One Day My Soul Opened Up by Iyanla Vanzant

At another chaotic junction in my young life approximately 10 years ago I bought a book called "One Day my Soul Just Opened Up" by Iyanla Vanzant. At the time I was convinced that spiritual study for 40 days and nights was what my soul needed. The thought has re-occurred to me many times in the last 10 years that I have owned this book. However in it's 10th year of possession I have finally completed the 40 day course and I can honestly say that it has transformed me.

Iyanla Vanzant is a spiritual teacher and Yoruba priestess who transformed her own chaotic life consisting of teen pregnancy, abusive relationships and a dizzying search for meaning. She offers in this book every lesson she learned on her journey. It is split into 40 lessons, one daily that honour spirit, life, yourself, and others.

Taking the time to do this course has been incredibly enlightening and healing, when I arrived at every day's lessons I found the answers to questions, I didn't even know I was asking. The overall theme that stood out for me was one of surrender. A time to let go of all the hurts from the past and the expectations for the future and focus on the stuff of my life right now.

I suspect depending on where you are in your own life, a different theme will arise.

If your life feels chaotic and your struggling to find meaning in it, I would highly recommend this book, and don't worry if you can't stick with it for 40 days, hang on it and when you need to - you will.

For those who can't commit I still feel that what she offers is a treasure so I sum up her lessons below;

1. Tell the Truth
Even if it feels like there will be a free fall if you do, there will be a net to catch you. Suppressing the truth will poison your soul.
2. Do What You Know You Have To
You owe yourself to keep the promises you make to yourself. If your in doubt about what to do ask yourself; 1. Will it bring joy to my life without harming anyone? 2. Will it be good for me and others ? 3. Will this thing move me beyond some fear I am holding onto?
3. Discipline Your Mind, Your Body, and Your being
4. Put Your Life In Order
Start with your house and work your way up to your heart and mind
5. Make Another Choice
That may simply mean choosing to think about something differently
6. When something is done, LET IT GO
7. Trust yourself and god
8. Fear Not
No matter what you do, or what happens - YOU CAN NOT LOSE. Everything that happens is a gift.

Sugarbabe by Holly Hill

I’m not sure what compelled me to pick up Holly Hill’s book Sugarbabe, like the sugary treat it evokes, I felt it may be a little hollow on literary calories. However when I gleefully succumbed, I ended up gorging and read it all in one day. Sugarbabe is the true story of one women’s search for a Sugar Daddy, it details the many delights and pitfalls of both finding and having one. Author Holly Hill lives the very picture of the Sex and the City lifestyle, in the city of Sydney. She has a beautiful apartment in Darlinghurst, a gaggle of gay friends, a party lifestyle and a professional job. When a married prince charming sweeps her off her feet and puts her on the ‘mistress’ plan (a generous allowance is return for 24/7 access), life seems even sweeter. But like all sugar high’s she comes crashing down when her lover leaves her with little notice and even less cash. Disillusioned with both love and work, she decides to maintain her champagne lifestyle by engaging a Sugar Daddy.

The book begins as a voyeuristic and slightly trashy description of her interviews and the trials of her Sugar Daddy’s. However it eventually gathers momentum and delves into some interesting and arresting themes. As most of her Daddy’s are married, the subject of marriage and male infidelity frames the book. What she offers is a perspective on relationships and cheating as seen from the other side. We become privy to the crushing physical and emotional isolation, that often sends men running into an affair. However, Hill does move beyond the cliché to successfully showcases a wide variety of the male species from an open stance. We see the serial good time cheater, the rebuffed cheater, the dominant controlling cheater, and the pathetic cheaters. By being prepared to expose herself, Hill brings to the surface a side of relationships and men not easily discussed.

The main premise of her book is that sex is a physical need, like breathing or eating. She argues that expecting a man to deny his biological instincts, is on par with refusing his basic needs. Where men see sex as physical, women attach sex with love. Thus for men cheating is a physical act and for women an emotional one. The problem she claims is not so much in the cheating itself but the lying and deceit that surrounds the act. What Hill suggests is that relationships could break out of their conventional bounds and operate under much more negotiated terms. Although we have seen this happen in other areas of marriage such as money, work and children. The issues surrounding sex seemed to have remained at a firm stance.

