Annie’s Notebook 9
WAKING UP TO OURSELVES
A regular review for those who feel there’s something more.
This month’s topic
HOW MUCH SHOULD WE TRUST IN FATE?
The Bhagavad gita tells us that we should invoke action but have no attachment to the outcome; to accept whatever comes with equal equanimity. Another spiritual epithet says, “let go and let God, and tie up your camel”. In other words, trust in God, but also invoke the necessary action. How much are we really in charge?
Guidelines
“The real question here is, how much do you trust? Because your ability to trust is the key to everything? The level at which you believe in yourself, the greater the chance you have for your dreams to come true. And yet, the hardest thing for any of us to do is trust in ourselves. We have so many reasons not to trust. Our greatest difficulty is in really trusting our own propensity for good fortune.
How difficult is that? How do we reverse the thrust of a lifetime, not believing we are safe? That is truly the crux of it. We lack trust because we do not feel we are safe, and the place we feel the least safe is in our own heads.
The head is a tricky creature. The head leads all our fear and mistrust. The head is the carrier of all our past demeanours and fears, and continues to carry our fears for the future. Think about it.
Supposing you were suddenly to drop your head off your body and find yourself held solely inside your body. Nice and snug and warm, not worrying a jot about anything. What a relief, how wonderful. How absolutely safe you feel, just for a moment, inside your own welcoming body.
Sit for as long as you can, snuggling inside your own body, getting comfortable. Hug yourself from the inside, feel loved and cherished by your own sense of being happy, alone, inside yourself. Bliss.
The trouble is you have to be alone in there. You have to feel separate, cut off from anyone else, free to be you. If you were to walk around ‘body first’ as it were, rather than ‘head first’, you would have to get used to feeling separate, able to act according to your own principles and movements and enjoyments. And that is the problem.
No one can bear to be alone. No one can bear to be separate. So being in the world, incarnated, the head comes into gear. And then the fear starts. Fear of being ourselves, having to defend and react to survive, afraid and unsafe, simply trying to negotiate the world and everyone else out there who doesn’t get who you really are. And then you forget who you are.
Most of us do not live in our bodies properly. We are half in, half out, and some people, when their heads have run away with fear and anxiety and fighting to survive, are wholly out of their bodies, and don’t know it. And then the head starts to dictate to the body, and the body gets sick from neglect or anxiety.
Of course the head matters, but human beings need to be led by the body, not by the head, and the world would be a nicer, simpler, less complex place. Living safely, happy and alone, inside the body, allows the body to be the arbiter of trust, not the head.
When the truth of who you are emanates from inside the body there is such a different reaction to the stimuli of the outside world. Decisions are made from the standpoint of feeling safe in your own world no matter what, and the urgent need to survive and therefore fight for ‘freedom’ would subside. The fight for control would go out of you and the decisions you make, the actions put into the ethers from a body led consciousness would bring to fruition a different kind of response. Whatever the outcome, you continue to feel safe. And the right thing has happened.
Led by the body, we would know that fate is the experience of the body. Fully embodied we can trust that at another level our free will is choosing that fate!”
What triggered the bigger picture for you and set you on your spiritual journey?
When ‘serendipity’ (or fate?) triggers an awareness of the spiritual dimension within us, there are so many paths and courses we can take on the journey of exploration that inevitably follows.
Philip has kindly sent me his story. I remember sitting by a pond as a child in the early 1960s painting a watercolour, thinking that I’d like to be an artist when I grew up. How I wish I could have trusted myself, gone to art college as I wanted and perhaps have made a life in art. Instead, I let others set my course and without the nourishment of a proper education, I found the coming years hard, and by the mid 1990s I was sick at every level of my being.
I needed to change my life. Then something did happen, a sort of cascade of opportunities that led very quickly to working with Annie. I found guidance difficult to begin with, until one particular session, when I made a breakthrough, and with Annie’s support, was able to explore deeply and finally let go so much fear and sadness that had built up over the decades. It was as if a tsunami had washing through my being. It really was a huge moment. In this process of letting go, I’ve come to know myself better and now delight in a newfound awareness of my place in the scheme of things. I’m happy to live simply, having rediscovered the inquisitiveness and creativity I had as a child. And I’m painting watercolours again too!
