Last night in a dream-walk, I was reminded of what matters – ‘matter’. We find ourselves temporarily on this plane of existence called Earth, in a space-suit called a physical body.
It is animated by the 4 elements of nature – Air, Fire, Water and Earth, the elements are the ingredients. Our particular unique recipe concoction is the matter we’ve been given to take care of, to learn to balance, to use sensitively and enjoy for the span of the lifetime we have available to us – that is the primary job and the starting point of the journey called ‘Life’.
But we are also taught all about the Art of Distraction – there are Magicians with their tricks everywhere. They say, look here, look there, look anywhere but where you are right now. Look at the past, look at the future and look outwards. Go to ‘school’, get educated about everything but you! Everywhere else is interesting and matters, but you aren’t in the equation. So you know what many of us do as a result? We disregard ourselves.
To find ourselves in time and space, we first need to look down at our own two feet and within, before we look up and out. Do what a baby does, look at your own arms, hands, fingers, look at your toes, feet, legs. Look at them with wonder and curiosity – what is this amazing ‘thing’ capable of? Stop everything else for a day and just become reacquainted with your Body Elemental. The centre of the spiral of your own life-story begins...and ends with the body you have been given. Everything else is noise, interference and distraction until you get your own house in order.
Then ask yourself, what has this body been given to me for? What have “I” come here for? My personal answer to that question is, "I am a Space-traveller and a Time-experiencer and I've come to learn how to create a life and a world of my own".
Get to know you first and foremost. That has to come before you can do anything well in the world “out there”. Start and end the day with You, like the bread of the sandwich - and the rest of the day each of us experiences between these two points is “the filling”. The filling can always be different, sometimes it's tasty, sometimes it's not!
As Byron Katie reminds us, your “business” is right where you’re standing now. Your circle of experience and concern is within arms length, everything else “outside” is someone else’s business to take care of. We have to remind ourselves over and over again, if I tend to my own business well, the world will change because I'm a part of it. If everyone improves the way they take care of themselves and understands themselves, then the quality of our relationships improve and the world at large will change. If not, hurt people - hurt people and the storm increases.
This isn’t about self-obsession, it’s about self-responsibility. Don’t ask someone else to do your primary job for you. You are temporarily matter and you truly matter.
The word matter, comes from mater, Latin for Mother.
You and I ARE Mother Earth, animated and walking around. The environmentalists would have you save the Earth “out there”. How about starting right here. The politicians use buzz words and propaganda like Carbon Zero – you and I ARE the Carbon. So are the Trees that we are all dependent upon for life. Why would we want carbon to reach zero unless we want the world to be full of inanimate lifeforms or artificial intelligence. Let’s reactivate our own Living Intelligence that is our birthright, we don’t need to be educated to connect with that. It is an ever-present life force and when we turn off all the noise and programmes “outside” and start listening more attentively to the signals within, each one of us can experience and truly know the truth of that living inner intelligence – once we’ve untangled the knots of the wounds left abandoned for too long that constrict that natural lifeforce, often a growing mass of pain within. When you look after you, you’re looking after your piece of the Earth. When you’ve learned to do that first, then you can broaden your scope and gradually expand your capacity to care for more space.
Children and/or animal companions may come in the next circle out, then dependent elders, your home, your garden, then the greater world beyond that. Life begins at home, but take care of your own business first.
Many people are at the point of exhaustion, burnt out. They’ve forgotten themselves. They know nothing and care nothing of their adrenals or their hormones, or their circadian rhythm, or functioning of their glands. They know nothing about the way their own brain works, or lungs, or liver, or kidneys. The space within is completely unknown, a total mystery to them. Yet all of that affects the perceptions and responses we are able to offer to that outer world.
