A New Chapter

I gave my mother a call this morning as I was sitting in the town's trendy health foods cafe. We had a lovely catch up as we always do. She's had surgery recently on her foot where she developed some kind of debilitating arthritis condition. But her recovery time requires her to be immobile for 3 months or so, making her engagement with the world around her fairly limited. I've been away for a long time too, its coming up to four months since I've been living in an Ashram. My stay there means my contact with the outside world is also fairly limited and so for each of us the regular catch up had more rigour than normal. 

We discussed the normal kinds of things like how certain family members are going, how are we progressing with our immediate goals and the evolving ideas around our potential futures, perceptions around the nature of the outer world around us. I told her specifically, that I had decided to sit myself down in the local cafe this morning to just, write. I said that I hadn't really written seriously for a long time, but that in this moment I'd recognised my experience of the Ashram had forced me to. 

In the Ahram there is always so much happening both between people in the living arrangement, and internally for any spiritual aspirant. I had committed myself to the practices as thoroughly as I could have, and learnt as much as I could about the tradition I was now immersed in. In recent weeks though, my reading dropped off, admittedly, partly due to finding a chapter from the Upanishads that really required a lot of digesting. Also, my focus on the practices themselves had dropped off somewhat too. When this happens, a genuine seeker has to ask themselves why. Am I losing faith in this process, this tradition? Are there other desires arising in me that are causing me to deviate from my intention? Are any of the desires healthy...?

As the tradition, and well a lot of Eastern spiritual thought will tell you, the answer to these questions arises when one creates space within oneself. This occurred for me quite successfully four days ago on Sunday afternoon when I decided to use my limited time off to go for a bush stroll in the neighbouring forest. As I tried to observe every thought, and sensation as I traversed the incredibly natural and bushy realm, it occurred to me in a flash of insight, that was far more illuminous than the typical kind of activity that seeks to distract the soul from itself. 

The insight arrived in a series of questions to myself: Maybe you're full? Maybe you've absorbed too much? Maybe there's simply not enough room inside to put it in? Then I started to answer these questions with more questions, however, I could tell these were now answers because of their positive tone which reflected excitement and relief: Maybe, just maybe, it's time to write again!!?? Maybe you've reached that point!!?? Maybe what you feared was a dwindling of commitment, was in fact, the opposite - an inner requirement to spiel, describe, articulate, share!!

Of course, this was where I was at. I mean if I was to just step back from myself for just a bit, the amount of experience and ideas that have been trailing through my mind recently is so large that I wouldn't be able to actually discern it all properly. This is perhaps the point of it all, that there was too mush going on internally, and so it was time to document. 

In response to this story, Mum suggested I start up a blog, because she knew how much I had written in the past and she knew that I loved delving deeply into ideas and to make sense of experience, but that I should I find a way to communicate these with the world, rather in relative solitude or isolated conversations. 

Immediately, following that conversation I looked up how to start a blog and for no reason in particular chose Blogger over WordPress. When I signed in through Gmail, I found a bunch of blogs that apparently, I'd already written from 2013. Blogs that were fairly interesting, deep and compelling to my reading eyes. It turns out that I had actually started this project about 12 years ago, which stopped abruptly enough for to me completely forget about it.

I don't really know why this first attempt at blogging stopped so definitively. But I do know now that any commitment or resolve that I'm making right now is far stronger than what would have been those years ago. 

I won't dish out those reasons right now, but I will disclose my resolve. This will be to regularly (at least once per fortnight), post to this blog. At this stage I'm not exactly sure what the posts will be about, or even why I'm posting aside from an obvious need to communicate my experience. Some of the posts will be direct reflections from my experience, some may be educational around topics that have recently fascinated me, they might be the lyrics to songs or the songs themselves. I'm sure as time progress a style and intent for the posts will refine and crystalise into something more particular. As for now, it will stand as it is, quite loose. 

What I can say assuredly, however, is that I am committed to a spiritual path. This is my direction I've chosen as an individual which will surely take me down and through many different types of experience. Thos blog, is ultimately a reflection of that journey