A Travel Essay form the Inner Journey

Create the space. Protect the space. It’s your heart space. 
You said “yes” for a reason. Trust that reason even when you can’t remember what it was.
You are going to be opening up the vessels of love inside your heart and inside your life.

Richard Rudd on the Venus Sequence Retreat

And so I have begun the second stage of my Sage’s Golden Path Retreat. This is the beginning of a six-month long journey through the very heart of my Gene Keys chart. The Venus Sequence, or Venus Stream as it is also called (which I personally prefer, because it’s a very watery kind of journey … you are literally following the river of your emotions!), is the deepest part of the Gene Keys teachings. It is all about love! It is all about opening yourself up to love.

The key to a successful sojourn through this Venus Stream is to keep a consistently open heart, even when it gets hard and difficult, even when the wounds you are journeying through feel raw and painful. For this is not just a journey through our wounds, it is also, as Elijah Parker said, “a map of our wonders and our ecstatic nature”. Wow. I love that idea.

You Can’t Step into the Same River Twice

This is my third time through the Venus Stream, so I kind of know what to expect. The Venus Stream is all about looking at your Shadows and your Gifts, indeed your whole life, through the lens of your relationships, and that can be a rocky ride. But I am not afraid to make this voyage into myself; it’s what I was born for, after all. I am not afraid of the triggers, nor of the sacred wounds I’ll find there. For have I not been in training all of these years? Twenty-five years as the hermit in my own interior woods; over three years of making this journey of the Gene Keys. But here I am, fresh, dewy-eyed, full of love, ready to dive into my wonders for the next six months.

And that’s what it feels like … a dive into a great underground river of wonder. I’ve swum in these waters before, but of course, you cannot step into the same river twice, so I get both the joy of knowing how sacred and safe these waters are, but also the excitement of the new.

I feel so ready to follow this stream. I trust it. And yes, there will be wounding I discover, and recover, but I am not afraid, because I know that wounding never walks alone. Wounding walks with forgiveness, with compassion; wounding walks with love. Wounding holds no fear for me. For are we not wounded to the same extent that we have loved? My wounding is a map back to that love. So, why would I be afraid? Why would I be afraid of the love that the wounding might reveal? I am doing this for love. I am doing this because I want more love in my life, and because I know there are untapped wells of love inside me.

We allow the Shadow; we allow the challenges to be sensation to help us on this journey.

The Sage’s Golden Path Retreat

I love that my whole world view of my Shadows has so fundamentally shifted. I love that the Shadows no longer frighten me, nor are they reasons to feel shame. I have Shadows, but they do not stop me loving myself. Quite the reverse. My Shadows are doorways into love, into trust, into myself. If I can love myself in my Shadows, I can heal myself. If I can love myself in my Shadows, I know I am worthy.

Excavating and Reclaiming the Abandoned Parts of Ourselves

Some excavation work is required in the Venus. I have done a lot of work on myself in the past three years, and the past three decades, but I know that there is more for me to uncover. I know that there are deeper recesses of my Shadows that I need to examine.

I’ve been through this sequence twice already, but I am coming to it fresh this time, with a beginner’s mind. I feel as if my first solo journey with my glorious guide Hayley Curtis peeled back the turf to reveal a whole ecosystem below the surface of my life. I think that first time with Hayley was just me finding out that this inner world of mine was even more vast than I could imagine in my wildest dreams. Devoted, Hayley’s group programme, helped me to uncover the deep mother wound and start the healing.

I feel as if, with these new Sage teachings, I am going to get to the bones of me. I’m going to dig back more and more layers and reveal those bones of me that have been buried for so long. Now is my time. This feels like sacred archaeology.

And I do it in stillness. What better time to adopt a practice of bringing deep stillness into my life than now, when my external world has kicked into overdrive? (Isn’t that the way of life … you want peace and stillness, so life throws you curve balls again and again!). There is no better time to prioritise my rest. There is no better time to bring in stillness to every day.

I have noticed Toad and Toad has noticed me. It’s time to find this stillness inside myself. Then I can bring the Sage wisdom into these quiet rooms, to ponder, to savour.

There is no rush. I can savour the journey.

Pure Love

Sage Line 33.5 … Pure Love

Will you hitch a ride on the next big thing?

There is nothing new in the world of the soul.

Thus, contented and alone

I let the future quietly pass me by.

Richard shared this Sage sutra on his Instagram page and it so perfectly describes the way I do this work … contented and alone. This is how I feel about my morning practice of journaling. Contented and alone. I sit at the page and let myself just be. I contemplate my Gene Key or my Sage line. Sometimes I contemplate a sentence Richard has written. Sometimes just one word.

