As Above, So Below…

How many times in life do you read something and it resonates with you? You get the theory behind what you have read or heard. You even believe what has been brought to your attention, but somehow you’re not ‘feeling it.’ This is particularly true of spiritual journeys. Take The Secret for example. It made a huge impact when it came out. It was the latest spiritual buzz. I read the book and watched the movie. I got what they were saying. I looked back on my life and could see how eventually my thoughts became things. The message was, “Thoughts become things.” I even intentionally thought ‘good’ things to see if I could manifest them, but it was rather hit and miss. Or was it?

Spiritual journeys can be a bit of a roller coaster ride. One day you are heading up to the top of the track and you think you’re doing well. You think you are on your way to enlighenment. However, what happens when you’re on a roller coaster? You come back down. Pretty fast, I might mention! After a few ups and downs, and a loop or two here and there, you decide you have had enough, and get off. You may get stuck in the daily grind of life and not venture back to the amusement park for awhile. Eventually though, the roller coaster enters your thoughts. You reminisce about the ride. You wonder why you stopped riding the roller coaster, so it beckons you to come for another ride. After all, the path to enlightenment wasn’t that much of a crazy ride. You purchase a ticket, climb on board and buckle up. At what point do you decide you’ve had enough again? Who knows? Maybe this time you will become enlightened, or maybe not. One thing I know for myself, it has been one heck of a ride! I don’t even like roller coasters. I went on a kid’s roller coaster a few years back and screamed the whole time while my daughter, who was about six at the time, sat there quietly. Everyone chooses a different ride towards enlightenment. Perhaps some buy a ticket on the gentle and pretty carousel. The sugar and spice, and all things nice trip with carnival music playing in the background. The ride where you could sit and sip on a glass of Rosé watching the world go by as you are bobbing up and down on a horse that won’t buck. To be honest, I feel like this ride is more in line with my personality, but apparently my Soul is a bit of a thrill seeker and likes to go hard! Though, imagine if you bought a ticket to the haunted house. S-C-A-R-Y!! I don’t even want to go there. Where am I going with all of this? Read on my fellow amusement park visitor. Perhaps you will want to settle in with some popcorn or fairy floss while you’re reading.

My spiritual journey has been on and off throughout my life. There were phases where I delved deeper, and at the time I couldn’t imagine that I would stop delving and searching, but life does get in the way. The mundane can take your attention away from it. You become stuck in a rut, but that is usually the very thing that brings you back on the path to the amusement park. That is how it was for me. However, each time I started seeking again, it was at a deeper level, but in a different way. Eventually I ended up where I am at now. Firstly, I don’t consider myself to be an enlightened being. I do believe I have experienced a few moments of enlightenment where time suddenly stood still, and I felt the most incredible love and peace within myself. It was kind of a weird moment as well because while I was in deep contemplation, I was actually driving at the time. Sadly I was brought back out of my moment of bliss because I thought my car had died and wasn’t going anywhere. It was, and I was still moving with the car. Nothing outwardly had changed, but for me in that moment, there was no time. The only other time (no pun intended), I experienced a dramatically slowing down of time was when my family and I were about to collide with another vehicle at 100 km/hr. Suddenly, there was nothing else but that moment. The strange thing was that in those few seconds leading to the collision, I felt fairly calm. Of course I yelled to my husband who was driving, to warn him, but apart from that there was a calm acceptance. I braced myself and shut my eyes, but I never thought I was going to die. I knew everyone was going to be okay, but I did think to myself, “This is going to hurt.” It did. I spent three nights in hospital with a fractured sternum. Very painful.

When we hear of other spiritual teachers talking about being present, and being in the moment because then we find peace, I believe that is exactly that. One was a joyous experience, the other moment of presence was, well, it was a moment of being in the moment, and I did experience a stillness in that also. I don’t recommend experiencing the power of the now like my first time, but sometimes we need the duality of an experience to fully grasp it. The first experience must have been my soul dragging me onto the roller coaster. Thankfully, the second time was more like the carousel. Sadly, there was no Rosé as I was driving.

