I have appeared quiet on this page but in fact been incubating at unimagined levels, as this time has required of me. The stirrings, then, have brought to surface a cylce of huge movement, new projects, new forming bonds, finding community. Alongside more loss, sliding ever so close to the crumbly edge of radical change, of unanchored territory.

Alongside again, deepening into what I have at last recognised as my true calling, this work of embodied imagination, creation, contemplation, that ignites the soul alive through the immense knowing of our moving, living body. A recognition distilled over the course of a lifetime. Gratitude. Relief. A quiet arrival, one that has awakened dormant knowledge, and memory (and dares me to more change).

I was writing a new year post – three years ago – that was never published, falling silent on the loss of a life time friend.  In this time the crossing of human paths, the heart wrenching exprience of being let into the mystery of a life turning to its essence, the strangers who become family, the opening of the collective heart of groups of people sharing their ways to spirit,  have filled me with the kind of awe that humbles every bone of mine, stops me in my track and has me cry over a slice of shared pizza.

Never more than now I know how easy it is to isolate and miss each other, that the loneliness of being ‘missed’ is a place the most confident of us can trip into. Never more than now I hold dear the blessing of ‘Anam Cara’, our soul friends, the life witnesses walking alongside us, whether or not we are conscious of the thread they hold for us, of what they affirm and sustain in us, the difference they make to our sense of ‘existing’, the anchoring that they provide for a necessary sense of safety in ourselvs, in our being in the world.

So, at the turning of the year, tonight, I wish you all to treasure, nourish and be blessed by the presence of Anam Cara;
for your visions and intents and your hearts and souls calling to birth fully and rise courageously in the times to come, however big and glowy or quietly weaving their being away from sight.

EVERY single voice counts, in its own signature and nature, anywhere it works away inside the fabric of life.
I appreciate all and each who are in my life and around it in any role, immensely.
Be well, dear people, travelers of this plane, of this world that needs the light you are here to shine. Stay loyal to your truth, hold together, sing your own song.

I leave you with the words by John O’Donohue that many of you know, from his beautiful Book of Blessings.
Love to one and all

Filomena

~ A Friendship Blessing ~

May you be blessed with good friends.
May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.
May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where
there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness.
May this change you.
May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold in you.
May you be brought in to the real passion, kinship, and affinity of belonging.
May you treasure your friends.
May you be good to them and may you be there for them;
may they bring you all the blessing, challenges, truth,
and light that you need for your journey.
May you never be isolated.
May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your anam ċara. 

(John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, 1997)

The post The Grace of Friendship and Being Witnessed first appeared on AllThingsFlow.

This year I will be brief.

This year I wish to be, more than do, to gather at the centre of my core and listen, more than tell.

A few profound landmarks to my year, with those near me and all that connects to the choices made and the events unfolded.

I have taken a long sabbatical from my psychotherapy  work. A choice that has left space for my soul to emerge and guide me, for my music to return more fully, for the learning that was awaiting to occur and the help that needed to be given, for my presence to be available both to myself and to others.

I have lost my father at the end of November. The culmination of a journey that took many twists and turns and brought healing, amongst the suffering, and resolution, amongst impossible struggles. May he carry on his journey and healing in all forms needed where he now walks his path.

The way in which we followed, accompanied and actively jumped, body and soul, into the very different other journey of  healing for other members of the family, has brought tremendous fast and necessary growth in all of us who rallied round to support and allow, to face the shadow in each of us and as a whole, to let light in. This continues to unfold and amidst the pain and struggle and fear that run through, I wish to honour the courage for all involved to believe in our truth, beyond both medicine and others’ personal beliefs, and to pursue this no matter what.

This has opened our hearts, strengthened our souls, heightened our resilience and offered us the precious, invaluable, life changing sight and experience of what miracles really are about and the immense and deep work and commitment these take. It takes the courage and determination to defy messages we have been moulded by, born into, fed and woven with. It involves unraveling all this, undoing and making space for what needs to come forth and to breathe.

