Hi all, I’m pretty new at all this and after reading Five Gateways in one go I am now rereading it slowly to contemplate on what is being stated. I have not fully committed myself to it yet but I do find myself remembering to observe myself during the day and questioning if what I am thinking and doing is coming from the ego or not and trying not to be judgmental about what I notice. What is really helping me is reminding myself that everything is awesome just the way it is. It requires effort on my part but it is making my life feel more like an adventure instead of an act of survival.
Even before I found Openhand I had moments of feeling at one with the world. I could look at a stranger and be so moved by love it would bring tears to my eyes, which can be a bit embarrassing when in public. I thought I must be getting sentimental with age . My life has been one of trying to be what I thought everyone expected of me and not listening to myself and that does not work. When bored or unhappy I would escape into all kinds of activities and I day dreamed a lot. I’ve had several wake up calls but still continued plodding along, trying to keep things as they were until I had a wake up call that really woke me up. I lost my job and that gave me the opportunity to finally get around to working on myself, only to discover I had no idea of what I wanted, who I was and after years of living in my head and not listening to myself I seem to have lost all contact with my intuition. I still have a hard time figuring out if what I feel is real or fantasy.
I find a lot of things interesting and each time I think ‘yes, that’s what I want to do with my life’ something happens or something else comes up that seems to move me in yet another direction. Recently I poisoned myself with elderberries because I didn’t know they are poisonous taken raw. I was feeling a bit under the weather and the berries were ripe so I thought I’d make myself something healthy. To make a long story short, I have never felt so sick in my life. A few weeks later I fell of a pony. I had a plan to travel the world on horseback so I decided I needed to start learning about horses. As a teen I had ridden before so I didn’t give it another thought. I did need to learn how to care for them so I contacted a friend and she told me all about horses and how to care for them. We then went riding and she let me ride her mother’s pony to be on the safe side. The pony must have sensed I was an inexperienced rider and quite unexpectedly she took off and because I was unprepared for this I fell off. I ended up with bruised ribs that were very painful for a few weeks. I decided that at 56 years of age that perhaps traveling the world on a horse was not such a good idea after all. It wasn’t until I talked to a psychic that told me I had healing energy (I’d been told this before but never believed it) and that she saw my strong connection with the earth that I remembered that I had always been interested in herb lore but never did anything other than buying a few books about it. The whole time I talked to her I had goose bumps going down from the left side of my head downwards. She suggested a book about Celtic healing herbs so I bought it. I went straight to the part about elderberries and while I read that I had the goose bumps again. It got me thinking about the lesson to be learned from both experiences and I decided it must mean I should pick up my interest in herb lore and get my head out of the clouds and connect more with mother earth. But what I really would like to know is, what do those goose bumps mean?
Gerla