People talk about being connected to the source. Unconsciously it is what we all seek: a feeling of being at home, while feeling clear and guided at the same time.
It sounds good, doesn’t it: the source? The source of energy, the source of wisdom, the source of inspiration, the source of love, the source of happiness ….but what exactly is it? It’s a term you hear a lot, but how do you know how to find it, or who will lead you there if you don’t know what exactly it is.
Discovering all these things is a lifetime’s journey, one we travel a bit like a salmon, spawned at the source and then spending most of our adult lives at sea before we understand that it is time to use our power to swim upstream and find the place of our origin where we can be happy fulfilling our destiny and leaving a legacy for the next generation.
Often it is pain or misery that compels us to find a way out of the sea. That was certainly the case for me. I was swimming competently but unhappily in the ‘sea’ of our mainstream culture, a mother of two with a full time job as a BBC producer, when I was stopped in my tracks by a brain tumour. The condition disabled me. I suffered pole-axing headaches, and I was cross-eyed, dizzy and nauseous, to say nothing of the fear that such a diagnosis brings. But, mercifully, the tumour was buried too deep in my head for the doctors to operate, and so, in spite of myself, I was forced to recognize that the solution to my situation lay inside, with me, and not outside, with them.
My discovery of healing, through the work of American healer Martin Brofman, opened my eyes to a different view of reality than the one I had been accustomed to. It proved the start of a journey that feels like the salmon’s journey back to the source (insofar as I can imagine what it feels like for the salmon of course!) This discovery, and the process of healing it offers, is the story I tell in my book: Change Your Mind Heal Your Body, because I recognised that people tended to see healing as a miracle that was beyond them, whereas in fact it is, I believe, a possibility for all of us. In my case understanding healing and passing this on by becoming a healer as well as a writer, has led me closer to the ‘source’ than I ever dreamed. The tumour is gone, without surgery, my energy has returned. I am older but younger, stronger, happier and wiser.
So how do you get there? In my book I offer exercises that I found especially useful, but here are some key points..
- Learn to listen to yourself. The solution to illness and unhappiness is inside you – not ‘out there’. Your body has a ‘memory’, deep in the fibres of your muscles and in each cell. It functions according to an unconscious mechanism (around 95% of your bodily functions are carried out by the autonomic or unconscious nervous system.) There is increasing scientific evidence of the effect that thought or feeling has on this autonomic system, although this is not so widely accepted. However, understanding that your thoughts and feelings create your physical conditions is the key to healing. If you have an illness, learn as much as you can about the normal function of the organ affected and consider how it is affected. You will find that your body has a language and is speaking to you.
- Get help from a healer who can show you what is inside you in a way that you can’t see because it is so familiar to you that you think it is the only reality.
- Learn to breathe. We all think we breathe, but few of us understand how much power there is in our breath. It is actually the first link between our conscious minds and our unconscious selves. When we breathe poorly we neither listen to ourselves, nor nourish ourselves.
- Explore what makes you happy: the places that make you comfortable, the people who make you feel good, the things you enjoy doing. Spend time with them.
- Observe animals. We have a lot to learn from them. Watch their behaviour. Study their life cycle. See how their intuitive intelligence leads them to establish conditions in which they thrive. See your relationship to them and to the rest of the natural world. We are, essentially, sophisticated animals, and they know many things that we have forgotten.
Remember, you yourself are your key to finding the magical ‘source’. You know more than you think you know. The more pre-conceived ideas you release, the better you listen to yourself, the closer you will be to love, happiness, inspiration and strength.