We learned that healing is not about doing, knowing, finding, fighting. Healing is about getting out of the way so that the light that’s always there, at the centre, can do what it does, can be what it is, and lead the way.

I have deepened into my mystical nature, long forgotten and vital to me. I have opened up more and more to the relationship that offers me not only love, but deep and unconditional respect for who I am in my truest being, and has supported my way to reuniting with it, step by step.

I wish to offer my immense gratitude to all those angels in all guises, near and far, who have come along or been there all the time, with help, with unexpected gifts, with wisdom, with the right word at the right time, with resources and with just being in my, in our life, without having to ever ask and responding when I did. I have made leaps in my appreciation and realisation of love as the only force we need and have to appeal to for EVERYTHING, and that this is all there is and all we are here for.

I want to thank Red Kite’s magnificent spirit, for leaving, at a crucial moment in my life this year, a beautiful red feather from its tale right there at my feet, whispering to my soul how to steer the direction and glide the winds.

Finally, I wish to close with a blessing Janet Adler, co-founder of the Authentic Movement Discipline, which I love and practice, wrote at the end of her book, ‘Offering from the Conscious Body’. The silent, profound impact of this practice, by which our being truly speaks from its wordless essence, has brought me back to the sacredness of our embodied existence.

May there always be light in and through all that which appears to us dark or difficult, and may our eyes and hearts be open to see and know this.

May the quality of consciousness

that is emerging collectively within our world

outweigh the quantity of unconsciousness

that suffers on our planet.

May all suffering become compassion.

May we be ready, may we be able.

Janet Adler, July 2002

The post Courage to Love first appeared on AllThingsFlow.

Rippling through in waves of tantalising reality

There it is – I’m sure it was there

Gone now in the remembrance of ‘me’

Grappling, rolling through the current of time and space

Ever elusive and yet it’s there in the reflection I see

Quick! pick it up – look over there!

The shades drip through my fingers

As I reach out for impossibility

How can it be there and not there?

Does my heart cast a shadow across my chest?

Are my hands like gloves, knitted together

To protect the depth of touch I yearn for?

Without the shadow your image is static, untrue

Flattening itself into something it’s not

Let’s dance & play in the shadows for a while

Let’s dare to dream of a world beyond

In the darkness

In the deep, unfathomable wilderness

In the murky greyness

It’s not clear, it’s not without risks

Can we jump together?

Peeling away a perceived reality

And embrace the unknown shadow of truth

Come take my hand, breathe deep in unison

Together we could survive.

© 2011, Jayne Johnson – 1^st June 2011

The post Dancing in the Shadows first appeared on AllThingsFlow.

Little did I know at that point how much this would not only be my hope and wish but become a live theme throughout the year. Events amongst my friends and family, tragic losses, struggle, severe illness, faced me with what we are always faced with at such times, the possibility to drown or learn, to disappear in a spiral of powerlessness and grief or find, right where that spiral meets the earth under my feet, resources untapped into, neglected treasures, powers and blessings and the possibility of change I would have walked past blindly, had I not needed, wanted to dig and kick that door open.

Many little, repeated acts of faith have been had since, and some big ones. Each of these I will want to write better and more about in the new year.

Grief there has been, and loss, but I have witnessed and been part of some extraordinary miracles too, so much so that in the crack that opened within my habit driven mind and in my heart, I had to realise what miracles actually are, not the random, credit earned concession of some external force, but an active, committed, revolutionary inner process that requires choice, challenge, a complete paradigm shift regarding who and what we are, the uncompromising listening to what the soul (our intuition, our inner knowing) is pointing at – regardless of what all other voices say around us – and the courage, to follow, no matter what.

This calls for faith. This calls for re-examining what faith, as well, actually is! Not the religious construct of a faith in a being other than us, but the truly and deeply, life-of-all beings faith in our true nature, that whatever Light we profess to believe in, whatever we call what religions call by many names, whatever natural spirituality calls life force, nature, whatever the vision attached to this, it is us, and we are it.

