A Travel Essay from the Inner Journey

I am less than a week into working with my EQ sphere in the Sage’s Golden Path Retreat, and I am already totally in love with the Sage word and line, which I talked about in my essay, The Seeds of Tomorrow.

I’ve spent the last few days contemplating the Sutra, which has settled into me with a delicious feeling of both newness and of familiarity. The Gene Key I have here is 64.5, the Siddhi of Illumination, the Gift of Imagination and the Shadow of Confusion. The way that Richard Rudd has wrapped the feeling of Imagination and Illumination up in this short maxim is at once profound and simple. Like so much of the Gene Keys writing, there are layers of meaning here that I am sure will unfold and open to me, like the petals of a flower, the longer I sit with them.

We, the children, are the sowers of stars

I am a bringer of light, just like the stars. Stars have so many things to so many people over all the ages of humankind. Deities riding high in the sky. Ancestors sitting by their campfires. Mysteries. But to all, they have been both map and compass, pointing their way home.

We might know from astronomers and scientist what they physically are; we may know that some of them are so far away that even though they no longer exist, we are still seeing their light as it travels towards us.

We might know many things about stars, but what we feel is wonder.

Go out into a starry night, in a place with little or no light pollution, and I defy you not to feel joy as you stare up at the milky way, that river of stars that feels so close. I lived in Ireland for nearly 20 years and I would stand outside every night the sky was clear, just to stare at the stars. I didn’t know many of the constellations’ names, but I knew that they made me feel something special.

To be a sower of stars therefore is to be a sower of light, a sower of wonder and joy.

To be a sower of stars is not like shining the sun’s spotlight on people; it is rather to sprinkle your light, leaving little light trails for people to follow.

To be a sower of stars is to become the map and compass that will aid people in finding their own way home to themselves.

I am not a guide. I am not a teacher. What I am is an ordinary woman; but I have taken the map of my Gene Keys chart and used it to interpret my life, my history, my wounding, my belief patterns. I have used the star map of my Gene Keys as a way into understanding myself.

And it has worked! I now feel as if I am home in my own self. I followed the light trail of my own personal Gene Keys stars and I found my way into my own heart. Sometimes it’s very dark on this journey, but every now and then I catch a glimpse of a star so bright that it pierces even the darkest night. And that is enough to keep me moving forward on this path, it is enough to keep me on this journey.

Our thoughts the seeds

I love this imagery of our thoughts as seeds. It’s one of the tropes of this Gene Keys story … the seed that holds the potential. 

The Shadows, which can feel so overwhelming, contain the seeds of the Gifts.

We talk in the Gene Keys of growing our garden, and planting seeds.

We talk about the potential there is in these seeds, just like the acorn that grows into the mighty oak.

All that potential for hundreds of feet and countless centuries of growth, all held in a tiny seed that could sit in a baby’s hand.

Seeds and gardens and potentiality are important parts of the Gene Keys’ lexicon. So, for this Sutra to say, “Our thoughts the seeds”, oh, that brought me so much joy. That brought me so much pleasure.

For my thoughts are infinite, my thoughts are wild and free. My thoughts are the seeds of my imagination, and it knows no bounds. And if my thoughts are the seeds of what I am to sow and reap and harvest in this life, then what a garden I shall grow.

My thoughts are infinite, so my garden will be lush and fecund, rich, fertile; it will be vast and so full of life.

My thoughts hold within them pure potentiality. (Richard says of the Shadow here, “Confusion is a state with neither order nor structure – a state rippling with pure potentiality.”)

My thoughts can hold anything … from the wide expanses of lush rainforests, to tiny flowers that reflect the whole universe in their perfection.

If my thoughts are seeds, I must scatter them far and wide. I must throw them into the wind and trust that they will land on fertile soil. 

But the flower or the tree cannot control where their seeds will fall, so I must not let myself get caught in the grips of control here (hello Radiance Shadow, my old friend!). I have to let the winds and nature take their course. I have to let the winds of fate blow my thoughts where they will, and trust that they will fall onto the right receptive earth.

Our words the flowers

“Our words the flowers” … ah, now there is an image for me to savour … my words as flowers!!

Anyone who knows me, knows how much I love flowers. I love to fill my garden and my home with flowers; I work with flowers in my cyanotype prints; I love to photograph flowers. When I imagine my inner world, it is full of flowers, a lush, fecund forest garden, teeming with flowers and colour and scents.

And anyone who knows anything about me, knows that words are the medium I am most comfortable with in my creativity. I write every day. I have filled book upon book with my writing. I have always been a prolific journaler since I first picked up a pen and opened my first Artist’s Way journal. This writing habit has only deepened since I started working with my Gene Keys. I contemplate my Gene Keys through my words. I ponder on their meanings in the pages of my journals.

