhi of Valour in our ordinary, everyday lives. We are virtuous, not because we expect anything in return, but simply because that is the right way to be. We show wisdom, we access wisdom deep in our own being. This Gene Key is, after all, the Programming partner of Wisdom, which is my essential Purpose in life. Valour makes me brave enough to dig for that wisdom, and to bring it to the world, with no artifice, pure of heart, trusting in my own innate wisdom.

Valour is the Expression of Love in the World

And Valour is the expression of love in the world. Now that I know what true love is, I want to bring it forth into the world. Now that I know that I am here to love, I want to pour my love out all the time. I am so lucky; I have so much love in my life. I have my husband, I have my son, I have my best friend, Meghan, and I have the most incredible friend and Guide, Hayley Curtis. I have all these people whom I love so much. And I get to show that love, I get to tell them how much I love them, every single day.

Of course, the bedrock of love that holds up all the rest of it is self-love.

I do love myself. I love that young girl, running wild in my imagination.

I love that young woman, still standing after the storms of life battered her.

I love that mum, who did the best for her child.

I love that version of me who was brave enough to reach out to my (now!) husband after twenty-five years of separation, who was brave enough to leap off the cliff and start a whole new life with him.

I love the crone I am becoming, who is brave enough to speak her truths out loud.

I love all these parts of myself. I love how much I love life. And I love that I do express all of this in the way I live my life.

Surrendering the Masculine Need to Control

“Surrendering the masculine need to control and moving into the feminine wisdom of trust in life” … ah, this is a flavour of Valour I can understand, and which resonates through my whole body. That masculine need for control dominated my life for decades. I was literally under the boot of masculine control for years, and that has given me the fuel to want to fight for other women who are so oppressed.

I had my own boot of control on my own neck for years, even after I’d escaped those who wanted to oppress me. And oh, the joy of being swept into the feminine embrace of trust in life.

That is the sweetest piece of wisdom I have learned … that I can trust life. That I can trust my everyday, ordinary life. That I can trust the changes that come in great sweeping waves. That I am able trust in life is the most precious pearl of wisdom I have brought back to the surface of my life.

Having the wisdom to trust life is feminine, for it invites softness, yielding, gentleness, nurturing. But with the fierce care of the lioness, with the protection of the eagle, high in the mountains. Feminine wisdom is soft and tender, but it is not weak. It knows when to trust, and when to bare its teeth or unsheathe its talons.

The feminine wisdom of trust in life.

Now, that is a message of valour that I understand.

Being Truly Sovereign

To be truly sovereign is to be at ease inside oneself, no longer tempted to try and control others, but simply emanating virtue in every breath.
Richard Rudd, The Sage’s Golden Path Retreat

Ah, and there is that word “ease” again! This is one of the wonderful things about the Gene Keys … they do not ask you to follow strict dogma, they do not ask you to bend yourself to their shape or some teacher or guru’s will. No, they invite you endlessly to be yourself. To be at ease within your own body. To be your natural self, flowing with the river of your life, paying attention to yourself and not getting yourself so entangled with others that you try to control them.

All the Gene Keys ever invite you into is more love.

More love for yourself, more love for others.

Even when you encounter non-love, the Gene Keys invite you to love, not to control or to change.

To embrace the Siddhi of Valour is to be sovereign, whole and complete unto yourself. Valor invites you to always be true to yourself in word and thought and deed.

Imagine if I Were to Emanate Virtue in Every Breath

The Siddhis are, of course, higher states of being, and you can’t make yourself leap into that state by force of will. But with Valour, if I am always true to myself, if I am always virtuous in every breath, if I am honest and good, then I might glimpse that state of Valour.

And even if I am never conscious of it, even if being in a Siddhic state feels and is unattainable for an ordinary human like me, wouldn’t my world be a better place if I were to emanate virtue in every breath? Wouldn’t I be a better person if I emanated virtue in every breath?

This world feels very dark at the moment, and the weight of the pain that people are going through is so heavy, that it feels as if it could crush me some days. There are days when the grief I see on the faces of the people of Gaza and Iran, Ukraine and Lebanon and Sudan, is so all-encompassing that it is hard to catch my breath. What can I do? How can I help? I witness. I give money. I will never forget.

And I try to be a virtuous person … I fill my life and my world with love … I fill my heart with love and compassion … I bring light to my world … even if it doesn’t spread very far.

Even if it only touches a few hearts, I still bring light.

I still bring hope for healing and reconciliation.

I still bring love.

All of the photographs for this essay are of sunlight on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, near where I live, and but a stone’s throw from Stonehenge (for those of you not so familiar with the south west of England, I just know that you’ll know about Stonehenge!). Salisbury Plain is a great sweeping landscape of chalk downs and undulating combes and vales. It is actually owned by the Ministry of Defence and has been used as a military training ground for over a hundred years. Because it is uninhabited and only visited by training soldiers (and keen photographers like my husband and I!!), it is like a huge nature reserve right in the heart of the county. The light on the Plain changes constantly, and one of my favourite times of day to photograph there is as the sun is heading for sunset. The whole world becomes golden. The light is incredible. And it felt wholly appropriate to use some of my shots to illustrate this Siddhi of my Radiance.

You can see more of my photographs on my Flickr page.