My favourite Oak Tree is in Marble Hill Park, near Twickenham. According to a Druid friend of mine this would be considered a Tutorial Oak which means it will attract people to it in order to share its wisdom and yet cloak itself from other, more unwanted, visitors. I wondered why so few people seemed to notice this wonderful, majestic tree.

This image was taken at the tail end of winter and you can see its beautiful symmetry. Imagine how horrified I was to find it cordoned off with a sign saying it had this disease.

Two days ago I decided to visit this Oak tree friend of mine and connect with it intuitively. I was delighted to see the cordon gone but it still doesn’t look as healthy as it should.

I sat facing the tree and tuned in intuitively to this tree’s ‘Greatness’ and the sense that I got is that it has a library of wisdom to share. For those of us who want to explore its wisdom we only have to connect and open our hearts and minds to see what it may have to offer. I then tuned in to the tree’s ‘Identity’ - that aspect of it which is more disempowered and prone to fears and anxieties. May sound weird to think a tree will have that but I decided to explore anyway. I was fascinated to discover that this tree does have its fears - fears that it will be cut down and instead of sharing its wisdom for generations to come, will be turned in to paper for other books. Then I tuned in to the obvious next action step to take and what I got was for me to learn the wisdom from this wonderful Oak tree and share it! What a project.

So I shall see what the next instalment is and post it here.

About three years ago I found that I had a natural ability on radio - I was interviewed about ethical weddings because of an article I’d included in a magazine I was publishing at the time called The Changing Times. I was really nervous but the interviewer said I was a natural. Then when I was part of the Copperstrings team I created audio - audio blogs, interviews, a series of recorded radio shows with the wonderfully funny and creative Carl Munson. Then at the beginning of this year, 2010, I discovered I also have this natural ability to be authentic and relaxed in front of the camera - something I’m sure would never have happened had I not been doing Darren Edens ‘Transformation’ training. I received an intuitive action to start a video blog and the rest is beginning to be history. One video blog and I was hooked!

Now I’ll jump at the chance to video. I’ve created a business making video content for websites. I love visiting restaurants and creating a video to reflect the ambience, the food, the energy and the heart behind the business. I love interviewing authors about their new books. I love creating video newsletters. I love creating mini nature documentaries. I can sense the film maker in me emerging.

What a wonderful journey.

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First of all I want to share a ‘gig’ I did on Sunday. Over the last fourteen years or so I’ve created an income by working as a ‘fortune teller’ at events like corporate parties, product launches and a few private parties. It’s not been something I really love as its usually in very loud conditions and I have to do readings as if the guests are on a conveyor belt - very rapid, and I find it exhausting. Over the last couple of years I’ve had very few bookings but a last minute one came in for last Sunday. 2pm - 6pm on a beautiful Thames Cruiser for 100 Nigerians at a graduation party for triplets! I particularly enjoy events where the guests are late teens and early twenties - they are often more open to read and I find I meet many who are exceptional individuals. This event was no exception….but what was the exception was for me to tune in intuitively beforehand. My intuition told me to have them sit next to me rather than on the other side of the table and also to prepare the space by being in my golden circle embracing my wound……

The wound is that deepest part within us where we originally felt the separation from our mother, our divinity, our home, whatever you choose to call it. This is where we recoil from as it is too painful usually to even consider embracing. However, embracing it is part of this journey.

The result was a level of connection beyond what I normally get. I’ve experienced this before and now I know what I can do to create it intentionally!

Instead of focusing on the story the tarot cards told me I allowed them to simply have my focus and then I ‘made it up’ - this opened me more deeply to intuitive symbols, which in turn connected me to that divine space of ‘knowing’ the person I was chatting with. One young man was clearly torn between the business path set by his parents and the path his heart yearned to travel. He was just finishing his Masters in Business and knew exactly what I meant when I said how much he wanted to be involved in humanitarian causes. When he asked me if he could combine the two I worked with him to support him making decisions and choices from his greatness and not his identity.

Another young woman was taken aback when I asked her if she was a Libra. She said she didn’t believe in astrology. I explained that I’d come to this conclusion because I had a symbol of her weighing things up like the scales of justice as if she was in a law court. She was just finishing her law degree so that blew her away.

Anyway, back to the original intention of this blog.

Yesterday I tuned in to my choice ‘I love and choose to receive my shamanic journeys in deep nature’. What became obvious to me was that my shamanic journeys, when I embrace my wound, allow me to access ancient wisdom like that of the pyramid and the intelligence which created that, and in fact the intelligence which created geometry and beyond. I got such clarity about how we are all connected by a web of life. In fact I could see how our internet is a facsimile of this web of life. I know that I am not ‘gifted’ any more than anyone else and we can all access this intelligence because we are all connected to it anyway.