Sharing My Words

And then I turn the words into essays and articles that I share in Gene Keys Unleashed.

And of course, for the last year I have been sharing my writing here in our Cauldron of Crones, the vessel that Meghan and I have created to hold our words and our art.

And that is just the written words. Words also bloom like flowers through my voice in our Conversations With A Couple Of Crones Podcast, where Meghan and I talk, unscripted, about the inner work.

This last is such a new experience for me. To share my voice, to speak my words out into the world. Oh, it takes my breath away that I have become so brave! If you had told me 3 or 4 years ago that I’d be recording my voice, my words, and sending them out into the world, I would have laughed. The idea would have seemed preposterous to me.

After decades of having my self-belief and self-confidence beaten out of me, the very idea of public speaking would have filled me with panic. There were times in my thirties, where I was in such emotional distress that I lost the ability to speak completely. Spontaneous laryngitis caused by stress.

New Me – Natural Me

This “new” me, this vocal me, is actually “natural” me. I used to be a natural performer in my SQ and EQ years … school plays and pantomimes, skits and dance routines I’d make up with my schoolfriend and perform for the class (10CC’s Rubber Bullets … what a performance that one was!! Pans People eat your heart out … of course, you have to be British and of a certain age to get that reference!). 

I used to love acting and performing. But then all my confidence was shattered, and as life layered more and more struggle and suffering upon me, I lost all self-belief and confidence, and lost the ability to speak in front of people.

Now, because of this work with the Gene Keys, I am like a totally different woman. Now I love to talk! I talk to my best friend Meghan every single day. I talk to the women in GKU that I bonded with during Devoted. And I talk on our Podcasts.

I love to use my words, written and spoken, I love to send them out into the ether, flowers strewn along my path.

“Our words the flowers” … oh, could there be a more perfect phrase to describe how I feel about sharing this work?! I am planting a whole land full of flowers, my inner landscape, the world where my imagination lets loose, and runs wild and free.

Our deeds the fragrance of living compassion.

If I could ensure that all I do in this world had the fragrance of living compassion, then I would indeed feel as if I were living a worthwhile life.

One of the greatest tenets of the Gene Keys teachings is that we do not do this work on ourselves just for ourselves … we do it for all. We do it for the collective. We do it to be in service to the whole.

Service is a driving force in this work.

Yes, we are looking at our Shadows; yes, we are working with archetypes in order to heal our emotional wounds. But the whole point is not to stop there! The whole point is to take the self-love we grow for ourselves out into the world, to share its bounteousness.

The whole point is to have compassion for every living being and for our planet herself; to open our hearts in true living compassion.

In order for one’s deeds to be the very fragrance of living compassion, one must be prepared to return non-love with love. One must be prepared to keep loving, no matter what provocations life presents. One must keep one’s heart wide open.

One must be 100% committed to maintaining a consistently open heart.

The Miracle of Seeing Everyone’s Wounding Patterns

When you do this deep inner work, when you uncover your own wounding patterns and learn to love and forgive yourself, then something rather miraculous happens … you start to realise that every single human being has their own wounding patterns! As you recognise the wounded child inside yourself who is triggered by another’s words or actions, so you realise that all humans have that wounded child inside them. And often (or always!) when a person lashes out, it is their wounded child in action.

As you learn to hold compassion for your own wounded inner child, so holding compassion for others comes as a natural next step.

You know that you would be doing a disservice to them if you were to react in anger or blame or judgement; just as you would be doing a disservice to yourself if you treated yourself so.

I do love this image of living compassion as a fragrance. Imagine that … your deeds in the world would emit a fragrance of sweet compassion (mine would be flowers, of course!). How beautiful to move through the world, exuding the heady fragrance of compassion. You would make people feel so seen and so heard. You would make people feel safe. You would walk through life as if you walked through the most beautiful garden, brushing against flowers dripping their nectar and their sweet aromas into the air. 

Oh, what a glorious way to live.

I really would be the flower child I always wanted to be, if I lived the truth of this Gene Key and Line!

The photographs I’ve used in this essay are mostly of cyanotype prints developing. I wanted to use flowers, and at first I thought I’d use some of the gazillion photographs of wildflowers or of my garden that I have taken over the years. But instead, I decided to use photographs of cyanotype prints developing in the sun. These photographs feature three of my favourite creative things … photography, cyanotype prints, and pressing flowers. There are also a couple of photographs of my journaling habit … one being filled with words, the other shows all the journals I had filled in the first couple of years of working with the Gene keys.