Life Experiences

Indulgence

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Some days are simply meant for indulging. Today has been one of those glorious days. I have pampered myself with a soak in the bath, eaten delicious food that is usually considered my some times food which included an amazing baked camembert and garlic tiger bread loaf, romped around and had an amazing time with my husband, and generally had a low key, lazy day and it’s been fabulous.

The beauty of this day in particular is that it happens to fall on a weekend. It just so happens that my husband is home. It just so happens that the weather was grey and not inviting for hanging outside. It was a lovely inside autumn day and I am so thankful that we were able to take advantage of it.

When working with someone else’s schedule, it’s a lot harder to go with the feeling of the day. When deadlines are looming or you have to be inside the office like most people working 8 to 5, Monday through Friday, you don’t get to indulge in how you feel very often. It’s interesting, it’s like we have to squish it down and put on the hard hat and go in no matter how we feel, unless of course you are really sick, you are there. The days of indulgence are partial, a short 4 hour window after work ends and bed time begins, or the 2 days on the weekend, but that is it.

Somehow we’ve all agreed that this way of working 5 days on and 2 days off is okay. That it’s more important to work for someone else doing what they want, than to spend time building your own family and your own business. I see it as freedom, and the lifestyle of the truly rich who are able to have the flexibility to work when they want.

Hedonism always comes to mind when I think of indulging, and being a bit hedonistic is fine, everything in moderation. Perhaps if we didn’t have these obligations in place where we are expected to be someplace and need to go in order to have money to live and provide for others, then maybe people would just waste away. I’d like to think that if people didn’t have that obligation, then instead they would use their time and creativity to solve problems in the world, to learn how to love more deeply, and give back in other ways.

If learning to listen to ourselves is a big block in being self directed, it would make sense because we have been taught and have learned so well to fit into a schedule created by someone else. It starts from school, and then goes into the labour force, all Monday through Friday from about 8am until 4 or 5pm. This is the life schedule of working for someone else for most people in the western world.

I have a strong feeling, based on my own experience, that once that habit of fitting into someone else’s schedule has been broken, a new thought pattern will arise, naturally. Then it’s a prime opportunity to create a better, more empowered version of life that one can take ownership. Perhaps this would simply be because it’s easier to listen to your own wants and needs when the other is no longer being enforced.

These indulgent days are so needed. Time to recharge, reenergise, and rest always brings about new energy to keep moving forward and pursuing what is important in life.

Meditation, My beginnings

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Meditation has been something I’ve done since 2008, so a good 8 years now. I started out with teaching myself how to meditate while living in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I would lay down, with ear plugs in, and focus on one word, and then just keep going back to it it. This was effective and was a great start.

Vipassana was introduced into my world in early 2009 when I ended up staying about 2 months at the Vipassana Centre in North Fork, California. I had returned from Brazil and was seriously needing to find my own centre, funny that North Fork just happens to be the exact centre of California too. All so very fitting. In Vipassana, specifically in a 10 day silent meditation course, you think of nothing. For the first 3 days you focus only on your breath, narrowing it down the little triangle under your nose. Then for the next 7, the whole practice is scanning the body from head to toe, toe to head, and spending time on the painful/hard/heavy places before moving on. Then the very last 24 hours, Metta gets introduced which is like the salve after doing this major work. Jetta is all about loving kindness. The best way I found for practicing Metta was to focus on myself being vibrant, healthy, in a place that I have been, or an imagined state of being where I am full of happiness. After I really feel that, then I would think about others in the same way, imagining them full of health, being so vibrant, and with the biggest smiles ever. I would think about Goenka the teacher, I would think of dear friends, I would think about family, and then people I have had challenges with in the same light, then I would think of people I have seen but have never actually spoken to, because loving kindness extends to everyone always. It’s a lovely practice. When doing it all together in a single “sit” you start for a few minutes on your breath, then move to scanning the body as the bulk of the practice, then at the end a few minutes of Metta. Any time the mind wanders, just bring it back, always bring it back. We would sit like this for hours on end for days at a day. Overall I have sat more than 50 days in silence like this, and have served on courses where I have meditated 6 or more hours a day while serving others. It was the ultimate reset and what I needed. I did the majority of this kind of meditation from 2009 until 2011 when I had moved to Australia.