I am a wordsmith. Words are my currency and my balm; words are the way into my heart and they open doorways into my soul. It’s not an intellectual love of words; it’s a poetic love. Words drip into my ears like honey; words flow from my pen like molten love.

Words are my métier and my home. It has been one of the most enriching experience for me, to hear the poetry in Richard’s words.

Yes, he is teaching us about our Gene Keys and our lines, about the spheres and pathways, but there is no dogma or instruction in his teachings. There is poetry, there is an invitation to lose yourself in the fecund folds (one of my favourite phrases of his!) of the words themselves.

The Gene Keys are all poetry. You could read the one hundred and ninety-two words of the Shadows, Gifts and Siddhis, and never need to read another thing as long as you live.

Contented and Alone

I am satisfied and complete when I am alone.

I am serene.

I am tranquil.

I am a singular metaphysical entity, and I am whole unto myself.

That is what this work gives me.

A place to be whole unto myself. A place to love myself. A place to be myself.

I buck the trends of our fast-paced life by knowing this is long, slow work, and relishing that. I’ve been on this path for nearly thirty years, and every day I feel as if I am still at the beginning. 

I am content to stay on this slow path, allowing Richard and the Gene Keys to drip their mellifluous words into my heart, and then allow my own honeyed words to flow.

I am contented and alone as I sit here writing in my journal.

I am replete. I am sated and I am so grateful that these poetic teachings came into my life now, as I embark upon the journey of my crone years. What a gift these teachings are. What a gateway into my own self.

This practice I have of contemplating with my journal every day is the most important part of me. It is from this place of aloneness that I am able to embrace my Shadows. It is from here that I am able to find love for myself and for others. It is from my hermit world that I am able to find my voice and my creativity.

It is from this place of aloneness that I will step once more into the Venus Stream. I just need to take one step at a time.

There is no rush.

I am never left behind.

I am exactly where and when I am meant to be … content and alone and allowing the future to quietly pass me by.

Entering into a Deeper Relationship with Myself

The Venus Stream is an invitation into a deeper relationship with myself. It is an invitation into being completely open with myself, into opening my heart so wide that I become completely vulnerable, because I will be becoming completely, fully and entirely myself. I cannot enter into this journey with any of the raiment of pretence. I cannot try to cloak myself in ideas of what other people think I should be like. I must walk naked into this journey, with only my own skin between me and the world. I must walk naked into the oceans of my feelings and bathe there.

This is my journey. This is my Venus stream. I bathe there in full nakedness, utterly vulnerable.

The Longing Inside Me

The longing inside me that I want to grow into this year is to slow down. To slow down my life. To slow down time. To slow down the world.

Everything is changing so fast, everything is moving so quickly. 

I want to bring in the energy of slowing down, of pausing, of breathing, of being still.

It is so perfect that in the Opening Retreat for the Purpose key in the Venus Stream, Richard asked us to find a stone with which we could imbue our longing. A stone is still and slow. I chose a stone from a Devon beach, collected on one of my many trips to that Jurassic coast. It is a little, rounded mountain of a stone, that sits snuggled in my hand. There are two bands of white quartz encircling the red stone. It feels like a very feminine stone. It could almost be an abstract sculpture of a vagina … I am reminded of Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of flowers. This stone shows me an entrance into the feminine. How perfect is that energy for the Venus? It has probably taken the sea thousands of years to wear down and smooth this stone into this tiny mound I now hold in my hand.

There is so much I want to do in the world. I want to be creative, I want to write books, I want to make beautiful things, I want to share them with others. 

But to do that, first I must plant the seeds of that longing deep inside me, and then I must be still, I must wait for the fecund folds of my being to wrap around the seeds and germinate them.

That is what this Venus journey is for me … a pregnancy, where all the growth and wonder and life happens deep inside, where only me and my body know it, feel it, sense it.

Of course it ripples out into the world, into my other relationships, but like the iceberg, 95% of this work is beneath the surface of me. It is for me and me alone to do this work. I gladly enter into this portal of quartz and step through into my own interior, into my feminine self.

This Venus journey begins in Core Stability.

Richard Rudd, Venus Sequence Retreat

How perfect that my Sage line is … Becoming an anchor of stability in troubled times. Everything is telling me to be still; to be the steady anchor in the troubled times our world is in. My Sage line says it. Toad brought me this message.

And as I held the stone that is the anchor for my Purpose journey, I felt it. Still, like the stone, that’s how I need to be.

Still.

Steady.

Lasting.

I am entering into the portal of my own inner being.

Yes, the Venus stream is all about relationships, but it starts here, in the stillness of my own being, in the openness of my own relationship with myself.

All of the photographs in this essay are of rivers … in Wiltshire, in Devon, in Hampshire, in Scotland, and in Wales … basically a River Tour of the UK! The Venus Stream is often likened to a river, so it felt appropriate.

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