Old Father Time

In the modern world, we are acutely conscious of the passage of time – the beauty industry is centred around delaying the signs of ageing, we want to achieve goals by a certain age, we measure all of our human relationships through the passing of time. Yet, why do physicists say that time is merely an illusion?

Taking time in the context of human interactions (the physics is way too mind boggling for me to think about this evening) – you can “know” someone for 10 years but yet in all that time, they don’t really understand you at all. A friend of mine said to me a few weeks back that she feels she can say things to me (who she has known for nearly three years), that she can’t say to people she has known for 20 years for fear that they will judge her. Sometimes, time is no measure of anything at all given that a) people change over time and paths drift apart and b) sometimes you just click with someone and time just serves to deepen a pre-existing connection.

There are many explanations for this – I’m sure most people will have heard the theory that when you feel a deep connection with someone that you have known them before in a past life. Perhaps not in the same context – maybe they were your brother, sister, parent or grandparent and someone completely different in this life. That provides a reason for why you feel like you know them; because you do. You just “get each other”.

People like to say that relationships are hard work and yes, they most certainly take effort. However, it shouldn’t feel like such a massive, omnipresent responsibility. Most of the time it shouldn’t feel like work – it should feel happy, fulfilling and fun. Bringing out the best side of your personality.

So if there were practical signs that could point to this connection, this feeling of knowing, what would they be?

1. It’s comfortable – all you need to be is you; no more, no less.

2. You can be honest – no secrets, no lies, just open communication.

3. Time just flies by when you’re with them – with most friends, you’ll meet for a few hours and that will be enough. Where there is something deeper, days will go by and it felt like no time at all had passed.

4. And the over-dramatic one; a feeling like you won the lottery. Phew, someone actually gets all the s*** that I go on about and it feels amazing and liberating.

My meditation teacher once said to me when you change your frequency, you change what you attract into your life. I know she’s right. I will wrap up as usual with a quote:

“I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.”   Brene Brown.

Namaste.

Why do certain people get your goat…

Have you ever met someone who you took an instant dislike to for no particular reason at all? Probably more of a female thing than a male thing… I mean when you are first introduced to this person (and they may even be on their best behaviour at this stage), yet you just instinctively want absolutely nothing to do with them. Daily encounters became somewhat of a chore for me because try as I might, I just could not bring myself to act like I liked this person….

I would also like to say that this instant dislike does not arise because of jealousy – I am happy enough in my own skin most of the time to realise that there will always be people who are more (and less) thinner, prettier, richer, or successful than me. That’s life. In fact, I have one very beautiful client, who I am fond of. I find the way men act around her in meetings rather amusing to be frank… But at the end of the day, I think she is a decent and smart woman.

To differentiate, I think what I’m talking about goes beyond merely being judgemental, which I confess to being on more than one occasion. If you judge someone based on their actions or appearance, then you can always be proved wrong later when actually that person turns out to be completely different from how you originally perceived them to be. I have often been pleasantly surprised by this. Some of my closest friends were people that I did not necessarily click with instantly but certainly grew on me over a prolonged period of time. In turn, I think often people can take a while to warm to me, and I think that perhaps some people when they first met me may have thought I was a bit of a b***h (I hope most of them changed their mind).

After all, how often do you meet people where you click almost instantly and they just “get you”? You fall into conversation instantly, and you don’t want to stop talking. It doesn’t happen a great deal, maybe once a year or so if that… If I based all my friendships around this, I would have fewer friends. Similarly, I rarely meet people who I instantly dislike. However, when I do meet these people, I don’t ever tend to change my mind about them….

So having distinguished an instant dislike from being merely judgmental, why do we take an instant dislike to certain people?

I think for a few reasons (spiritual and less so):

1. They were someone that was our enemy in a past life

If you believe in past lives, then very often important people in our lives are people that we knew before on some level.

If you take an instant dislike to someone and there is absolutely no rhyme or reason for it other than a deep “instinct”, this could be the past life memory re-triggered. The negativity could be leftover feelings from a past lifetime. The question here I guess is whether it is better to avoid them or try and work through those feelings..