There is no divide and therefore our body does not have ‘it’ inside of itself, but is itself inside of ‘it’, we all are this. We all affect each other, not matter what distance and place, we can all, and all do, move the energy, the actions, the thoughts, the decisions that change us and everything else. This is our power.

We also have limits, of course, this is our power too, to know and embrace our limitations, our shadows and so from there, stripped of everything’s we held onto, tap into the light we have forgotten, and be ‘graced’ by it and find – by opening up to it – help, out there, in here, and generate healing at whatever level we have access too, whatever alignment possible.

I know this has been said, written about, spoken. I am not wishing to add one more doctrine, one more enlightened teaching here. I am trying to describe what words can’t, the experience of stepping  and feeling completely immersed into that centre of light and clarity, quietly conscious that this is not a ‘special’ place, but ‘home’.

Faith, trust that listening to soul and doing our best will bring what can be brought, and more than we imagine, that we can endure, change, grow, heal and act in ways beyond those we might feel encouraged to and are able to predict. Acts of faith imply the unknown, a trust that what is unknown now will show itself and that a choice that feels important, true and necessary,  is still so, even if we don’t know where it leads. A trust, with this, that we will be and find what can support us along the way, that the way itself is already, in each moment, the destination; that not knowing opens more  possibilities than those we restrict ourselves with by planning it all.

I have made radical choices too this year, following a soul call I heard a year ago, needing to trust, knowing this is all I know, but know it deeply and powerfully. It’s time now to go with my faith and find out.

I thank you all, my friends, family, my teachers in all forms, the wonderful beings I have crossed paths with, sometimes for a long stretch of time, in my work and I have said goodbye to, who have blessed me with profound sharing, let me into their soul, with words and insights and love that surprised, moved me and showed me parts of myself and what I am about I was completely oblivion to.

I thank Spirit, in all its forms, within and without and around. I thank mother/father/ sister and brother  Nature in all its forms, within me and on this beautiful earth. I remember those dear ones who have crossed over into a different being this year, teachers all in my life to whom I owe gratitude and blessings of community and drum beat that have changed and enriched me.  My love goes to those who will have threads and journeys of grief to unravel before finding ground again, this coming year, and those who have and are coming through to greater light.

May we all be the Light that we are,

fully,

and have the courage to follow, no matter what,

this year and beyond

Filomena x

The post A Blessing of Light first appeared on AllThingsFlow.

I am torn between the wish to see you enfettered from my maternal bonds and yet, I feel fear

You asked once had your life been planned by me to come into existence and in truth it was not

You made that plan for me and it was one I gladly accepted and embraced, you made me mother

Yesterday as I watched you with the eyes of detached observer, I saw the you that others see

I realised that for almost twenty years the you I have known has been uncensored and intimate

The you without constraint and sometimes without control, where you end and I began vaguely drawn

This moving on, this separation will surely change all of this and I must grieve the loss brought by my desire

For in my heart I know the time has come and I want to feel this pain.  I instigated it, I can do no more.

You have all you need my child and you are ready, so go with love and live your story.

© 2011, Barbara Isherwood – 26th July 2011

The post The Letting Go first appeared on AllThingsFlow.

The clamour of voices

Of energy searching to be born

Hold on tight and ‘push’ against the other

Surging, groaning under the strain

The clash, the roaring thunder of life

Is asking for space

For room to grow

For a channel to flow

I can feel you in the resistance

In the edges around you, around me

Holding ground, standing firm

Ready for the battle of life

Fire shoots its purposeful arrow across the space between

The sparks fly and embrace in an arc colour, of vibrancy

Speaking of wounds long forgotten

Of the injustices of a suffering child

The tolerance of destruction

Bearing the sword of death

Breathing through the pain of this tortuous labour

When will it end, when did it begin?

The space in between

The void of darkness is the only thing remaining

Into the scorched ashes scattered to the winds

Lowering down deep in to my body

Letting go into the cavernous space of nothingness…

A deep sigh

A sob

And a new heart is born

© 2011, Jayne Johnson – 1^st June 2011

The post New Life first appeared on AllThingsFlow.