You might be wondering by now where I am heading with this. I promise, I am heading somewhere, with this story anyway. In life…um…not too sure yet. So, you may have noticed the title of this post, “ As above, so below.” You more than likely have heard of this before, along with, “As within, so without.” The words “as above, so below,” popped into my head a few weeks ago. I was pondering over the likelihood of something pertaining to a spiritual and earthly ‘thing,’ when those words came into my head. To me they felt like a message. I suddenly thought, well if we have ‘X’ on earth, then why wouldn’t there be “X’ in the spiritual/heavenly plane as well. because…As above, so below. This remained at the back of my thoughts when about a week later I saw those words on a post. Then again a few days later. Now my attention had been gained. Next day those words, and again the following day. Last night those words once again appeared. This time someone had put a meaning to it. This morning as I was talking about my experience to someone, it suddenly hit me. As above, so below. As within, so without! My focus had been on those four words. They were in my thoughts. What are thoughts? Thoughts are things! The more I thought about those words the more they were manifesting into my reality. The more energy I gave those words in my mind, the faster they were appearing in my outer world. So why was I able to manifest all other similar thoughts just as quickly? Because I had no emotional attachment to them. I didn’t have any emotional blocks preventing the meaning of those words being revealed to me. I knew and TRUSTED that it would happen. Guess what else happened…after this epiphany, I later in the morning opened up a book to do some reading. A couple of paragraphs down were the words, “ As above, so below.”

That part of the story is actually very important because this realisation came after a post I made on Facebook. For those of you familiar with different personality type tests, I am a Nine on the Enneagram. The Peacemaker. As a peacemaker, and an empath, I hate conflict. Probably because I can feel the energy of the person I am in conflict with. I also hate the thought of inflicting hurt onto someone else which usually means I will suffer in silence. That isn’t a healthy way to be I would like to add because eventually that leads to a whole other set of problems. Sadly, following your heart does mean that sometimes you will hurt people, including the people you love. It is a part of life. It is a part of learning and growing. The point I want to make is that 99.9% of the time I will not express my personal opinion on social media, particularly pertaining to political matters. However, the other night I did.

With everything going on in the world at the moment, I had reached a point where I was fed up. Just like everyone is feeling the impact in their own way. I was becoming overwhelmed with the latest restrictions here in Sydney. Being forced into confinement again, being forced to stay away from my girlfriends who are a very important part of my life. Not to mention that I can’t work, again like many people. Small businesses that are struggling to survive. I know I am luckier than a lot of people, and I am grateful for that. We live on acreage in what is still a fairly rural town. It gives a little bit more freedom than those who live in the heart of Sydney. However, the threat of loss of freedom was mentally taking its toll. The notion of losing basic human rights was playing on my mind. When you’re a sensitive person the load can feel even heavier because we are natural healers. Our innate drive is to heal. It is to tend to others and their needs. We want to make the world a better place. We want to create peace and a state of well being. I live in a household that is filled with very masculine energy. As you can imagine the discussions are sometimes quite heavy with everything going on the world. While I do partake in these discussions and I do agree with them, they are heavy energy discussions. Not good for an empath in big doses. I deliberately do not listen to the news. I am selective as to what movies I watch. As I said, while I agree with the discussions they were taking me to a dark place. A place that felt like evil was winning, so I voiced my opinion on Facebook.

In some ways I felt I had done the right thing because what are words without action? They are just words. I thought to myself that at some point you have to stand up and have your say. And, I do believe we do have to stand up at times and fight for our beliefs and our rights, but something wasn’t sitting well with me. One of the responses was in disagreement with mine, which I respect, but at a deeper level I knew that something was not right with this whole situation, the post. I was playing into the hands of fear and of division. I was being lured into the very thing I did not want to be lured into. Fear was beginning to dominate my thoughts. My post was about division and choosing love, not fear, but here I was coming from a place of fear myself. Fear is what was motivating my post, not love. Every choice we make is from fear or love. Fear cannot live when love is present. Love heals and fear makes us sick. I know this from a personal experience 3 years ago.