What also became fascinatingly clear is what happens when I resist my wound. I become an eating, surviving mechanism with tunnel vision and no awareness of my connection to anything, let alone everything. I just eat and survive, rushing through life one way or another, blinkered to the magnificence of life and my own greatness. I also saw this as the human condition. I really saw the pointlessness of operating from this space as I achieve nothing and leave behind my residue of fear like a nasty slimy path. What I resist persists!

This morning I chose to tune in to ‘I love and choose to receive my exploration of alternate realities’. Once again I got this great recognition that when I embrace my wound I really go for what I love with a clear focus, and I saw myself playing in innocence through the fabric between dimensions. It was a bit like the Subtle Knife but playful and innocent.

But it was in the resisting the wound in this choice where I saw how effectively I make this reality solidly unchangeable around me. When resisting the wound I lock myself in to this dimension, this reality, this limited world view and there seems no way out…..except through the wound. When I choose to resist then nothing much happens but more of what I already have - in the identity sense.

How expertly we have created our identity and then through such pain of our wound ensured we’d entrap
ourselves in it, not even able to fight our way out of this imaginary paper bag of reality! My understanding of how our wound is our way home has deepened immensely. This is our path to our greatness, our divinity, our magical selves. Welcome home.

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About 18m ago I moved to Twickenham and discovered there are a number of small islands in the middle of the Thames. One, Eel Pie island, is close by and has a nature reserve on it where thousands of amazing, bright green parakeets live. Of course it’s obvious that parakeets aren’t native to the area so I did a little research….

Apparently they’re a legacy from the film itself! I read that some of the swamp scenes were actually filmed at an island called Brentwood Ait and to lend authenticity to the filming a number of these bright birds were brought in - and decided they’d stay. They must have chosen to nest at Eel Pie because of its nature reserve.

With my burgeoning interest and fascination for filming all I come across while I’m out on my meditative walks along the stunning riverbanks I decided to see if I could create a mini documentary about these startlingly vivid
birds. Even though there are so many of them and you can catch sight of them all over the area, they’ve been surprisingly challenging to catch on camera. They seem to wait long enough for me to turn it on, look through the lens and then teasingly off they fly.

This morning I saw one high up in the crook of a tree and I thought maybe I should just ask if I can film it. So in my head I sent my telepathic request. I got some footage! I think this one has a nest and is feeding some youngsters so I’ll keep an eye on that. Then, blow me down, a few hours later, one turned up outside my window, calling to me to attract my attention. He then gave me a couple of lovely minutes watching him eat.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

On top of that, you’ve just completed an eight month transformational training where you’ve learned that focusing on money and how to survive is keeping you entrenched in your identity/ego and not the way to live in your greatness……

I had two choices when I woke up to that on 9th January this year – I could either go the standard route of finding an income source and hold two fingers up to the intuitive training I’d just completed or I could let go of all my security blankets and structures and keep heading deep in to the wilderness of this vast unknown and see if this stuff really works.

I chose the unknown.

I chatted with my intuition which told me to make this a visible journey and to create a video blog on you tube. What???????

It’s all very well knowing you’re likely to fuck up but to do this publicly is another matter…..

It was at this point I realised how clever I’ve been at playing games and pretending I’m living the dream, convincing myself more than anyone else. I received an actual shock to my system when I also understood that my motivation to create projects which help humanity were all driven by a need to feel significant. So I dropped that too. If I’m to live in my greatness then I must choose what I love, not what I think I need.

I chose to commit to following my hearts intuitive counsel, the way I’d been taught over the last eight months, and to authentically share my journey with whoever is drawn to watch. What I in my greatness loves is frequently very different to what me in my identity loves – and let’s not get them confused. My identity would have me curled up in bed with a good book and chocolate. My greatness has other plans.

My identity is desperate to know how I’m going to survive, how I’m going to create money to eat, pay bills etc, but my greatness is firm with me not to resolve the tension. It’s when we hang with that tension that magic can happen.

What I’ve discovered over the last three weeks is that my intuition is guiding me to spend more of my days doing the things I’ve said I’d love to do when I have more time and money. Walk in nature, explore my creativity, write, create, imagine…..

The strangest thing of all is that thirty years ago I wanted to follow in the footsteps of all those courageous people who wrote books about how they upped sticks and followed their hearts, but I never had the guts. I was always too concerned about how I’d survive and how I could even access my intuition. And yet this is the very unknown I’ve been dropped in to….erm, er, how did I get here? My intuition hasn’t told me to travel yet so maybe it’s more of an inner journey…but who knows….

