Why The Caterpillar Dominates Our World At This Time! We as human beings, at this moment in time, seem to hold dominion over nature. With each day that passes so the imbalance between our own population and the rest of the species upon the planet becomes ever more extreme.
Both through the continual building of our own numbers and the way that we choose to live, we impact on the rest of our ecosystem. This is proving to be detrimental not only to those other creatures that live alongside us but to ourselves now too. We can visibly see the influence we are having on the world around us with the melting ice caps and deforestation visible from space, as well as the plastic pollution that can be witnessed within our oceans first hand. We are a species out of control, out of alignment with the rest of the Earth. When Coronavirus came along, regardless of whether it was man made or came from nature itself, during lockdown, the rest of the planet was able to gain some temporary relief from our continual onslaught. Both the waters and the airs around the globe began to become clear again and the animals of the land and the sea started to venture out of the depths of the wilderness to reclaim their natural territory. It was like as if an electric shock was being administered to Mother Earth to pump new life back into her body and to help her fight back. Yet in this time of societal upheaval, if human activity was being restricted and we were less evident as a species on the surface of the planet, we were still growing within our own households, out of sight of everything else, the world over. In 2020, as a population, up to the time of writing we have birthed another 79 million people on to the planet, where only 33 million have departed in the same time span (a mere 644,000 of them being attributed to Covid - 19). That means we have created a net population increase of 46 million since the turn of the year. All those people need to be housed, fed, clothed and watered. This is space that is needed for the human being at the expense of nature. We are bullying the rest of the planet into submission with our continued expansion and consequent consumption. I believe there are some simple reasons behind this phenomenon. What lies at the heart of it all is a feeling of lack and fear deep within us, of people not being whole and fulfilled, always wanting more, be that stuff or children, in order to fill a massive void within us. This feeling of lack stems from our family upbringing, childhood, playground activity and reaffirmed society values, where we are bullied into a life determined by others whilst we remain unaware of who we truly are and our authentic place within the natural world. There is no rite of passage any more that encourages us to voyage out into nature to be able to gain the knowledge we require as to what our true identity is all about. Bill Plotkin states in his book 'Nature And The Human Soul' that we now live within a 'Patho-Adolescent Society'. My personal interpretation of this is that we live in a permanent state of adolescence without ever truly growing up. As many of our leaders exist in this state too, not ever having had any real affinity with nature themselves, we are being led down a cul-de-sac with nowhere to go except oblivion. Bill would say that 'in current Western and Westernised societies, in addition to the scarcity of true maturity, many people of adult age suffer from a variety of adolescent psychopathologies - incapacitating social insecurity, identity confusion, extremely low self esteem, few social skills, narcissism, relentless greed, arrested moral development, recurrent physical violence, materialistic obsessions, little or no capacity for intimacy or empathy, substance addictions and emotional numbness'. Any amount of this is brought on through bullying, criticism, control and abuse and the consequent trauma that happens to us as a result of all this. In effect what we are talking about here is what I class as a caterpillar way of being. Where we continue to eat up the world, consuming all the while, unaware of our true potential that lies within us, the ability to transform into the butterfly we are all capable of being. We have a whole mode of communication that connects us to the caterpillar growth model in existence every day that encourages us to compete at the expense of others, knocking people down and bullying them into submission so they are unable to do that to us. We need to be aware however that there is another way of relating that is more collaborative, supportive, encouraging and indeed loving that will take us closer to evolving into the more aspirational flighty form of ourselves that we ultimately desire, one capable of creating everyone as winners. If we are to heal the world and bring it back into alignment we must first heal ourselves, then change, develop and evolve into the more complete human beings we are capable of becoming. That way we can help nature do likewise but we first have to stop and take responsibility for ourselves again. For if we do not then Mother Earth will surely strike back more strongly than ever before, if not through another pandemic then famine, drought, flood or other extreme weathers and circumstances designed to test the survival spirit of the human being to the limit. We have a choice now to change and make long lasting amendments to the way that we have been living to bring us back into balance with the rest of the Earth. I suggest that we take this opportunity now before it is too late and the world is too far gone. If you care to comment on this blog with regards to any issues or feelings it brings up for you please feel free to do so below.
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Can One Moment In History Do Enough To Shift Consciousness? Little did Derek Chauvin know when kneeling upon George Floyd's neck what the next 9 minutes would bring for himself, George, the black population, and humanity as a whole, I would imagine.