I will try and make this next part as short as possible, but no promises! Give me a pen and paper and before you know it, hours have gone by. Three years ago I was rubbing my throat and I found a lump. I thought it was a gland, but it was in an unusual spot so I went to the doctor. It was a bizarre journey that took place over a few months. In that time I had 3 ultrasounds and a biopsy. It went from me being told not to worry, to inconclusive to then being told by a leading surgeon that I had a tumour. When I burst into tears, he was surprised. He even said to me that I seemed surprised. I was! Leading up to that point my doctors were telling me not to worry. Sitting in the surgeons office, I was not expecting the news he gave me. However, also leading up to that point I had been practicing gratitude in advance for healing, and I would also imagine the outcome of every appointment as being positive. I guess at that point the positive was he would remove it, and more than likely everything would be fine without further treatment. I left there shocked but he implied that it was nothing really in the way of removing it, but of course I was scared. My fear grew when the hospital rang to change my surgery to another day because there was an urgent case, and considering mine was a major operation they wouldn’t have time to fit me in. It was postponed for a couple of months. The words, “major operation’ floored me. When I asked the hospital why, they informed me they would have to remove the whole gland. Something the surgeon had failed to tell me. Once again, I became really scared. I would like to make a note here…I had noticed however, that the lump seemed smaller. I was still practicing gratitude in advance for healing.

This next part is important and I believe the key factor. The whole way through I had been too frightened to actually look at my ultrasounds. I didn’t want to see the lump, but I decided to face my fear and look at it. In that moment the tumour was no longer that. It was a part of me that needed healing. It was something that wanted love. That’s when I suddenly felt an incredible love and I gave that love to the tumour. It needed love. Unconditional love. After that the lump went away. When I went to the surgeon he didn’t believe it had gone. I could tell by his arrogance, however the ultrasound he did proved that indeed it was gone. He even asked if it was his understudy and not him that I saw!

What healed me? Love. I replaced fear with love. I also want to add gratitude, but I know when I felt unconditional love towards that tumour, everything shifted. Only a couple of months ago I was laying in bed thinking about that time and the message I received was, '“ because you loved that, that which you feared.” I faced my fear (looking at the ultrasound) and I gave it love, pure unconditional love. So, when I write my posts and I say choose love, not fear because the two cannot live together, it’s true. They truly can’t. I replaced fear with love and I healed myself. For just a moment I had tapped into that Divine source of light and unconditional love that resides within us. I didn’t look at the tumour and hate it. Hate would have fed it. Instead I was able to access the part of me that is Divine. The Divine that lives inside all of us, and this is where I realised my post from the other day was not based on that love. It was not coming from a place of unconditional love, even though that was my intention. It was posted from a place driven by fear, my fears. Just as the counter argument was driven by their fear. This is where the meaning of “As above, so below. As within, so without,” finally sunk in. I was allowing my outer world to influence my inner world, which in turn was creating my outer world.

“Thoughts become things.” This very morning as I woke up, I heard the words, “Tend to your inner garden.” The only thing that will change this world is unconditional love. How do we do that? We start with our thoughts. We tend to the garden of our thoughts. It is true, we either feed the weeds or we cultivate the flowers. In my garden it will be roses. You make the choice, because no matter what, your thoughts create. You can create consciously or create mindlessly. And, yes, there will be those that choose to feed the weeds deliberately. Life on earth is one of duality, but we can all raise our vibration to a higher frequency. We are all creators, co-creators with the Divine, but don’t just take my word for it. Put it to the test yourself. That is the only way you will truly understand and “feel it.” Let’s plant some roses, or whatever flower you like.

Love,