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In this magic modality we access our intuition through symbols and then ‘make it up’. This is the most enjoyable way, and most accurate, that I’ve come across and I could spend all my time intuiting rather than following the action….but anyway….

I looked back at the symbolism which has come through over the last couple of weeks and realised that when my intuition said I needed to follow my passion that this is my passion. I didn’t need any other information on what ‘it’ is because this is it! My passion has been for as long as I can remember to discover and master our innate magical ability only I’ve been too scared to jump off that high diving board and commit. And here I was again pretending to myself I didn’t know what game I want to play. Haha!

I also have a sneaky suspicion that I wanted someone else’s permission to follow this risky path. I say risky because it’s such an unknown. When I look back and see what my usual strategy is along an apparently ‘known’ path the end results have been great learnings but not the end result I’ve wanted….so what now?

I can choose to give myself permission to jump off the high diving board and commit to discovering and mastering my own innate magical ability….or live the way I’ve always done? The way I’ve always done has been fantastic but has progressively been limited by my fear and dogged by a stubborn persistent feeling of frustration that I haven’t had the guts to live magically. I’ve almost lived magically, if you know what I mean. I’ve done some pretty cool things over the last few years but they haven’t been the real thing. The magic is that they have led me here to this point. This pivotal point of choice.

So, what shall I choose?

Joseph Campbell, a perpetual and inspired student of mythology and comparative religion, revealed the common thread of the ‘Hero’s Journey’. Having spent an extraordinary weekend a month for the last eight months experiencing The Transformation with Darren Eden I have learned a lot about the Hero’s Journey and how it applies to my own life.

The first step of the journey we were shown was the idea that we’re all born of Royalty – in essence that we are all actually and truly Divine Magnificent Beings. Many of you will nod an agreement at this as the majority of spiritual paths suggest the same.

So what does it mean to consider ourselves Born of Royalty, what difference does it make, can it make? I’ve been playing with this idea for many years having begun my spiritual and personal growth path over twenty five years ago, and yet I’m only feeling the implications now.

I remember my innocence before I started this delving in to my psyche – I thought I was a well adjusted and normal person. Then I got to know the word ‘stuff’. Suddenly I was weighed down with ‘stuff’ and turned in to someone I considered quite neurotic! That old can of worms is well avoided if you don’t want to upset the applecart. ( Just testing if I could manage two cliché’s in one sentence!)

Having done some workshops on belief management I found myself overwhelmed at the number of negative beliefs I held about myself and felt in a miasma of debilitating energy. And the tools I learned I couldn’t quite put in to practice enough, in fact I managed to tie myself in such clever knots that I believed they could never be undone. Not in this lifetime anyway. In effect I couldn’t sense my divinity even though I believed in it on a head level.

Then I discovered the Hero’s Journey and Darrens approach.

Using my imagination to access symbols which then reveal their meanings through effortless intuition (not my previous experience by any means) I discovered how I have been experiencing myself both subjectively and objectively.

My symbol was a square porcelain sink like they have in the butlers pantry or where the scullery maid spends her nights up to her elbows in dishwater. What immediately became clear to me is that this is how I’ve viewed myself all my life. I knew it instantly as in this intuitive space there’s no need to pretend; it was if my life had opened up like a flower to be seen in all its facets (or fawcetts in this case!).
I recognised that sense of feeling second class or second best, even though it feels cringeworthy to say so. Subjectively I considered myself ‘less than’, and therefore at other peoples beck and call, subject to their needs and desires, where mine were of no consequence. I saw how that has played out in most of my relationships and could also see where I had stamped my feet on occasions in rebellion – but to minimal change. And yet much of this wasn’t new to me. What made the profound difference was the understanding that as this sink was in only one room of the mansion, then I had been identifying with only one small part of me, and believing that small part to be all of me.

This understanding has made a significant impact. I really ‘get’ that objectively the scullery maid is simply a part of my identity; a small portion of the whole me. The rest of the mansion is now open to exploration and I finally know I can be the Lady of the Manor – in touch with my divinity, my sovereignty.

Strangely I had thought that to ‘be of service’ was the same as ‘being in service’ and yet now I see that I can be far more of service when I access my fullest potential. Knowing yourself, in your heart, as a divine magnificent being doesn’t send your ego in to overdrive. Far from it. Recognising and acting from your divinity is a place of responsibility and its only when we pretend we’re divine that our ego becomes over inflated and prone to bursting.

Our own hero’s journey is a real and tangible path – one we can refuse or one we can embrace. What do you choose?