Racism, is in effect bullying. Bullying of a group of people purely because the colour of their skin is deemed to be somewhat different to what we might experience ourselves. We see the other person as separate from us, where the human connection and commonality between us has been lost. Maybe the person comes from a separate neighbourhood, a different country, a contrasting part of the world, experiencing a varying culture and set of life circumstances to us. Instead of seeking to understand and begin to know that individual, extending the hand of love towards them, we choose to concentrate on the separateness, the fear and feeling threatened by the other person. We end up punishing them for not being like us. I speak from personal experience, my life path is one of being bullied. Ironically experiencing the flip side of the coin, as a privileged white male, certainly within my own peer group, in contrast to other caucasian youths that lived within my own neighbourhood. I was seen to be different. I seemingly had more than others, a bigger house, larger amount of wealth, more loving parents and these guys were envious of my upbringing and lifestyle. I actually ended up having a similar experience to George. Years of bullying by my own tyrants, two individuals in particular, led to a pivotal moment, a crescendo, where one of the protagonists placed his arm around my neck, playfully demonstrating to his counterpart of what it would take to strangle somebody. Unfortunately for him, and for me for that matter also, he pulled his arm a little too tight around my windpipe and I blacked out and fell to the ground. Just like George, I was able to offer up little resistance to what was happening at the time, almost accepting it as the norm. That was, until immediately after the event where I realised the ramifications of what had just happened. Fortunately I was able to get back up onto my own two feet again. On doing so I felt immediately empowered to go and get help to start to bring about some sort of change. This I think is what is happening now, the black population is getting back up on its own two feet again on behalf of George and for their own sake too. They have been suppressed for far too long and this is perhaps the moment that has come to trigger a whole race into action and bring about lasting transformation. We of course have been living in an unprecedented time of late, the Coronavirus lockdown has placed restrictions on society across the planet like never before. If there has been any feeling of unrest going on behind closed doors then this scenario will only have exacerbated the situation. A pressure cooker of ill feeling could well have been building up in households across nations not necessarily related to racism, just in experiencing what it is to be a human living through this time with our own unsatisfactory set of life circumstances playing out within our own mind. Under such a situation it only takes a tiny spark to explode a powder keg of emotion that has been pent up for decades, centuries, millennia even, and rightly so too. It may well prove to be the instance that brings a great deal of things to a head within the world that need to be healed within our own society and then moved on from. What the black race will have to do now, if my own circumstances are anything to go by is to seek to make themselves stronger in whatever shape or form is deemed possible, not by way of further conflict, but by way of questioning their oppressors and enquiring into how a more even society can be experienced and parity formed. For when I was being bullied, I didn't realise that I was the type of person that could be bullied, or would be bullied. So when one oppressor left, it was only a matter of time before another oppressor arrived because I hadn't done anything to change myself and my own way of being. I realised I had to change my own behaviour, the way I conversed with people. I needed to find myself, get in touch with my own belief system, be sure of my own abilities, worthiness and purpose, to create a tougher core that was not to be pushed around any more so I was more able to stand my ground. This took many years of investigating and experimentation before the right path, teachings and tenets started to present themselves to me through my own personal development and eventually finding The Shamanic Path. If we resort to rebellion at any time and seek to become the oppressors ourselves, to retaliate through more violence, then we are no better than what we have experienced first hand ourselves. Sometimes, I grant, this is a necessary process if our oppressor won't listen to us or is not prepared to enter into a negotiation with us, but ultimately there are only losers in this scenario. If we are to follow Dr Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis, where we realise that the only options open to us, by way of communicating with one another, are through being a parent, adult or child, then when we become the oppressor or are the oppressed we are acting out the parent / child scenario. Here we can only bring heartache and pain to our world. Our challenge or invitation is to try and shift that emphasis into the realm of the adult. Here, a more supportive space of enquiry exists in a place of love, not one of fear. Here we can bring peace to ourselves, others, our community and our planet for the benefit of everyone in the future. If you care to comment on this blog with regards to any issues or feelings it brings up for you please feel free to do so below. Overcoming Bullying To Discover My True Identity. At 33 I sought counselling for the first time, I discovered that up to that point I had been letting other people rule my life. I had been brow beaten from birth, I had a difficult childhood and was severely bullied at school, this continued right through college and into the workplace.