Last year, at this very time, the town I live in and surrounding villages and towns were only just beginning to surface from the most severe flood catastrophe in a long time. Both the magnitude of this event and of the unprecedented community cohesion and action to bring us all – literally – out of the water,  have left an enduring mark in our spirit that makes us look around now, at the aliveness and brightness of everything this year, with wonder, gratitude and relief.

Somehow, in my own soul register, this felt like a turning point not only in this valley, but in the collective consciousness of many, carrying an overbearing sense that we have entered times of unimagined change, the sense of loss most prominent at the time and also, later on, of possibilities, but with an inevitability and necessity attached to this that made the feeling unsettling, pushing some of us to sniff the air, scan the horizon, search for signs and tracks. Fox as an animal symbol has appeared repeatedly throughout my experience of this time.

I won’t need to sum up some of the most crucial and destabilising global events that characterised this year. So much of it in process and indicating again a magnitude and unpredictability to the possible developments of such extreme phenomena the human species is causing and living through that is evoking collective terrors and shaking the texture of our known world.

Many have realised how so much of this unthinkable turmoil has to do with the erupting voice of all neglected distress, poverty, injustice, deprivation and fears. Like all suppressed voices, this explodes and manifests in extremisms and irrational, counter-survival behaviour, mob based reactions, thoughtless blind attacks. An extreme way of becoming visible, being heard, reclaiming power, ‘amplifying’ the problem so that it can no longer be denied.  This is both a catastrophe and an unprecedented opportunity. Here we listen, respond, learn, change or implode.

In my personal life I have felt directly affected by these events, some more than others. There have also been illness, distress and loss amongst my circle of friends and family and we lost a dear friend too at the end of Summer, painfully and shockingly.

Life feels more precious than ever, the capacity to maintain hope more important than ever. But above all, in the face of the pervasive sense of powerlessness and disillusion, it feels absolutely crucial to recover and preserve as sense of meaningfulness, of worth, and of our birth right ability to effect and change the course of events, decisions and actions both in our own individual lives and elsewhere in our world.

This might sound naive or out of place, but at this time the abundance of magical imagery in children movies and stories presents itself to me in a new important light. This is not about denying the hardship and tragedy of some realities in ours and other people’s lives, but about reminding ourselves of our original ‘trust’ in our ‘power’ to impact reality. If used this way, the magic we believed in as children will have taught us not about relinquishing this power to other entities, bigger than us, farther away, but about faith in our own ability to connect to the inner and outer resources we need to be who we are, connected, worthy, effective, impactful, meaningful, not by merit, not because of a reward for extraordinary, heroic and unusual  acts, but by virtue of our own existence here.

As a friend put beautifully in one of his posts lately, not only we each and all have influence on the course of events, on our environment, our politics, our economy, our health, our creativity, but we can’t possibly NOT! We are inextricably  part of ecosystems, at micro and macro levels, inevitably, undeniably. Nature, life, our bodies, communities, humans and all species operate this way, it’s a given. Once we fully realise and feel this in our own very cells, and act accordingly, we then effect the most powerful paradigm shift in recent history, we know that we cannot NOT have power and that to act as if we didn’t, also has an effect, consequences, far reaching and unavoidable. So we might as well embrace our power responsibly and notice how far it goes, make it work in favour of life.

The good news is also that once we know this, we no longer have to feel that it is the size or specialness of our acts that makes a difference, but ALL of who we are, ALL OF THE TIME. That all the little minute, neglected, underestimated, overridden acts of positive change, of compassion, help, courage, decisiveness, integrity, has infinite ripples.  Look at how much has also been achieved and changed and stopped by the force of collective gathering and effort everywhere! Powerlessness becomes an illusion.

So here we are. Alan Watts says in one of his inspiring talks that life is an act of faith. Think about it, our daily lives are made of endless series of acts of faith, of which there is no guaranteed outcome (just think of how many of these takes to just drive in a box in the middle of traffic for few mins to the shops!). Pure faith.

