How shall it be, this life we live
Will it have riches? Will it have Joy?
Will our endeavours bear fruit
Or will they end in nothing but frustration and despair

Will you be the driver, or just a passenger?
Will you choose your own road, or follow those in front?
Would you plan your route or wander the lanes of life?

First know what riches are and what brings you joy
Then you will find you are the driver,
and your journey holds all that you desire.

Normally I when I’ve been caught up in my work or just been immersed in mundane family activities, I can re-centre myself quite quickly, but not this time.   This time I had to recognise that I was lost so I could find myself again.

I’m not a workaholic – but I am commited to my work which is in a school.  It’s not about making money – its about providing the database infrastructure needed to support the teaching process.  If my work doesn’t get done then the teachers don’t know who they should be teaching when and where and the students don’t know where they should be when.  The busy time started before the Summer break and continued when the new term started.  I’d had nearly 6 weeks leave in the break, and spend lots of time relaxing … but in that time I didn’t manage to re-centre and connect with my spiritual energy again.  Maybe it was because many of the tasks I started before the break couldn’t be finished off until after the break, or maybe it’s simply that I didn’t recognise that I was lost.  (I’ve been told it’s not a good idea to blog about my work, but it’s too big a part of my life to never get a mention.)

I’ve finally caught up with all the work I wanted to get done in the first 2 weeks after the Summer break – only 2 weeks later than I’d planned.  There’s always something new to do, but I’m used to normal ebb and flow of my workload.  So, having caught up, I expected to go back to feeling my normal self.  Normal for me is not having separate mundane and spiritual activities, but feeling connected to my spirit while undertaking mundane activities and feeling connected with my physical existence while meditating or taking part in other spiritual activities.

This morning I returned to that state while meditating.  I realised what was missing, reached into my spirit and found my peace waiting there for me.  It feels like I’ve suddenly found my way out of a maze.

I normally do my spiritual art on my laptop PC, but that wasn’t practical for a large group to try. Instead, I had everyone work with wax crayons instead. When I first started to draw spirit I worked in shades of grey, as trying to figure out which colour to use got in the way of the drawing itself; so I limited the participants to using a maximum of 2 coloured crayons.

Adrian, who runs the Bancroft church helped me, and we started the evening with a series of meditations with explanations about linking with spirit and “intention” in between them. The aim of the meditations was to help the participants to open their energy field – allowing them to link with their spirit guides for the practical part of the workshop.

After a short interval, during which tables were set out, we moved onto drawing with spirit.

I asked the participants to simply use their crayon in short, shading strokes to begin with until they felt they should make any other kind of mark with it. I was amazed at how many different interpretations people had for these instructions, and how many different ways there are to hold a wax crayon. Everyone doodled on their paper for about 5 minutes and then we had a discussion on what had worked and what if anything anyone had managed to draw.

For the second attempt, I clarified how they should hold the crayon (like a pencil) and reminded everyone to have a specific intention in their minds as they drew. The results this time were amazing. There were clearly faces and representations of spirit coming out in the doodles. Whilst some people found themselves drawing what were clearly faces, others drew an energy field with a space where a person or spirit would be in the middle of it.

The third and last attempt produced even better results. The group had a better understanding of how their intention would affect their results, and they were much more relaxed. In the last session we had drawings that were answers to questions, robed figures and angels amongst the drawings.

The people who struggled the most at this workshop were the ones who can draw. Those who had been adamant they couldn’t draw found they could with spirit guiding their hands.

My thanks to Adrian Denney at Bancroft Spiritualist Church for giving me this opportunity, and for his help in presenting the workshop.

We hoped to buy our bikes last weekend, but the cycle shop we went to didn’t have anything low priced in the frame sizes we needed. So, I got the afternoon off work Friday, and we headed to a different cycle shop, in St Albans. We bought 2 Ridgback MX2 cycles and collected them Saturday morning.

I didn’t get to ride mine on Saturday – it started to rain, but I took it for a spin around the block on Sunday morning. It’s been about 4 years since I last rode a bike, and that was for just a few days at Centre Parcs. I’d forgotten how much fun it is! In the afternoon, we set up the roof carrier for the car for all four bikes and went to Marston Vale Forest Centre. There are 8Km of cycle paths there. We didn’t cycle the full 8Km but we did have a great time getting to know our bikes.

Our son’s confidence on his bike really grew as we rode around the cycle paths yesterday, so today we took the stabilizers off his bike – Yaaaayyy! We took him to an empty car park across from our house and within a few minutes he was riding his bike with confidence.

I think cycling together is going to be a great way for us all to get exercise together and have fun this summer.

To do this with my guide, I go into a meditative state while I’m holding my guitar and just let myself start to play something.

This is like automatic writing but with a guitar instead of a pen. The control is very light and its easy to get distracted or try to have too much control over the playing – and then it goes wrong.

I record the sound from my guitar via a transducer pickup, connected to my PC’s sound card.  I use Cakewalk software as the recording interface and to edit the recordings.

Click HERE to visit the page where you can listen to the recordings I’ve made so far.

It started well – there was a robin perched on a branch just a short distance from the entrance. But most of the other birds were very elusive.

At one point, my family were far enough ahead of me for me to feel like I was alone in the place. I could hear birds all around me, but I couldn’t distinguish one birds song from another’s, and I couldn’t see any of them. Occasionally I would get glimpses of birds as they flew from tree to tree, but none kept still for long enough for me to get a good look at them or photograph them.

Reflecting on this now, I wonder if how we first experience becoming conscious of spirit is similar. We know they must be around us, but we just can’t get a proper look at them. We might shudder as we sense their energy brushing up against our aura, but still we cannot see them, or hear them.

If I could be a bird, would I be able to see the other birds more clearly, and distinguish one song from another?

If I can experience myself as my spirit, how will that change what I can perceive?

Are spirit all around us but unseen, just like the birds in the trees were today?

Its easy to say that people would be happier if they accepted, and loved themselves unconditionally – but the journey to doing so takes time and perseverance. To accept oneself you first of all have to get to know yourself. You have to give up distracting yourself from unpleasant, negative feelings – but that doesn’t mean that you should wallow in self pity either.

There is a balanced pathway between the two where you allow yourself to look at what you are feeling, acknowledge it, and give yourself the opportunity to see why you are feeling that way. The part that then takes practice is to then neither judge yourself nor blame others for what you are feeling. You’ll find that once you allow yourself to experience those feelings they will lose their potency and fade away. Your life will no longer need to be driven by finding ways to avoid them.

Our negative emotions – the ones that we don’t like feeling, are all based in fear. Once we can look honestly at those feelings we can then take the next step to see what exactly it is we are afraid of – and in doing that the fear loses its power over us.

Each one of us can set ourselves free, if we are willing to take the journey to know and accept ourself.

When I first learned to meditate, I did not know that this is the knowledge it would lead me to. Sitting quietly with myself, I began to experience my existence in a new way; to feel my own energy circulating around my body, and extending beyond my body.

Having got in touch with my spirit, this spiritual awareness has now become my compass, in navigating what is right and what is wrong. I have no need of dogma and traditions which have lost their relevance. I am free to navigate my own road through life. It is my hope that I will be able to help others learn how to do the same.

On a higher level, if we can all learn to live peacefully – standing firm for ourselves but without attacking others, could that ripple out into world conflicts. Could it be that world peace starts within each of us?