The Courage of Vulnerability

The energies have been interesting over the past two days…like an emptying.  Of thought, of feeling…of me.

Interesting that on the day I couldn’t have possibly written a blog post, had absolutely no interest in doing so, (that was yesterday) – I had only two visits to Metewa.  I thought, yeah, exactly….I got that too… and then for fun I saw those two visitors turning up on my blog and thinking  how did I get here? WTF is this crap!! And complaining bitterly that they found me.

  That picture  made me laugh.

This post is really about something wonderful I’m watching on TV.  I know…it’s hard to find wonderful things on TV but I found one.

It started last week and it’s a programme on the Maori  channel about singers and song writers going into prisons to make music.

It is divine.

I have a little bit of experience with prisoners ….a few years ago I used to attend a rehabilitation programme for guys being released from Ngawha prison.  A group would live for a week at a marae near the beach at Ahipara and one day of that week, local healers would come in and provide reiki, massage, energy work, acupuncture…

It was the most amazing experience every time.  I learnt so much from those guys.  They were the most honest, the most clear thinking, the most heart-centred people I could ever meet.  I’d go there and sigh with relief that at last I could communicate in truth and honesty.

I didn’t find truth and honesty in every day life…

This honesty they had, it was based on discovering the truth of a word.

Vulnerability.

To me  vulnerability is the ability to be courageous enough to be completely open to  truth.  To open yourself fully to the experience, whatever that experience is.

Understanding the truth of vulnerability is a high level vibration.  Because of that, it is so easy to work, to do energy work, with these guys.

Which is why I had such extraordinary experiences with men on the programme.

And that’s why I love watching this TV programme…the songwriters are finding the same level of experience that I had. They are feeling humbled by the chance to work in this completely open way.  

Last night, two of the comments from the women prisoners were, when asked about what they wanted out of the programme, I want to find the inner child.  Another said, I want to forgive myself.  They didn’t say those things as just words on the wind, without substance.  They said that in that vulnerable state….that state of swinging the doors wide open and riding on the winds of truth.

That’s scary…truth is scary.

Which is why vulnerability has got a bad rap all these years.  Funny how we’ve learnt to see vulnerability as being weak and being open to danger.

HA! That’s the opposite to what the word means…as so many prisoners have personally told me ..without saying a thing.

Sunday nights. Maori. Songs from Inside. 8 pm                    

 

 

Southern Light

In two months time I’ll be in the deep south of New Zealand…I can’t wait!

I have felt the energies and set the itinerary according to what I’ve picked up.  It includes the Catlins.  I love the sound of the word Catlins.  And in researching photos on Google, I love the look of the place too.

Bluff is on the itinerary….when I wrote it down on the list, my body tingled….Bluff feels like another top place to visit.   I have never considered Bluff as a must see destination.  I’m glad I’m going.

….and I keep getting we’ll see the aurora australis, the southern lights. A couple of years ago I got information that I’d see them in 2012.  I still feel that, only much more strongly.

On the last two trips to the South Island I have seen some southern lights…my version of them anyway. 

The year before last I looked up  into the sky somewhere on Lindis Pass and saw irridescent clouds.  I didn’t know irridescent clouds existed until then. I saw pinks and green and yellow  swirl through a cloud… looking similar to what you see when you hold a paua shell in the sunlight and turn it to catch the colours…those colours and that movement were so beautiful …and it sparkled too. 

Last year it happened again when I was at Castle Hill, an hour west of Christchurch.  We were walking along the the track there and I looked up to see  an irridescent cloud forming.  The most beautiful emerald green came from all sides of a central point to build an emerald block of colour. I’ve adored emerald ever since and that particular green is the colour of the healing heart and the colour I worked with when I used to do energy healing. 

No-one I’ve ever met has ever seen an irridescent cloud.  So something’s up with southern lights and me.

White Sage, Drums, Rain

Years ago when I first started getting interested in energy I went to a few shamanic intensives.  I didn’t know why I was going to them – it was just that the word shaman/shamanic kept appearing in my mind.

I really liked the first one I attended near Tuakau on a piece of farmland gifted for shamanic retreats. Inside the retreat building we would lay down under a cuddly blanket and listen to the beat of the drum. The sound triggered my brain’s alpha wave and off I’d go on journeys of exploration and insight.

One of the sessions we did was just a bit of fun…we had to partner up with the person next to us and give them an answer to a question.  My partner wanted to know where she was going to live.  I got Waipukurau…I didn’t even know where that was exactly and I’ve never said Waipukurau in my life.  My partner said, well yes, I was thinking of buying land there for my horses. 