Having been on the receiving end of a cheating lover and having cheated myself. I have to honestly say that I think issue is much more complicated than the physical act or biological needs. I disagree that men cheat purely out of physical yearning. In my naïve youth I dated a serial cheater, who used his conquests to build his fragile self worth. I have also known women who cheat in order to fulfill the physical needs their partners can’t. For me what made Hill’s book interesting was her risk in itself, the willingness and bravery to pursue a profession often harshly judged. I admired her openness in penning a story that does not always flatter her character, and her willingness to refuse to judge others or herself. Her story illustrates the limiting bonds that society can impose, and encourages a pioneering spirit in questioning those boundaries. Although I wouldn’t classify this book as a must read. I have to admit that the questions and issues it raised stayed with me for sometime and made me re-examine some of my own ideas and beliefs about relationships and sex.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson

Unlike many households where the elongated call of a child’s name denotes dinner as in Taaaaannnyyyyaaaa. In the Bryson household it would seem, the explosion of forgotten potatoes was a call to the table. From the beginning of Bill Bryson’s childhood memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, I am instantly taken with his mother. Mrs. Bryson is a total contradiction in terms for a women of her time, an age that created the very picture of a domestic goddess. Although she is the home editor for the ‘Register’ Iowa’s local paper, she could neither cook, clean nor remember her children’s birthdays - or things in the oven for that matter. She instead runs between home and work, in a blaze of disorganization. Burning food black and serving it up to a husband, who will only eat food burned beyond recognition and taste. It was, as Bryson describes a match made in heaven and so begins Bryson’s wonderful romp through his all American childhood, a very sweet and lovingly tribute to his family and to the fifties. To his credit he honestly admits that there is not a lot of substance or story to his upbringing. Little illness, adversity, or drama pitches the story; it is still however one of the most entertaining books I have ever read.

Bryson’s hold on the reader is of course his fabulous sense of humour, which spins stories of his mothers cooking, strange family relatives and visits to the local drug free dentist into a fever pitch of hilarity. I recommended this book to my friend Megan, who had to call me while reading it on the bus, so that her sudden and intense bursts of laughter would not be mistaken for madness. What also makes this book remarkable is that the devil is truly in the details of our lives. By carefully collecting the details, he builds a picture of his family and their many quirks, his little town of Des Moines, and of the 1950’s. The birth of our society as we know it. He talks, among many things about the consumer rituals of his time, when visitors would come as much to see their new fridge as to see the family. I thought about the consumer rituals of today, when someone who doesn’t have a fridge would actually rate as more of curiosity. My friends Kath and James are still the subject of admiring conversations about how they live without a TV or microwave, as if they were surviving without limbs. How the world has changed.

Although the 1950’s was a precursor to our manic consumer age, (Bryson quotes that in 1951 Americans owned 80% of the worlds electrical goods), there is still a lovely sense of innocence about the time. Or perhaps it was more ignorance. As Bryson comments “the people responsible for the 1950s made a world in which pretty much everything was good for you”. The book is peppered with now famous advertisements of doctors endorsing cigarettes, svelte families exclaiming their happy because they eat lard, and diets based on eating hygienically treated tapeworms. “Never” as Bryson puts it, “have people looked so ridiculous and so happy at the same time.” What really struck me about the book was people’s blind trust of not only consumer goods but technology, particularly nuclear technology. In the fifties, it seems atomic bomb blasts were the hippest of tourist attractions. During which people clamored to have their radioactivity read as they sucked down ‘atomic’ cocktails. Containing more I am sure than they expected.

Despite having marveled at naivety of the age, I had to wonder. What will be revealed about the products and weapons of my time, that will make me realize just how stupid and innocent my own era was. Reading about Bryson’s fifties is a bit like going to an alternative universe, where life is both completely different but startlingly parallel. It gives a personal dimension into the history, politics and culture of the 1950’s, bringing it into colourful life. However, I warn you, read only in close confines or within earshot of those who love you. I hysterically laughed my way through most of the book, had I been in public the men in white coats might have carted me away.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

I recently lost my job. I say lost even though I resigned because it seems to have disappeared from my life with such light speed. I literally feel like I put it down somewhere and just can’t find the damn thing. But having just lost my job I am trying to settle into what Elizabeth Gilbert describes as bel far niente “the beauty of doing nothing”, rather than the supreme ease and bliss that those words resonate, I find myself trying rather than succeeding. I am rather uncomfortable in my unemployed state, and am discovering that doing nothing in our frantic age, in on par with being nothing.