I have kept the scanning part of Vipassana very much with me even if I haven’t sat in the centre, it just became a way of life, even though I certainly never sat the two hours a day they recommend after leaving. That was too much for me outside of the centre world.

Birthing a New World Part 1

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My son was conceived on a glorious day of love, a celebration of my marriage, which is also my birthday, specifically on our wedding day. We intentionally created him with love, had just weeks prior made a wish at a Shiva celebration asking for a healthy, fun, baby boy. We offered up our milk, ate some lovely Indian food, and made love each time with full intention and presence.

I started to get sick on the honeymoon, but didn’t think I was pregnant, just thought the circumstances of stress from the farm, getting over a flu, the exhale moment when the wedding is done and life moves along, and being out on an island in the Whitsundays taking trips out in the Great Barrier Reef.

By time we got back home, I knew I was pregnant. I still took a test to confirm at 4am with my first mornings urine which is supposed to have the best rate of truth, I wanted to be sure, and I was. I woke my husband up and told him excitedly, he smiled at me and then we went back to sleep. I was pregnant and it certainly didn’t take long, I had only taken my IUD out less than a month before hand. Everything was happening very quickly!

I had what seemed like a mini period after that, which caused concern, even though I was feeling nauseated. The GP suggested I go in to the radiologist to have a sonogram as soon as I could, so I booked the next appointment I could, and went in. As I laid on the table, I was scared, what if I had lost the baby? I was so new to all of this. My husband wasn’t available to come with me, so I was there alone, and I felt just that, all alone. Then all of a sudden there was a heartbeat, and I was both relieved that it was there and also sad that I couldn’t share this first heartbeat experience with my husband. I saw my insides on the monitor and baby looked like a little dot amongst it all, but alas baby was there. It turns out that was implantation bleeding, which can occur for some women when the egg plants itself into the lining of the uterus.

For the rest of the first trimester, I experienced the most nausea I have ever had in my life. I took ginger, I went to acupuncture, I ate small bites of food regularly, and it never subsided. I really pride myself in the fact that I can avoid puking if I want, every so often I just cannot handle it and I have to vomit, but in this case, for weeks, months actually I was so sick but never actually vomiting. I was hot, like burning up hot most of the time. The acupuncturist would try to lower my heat from my upper body into my legs, and it did work a bit, it at least gave me peace of mind and I was able to cope a little better. During that first trimester I had to really take it easy, but I couldn’t, not really.

Also during the first trimester, the climax of a big dispute of the processing plant tenants at the farm came, it had been building as they had not been taking care of the animals and we even had to intervene and feed the starving animals ourselves on the eve of our wedding night. The whole time during our honeymoon, we, more so my husband, had to deal with the issue, and it was intense. When we got back my husband had to get to work in Sydney, so I was there at the farm with his parents and a few woofers trying to make a presence and not let anything happen. They were hostile and very volatile and we did not trust them at all to leave peacefully. I was on edge and I know that certainly did not help my pregnancy. Along with that, the farmhouse upstairs has this incredible way of syphoning all of the cooking smell from downstairs to the upstairs where the rooms are. So every day I would have nausea and have to smell cooking flesh on the stove, it was almost more than I could bear. I had to ask the woofers to wear deodorant, but only a non fragrant kind. Nausea and farm life really don’t go so well together, with animals being slaughtered, carcases decomposing, and all of the chicken poop and animal smells that come along with a farm.

It was so hard for me to be away from my husband, but I did not want to move to Sydney. I did not want to raise our son in the city, I did not want to move away from the group of friends I had made in country, but I missed him so much, that eventually in the 2nd trimester, I made the move down with him full time. As soon as I was in Sydney, in our new penthouse apartment, I hardly had nausea or morning sickness. By the way, whomever called it morning sickness may have been thinking globally at the time, because it is certainly not contained to one morning in one hemisphere, mine lasted all day and night every day at the farm.