The magic is that we CAN. This is my wish for us all.

May we notice and believe in the innumerable acts of faith that fill our lives.

May we believe in the real, practical magic of our birth-right power, our capability to make change, to create, to heal, to affect lives, to intervene.

May we trust in the force of collective spirit, of community, of human solidarity, of compassion, of courage and the innate, creative, imaginative, wondrous resilience we and all living being possess.

May we know deeply that we are never alone as the web we are part of is always around us and we are children and parents of nature, and fellow beings to all life.

May each of us remember the child’s magic, what made us most happy and this way bring back our most necessary creative gifts to the world and to ourselves and travel these times to come with faith and determination.

Cross safely and lovingly into this New Year xxx

The post An Act of Faith first appeared on AllThingsFlow.

I am sat watching the sea, through this beautifully wide window,  from a place special to me and to my companion, feeling blessed to be able to be here. Only an hour ago the horizon had disappeared into a myst of sea spray, clouds and wind, the waves beating hard against the rocky shore, splashing onto the road. Will it fill the hollows in between and flood the passages, will it retreat pulling with it what now stands on solid ground, into watery currents… But the tides begin to go back in, slowly, and all feels calmer and safer again, the lights appear in the distance from mainland, the wind is softer, dry land beings here, water dwellers there.

We have arrived here from our flooded home grounds, a repeated scene this Winter we struggle to behold, despite the equally strikingly resilient, generous and compassionate actions of human cooperation everywhere, creating webs of help, reconstruction, fund raising, consciousness activating and down to the ground aiding, feeding and holding. But let’s hold on to this, it will come in handy later on.

Disasters on a larger scale have been known this year, some less ‘natural’ than others, when we look at how much our global misuse, abuse and obtuse exploitation of our earth’s resources has a hand in them. Cause and effect may well have hundreds of years in between them, thousands even, but they show up, sure and precise as only nature can be. This is not negotiable, it is as it is, and we are learning the hard way, the way of the ‘fools’.

Walking along the beautiful shores and hills and river beds covered in heather and other sturdy bushes and trees here these past two days, you can catch a glimpse of a better balance in the living environment, where the torrential rains and the abundance of waters on the land and around it have still not turned into devastating floods. The roots of trees and shrubs hold the ground steady, besides ‘drinking’ the water. The space around the water courses allows for outlets, dispersion, re-channeling.

Elsewhere, just around our homes, bushes and trees have been burnt down to allow for bird shootings we don’t need in order to feed ourselves, for if we knew anything about true hunters we would know that in any population that ever lived in symbiosis with their land and other animals, anything that was taken was also put back, the land attended to so that life could preserve itself. We shoot for fun, and to do so we act as the most obtuse and unknowing of hunters, wasteful, destructive and in fact endangering of the survival of their very own species. For money, for distorted ideas of tradition, for power, for greed.

We can see this very same process in any unnecessary, mindless drilling, deforesting, damming, killing, trading, exhausting life on, above and below the surface of this earth, waging war, fabricating and selling weapons to those we wage war onto, persecuting those we have exploited and reduced to poverty, living and thinking as if privilege will never have any costs for the privileged also, walking this earth as if there even was such a thing as ‘entitlement’ to take endlessly, as if we were exempt from the laws of nature, as if there, anywhere, woods or cities, such a thing like privilege existed at all.

So we are flooded. By waters, by heat, by wars, by the trauma that these times in history are generating and passing on, by the continuous news updates on it all, by the spreading of fear and distress, by knowing and by ‘not’ knowing.

But hold on…..

In these past two days, perhaps because of standing closer to the sources of streaming information about this, I have also felt flooded by the human spirit’s capacity to respond with generosity, creativity and resilience, across diversities and distances and in fact even more resourcefully ‘because’ of these. Looking up from this, the world view fills up with acts of immense courage and healing, of dedication, of barrier braking, of creation, of life saving, of radical integrity, of love and survival in the face of unthinkable circumstances. For this too is what we are capable of, this too mirrors nature’s persistence in carrying on, infiltrating wherever it can, reshaping, recreating, getting through and over, finding ways, returning, producing miracles.

