I've never been particularly good at sticking to one thing, and I think I've finally reached the point where I realise that perhaps I was never supposed to.
My dad always wanted me to train for one job and have what he considered a proper job. There was probably some very sensible advice in there, but my brain has never really worked that way. I've always been interested in lots of different things, wanting to understand how something works and then finding myself drawn towards something else that seems to connect with it.
I think I'm much more like somebody wandering around with a basket, gathering different things along the way and taking them home to see what sort of soup I can make with them. Some things go into the basket and stay there for years, others might be useful for a while and then leave again, and occasionally I pick something up without really understanding why I need it until much later.
When I look at the work I do now, I can see that I've probably always approached life in this way. Holy Fire® Reiki, crystals, sound, essential oils, sacred geometry, working with the angels and everything else I've explored have come into my life at different times. I've trained and learned the foundations of the things I work with, but I've never been particularly good at keeping them in their allotted boxes afterwards.
Even during my shamanic training, although I learned about practices and traditions from elsewhere, I found myself being drawn back to the land I was actually standing on. I didn't want my own practice to become an imitation of North American or Peruvian traditions simply because that was where some of the teaching had originated. I needed to understand what connected me to this land and what was meaningful and authentic to me.
I think that's been a pattern throughout my life. I learn, explore and take the foundations of what I'm being taught seriously, but eventually I need to understand how it fits with everything else I've gathered into my basket and how I can work with it in a way that feels natural to me.
When the boxes start to disappear
I've noticed this more and more in the treatments I offer. Someone may book Holy Fire® Reiki and ask whether they can experience sound as well, so we might divide their treatment between the two. When I offer Indian Face Massage, I can incorporate tuning forks. My sound baths also include Holy Fire® Reiki, because to me it feels completely natural to allow the energy to be part of the experience rather than deciding that sound belongs in one box and Holy Fire® Reiki belongs in another.
The Eight Cosmic Stargates of Healing treatment I created probably sums this up better than anything else. It grew from bringing together different areas of my training and experience: working with the Eight Extraordinary Meridians alongside Holy Fire® Reiki, sound and crystals. Rather than feeling like four separate things squeezed into one treatment, they seemed to belong together and each brought something different to the whole.
The same thing is happening as I prepare for my Chakra Energy Weekend. We'll be looking at the chakras, but we won't be exploring them from just one perspective. We'll be working with crystals and experiencing their different energies, looking at the relationship between sound and the chakras, bringing in essential oils and experiencing Holy Fire® Reiki throughout the weekend. These aren't separate subjects to me. They're different ways of exploring and working with energy.
Perhaps that's why I've never felt comfortable choosing one thing and declaring that this is what I do now and everything else needs to disappear. In fact, some of the things I work with seem to have chosen me rather than the other way around.
Looking back, there have been times when it has felt as though the universe has performed a little sleight of hand. I've been nudged towards a course, a subject or a particular way of working without quite understanding why, only to discover further down the line that it connects beautifully with something else I'm doing. It's only when I look backwards that I sometimes understand why I needed to put that particular thing into my basket.
A little heart-based shuffle
October always seems to bring a natural slowing down with it. The leaves are changing, the light is changing and nature is beginning to draw inward. I find myself doing something similar, not necessarily physically slowing down – because anyone who knows what my diary looks like at the moment might laugh at that – but taking stock of where I am and whether what I'm doing still feels right.
I call it my little heart-based shuffle, although it's nowhere near as formal as that might make it sound. I don't sit down with a notebook and make two columns headed “keep” and “get rid of”, and I don't decide that because the leaves are falling from the trees I must immediately shed half of my life before winter arrives.
A lot of my clearest understanding actually comes when I'm out walking the dogs. There is something about walking that allows my mind to wander without trying to force an answer. An idea might arrive, I might suddenly see something differently or I might feel strongly drawn towards something without knowing exactly where it's going to lead.
If I'm unsure about something I'm already doing, I'll sometimes try to look at it with as little attachment as I can and imagine what it would feel like if I simply decided not to do it anymore. I'm not asking whether it has been successful, whether other people think I should continue with it or whether I've invested time and money in it. I'm simply noticing my own response to the possibility of putting it down.
There are some things I can imagine letting go of surprisingly easily. When I mentally take them away, there isn't a great sense of loss and that tells me something. It doesn't mean that they were a mistake or that the time I spent doing them was wasted. Perhaps they gave me exactly what I needed at that point in my life and their job is simply finished.
Then there are the things I try to mentally remove and something in me immediately says no. I can't imagine not doing them because they still feel alive and connected to where I'm going. Those are the things I pay attention to because, even if I don't yet know what their next incarnation is going to look like, I know I'm not finished with them.
Maybe we don't always need something new
We're often encouraged to think about letting go at this time of year. Autumn arrives and suddenly we're surrounded by messages telling us to be like the trees, shed what we no longer need and prepare for a new beginning. There is certainly a place for letting go, but I'm not sure that constantly discarding and reinventing ourselves is always the answer.
Sometimes I think we need to look at everything we've already gathered and see it with fresh eyes. Something we learned years ago may suddenly make sense because of something we understand now. An interest that seemed completely unrelated to the rest of our lives might turn out to be exactly the missing piece we needed. Something we put down years ago might even be waiting to be picked up again, but used in a completely different way.
That's certainly how I feel about much of my work now. I'm not necessarily looking for another new thing to add to the collection. I'm much more interested in seeing how the things I've already gathered can work together and what happens when I stop trying to keep them apart.
Of course, there will also be things in the basket that have served their purpose. Letting those go creates a little more room, but I don't think we have to empty the whole basket just because we've reached another season in our lives.
That's really what my heart-based shuffle is about. I'm having a rummage through what I've collected, deciding what still belongs there, noticing what I'm ready to put down and seeing how some of the pieces fit together in ways I hadn't previously recognised.
Perhaps October is a lovely time to do a little of that ourselves. Instead of only asking what we should let go of, we could also ask what still feels alive, what we're not ready to give up and what we've already gathered that deserves another look. We might discover that the next part of the path doesn't require us to become somebody completely new at all.
It may already be sitting in the basket.