During all of this, I had many different projects going on. I had hired on a coaching team to help me build my own business from scratch, which was becoming harder and harder to manage with my fluctuating levels of energy, feeling unwell, and a totally spacey head. I had a very candid conversation with one of the coaches, and she told me to stop doing it, if there was any advice she would give it would be to stop and not do it, being a soon to be new mother and trying to start a business at the same time was a disaster recipe, and that the most important thing was my child and to not make the same mistake she made by trying to do it all. She also suggested getting a really comfortable reclining chair to live in with the baby. I took her suggestions on board and she was right, although I will get back to it and finish what I started, when the time is right.

We also had the closing of the abattoir at the farm, which was a very big deal. There was also an internet business that my husband and I were getting into, which long story short, over a year of being dragged along, paying out our noses and still not getting to the point where we could sell the internet to others, Telstra finally got back to my husband with the contract. It’s such bologna that any independent resellers have to go through the one company which owns all the lines in Australia that were actually paid fro by the people before they fave it over to this private corporation, who more or less has a monopoly over all the lines across the country. Of course they don’t want competition, there is no reason for them to help someone compete with them, it’s a very flawed system. We didn’t think it was going to be such a big issue, but it was, had we have known we wouldn’t have been stuck into it as long as we did with our finances draining by the month.

Along with this I was still contemplating whether or not to take up the offer for Honours at University and to teach the Digital Marketing class part time. It would have to be all out of pocket as I didn’t have PR, and was considered an international student. The next question was whether or not I would be able to handle having a newborn, living in the Northern Rivers while my husband was in Sydney and trying to do it all. This had to wait as well.

I also started up a mini little network marketing business to help generate some income, which ended up me just spending a lot of money in the way of their products, which while the dollar was one to one, it wasn’t so bad. I sent out heaps of greeting cards and that felt really good, until the realisation that the only way you make money is not by having others buy your greeting cards, but they have to be distributors as well, it felt a bit strange, and I found that it didn’t work as well in Australia, especially as the US dollar increased in value, it became really expensive to keep this going. Eventually I stopped paying and my account has just enough to send a few more cards and then its done.

So there were all of these projects happening, lots of stress, and then a move, to a place I didn’t really want to live, but did because I wanted, err, needed, to be with my husband.

I started trying to figure out where to do antenatal classes that fit in with my husbands rotating schedule, I didn’t get into this alone and I didn’t want to do it alone. I found a birthing from within program in the Northern Rivers and it fit the dates in my 3rd trimester, and I felt better. I had luckily gotten in to the caseload midwife program at the local hospital near the farm where I could have a water birth and be assisted by lovely experienced women with the security of having the hospital as well just in case anything went awry.

There was still a lot of stress regarding the projects we had going on, but I was getting everything sorted one by one. Then at one of the ultrasound appointments, I was told that my placenta was low lying, and that if it didn’t move up, then I would have to have to have a cesarian. This was the opposite of the midwife assisted water birth I had planned to do without any kind of medication. I kept hoping it was wrong and was misdiagnosed due to me not drinking enough water so they could see inside properly with their machine. At the 20 week scan, we saw that my son was not shy at all and was showing his parts in full glory. I was going to have a boy. It was all pretty surreal and was happening.

After a quick trip back to the farm, I got back on the plane to Sydney and was required to show my letter stating I was okay to fly. I honestly didn’t feel very good at all. The day before I had spent a little time in the healing waters of Lake Ainsworth, a nearby tea tree oil infused lake, which happens to be my favourite lake in the world. I was told later that it was an aboriginal birthing lake, which maybe somehow my body knew that.