I am a firm believer that books have a way of just coming into your life when you need them or in my case stalk you until you read them. Gilbert’s book has been nudging me steadily since I traveled to India last year, I read it once with the certainty that everything she was saying had some deep meaning and promptly did nothing about it. Then I lost my job, life generally fell apart around me and there like a signpost from the Universe was Eat, Pray, Love. This book opened up for me a long needed spiritual conversation that had me deeply questioning; whether there might really be something more.

Eat, Pray Love is a story of spiritual exploration set against the backdrop of a travelogue through Italy, India and Indonesia. A journey not so much across the globe but rather as Gilbert calls it a traverse from the “worldly to the eternal”, in search of pleasure, devotion and balance. Gilbert’s story begins with a desperate, late night prayer to God. When an unexpected calm voice answers her prayers, it sets her on a quest of spiritual transformation. Living in a world that has been divided by a war where Islam and Christianity have taken sides, her book presents us with an inspiring alternative. A means by which we can open up our own conversation with God and seek out the golden nugget of divine within.

What Gilbert offers is a yogic journey for our modern times, she calls herself an ‘antevasin’ a Sanskrit word meaning a border dweller between the village and the deep, dark forest of faith. Like her, many of us cannot take up the traditions of monks or Sadhu’s people who turn away from material life to embrace the spirit and seek god. However, like many of us she lives a chaotic and exhausting life, sorely in need of meaning. What she brings to this tradition of spiritual journeying is a rich self depreciating, laugh out loud humour coupled with stunning and candid honestly. Far from heavy spiritual reading, the book is instead filled with mouth watering Italian food, spunky Italian twins, wise-arse joke cracking characters, and a love story ending. She draws the reader in by being both achingly human and a gentle ambassador to the heavens.

I must admit that I read Eat, Pray, Love like something of a guide book, it seemed like Gilbert had crossed the great divide and not only discovered God but herself. Her book although a personal memoir offers many gateways for the reader to enter and live the story. For example in the early chapters, Gilbert writes a heartfelt petition to God to help end her seared and broken marriage. Moved to action I wrote my own petition, a humble dialogue with the universe. I wrote that I was depressed, that I had quit my job, suffered a heartbreaking miscarriage and that life was not really making any sense nor had it been for some time. I asked for help and comfort. That night as I went to bed I saw a single bright star from my window. Offering me a jeweled hope that there was in fact a beautiful order to the world. Even if I didn’t know it. It doesn’t seem like much but I have lived in the inner city, in the same house for last 6 years, and this was the first time I had ever noticed that star.

Gilbert exclaims that of the whole beautiful and poetic Italian language her favourite word is ‘attraversiamo’ meaning crossing over. Her story is an expressive tale of crossing over, in her self-made vessel of faith. Over the divide of the unknown and directly to the divine. What makes her unique is as she calls it, her “cherry picking” of various faiths and practices mixed and matched to find her personal portal to God, which as it were is also a portal within. Great books allow us to imagine different possibilities. With hilarity, mishaps and misadventures Gilbert calls us to pen our own rituals, construct our own vessels, and reengage with a spiritual conversation.

Resume Writing 101

The world outside is like a sleepy child, it's pink lids fluttering with tiredness but not yet ready for bed. The orange and pinks of the sun are sinking down, the drawn lilac of evening is pulling up the covers for the darkness to approach.

I have spent the afternoon writing my resume, which is really up there with having your bikini line waxed, doing your tax returns or swallowing a spoon of fish oil. But surprisingly I am revived and excited. I took a different approach this time. I stayed in the moment concentrated on what I was doing, rather than allowing my mind to go into that swamp of negativity that I usually dive into every time I am job hunting.

I am determined that this job hunt is going to be totally different, I am sick of the up and down drama I normally indulge in, as I swell with negativity and imagine all the impending disasters. This time I plan to relax, not take it personally, focus on the work and the NOW and just surrender and I'm sure the job will find me.

