What is your Superpower?

When I lived a cramped, hectic life in London, I often romanticed the texture of life in a scenic little seaside cottage with no neighbours in Cornwall or a tiny remote island a few miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest or a lonely dwelling on the side of a vast mountain in the Himalayas. Deep down lay an incipient desire to experience it.

A few years on, I make the choice to live in a one bed-room house in remote South India. Malnad, the region of rain, notorious for a long heavy monsoon. The nearest airport, five hours by road on a good day and the closest half-decent hospital an hour’s drive away. After a few months the newness of this rural setting starts to diminish. Mornings begin with chirps and trills emerging out of a serene silence. I draw the curtains to find the morning fog gently floating across layers of overlapping lush green slopes, reaching right up to the horizon. I am filled with gratitude. I say to myself, ‘Don’t ever take this for granted.’

If I start listing all the things that are not here, an exhaustive inventory might appear – a library, a café, a restaurant, a museum, an art gallery, a community centre, a swimming pool, a book shop and so on. But I do have a superpower. On whatever I put my attention, that seems to grow, fill my awareness. Music, chanting, yoga, reading, writing, meditation, nature – all the things that I used to struggle to make time for, are now in abundance.

I can choose where I want to place my attention because this is my one precious life, my one chance to live and learn and enjoy. I am exactly where I want to be and need to be. This is the perfect opportunity to match my inner silence with the one I sit within. To observe and let go. Examine and let go. Feel and let it go. Think and let it go. Breathe in and let go.

Contentment does not need objects to justify itself. In every moment, it is present as a choice. At the tiniest hint of my attention, it shows up, smiling. The more I sit with it, the more it makes itself available. When I touch, its texture is silky.

Caves are well-known conduits to enlightenment. May be this is mine. I wonder if contentment is another name for happiness.

Who’s the boss?

Posted by kidsaregifts20

Did you know there’s an organisation that brings science and spirituality together? Its mission is to create a kinder, heart-centered world where we care for one another and live harmoniously. It’s called the HeartMath Institute and offers many free resources.

They have found that the heart is not just a mechanical pump. It contains thousands of nerve cells. That is probably the reason our memories and trauma are stored in various parts of our body, mainly the brain and heart.

We were taught in school that the brain is a master-organ but it’s the heart that tells it what to do. The intelligence of creativity, innovation and intuition resides in the cells of the heart. Brain neurons are the antennae that follow the heart’s desires. For example, I want to speak and understand Spanish says the heart. The brain follows.

We humans have a stunning ability to self-regulate. Our biology is engineered as a soft technology. Our fundamental physiology is made up of ion-potentials across membranes. We’re the only form of life that can harmonise its two major neural organs through Heart-Brain Coherence. We can alter the chemistry in our bodies. Once this coherence occurs, we can heal and be healthy. The immune system is strengthened, longevity enzymes rise and stress is reduced at a molecular level. Three minutes of this shift can produce beneficial effects for 6 hours.

3 steps:

Shift in focus – into the heart
Shift in breath – slow it so the exhalation is longer than the inhalation
Shift in feeling – a positive feeling – initiate Gratitude on demand.

We are powerful self-regulators. It is a God-like ability that we have, to heal ourselves. We’re conditioned to feel helpless and think we need external help. Sometimes we do need interventions, but we can honour the gift of this body to heal ourselves.

Like this only.

Posted by kidsaregifts20

I guess only in India we are talking like this sometimes. But you are understanding. So, it’s okay. If the weather is not kind right now, it will change. We will pass through time. We’ve got to have patience, like the trees. No kind of weather is lasting for ever. The autumn ten years ago, I thought would stretch past eternity. I was wrong. How little I knew. It changed many times, inside and out. I wonder how many other things I was wrong about.

Wolf-moon.

Posted by kidsaregifts20

Twelve years ago the word ‘lunatic’ was removed from all federal laws in the USA. It was replaced with ‘of unsound mind’.

Edgar Alan Poe has said, ‘I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.’

Emily Dickinson begged pardon for her sanity and claimed that much madness is divinest sense. Some days, sanity is a serious challenge as all I do is dart around from one home to another. I have five homes – illusion, reality, the past, insanity and my breath. I wonder if others do too. Do you have a few? Happy full-moon!

Heartless humans.

Posted by kidsaregifts20

In the interest of electrical safety, some trees had to be cut down. Luckily, not the one above as it is out of the way of the lines. I simply watched as a man scrambled up a tree with a machete and single-handedly, branch by branch, slayed it within minutes. It felt like witnessing a murder I had paid for. I wonder which one of these is more painful for a tree – to be hacked down bit by bit or to be neatly slit across the trunk with a chain-saw.