The basics of life we are to come into deeper relationship with are very simple. So simple it’s easy to overlook and to think that by sharing this perspective within me that it has no value and isn’t worth recording in this way. I had to convince myself to write this inspiration-information I learned from listening within to that mystical intelligence. But then I look outwards at the world around me and I see all the others wandering around in their space-suit costumes and realise they may find use for this sharing in their own lives and some of these simple truths may have been forgotten or overlooked, so fascinating is the playground we all find ourselves in. The pain and suffering is rising, closer to the surface orf people's lives now felt and everyone tries to find a myriad of ways to escape their own spacesuit, themselves, whilst at the same time not really wanting to leave it (also called dying)
To heal we must feel. To feel we must take away distraction, historically called fasting. Take away the coffee, or the mobile devices or the money or the other so-called pleasures and people will feel their pain very quickly. I witnessed it once on a retreat and it was one of the most powerful perception experiences I've been gifted. The retreat was beautiful and simple, pure water, ocean air by a beautiful coastline, fresh healing food prepared by someone else - all we had to do was sit back and enjoy the teaching that was being offered. Within two days, one individual couldn't cope because there was no coffee and their personal emotions rose to the surface and so they ran away and left the retreat space to get the fix that helped suppress their own personal pain. These daily habits that can seem so innocuous can hide a myriad of behaviours that disguise a truth that sits just barely below the surface of existence.
If we were to put ourselves into a simple space, release all distractions and deepen our relationship with the four elements, come back to basics, the cleaning up would happen very quickly.
Not a single one of us can survive in this form on this Earth-Plane-Space-Station without Clean Air, Pure Water, Healthy Soil grown food and warm Sunlight on this skin, that requires the light to animate and charge the solar-powered cells within this battery pack, called “mitochondria” providing our true energy. The trick of this whole place is BALANCE, not too much and not too little and understanding the nature of those 4 elements – Air, Water, Earth and Fire.
The dream at Elemental is to provide a simple healing space, full of simple little retreat cabins and a daily routine that helps us reconnect with the 4 elements so that we can put "our own house in order again" and then return back to our lives "out there" and see how differently we perceive the life patterns that form the current matrix. I want to provide an opportunity for the cracks to appear in the other reality, because it's not the one I want to live in and this is one way I can see myself making a contribution to harmonious change.
The 4 Elements make up the Wheel of Life and keep it spinning or moving. This was represented in Native American and Celtic Culture, also called the Medicine Wheel. Life’s original and best medicine and entirely in our own hands, our own responsibility and the reason why people don’t like taking it. To accept that your life is in your own hands is too big a responsibility for many to accept – and so, like children, we want others to take care of us and tell us what to do.
The truth is, for many of us, it wasn’t our fault because we (deliberately) weren’t taught the basics. We weren’t shown the correct tools. We were often raised by people who did the best they could, whilst juggling multiple other modern day stresses, but from the patterns of behaviour that had been repeated over and over again until they become very distorted or broken behaviours – and then everyone copies everyone else and things just deteriorate into chaos. We may have been 'treated' too much or mistreated, we may have been ignored or rejected, we may have been compared and found lacking, we may have been forgotten or abandoned. And so we tend to mirror and repeat those experiences to the others we come into contact with and then often to our own children - or we pendulum swing in the opposite direction, creating a different kind of imbalance. The generational distortions become worse and every new generation arrogantly believes they can do it better! Yet all along the way, we project and transfer our pain onto others. We refuse to take responsibility for our own mess, preferring instead to be the judges and commentators about others lives, which we conveniently find to be messier than our own. Then we can justify and excuse our own overlooked issues.
No-one had a perfect childhood. In fact this generation of children/young adults who never had more materially in the western world, now seems to be the most damaged and anxious generation of children/young adults ever. Like it’s all one gigantic experiment and the rats in the maze are now turning on one another ferociously and everyone wants to claim victim status. Well yes, each of us has been the victim of something or other but we’re also capable of being our own healer too.
Elemental Garden will soon be flying the Medicine Wheel flag, reminding every single one of us, through the symbol it shows, that the Life that is each of us, is our own responsibility. We need to raise our children differently, with these ancient basics at their foundation, but we can't do that until we've taken the medicine for ourselves. Then we may stand a chance of building a truly healthy future with the new technologies that are rising and use them responsibly. If we can’t even use the “old technology” or better said, the original, incredible, largely unexplored technology of the human body, what right do we have to move onto the next shiny plaything, the latest tech, like irresponsible and spoilt little children – whilst all the while, the most amazing “tech” ever created is standing right here – the vast inner space that is you, an absolute original that we haven't even begun to discover the vast potential of.
Let’s go on a journey of discovery, just like in Star Trek and explore where no-one has gone before – this is the infinite possibility of the story of you. What might you do this year that lights you up from within and creates a kind of Heaven on Earth using Nature’s Technology?
That’s the adventure that Elemental invites...
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