I thought really? Then I got all chuffed with myself for thinking up that particular place name.

I think I went to another weekend workshop in Auckland….can’t remember.  Apart of the wonderful feeling of listening to a universal heart beat (that’s what is was for me) and getting pretty neat insights, I loved the smell of white sage, that was always in the air from smudging. 

The smell, the sound; all of it  was like a homecoming.  I remembered all this somehow.

Then a friend and I went to a week-long shamanic course near Bethells Beach. The woman running the course scared me a bit. She had beady eyes and strange energy. She wasn’t my cuppa tea.

But two things happened.

One day we were gathering huge energy for some exercise.  I felt the energy come in, and I felt it gather.  I rushed out of the room and found a few fronds of ferns …I returned to my place and vibrated energy through these fronds….I felt  the energy of the ancestors flow in as I did this.                                 

 Then I felt my tipuna, ancestors, line up behind me.  Suddenly they were there…in a line….

It was the most amazing feeling because I had never experienced much to do with Maori spirituality or culture, even though I am Ngati Porou.  I was SO honoured to be able to feel the presence of these people.

After we finished what we were doing, a girl from Sydney  who was standing opposite  to me  rushed up and said, “I saw them, I saw your ancestors!!” 

It was amazing to me that someone saw what I was experiencing.  That blew my mind I can tell you!   

The other thing that happened was we experienced weather respond to our energy work.  We had  a  tremendous downpour of rain after an intensive afternoon energy session.  We finished the session, walked out of the centre, got to our room and suddenly… the most torrential rain came out of nowhere.  After  a swirling  and a rushing of water everywhere…it just stopped.       

Those were my early days of energy work.  They were fascinating.  A great introduction to where I am now. 

I don’t know where I am now. 

That’s the best part!

I Don’t Know…

I haven’t written post for a week but it feels longer than that.  I did try a couple of times..sat down at the keyboard and stared and stared and stared.  Nothing happened.

I watched this TV programme last night called Who do You Think You Are?  It about celebrities tracing their blood line.

Personally blood lines don’t do anything for me. Except  I did get excited when a family member doing our branchy tree found out we were pretty closely related to Rachel Hunter. 

 That was hilarious ‘cos I’ve always loved her ‘it won’t happen overnight, but it will happen’ soliloquy on the Pantene ad. That has become a Kiwi phrase.  You’ll often hear someone say, well, it won’t happen overnight……we all get the reference and laugh.

Apparently our line on my father’s side goes back to Charlemagne.  Yeah….right.  (yeah….right, comes from the Tui beer ad, scattered  on billboard aboves motorways.) 

So, the guy on the programme was a American football star who I  don’t know ‘cos I live in New Zealand and only know rugby football.  I do know he was very cute and black.  The black part meant he was most likely going to go back to the lives of slaves.

Just imagine…. the only reason you are a commodity is because you were born a particular skin colour.

This guy was given a copy of the Will of his great great grand nanny’s  slave owner.  His family’s  names were there on a page entitled household chattels.   His family were entered underneath the list of teaspoons and salt shakers. 

I’m  not writing about this  to say how much I disapprove of white folks. I’m writing to say, wow, isn’t that incredible….that this can happen?  That a whole society accepts the notion that one group of people is ‘less than’ another based on a particular colour.     

That’s some energy to hold….that’s some dense energy to hold.

I feel like there is still slavery.  If there are wars there is slavery.  You can only fight another if you think that ‘other’ is less than you.  This is not coming out right…I’m not saying what I mean….haven’t got into the swing of post writing again yet.

Here it is.  Bloody wars…and they are bloody.  Wars, slavery….they are two ridicoulous notions.  Both are ridiculous as each other.  Countries I know and the country I live in still believe in wars. 

So we are still in slavery because the basis of slavery is you are less than me and I can, if I like,  kill you for it. 

I don’t know about this post…not exactly elegantly written is it.  Something’s up!

Wananga

Almost the only time I feel completely at home is when I listen to Judy Satori’s light language.

That last full moon transmission… it was like sinking into the ulimate bubble bath. The cells of my body relaxed and sighed. 

At Judy’s retreat in January, a friend and I were sitting with a couple of the volunteers who worked hard in the kitchen to produce many meals for 60 of us participants over for days.

The day before I had noticed these two volunteers slip into the afternoon session to experience Judy’s energy and light language.

So I asked them if  the sounds and language coming out of Judy’s mouth sounded weird…

  One said no, the other asked “why couldn’t she just talk in English?”

I thought that was a good question and one that I hadn’t considered because I  get what she’s doing.