2. They have personality traits that we really dislike in ourselves i.e. they are mirroring back to us some or all of the things we don’t like

Where there is an aspect of ourselves that we don’t like, it is easier for us to hide from it and even deny it, instead projecting those feelings about ourselves onto others. It is easier for us to think that a friend is vain for example than to accept that we are in fact vain. When we do this we are not taking responsibility for our own issue and doing what we need to do to resolve the issue. By being self-aware, we have the power to change things.

This person you have attracted, whose traits you dislike, you have drawn them in. Like attracts like. That person is a mirror of you in some ways.

3. Women are instinctively tuned into people on their wavelength

Women have an inbuilt sense of who they will and won’t get along with. It’s important to listen to our intuition and if it’s screaming at us not to trust someone, it’s usually right. Men are slower to pick up on this “vibe”. In the past, when I have said to a male friend, I just don’t like so and so; they have always been surprised and asked why (I could not give a proper answer at that stage). Generally, they discover later when the person in question shows their true colours that there may have been some method to my madness.

I used to work with a girl, who I seriously think suffered from a borderline personality disorder. She was adamant that she wanted to be friends with me (I remember her saying, we’re both hot, we should hang out??)…. Against my better judgement, we went drinking together etc. Turned out she was using me and took the first opportunity to stab me in the back (obviously whilst still pretending to be friends). She was not subtle about trying to hide the fact that she was using people after a while, so everyone saw through the mask.

I’m not sure what the answer to the question is but all I can do is try my darndest to be friendly (even where I don’t want to be). You may not become friends with everyone but you get back what you give out one way or another.

Namaste.

The Past Life Concept

Before I started doing spiritual meditation, I thought that only Hindus and Buddhists believed in the past lives. Now I understand that this belief extends much further than that. Even though Christianity, Judaism and Islam in general believe in the more traditional concepts of Heaven and Hell, even within those religions there is a variation in opinion.

For example, in Judaism the concept of the after life is not as discussed as in Christianity. It is interesting that Kabbalah, the mystical branch of Judaism (now popularised by many celebrities) believes in reincarnation. I once met the Israeli astrologer and Kabbalah devotee, Gahl Sasson, who when asked if all of us have past lives, said without a moment’s hesitation “yes of course”.

Having reached the stage where I have started to believe in it, my curiosity led me to a past life regression session. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I was curious not so that I could live in the past but more to give me an indication of what I should be doing in the present.

It was a first for me, having never been put under hypnosis before. I was first put into a hypnotic state, which is on a plane between being awake and fully conscious and being asleep. I suppose akin to being in a deep state of meditation.

The key I was told is “just to go with it” and when asked questions to just say the first thing that comes into my head. The idea being that as soon as you hesitate to think of the answer to a question the mind takes over. I was also told that we all have lives as men and lives as women and not to be surprised if I ended up in the body of a man.

So fine, I was taken to a long corridor of doors. Behind each door is a past life. I took myself to four different lives, each one holding a key to my present life. I have to say I am certainly not a convert to this type of therapy. I usually have an inclination towards something almost immediately if it is for me; for example meditation, SHEN Therapy, yoga etc.

Even so, at the end of the session, I ask myself if most people wouldn’t question whether it was really “past lives” or just a figment of one’s imagination.

In my four lives I was a German soldier who died in the trenches during World War Two wracked with guilt about leaving behind a wife and young child; a bored housewife trapped in a loveless and frustrated marriage (the man in question was a former boyfriend of mine); a beautiful dancer for an Egyptian Pharoah and a painter in the Italian countryside (unsurprisingly the happiest of my lives). Good, the thing is it just didn’t feel real enough for me. This was not helped by the fact that I was a housewife in 1932 and a German soldier in 1942, which unless I was living parallel lives at once, either means I got my dates mixed up or that I had made one or both lives up in my imagination.

I did not see anything visual during my hypnosis, it was more a case of feeling certain things.

So what does this mean for my belief system? Actually, it remains unchanged and I still believe in past lives. I just think that regression does not work so well for me.

I did not learn any lessons from it that I was not already aware of on some level – that being creative makes me happy, that I fear being trapped in an unhappy relationship, that I carry guilt for not being as present for loved ones as I feel I should have been. All good things to re-affirm.

Maybe at this stage in my development, I should only be focussing on the present and not the past. Who knows, it may be something that I re-visit at some stage in the future.

I certainly would be interested to know other people’s experiences of such regression as I find the subject fascinating. Thoughts please…

Namaste.