We landed in Sydney, I met up with a Uni friend and strolled the open gardens on a lovely spring day at Westmeade hospital, and I was tired, very very tired. I had only just finished my 2nd trimester, the baby wasn’t due for another almost three months, but I was so exhausted. That evening, I went to the toilet and found that I was bleeding, a lot of blood. Interestingly only a week or so before, as a precaution I booked into the local Nepean Hospital just in case I needed anything while I was in Sydney related to my pregnancy. We called and they said to come in, and this was the first of many experiences I had with the birthing suite. They wanted to monitor the baby’s heartbeat and to make sure everything was okay. Turns out everything was okay, and that bleeding was par for the course when it came to having a low lying placenta. After a couple of days they let me go home after it was clear that I wasn’t bleeding anymore. I was relieved and very tired.

Since we lived in penthouse apartment that was a walkup, that meant I had to somehow make it up 4 flights of stairs to my bedroom. It was horrendous. We had to move. We had to move for other reasons as well. We had these two older Sri Lankans who totally leached off of us for more months than I care to admit. My husband didn’t want to deal with it as he had his plate absolutely full, and they kept promising they would pay rent. We took on two additional housemates on top of them to help pay the rent, so there was a full house on top of it all. We started looking intently for another place to live that was clean, nice, and not too expensive. I had been looking when I would come to Sydney from the farm and just couldn’t find anything that would work, the one place that did was then pulled last minute and rented to a friend of the owner. By chance, we were directed by a real estate agent to a place we hadn’t even noticed online, and it was the right one, so we signed on, things were looking up. It was a ground level, stand alone two storied town house with three bedrooms and three bathrooms with a a cute backyard. Perfect for what we needed and it was brand new.

I had another bout of bleeding a week later and again, we rushed to hospital, this time there was more blood than I’ve ever seen rushing out of my body.

To be continued.

I’ve Come So Far

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After reflecting upon some of the choices I’ve made romantically in the past, I came to the conclusion that I don’t have any regrets, but if given the chance to do it again, I would go about it differently. When I was young, I was so very naive, which is a major part of youth. I was reckless at times not realising how my actions affected others. I was definitely foolheartly and definitely went by how I felt, let my primal urges dictate what I was doing. I also drank quite a lot and it was in these times that my more questionable decisions occurred.

I was hashing this over and sharing it with a girlfriend yesterday and I realised that I have come so very far from where I was to who I am now. I am thankful that I have gone through the tumultuous times that I have from my previous life, but I am even more thankful that I have come through to the other side of it.

Personally I have evolved so much. I have reinvented myself so many times as well. I have given myself the opportunity again and again to grow and change… and I continue to do so.

Struggle

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You never know what people are going through.

Some hide it with a smile

Some hide it with achieving great things

Some hide it by being the centre of attention, on stage

Most quietly go through their struggles, alone.

The older I get and the more I actually talk with people about what is really happening in their lives, I realise that we all have baggage of some sort. Some of it we acknowledge because it’s painstakingly clear, but some is so obscure and its like we unintentionally continue to act it out without awareness.

I have met so very many people in my life from all over the world due to living and working on popular destinations and from living abroad. I never really knew about the struggles that people were going through. I always kept it light and tried to just be present with what was going on at the time.

Now that I’ve gone through and am still going through my own struggles relating to the emotional pain I experienced leading up and birthing my son, I notice that more people open up to me about their own struggles. I had this happen as well after the head on collision, but not in the same way, now it is so raw, it is an emotional wound that I and other women that I have been speaking to, carry within themselves, not for show in the outside world, like a scar across the face.

Part of me thinks that the internal struggle that none can physically see is the harder to bear. At least when having a scar exposed, the topic is already on the table. However, for an internal scar, a wound that maybe hasn’t healed yet, it needs to be talked about in a loving space.

For most things in life I think that its best to just move on and focus on whats happening now and by doing so, life will automatically readjust to be the best for you. However, now having experienced this major internal trauma, I find it absolutely essential to talk about it, to feel all the emotions in order to process it as best as we can, and then allow time to lessen the burn.

I found myself bawling in a mother’s group that I am a part of yesterday as another woman shared her traumatic birthing experience, it felt all so real, and I know that we were so close to being like her, losing her baby at the final moment due to the same placental abruption that I had gone through with Baby A.