They don’t get broadcast much, we aren’t bombarded with them. Often, in fact more often than not, they are not even visible or known to most. I, for one, sit with many of these miracles, day in day out, in my therapy room, in other work I do, with people in my life, with the wondrous healing power of making music, dancing, singing together, feeling this is the real privilege, this constant remainder that hope is possible, not only, but that it is an inextricable part of nature, of life.

I am not a public talk giver. I myself this year have felt the need to reroute, to go and quench my thirst for inspiration from those writers or talkers in the realm of human spirit that could ignite my own hope, remind me of what deep down our souls know, and who will speak to souls in the ways in which souls can hear and then breathe again in recognition. Of those I listened to, one more than anyone else spoke to my own soul in ways that resonated so deeply it made me jolt from the haze of pointlessness everything seemed to be sinking in then. It was Joanna Macy and her ‘active hope’.

This spells out what sounds like a belief, but is in fact a process at work in nature as in human spirit in forms we can experience continuously at every level, if we let ourselves: the paradoxical truth that it is only when we allow ourselves to fully feel the suffering,  the ‘pain of the earth’ and its inhabitants, our own pain, only then we acquire the power of hope. Many of our ‘distractions’ , as well as our acts of blindness and destructions, are lead by the denial of suffering and despair, the denial of pain and mortality, by the fear of these. But if we can learn to fully feel the possibility of sorrow and mortality, then we become huge and spacious, we don’t need to shrink into temporary solutions, to contract into cutting off from it all.

If we can feel this and still remain open, then there is room for compassion, courage and hope. If we can weep with the earth than we are immensely powerful. If we can weep with our fellow humans and other beings, then we have nothing to fear. And when this happens, hope and change become possible.

This is therefore my wish for this year ending and for the new one beginning, for us all everywhere:

That we may learn to stay with the pain of the earth without flinching away until we get to the light

That we may know the true privilege of feeling alive and of knowing the daily miracles of existence up close

That we may create, keep and support the community of fellow life travellers around us that we need to belong, to nourish ourselves and to feel safe and sustained

That we may each find the gifts unique to us and our very own purpose and bring them to our lives and to the world with confidence and joy

That we may always, always know that hope is as natural and legitimate and constant as the setting and rising of the sun and the moon, and the pulsing of the earth, and the sound of the sea

Love to you all

Filo x

The words of Joanna Macy for you:

The post The Sound of Hope first appeared on AllThingsFlow.

I am entrained
To the perfect rhythm of the Tides
Woven with the Moon

I am washed ashore
From the relic of shipwreck
From turbulent journeys,
Gold polished back to its own elemental shine
By sand and stone and salt and water

I am nourished
By the abundance of the Ocean,
Ancestral Home to all embodied beings,
Birthing and rebirthing,
Dreaming in the Depth,
Glittering in the Light

I am taught
By Gannet,
To dive with speed and precision
When food appears close,
Gliding, patrolling, playing in wind currents all other time

I am shown
By Basking Shark,
To swim effortlessly, purposefully,
Mouth wide open to receive the nutrients just there,
Filtering out the rest,
Knowing to follow an inner radar
To a spot of plenty

I am brought bare
To the ancient lands
From the womb of everything,
To retrace my steps,
To meet the wordless knowing of Soul
And create anew
What ever was, ever will be.

To Arran

 …and to my soul companion and all that he teaches me to see of the beauty of inner and outer lands x 

Photo by Edward Foster

The post Sacred Shores first appeared on AllThingsFlow.

Written on July 31st 2015, Blue Moon month (twice a full moon in the same month)

Image: ‘Nature’s Voice’, oil painting on canvas by Edward Foster

The post Blue Moon first appeared on AllThingsFlow.