My default, survival strategy had been to absorb and collapse, making myself as small as possible in order to disappear and go unnoticed. I was a good boy, quiet, timid and shy. I had no voice. Consequently, by the time I reached adolescence, I had little confidence when it came to women and it felt impossible to speak to the girls I really liked. I had a lot of shame around my sexuality and I felt emasculated. It took me until the age of 30 before I had any meaningful relationship with a woman and then ended up being with more maternal types that liked me more than I did them. Adopting a nodding dog style of communication, giving away my power to others, I also made poor career choices, not right for me. I was creative, and my tutors advised me to follow a textile design route when I really wanted to do graphic design. It took me 9 years to get back to where I wanted to be in the first place. By the time I had been made redundant from my second textile job in 1995 I had lost all faith in the system and decided that I would take responsibility for my own learning and development in the future. My counsellor showed me an alternative way to live. I received my first tools in order to try and create change in my life and I began to realise the true power of personal development. It was more difficult than I first thought however and the Universe needed to intervene to get me back on track. I had a car crash. I came across a farm boy going Mach 3 with his hair on fire in the back lanes of Liskeard and there was nothing I could do but watch him hurtle at 60 mph right towards me. Fortunately I had the foresight to let the handbrake off so my car was able to absorb some of the impact, but it was a write off and I had the effects of whiplash for 2 years afterward. This was enough to make me think about how I was living my life and whether it was truly rewarding enough for me. I still felt as if I was being bullied, in a way, because I wasn’t being paid well, even within my graphic design career. But then, I didn’t really know my true worth or where I was heading then so how could I expect anyone else to know that either? In a dark night of the soul moment I reached out to my network and a marketing lady I knew asked me if I was aware of the work of Neil Crofts. He was a life coach, who had written a book called ‘Authentic - How To Make A Living By Being Yourself’. His was the first book I had ever read that spoke to me as if I’d written it myself. He used nature based techniques in his teachings and I took a Medicine Walk with him one day out in nature and discovered that I was to become a spiritual guide. I followed him to Majorca to attend a transformation course he was running out there but even before the course had started I encountered a beautiful butterfly in the garden, the like of which I had not seen since my early childhood, a swallowtail. It was a truly magical moment as I glimpsed a reflection of my own identity I thought and I was filled with a spiritual energy like I had never encountered before, an explosion of heat was released from my lower spine right up over my head as if I was being touched by god. I was experiencing a kundalini (spiritual) awakening. This prompted me to become a life coach too. As a result, I started to care more about nature and the planet. I joined environmental organisations like the Transition Town Network where I was able to sit in circles and begin to speak my truth. In time I headed up my own initiative and started more formal public speaking. I started to take on a number of coaching clients too and I helped people feel less anxious about their life, increased their confidence, gave them permission to be themselves and helped them establish their own life purpose, my own confidence soared also as a result. Personally though, I was still struggling to share my heart with those with whom I liked the most. A seven year journey of unrequited love ended in disaster and I rather naively made mistakes with other women too. I had an affair with a coach of mine and a relationship with an ex-client too. Neither ended well even though I never wished either of them anything but love. I realised I had to work on my boundaries! At this point I began to question my own ability to be a life coach and I withdrew from the profession. I felt as though a rug was being pulled from beneath me and I was devastated. I chose to take time out to properly heal. I went to work in a finance department and even followed my passion for sailing for a while. Finally, I saved enough money to complete three years of training to become a Shamanic Practitioner with Northern Drum and a one year training to become a qualified Accredited Flower Essence Practitioner with The Chalice Well too. It feels like I have been blessed, I am thankful for it all, even the bullying! I continue to learn about our true allies of nature; the flora and fauna around us. I have found my masculinity, my true self and my medicine name, ‘Swallowtail.’ Best of all, I am now ready to help others to overcome similar issues to that I have encountered myself and I have launched my own flower essence and shamanic practice, Allies Of Nature, which incorporates a range of flower essences too. I work with my clients, in nature, to help them overcome the effects of bullying to discover their true identity, using nature as an ally to move them from a place of fear to one of love, helping them to live their lives more in harmony with the rest of the planet. We engage in transformational conversations and sessions together which take place in all kinds of natural locations: on a hill-top, by a river, at the beach or in a forest. Our natural surroundings help us to go deep and discover the way to heal. The flower essences are here to assist us in that process, proving to be magnificent teachers in their own right bringing their own individual restorative qualities via each flower essence in the range in order to help everyone come back into a state of balance and become the best they can be through improved emotional wellbeing. When you’re ready to discover your own true identity and become an ally of nature yourself, I’ll be here to help you with my flower essence and shamanic practice to guide you towards fulfilling your greatest potential. If you care to comment on this blog with regards to any issues or feelings it brings up for you please feel free to do so below. |
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April 2023
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