The journey begins...

Well I am confused – as usual I started out with great intent to produce a blog everyday for 15 days, and here I am – Day 3, and I although I have a GAZILLION topics running around in my mind, every time I decide to start one, the old monkey mind steps in, and starts hammering me! Who do you think you are – some sort of expert on Balinese culture after only a few short months in one place in Bali? – Well it’s been 9 months and I have travelled around a bit – but you get my drift.

I have been living a quiet life far removed from my previous life in Australia, and now I am writing, and if you like “exposing” myself to you all, my old familiar responses are creeping back in. The “I’m not good enough” voice has appeared again. I always combated this with lots of hard work, manual and mental!

I will try to briefly describe my journey. The whole story may emerge as snippets, or as a whole book, or may never be told – we will see. These days I am able to calmly say with gladness in my heart, “I am not in control”.

For as long as I can remember, I have said “I just want to go sit on a mountain”, and so being transplanted into a mystical mountain in the middle of Bali was an answer to this prayer! Of course years ago, I would never have described this as prayer – that would be admitting to the existence of God, and that was all tied into my post-protestant trauma!

I am a recovering control freak, and doing this blog almost led to a relapse! Actually I fall all the time, but I am very tolerant of my own humanness now. As Laboratory Manager for Dairy Farmers milk factory, we used to handle about 22,000 pieces of data a day, and all the bosses really wanted to know was that no bad product was out there to hurt anyone, and at the end of the month – how much it cost to maintain this level of control. So I was in charge of making sure all the standard procedures were followed, all the instruments calibrated, all the factory workers were trained in hygiene and quality control, and the farmers and factory received accurate reliable results whenever and in whatever format they needed them. I used to reduce that data to two charts for the monthly management review! I was working an average of 80 hours a week, studying Total Quality Management at night, bringing up two gorgeous girls in a large home in the country. My life was rockin’ and rollin’ – I was high on this level of control.

Nearly 15 years ago, I finished my third university degree, an MBA with the only high distinction in the final class (of course). I took a redundancy, left all of the committees and organisations that I had been leading, and focused my energies on getting to know my teenage daughter, so I could help her walk through a really tough patch that she was going through (while I was busy being supermum). I can sincerely say that her illness was my greatest gift, as it forced me to stop, just stop.

At this stage, my 25year marriage broke down, both my parents had recently died after long battles with cancer, and I was living far removed from my sisters and other family. I had no close friends in my life – I had been busy, trying to be superwoman, and trying to control everything…  During these tough times I felt very isolated, and very alone. I realized I could not control everything that was happening to me and my loved ones and everything around us.

One night when I did not sleep, I stayed out on my verandah, with numerous pots of tea, lots of crystals and candles, my tarot cards, a diary and a full moon. I was spent! I had no answers! I finally surrendered at about 4am! I asked for guidance and help to a “something” that was “bigger” than me and I received that help in the form of messages that I was open to, that started to lead my life out of the hole I had fallen into. They said to me that if I asked for help with a pure heart, not for ego, and check that I was not hurting anyone, that their help would always be available to me. And so the journey began…

I started to open my mind beyond science, business and control. I had rejected mainstream Christianity when as a teenager, I was expelled from the religious instruction class for asking too many questions! I was top of the class in everything else – expelled – as if!!!  So now, in my mid-forties, as the perfect family I had tried so hard to create, collapsed around me, I started reading philosophy, books on what other people believed around the world, ancient and modern religions. I studied the internet for any esoteric (outside Christianity) topic I could find, I read about other cultures, chaos theory, quantum science, art, literature, and music, opening and broadening my intellectual ideas. I found it imperative to balance this new information by filtering it through my country Queensland lens! At this stage I had never had a passport. I had seen a fair bit of Australia, and after two years at university in Brisbane, decided that my heart belonged in the country, and that cities were great for three or four days, but I wouldn’t like to live there again.

The right books starting appearing in front of me, given to me free or cheap, because after the redundancy with a big mortgage, a sick child and a divorce looking likely, money became very tight. Louise Hays book “You can heal your life” literally jumped off a sale table onto the floor at Brisbane Central Railway Station after I had been flown down to HR to receive news about my redundancy.  Carolyn Myss’s Fulfilling your Sacred Contracts CD’s played for years in my car, when I wasn’t listening to country music especially Beccy Cole’s raunchy album Wild at Heart! As my life twisted and turned, I began driving hundreds of kilometers every week. I would love nothing better than to belt out a loud and sometimes tearful rendition of “Too strong to break”!

People with an open view on the mysteries of life started appearing in my life. Offers of guided meditations, healings, past lives and even exorcisms helped me build a connection to what I called “the Universe” and slowly I started to walk my own path to “I didn’t know what”

Om Swastiastu

To be continued… hopefully J