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I saw a youtube video the other day about a scientist working with rats. This scientist was one of a group studying rats response to playing with each other, which developed in to researching their response to human touch. They picked up some unusual noises beyond our hearing with special bat sound detecting machines and have come to the conclusion that rats laugh when tickled. In fact the rats develop a taste for being tickled and follow the scientists hands around their cage as if asking for more.

This reminded me of Sharkman, a documentary about South African Mike Rutzens year long quest to discover the art of shark hypnosis. This weird hypnosis is called tonic immobility and Mike was determined to find out more about this state to see if it can be induced intentionally with big sharks like Great Whites. Amongst some astonishing underwater film footage you see something you would simply never dream up even after watching Finding Nemo on Ecstasy. As Mike hand feeds reef sharks he strokes their snouts and all of a sudden one slips in to this strange immobile state, swooning with his nose cradled in Mike’s crutch. The shark, wide awake all the time, can snap out of this trance in a heart beat. Next, Mike tests the shark to see if it prefers to go after food or his human touch. To see a shark choose the gentle touch of Mikes hand is not only deeply moving but opens up a can full of questions.

I don’t believe Nature ever creates something useless, even though we may often think differently. So my first question is this: Why has Nature created the shark snout to be so incredibly sensitive to the caress of a human hand, so sensitive it goes in to a vulnerable trance like state?

We’ve only recently discovered that rats may laugh and enjoy being tickled, and that sharks respond in an extraordinary way to human touch – what other assumptions could be challenged if we took the time to explore?

Further questions leap out of the can: What if the life forms on this planet are really designed to interact and connect? What if even a lion killing a zebra for food is a sacred agreement? What if we don’t need to be frightened by the things we’ve been taught to be frightened by?

I now see how most of my life has been about resisting structures because I thought they imprisoned me – and when I did choose to be in a structure I was always proved right. Of course! (I didn’t know then that focus creates reality.) I gave up a place at University to hitch around Europe, deliver boats, and play – that meant quite a lot of drinking and a serious amount of promiscuity. Well, it was before all the AIDS scare and it made me feel less insignificant than I did most of the time.

I always worked for myself and yet when I created a ‘business’ even that structure felt too much and I ended up having to do things which I didn’t enjoy and wasn’t very good at. I ended up feeling resentful. No wonder it didn’t thrive financially. Relationships weren’t much better and even though I didn’t think I was the commitment phobic one I haven’t managed to stay in a relationship for that long and have shied away from them altogether over the last three or four years.

Thinking about it there seems to be structure everywhere, even in friendships when people ‘see’ me a certain way and then I feel I have to conform to that too, or upset them – and I don’t attract conflict if I can help it! Way too scarey.

And all these years I thought I was living free – and yet reading what I’ve written I can see how cleverly I had imposed my own prison around me with so much avoidance and resistance going on. My prison had walls so gossamer transparent I haven’t even seen them. Aren’t we simply the most brilliant creators even when it’s sub-conscious?

The personal growth path has had me in its thrall for the last twenty five years too, with glimpses of being just ‘me’, but they remained glimpses. I was left with that hungry feeling you get when your nutrition isn’t spot on. Weird, how you can be full of food and still be hungry. Maybe mastery is where the true nourishment lies. But then mastery felt like discipline and structure and we know I don’t do that, right?

Well, I didn’t do it.

In December last year I found myself participating in a workshop with Darren Eden and two things he said, and then demonstrated, had a major impact on me – like a bulldozer stopping a fly (but without the crushing death bit). He said we don’t need to know ‘how’, and we should ‘hang with the tension’ rather than resolve it. The ‘how’ is our ego’s need to know and survive at all costs, rather than our all knowing intuition sharing its quiet but true voice. Hanging with the tension allows us to stay creative, whereas resolving it in favour of the known is another need of the ego. He then went on to show us how to access our deepest intuition in the most effortlessly enjoyable way.

I was fascinated. If this was all true it would revolutionise my life.

Well, it is and it did.

And the funny part is that it is a structure – and now I love this structure – this discipline. I find it effortless, enjoyable and transformative. I have changed the way I respond to life when I access my intuition in this brilliantly structured way. Working with this intuitive structure gives my work a shine I could only imagine, but not experience, before.

This structure crept up on me and I discovered this was something I wanted to master. I am starting to see how I create freedom through this discipline – freedom to be and express so much more of me than I have ever done before; freedom to choose so much more for myself; freedom to be seen and not hide; freedom to live the life I have always wanted and never truly believed was more than wishful thinking and imagination. Oh yes, I now have freedom to imagine, and imagine, and imagine!

If you want more freedom follow this link and take action! Freedom here I come.