I thought well, if she spoke in English she would be commuicating with our brains.  Brains are a barrier  to communication.  More like a way to convey mis-communication.

So this language bypasses the beliefs and judgements and supposed logic and common sense and goes straight to the heart of the matter.

 Oooh, I like that…the heart of matter.

And there’s is no better way to communicate with our hearts than through      song.

Her voice sings to my cells.

Today her sounds, when I listened, felt like they sang to me about Mu, my Motherland.

The land of Mu ebbs and flows in my consciousness….sometimes it is always in my thoughts and other times it slips away.

I miss those times…those ancient Mu times.  

I am beginning to remember bits of how life was. It was playful. It was joyful.      

You know…the other time I feel completely at home is when I’m at places like Castle Hill and the West Coast of the south island.

Castle Hill feels like a Mu retreat…beaming in information for participants who go there ….like those  who go to Judy’s retreats at Mana. 

….and the West Coast, there is something very interesting about that area, particularly Punakaiki.  I’m not sure what the energetic is there, but something is going on.

In two months time I will be spending two weeks travelling in the South Island. It is not so much a holiday as playtime.

It feels like I  will  be drawn to specific areas for, well, the word that’s coming is ‘wananga’ .  This word is the Maori word for esoteric, higher learning, as far as I know.

I just looked the word up.

 In traditional times the word wānanga conveyed meanings related to highly evolved knowledge, lore, occult arts.(wikipedia)

My brain would quite like to go to Fiordland and the Catlins.  Tourist hot spots.

I’ll tell you what really happened later on in May.    

 

Black Wholes

Once I went through a black hole and stayed there quite a long time.

My body prepared me, it shut down.  I went whizzing over the Event Horizon and ….well, once in the black hole you canot describe it. So I can’t tell you more about it. 

To other people, my fall into the black hole  looked like I had depression. 

 I had no energy, no inclination to do anything.  It did not feel like depression.  I have had what is termed depression – when I had it I wanted to die. I never had fear.

With this black hole feeling,  I was scared and wanted to get out.

I have been taught by my culture and society  that black holes are not to be trusted. And black hole is not a nice combination of words…it’s doesn’t sound like a holiday doesn’t it.

Black hole of Calcutta.  That’s not a holiday is it?

 So I did not understand  black holing.  It’s a  bit like black water rafting, which a lot of crazy adrenalin seekers do in New Zealand …for fun. 

Those  people might understand the sport of going through a black hole.  The adventure.  The possibilities.  The darkness.  The opportunity to heighten awakeful, awareness. The positive aspect of the fear factor.

I just got the fear of falling, the fear of being in the dark, the fear of being different to everyone else. A lot of fear. I’m not sporty.

When I  popped out of the black hole – one day I was me again – I realised the beauty of the black hole.

In a black hole everything is squeezed so it  ‘becomes itself at its densest.’ 

A point of infinite density.

That is enormous potential for power.   Unfathomable possibilities.

From such a pin prick of matter …our Universe was born.

I found out, discovered through this personal and physical process, that black holes are extraordinary creators. 

 Blackholes are potentialites for creation.

 

Without them we would not be here.

Being in the black hole was not fun.  I would not recommend it.  I went because it felt like I had no choice, I was at the event horizon, being pulled in.

But the experience has given me a better understanding of the workings of actual black holes, the ones Stephen Hawking talks aboutthey talk about

Shadows on the Moon

The moon and I did our own thing last night. 

 I went out to look at it about 9.30 pm and it hid behind a cloud.  I could not feel its pull at all. I took a couple of pics…they were ‘dull’. 

The night before the photos were ‘outrageously bright’ and I was definitely in the moon’s thrall. Not so much enthralled as in its thrall…being pulled.

I went to bed at 11 o’clock last night and woke up at 9 this morning.

Big sleep after the wakefulness of the night before. 

 I rang my girlfriend and talked about ‘stuff’ and then mentioned the  solar flares and pictures of the aurora borealis. (We are both fans of the auroras).

 That led her on to saying someone she had ‘facebooked with’ in the last day had posted pictures of the moon. This person said it looked different, so much brighter than she could ever remember it. 

I am starting to get wisps of information about the moon and me.  That the moon is here to show me shadow.  Shadow is defined as ‘that which is in duality’.

So it’s not  ‘shadow’ as in, aspects of myself that I don’t like.  It’s more generic.  More about language and thoughts and actions that make us separate from each other.  Nationalities, religions, colour and culture are some of the shadows that are meant.

I am also getting something about Time. The moon keeps time, or keeps us in time.  Time is like duality….a lie.  Moon tiime pulls the daily tides, pulls the divine feminine in monthly tides. Then there’s full moon, last quarter, new moon, first quarter. 