I felt the pain as it was so fresh, the wound was wide open. Some days I think I have been able to come to peace with it, and then other days I am completely amidst the throes of the memory. When Baby A came down with a cold around Mother’s Day all of those same painful emotions and fears came rushing back. I wasn’t expecting it, I wasn’t prepared for it, but all I could do was try to stay present, as present as possible.

My method of staying present when the feelings come rushing in when I am taking care of bubs and cannot have the time alone to really feel the feelings to let the go, I bring it back to right now, I remind myself that we are safe, we are alive, we are healthy, this is now, and I find some way to smile, to laugh.

I need to remember this, that everyone is struggling in some way the next time I get mad at someone on the road, or get frustrated with the way I see people behaving with their children. We all have something. We all have something to learn and grow from.

 

The New Era of Husband

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My husband is already an incredible man.

I admire him for his strength, endurance and capacity to always think outside of the box.

He is genuine, he is original, he is completely and utterly authentic.

I learn something from him in one way or another, every single day.

Now that my darling husband is a father, things have changed.

You might think, oh no… things have gone downhill since baby arrived.

But, no.

In fact, life has just gotten that much richer, that much deeper, and that much fuller.

My husband as a father is beyond words.

He is unbelievably caring and nurturing to myself and our son.

As I continue to think that I love this man as much as I can love,

I then love him even more.

Seeing him with our baby melts me, it excites me, and makes me feel so much love.

The joy that is derived from our household right now is contagious.

The joy is so think and so omnipresent that even if we are sleep deprived,

things always seem to brighten up and go our way.

My husband is absolutely my life partner,

he is my soul mate

he is my everything.

By far the greatest love of my life and I am blessed to know him, to be with him, to experience life with him.

It is through our love that we have created our own family and it feels so fuqing good!

Learning through Experience

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I often say that the only way I know anything or have learned anything in life is because I have experienced it myself, first hand. This is how I operate in the world. I need to do something on my own, with my own hands, using my own body, with my own thoughts, in whatever environment I am in, so that I can learn and be in it to gain from it what it is. I am like a sponge in that respect, I take it all in, everything I can around me – the people, the smells, the culture, the overall feel of the energy around and I do my best to find myself amongst it all.

Since I definitely have some empath kind of traits where I take on the feelings of those around me, accompanied with the understanding that this is how I learn, I have found myself in many bizarre situations. I have learned so much about life and about what I want based on what I don’t want, which has been based on my own personal experience!

Perhaps this is also why when I’m in a new situation or environment that I am so open hearted and open minded when I am there. I embrace it all and then sort it out. Wouldn’t it be great if I could just learn by others stories, which I do to an extent, but truly, the deep learning for me is in the doing. It always has been.

 

Surrendering to Death (and Life)

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All things change. It is the nature of this existence, of impermanence. In the process of change, it is necessary for things to “die” so that new things can emerge. In the same vein that the phoenix rises from it’s ashes, from the fire, from death, to be this glorious and powerful being. Death is just a part of the life cycle.

Without change, with the passing of things, the passing of stages of life, the passing of who we were, it would not be possible to fully embrace who we are meant to be, who we are in this moment, who we will eventually evolve into. It’s really a beautiful process. I don’t necessarily believe in reincarnation, but I do believe that within this one physical life that I am in right now, I have had many different “lives” all of which had a death, so that I could emerge into my new “life”. It’s very poetic and creative to me. I can’t see past what I don’t know, what I haven’t experienced myself. I can read up, I can imagine, I can listen to others, but in the end, it is from my own personal journey that I learn about life, about existence, about myself, about others, about life, and about death.

Surrendering to death at this moment feels essential. The death of who I was is quickly approaching. I feel like it’s been happening, that old version of me has been dying a not-so-gradual death. From the moment that I got married I felt a surge of new life. From that moment in that extreme rush, it was made possible because I surrendered and let myself go to the next level, I let the old fearful version of who I was go, in favour of the divine love and growth that I am intended.

