Zentangle created using Staedtler fineliners.

Inspiration: my daughter’s birthday, Easter and a cat called Pip-Pip.

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Over the last three years I have spent time going on an inner journey.  I resigned from my job as a successful corporate development manager for a software house and decided to spend time ‘being’ instead of ‘doing’. I changed direction. Began going inwards instead of outwards. Staying in more often than going out.

It was an experiment.

I gave up alcohol and caffeine and established a meditation practice. I learned conscious connected breathing and  ecstatic dance. Began blogging, writing a book and painting.

I met other people on a similar journey whilst taking part in family constellation and healing voice work with Jill Purce.

Someone asked me recently if I thought it was worthwhile spending my time learning how to do nothing. I told them that it is, without doubt, the most important thing I have ever done in my whole life.

After three years I am much richer inside. But on the outside there is a certain poverty. I see how easy it is, on this road, to become introvert and lose one’s way in the outside world.

What is needed now, for me, is a way to bring together the outside and the inside; to be a business woman and a meditator and not feel that the one excludes the other. In the past I have often felt like two different people, neither seemingly fitting in with either group. Business and spirituality – can the two meet?

I have just set up my own business insurance brokerage. I’m a chartered insurance broker. It’s what I know, from a career point of view. I want to see if I can succeed in the world and not lose my roots in my being; if I can continue on a spiritual journey and not lose my roots in the world. It’s a new path for me. I haven’t been the MD of a company before. Or tried to bring the two sides of myself together like this – two sides which are totally different and moving in opposite directions it seems.

And I can see that I am changing direction already. Moving outwards. I have to constantly remember to ask myself why I’m doing what I’m doing. Four-year-olds ask why all the time.  Then they grow out of it or it’s educated out of them. A mother was so exasperated by her daughter’s ‘Why?’(s)  in the optician’s, the other day, that she asked me if I knew who invented the word. A wise one no doubt.

There is no reason why there can’t be a time for doing and a time for being. Business and spirituality have to come together so that each sees and accepts the other.  Then we won’t lose anything.

It’s another experiment.

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I started this zentangle in the boatyard during ‘fitting-out’ – in between taking the covers off and raising the mast.

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Looking East yesterday evening, Mars stood out, bright and distinctly red.

The sky was clear. I learned to spot the V-shaped pattern of the constellation Taurus.

On this blog I came across a link to this site, which looks like it might be a useful aid to helping me with my ongoing experiment of learning one new thing about the night sky every week in 2012.

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