 We are measured out in weekly quarters. 

There will come a time when we will not be measured out in quarters. I do not like the word quarters.  There is something very limiting about a quarter.

I am a guts..I want at least half.

Hehehe….telling my truth is getting to be such fun.

Light Night

It’s 4.45 am and I’ve been awake for 2 hours.  It’s the full moon you see…the full moon these days does weird things to me.

For one thing I can’t sleep when the full moon appears.  The full moon has a different feel to it in 2012…I don’t know what I mean by that. 

 I went out and looked at it for 30 mins at about 10 pm last night.  It did that thing  I mentioned in another post…it kept moving in the sky.  I mean, this gets weirder by the minute, it was moving and staying still at the same time.  It appeared to be moving but it was still in the same spot.

God…shoot me!!  What the hell am I saying?

That’s the thing.  I don’t know anymore.  I’ve been watching the moon for at  least five years now.  I have, during that time, been drawn to most full moons and I can always feel when the full moon is coming up without looking at a calendar…I can feel its energy. 

During those five years or so, the moon has acted like the moon.  It comes up, looks the same, follows its normal moon route etc etc. Same old boring thing each month.

But ….not  anymore.  The energy I get from it now is….well I don’t know the words in English because I don’t understand the feeling yet.  Only the word different fits right now.

I took some photos of the first full moon of 2012 as it rose on the east coast.  I had a new camera and shot the photos on landscape mode which meant the  the moon looked small and unspectacular.  That wasn’t the truth ….the moon was gorgeous and huge and red.

I magnified the photos last night…what was weird was there were four taken  at about the same time, all of them showed a moon reflection on the sea except one.  What happened there?  There’s a picture of moon and reflection, and another one of moon and reflection and then the next shot no reflection…. and then the last shot, reflection again.  And we’re talking about  two shots taken in the same minute, one with a reflection, one without.

These pics of the moon and reflection….I have been getting ‘a message’ lately that there are two moon, one real moon and one false moon (whatever that means…) As I wrote that I felt a tightness at the back of my scalp.

I gotta tell ya this whole moon thing is confusing me…and as I write that I’m getting more tingling around my scalp.  Confusion.   Some sort of masking of the truth going on, an attempt to cover up or cover over  versus an unmasking, uncovering of the truth.

It would be easier not to tell you these things I’ve been seeing and feeling…

I don’t want to look like a twit. 

 But when I try to deny the otherness I am experiencing…I feel disconnected from my truth. 

I know that sounds naff…but it’s true.  

I took a photo of moon just now to see if anything else weird is out there to tell you about tonight. There was nothing unusual to report. The pictures were ‘back to normal’.

Anyway….last night people down in the deep south of New Zealand might have got to see some southern lights in the night sky, some auroras australis, after the solar flare activity. That would have been exciting.    

I am well and truly awake now. 

Starting breakfast at 5.44 am.                                                              

 

 

More Birds

…the next best time I had with birds was at Castle Hill, up in the South Island’s  high country near Arthur’s Pass, inland from Christchurch.

I was new to ‘the spiritual path’ (whatever that means) and felt drawn to a 10 day shamanic intensive course based at Castle Hill alpine village.  I had not heard of Castle Hill or the magnificent boulders that live there until then.

The course itself  turned out to be very… isolating…..I felt isolated from the context taught and the people around me.  This was perfect for the energy work I was to do there.  I found  my own course work outside the schedule which, even today, 8 years later, I still remember as foundational to my understanding of energy.  One day I will tell you about it!!

Every morning the most beautiful bellbird coos came from the beech forest about a  kilometre away.  I did not know bellbirds (koromiko) because they do not live in the Far North of New Zealand.  But these koromiko coos were heavenly. It was a soft floating lilt – it gave me the feeling that I was waking up in a fairie land. A place where ‘things’ were not solid but fluid and malleable.  You could make a tree into a playmate….and the tree would tell jokes. 

Every morning I would wake up to this gorgeous sound. I wondered what the owner of this sound looked like.  One day the course facilitator showed us a bellbird sitting in a beech tree in the late afternoon.  It was a little bird that looked like a sparrow….only greener. 

A few years later a friend and I came through the area from the West Coast late in the evening and decided to roll the campervan into the edge of the beech forest for the night at Castle Hill village.  There was no sound of bellbirds in the morning. Silence.   I don’t know what happened to the choir.