In that big day of surrender, of death, we actually created life. As in we conceived our child that is growing inside of my body right now as I type and think about this topic. All of which was so easy to do, all of which was so natural because we let go of the fear, I let go of the fear I had held onto for countless years of not being good enough, not being worthy, not feeling like I could be a good wife, or a good mother… it was all fear, and it was about time that I FINALLY LET IT GO!

What a blessing it was to give into that death. Sometimes death comes much more rapidly, instantly, like when I had the car accident, in a moment life changed. I absolutely prefer the gentle lessons approach of gradual and conscious change with full intention and full awareness of what is happening. It feels more natural, it feels real, it brings joy, and feels really good. Gradual death to breath in new life with the right nourishment and the right amount of space is unlike any other.

In this process of now being a wife, and soon being a mother, I feel that the old version of me is dying so quickly. I appreciate that I was that person, those people, over all of those different chapters and I can only look back with gratitude but only for a moment because the truth in life, the truth in the moment, the joy, the love, is in this moment. Who knows how many more deaths I will experience in this life, but I do hope that they continue to be infused with an abundance of health, happiness, joy, and love. Thus far I’ve been so lucky in my life and I can only expect that this pattern will continue, especially from now moving forward.

Soon we will be living in our new house, living in the life we are setting up for us to be parents, to grow ourselves and our family. This brings me so much joy that I can hardly contain it. It makes me feel really blessed that I have died enough to get to this stage. I’m also still gestating and working on a project that will launch later this year as well, a program to help women change their love patterns. I can feel that I am dying here too, letting go of the fear of if I’m not knowledgeable enough, or whatever perfectionist tendencies I have had with it. This will also take on that phoenix story arch and I will rise about and lead the way with my fire, my light, all born out of the ashes of my past. It’s all so beautiful.

So here’s to death! Here’s to moving forward! Here’s to embracing life in ways that the “old version” would not have been able to! Here’s to the Joy that growth and change can bring!

Loving My Pregnant Body

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I cannot even begin to express the amount of adoration I have for my own body as it’s growing this human being inside of me. I LOVE the new curves I have, I LOVE the way that my belly is changing, I LOVE that my body is able to do all of this! I am in complete and utter awe that my human body is even capable of this and to witness it changing shape and growing, literally growing, is absolutely amazing. I truly am in awe.

After my shower this afternoon I decided to lather on some coconut oil to combat the dryness of winter here in Australia. Thankfully it isn’t too cold so I just air dried my body and watched how the winter’s sun came in through the window and illuminated my growing belly, I was glowing! All of the feminine goodness that I am right now is so very attractive to me! I love it. I absolutely love it.

What a gift and blessing to be able to experience this. I feel incredibly grateful.

Ratha Yatra Hinduism Festival

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My contact experience with Hinduism seems to be growing now in Western Sydney. Today we just happened to look up what was going on in the area and there just happened to be a Ratha Yatra festival happening nearby.

As soon as we parked and started walking towards the park where it was held, a parade processing was just starting! All the colours, the smiles, the dancing, happiness, symbols, drums, bagpipes, and chariots were enlivening! It was incredible! We were invited to dance along and be a part of the parade, which we did and danced in the streets for blocks and blocks! We helped pull the chariot along as part of the festival activities and I was overwhelmed with joy! It was all happiness, all good will, people holding hands, holding our hands, sharing in the event so freely!

Afterward there was a huge vegetarian feast completely free of charge and it was incredible! The thousand people or so all enjoyed the delicious homemade food while sitting in the park on this lovely sunny winters afternoon. It felt so good to be there and everyone genuinely looked like they were having a great time, the kiddos that were young, the teenagers, the adults, the young families, the elderly, it was incredible!

From the openness, the lack of judgement, the happiness, and good vibrations I’ve experienced at these Hinduism events, it certainly makes me feel very grateful that I no longer go to church and quietly sit in the pew hearing stories poured out like I did as a child and youth. Life is truly a celebration and I LOVED this experience today!