I am feeling remarkably stable and happy, I say remarkably because normally when I don't have a job I am the loosest of all loose ends. But I am liking this new me, I am taking time to heal, reviewing where I am and what I want to be doing and am prepared to wait for the job that is right me. I am so grateful to be able to wait.

BE HERE NOW

The TV antenna guy is here, having just scaled the roof as casually as he would take an elevator, he is now in the lounge room playing with dials and testing the TV. For the last couple of months our TV has looked like there was a metallic grey blizzard in every location. Although I don't watch a lot of TV, getting it fixed is part of a general cleaning up of my life, a symbolic preparation, of tossing out the old to let in the new and sharpening the reception to listen to the signs that I need to hear.

This has been an incredibly healing time in my life, like the seeds that sprouts from the remains of a searing fire, I feel like I am ready to grow out into the sunshine again after the raging chaos of the last couple of years. What I am coming to realise by reading The Power of Now by Eckhardt Tolle is that most of the this chaos has been staged and played out in my mind.

The journey started for me 3 years ago when I first went travelling, a journey not so much to see the world but an attempt to find this missing piece of myself which I was convinced would be in India. I was certain that going to India would give me the sense of completeness and belonging that I had longed for all my life. For those that followed my Bollywood Dreaming blog you would know that this was not what happened, if anything I left feeling more confused than ever.

When I came back to Australia I was convinced that my completeness lay in finding a job in the arts and pursuing my calling. When that didn't work out as I planned I fell into a tail spin of depression. Wanting and needing anything to anchor myself to, I took the first job I could find and that recently ended like a bad horror movie. Then the miscarriage brought all of this longing and sadness to a head, as I again tried to anchor my lost soul onto something else. It was at this point that I realised that nothing was going to fill this gaping hole. That no matter what I did, what success I achieved, fame or fortune that it would still be there.

From my reading of late, largely spiritual books, I am coming to understand that this sense of incompleteness is part of the human condition. An aching need in all of us drives us to be better and to create, but also to consume and destroy. Our appetite gets bigger and bigger from the furstration of not be satiated. The sad part it seems is that we already have what it is that we so desperately seek, we have only to truly look within ourselves to see our own magnificent sense of perfection and wholeness.

Sounds easy right? Tolle claims that to see the perfection of ourselves and life we need to be here now. My first thought is; I am bloody well here now. But as I listened to myself I discovered that I have been checked out of the present for as long as I can remember, either digging through the past and trying to force it to make sense or reliving it's drama. Or by living far out into the future full of promising better-ness, shimmering like a desert mirage, or blazing red in an inferno of impending disaster.

So I am off to meditate and to BE HERE NOW.

Coming Back To Now

It's been a long time between visits but I am back. Let me tell you where I have been for the last 7 weeks.

1. I quit my job - it was incredible to finally stand up to an oppressive, abusive and aggressive person who was making my life sad and crushing my soul. However, I feel truly blessed to have been in this experience it has taught me so much. I believe in years to come it will be noted as one of my greatest teachers.

2. I had a miscarriage - my heart was broken in a way that I could never have imagined. But again I am amazed at how much I have learned from this experience, sometimes I feel like I have been asleep and the is what it took to wake me up.

3. I pitched an idea to a contact at NINE MSN - about a book review blog, I got some amazing ideas and have sent some work in for them to have a look at. I will keep you posted.

4. I have been doing a collage and multimedia class - I have returned to my first passion - art. I am rediscovering what led me to art school. The loving ritual of keeping a journal and creating artworks within it. I am currently creating a beautiful watercolour book about the last 7 weeks.

5. I have been doing a 40 day soul cleanse, following a wonderful program by IylanaVanzant called "One Day My Soul Just Opened Up". Today's lesson is about Authenticity her gem of wisdom "Wherever you find yourself is exactly where you need to be."

6. I have been meditating almost daily and have discovered the Siddha Yoga Ashram in Sydney, in between the chaos and sadness of my thoughts, I am actually experiencing blissful quiet.

7. I am learning to live in the here and now.

With that I will leave you with the eternal words of Maxi Jazz (Faithless)

I want more oneness less categories
Open hearts no strategies
I want decisions based upon faith and not fear
I want people who live right now and right here
I want the wisdom that wise men revere