This trip was also my first experience of the Kea.  I think it is the only alpine parrot in the world.  It is a very very clever parrot. I’ve seen programmes on the tele where keas are presented with a series of brain teasers….it’s a sort of food puzzle where, if they figure out which lever to push and which stopper to pull out, they get the food at the bottom of the cannister.  It takes them the blink of a eye to figure it out. 

I met my first kea on the road through Arthur’s Pass on that shamanic course,   We saw a kea wheeling overhead as we drove home from a day’s outing.  Our driver stopped the bus and we got out to look at it.  The bird flew down to us and landed on the ground.  I thought this was very cute at the time but, like I said, they are clever buggers…he was hoping for a biscuit or sandwich.    

Have you ever heard of Woof Woof?  I never met him which is a bit dopey because he used to live only 2 hours away from me, in Whangarei. 

Woof woof was a tui who lived at Whangarei Native Bird Recovery Centre.  You wouldn’t believe how clearly Woof Woof mimicked English words. He was (he’s dead now, a demised parrot or tui) ….completely hilarious.  Go to Woof woof talking tui on youtube and see for yourself.

Lullaby in Birdland

A couple of posts ago I wrote about my experiences with birds.  It was a description of chooks and ducks I have known.

The most incredible time I ever had with birds was on Little Barrier, also called Hauturu (resting place of the wind).  Hauturu is off the east coast, near Auckland.  It is one of the last remnants of primeval New Zealand bush because it has not be munched on by Aussie imports, better known as the possum.

It is a bird sanctuary because rats and stoats and weasels and feral cats and been ‘eliminated’. When I went there you could get a certificate for the killing of a cat.  I did not want that certificate.

Hauturu is not open to the public.  I was lucky enough to find a way onto the island for five days in 1991.  I did not know much about this beautiful place before I landed on its boulder ridden shore.

When we arrived at the Dept of Conservation (Doc) accommodation we were met by the welcoming committee – a band of  native pigeons (keruru) waddling around on the ground.  No-one sees this behaviour on the mainland – keruru fly from tree to tree, noisily, crashlanding onto branches. 

The other birds who flew in for the ‘meet and greet’ were kaka, a native parrot.  I have never seen a kaka before so I was delighted.

We left all our food, some in plastic containers, on the table outside the kitchen while we went to have a look around.  The kaka opened all the plastic containers and had a picnic.  They know how to picnic.

At dusk – the most incredible thing happened –  saddle backs, bell birds, kokako sat back and raised their voices to the heavens. The sound was the most divine symphony.  The most pure of notes fed the air,  it drank in this nightly blessing  and scattered it on the light winds across this small island. I wafted on the air too.

For you guys who are not Kiwis (yep, we call ourselves after one of our flightless birds)  saddlebacks and bell birds and kokako are not seen by most people in this part of the country and many people will never set eyes on a kokako or saddleback because there are not many of these beauties around.  They are a rare sight.

 The next morning I rushed out to listen to the dawn chorus.  It was like music that has yet to be penned by a muscial genius. There was no CD of this.  I was so happy and amazed by birds. 

Leaving the island on that first day of our arrival was Don Merton.  Don was (he is dead now) the man who brought the black robin back  from the brink of extinction and he is widely known around the world for his work with endangered species. He was there monitoring the kakapo, an endangered species, brought to the island to breed because of Litle Barrier’s predator free status. 

  The  kakapo  (kaka-parrot  po-night) is the biggest parrot on the planet.  It is so beautiful to look at.

It apparently smells like an old violin case and has a song that sounds like a boom.  It fills its chest cavity until it looks like it is a balloon ready to burst and sends that lungful of sound across the dark night.

It only sings to find a sheila (girlfriend) and it only gets romantic under the cover of darkness.

Anyway, we got to meet this international rock star of orinthology. He was a quiet humble man who spoke softly and said just a little about his work.  Then he was off to keep the kakapo recovery project booming on some far and distant island off the coast of southern New Zealand.

What was lovely was that a few years later when a friend and I were travelling in Cambodia, we arrived at our cheap lodge after a terrifyingly fast 100 km taxi ride….we turned on the tv to find something to watch to calm our shattered nerves …and found a programme about the kakapo. 

We lay there in the heat, amazed that we had just survived the maddest and fastest taxi trip in history and ooohhed and ahhhhed at our lovely  kakapo.

The next morning we caught another taxi to the Thai border with some Americans.  We traded nationalities and they said they had seen a TV  programme about New Zealand the night before.  We said, ‘ooooh yes, we saw it, the programme about the kakapo.’  The Americans said ‘you guys are crazy spending millions and millions of dollars just to keep some stupid birds alive.”

Guess you have to be a kiwi to get it eh.