I have appeared quiet on this page but in fact been incubating at unimagined levels, as this time has required of me. The stirrings, then, have brought to surface a cylce of huge movement, new projects, new forming bonds, finding community. Alongside more loss, sliding ever so close to the crumbly edge of radical change, of unanchored territory.

Alongside again, deepening into what I have at last recognised as my true calling, this work of embodied imagination, creation, contemplation, that ignites the soul alive through the immense knowing of our moving, living body. A recognition distilled over the course of a lifetime. Gratitude. Relief. A quiet arrival, one that has awakened dormant knowledge, and memory (and dares me to more change).

I was writing a new year post – three years ago – that was never published, falling silent on the loss of a life time friend.  In this time the crossing of human paths, the heart wrenching exprience of being let into the mystery of a life turning to its essence, the strangers who become family, the opening of the collective heart of groups of people sharing their ways to spirit,  have filled me with the kind of awe that humbles every bone of mine, stops me in my track and has me cry over a slice of shared pizza.

Never more than now I know how easy it is to isolate and miss each other, that the loneliness of being ‘missed’ is a place the most confident of us can trip into. Never more than now I hold dear the blessing of ‘Anam Cara’, our soul friends, the life witnesses walking alongside us, whether or not we are conscious of the thread they hold for us, of what they affirm and sustain in us, the difference they make to our sense of ‘existing’, the anchoring that they provide for a necessary sense of safety in ourselvs, in our being in the world.

So, at the turning of the year, tonight, I wish you all to treasure, nourish and be blessed by the presence of Anam Cara;
for your visions and intents and your hearts and souls calling to birth fully and rise courageously in the times to come, however big and glowy or quietly weaving their being away from sight.

EVERY single voice counts, in its own signature and nature, anywhere it works away inside the fabric of life.
I appreciate all and each who are in my life and around it in any role, immensely.
Be well, dear people, travelers of this plane, of this world that needs the light you are here to shine. Stay loyal to your truth, hold together, sing your own song.

I leave you with the words by John O’Donohue that many of you know, from his beautiful Book of Blessings.
Love to one and all

Filomena

~ A Friendship Blessing ~

May you be blessed with good friends.
May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.
May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where
there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness.
May this change you.
May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold in you.
May you be brought in to the real passion, kinship, and affinity of belonging.
May you treasure your friends.
May you be good to them and may you be there for them;
may they bring you all the blessing, challenges, truth,
and light that you need for your journey.
May you never be isolated.
May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your anam ċara. 

(John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, 1997)

The post The Grace of Friendship and Being Witnessed first appeared on AllThingsFlow.

I am sat watching the sea, through this beautifully wide window,  from a place special to me and to my companion, feeling blessed to be able to be here. Only an hour ago the horizon had disappeared into a myst of sea spray, clouds and wind, the waves beating hard against the rocky shore, splashing onto the road. Will it fill the hollows in between and flood the passages, will it retreat pulling with it what now stands on solid ground, into watery currents… But the tides begin to go back in, slowly, and all feels calmer and safer again, the lights appear in the distance from mainland, the wind is softer, dry land beings here, water dwellers there.

We have arrived here from our flooded home grounds, a repeated scene this Winter we struggle to behold, despite the equally strikingly resilient, generous and compassionate actions of human cooperation everywhere, creating webs of help, reconstruction, fund raising, consciousness activating and down to the ground aiding, feeding and holding. But let’s hold on to this, it will come in handy later on.

Disasters on a larger scale have been known this year, some less ‘natural’ than others, when we look at how much our global misuse, abuse and obtuse exploitation of our earth’s resources has a hand in them. Cause and effect may well have hundreds of years in between them, thousands even, but they show up, sure and precise as only nature can be. This is not negotiable, it is as it is, and we are learning the hard way, the way of the ‘fools’.

Walking along the beautiful shores and hills and river beds covered in heather and other sturdy bushes and trees here these past two days, you can catch a glimpse of a better balance in the living environment, where the torrential rains and the abundance of waters on the land and around it have still not turned into devastating floods. The roots of trees and shrubs hold the ground steady, besides ‘drinking’ the water. The space around the water courses allows for outlets, dispersion, re-channeling.

Elsewhere, just around our homes, bushes and trees have been burnt down to allow for bird shootings we don’t need in order to feed ourselves, for if we knew anything about true hunters we would know that in any population that ever lived in symbiosis with their land and other animals, anything that was taken was also put back, the land attended to so that life could preserve itself. We shoot for fun, and to do so we act as the most obtuse and unknowing of hunters, wasteful, destructive and in fact endangering of the survival of their very own species. For money, for distorted ideas of tradition, for power, for greed.

We can see this very same process in any unnecessary, mindless drilling, deforesting, damming, killing, trading, exhausting life on, above and below the surface of this earth, waging war, fabricating and selling weapons to those we wage war onto, persecuting those we have exploited and reduced to poverty, living and thinking as if privilege will never have any costs for the privileged also, walking this earth as if there even was such a thing as ‘entitlement’ to take endlessly, as if we were exempt from the laws of nature, as if there, anywhere, woods or cities, such a thing like privilege existed at all.

So we are flooded. By waters, by heat, by wars, by the trauma that these times in history are generating and passing on, by the continuous news updates on it all, by the spreading of fear and distress, by knowing and by ‘not’ knowing.

But hold on…..

In these past two days, perhaps because of standing closer to the sources of streaming information about this, I have also felt flooded by the human spirit’s capacity to respond with generosity, creativity and resilience, across diversities and distances and in fact even more resourcefully ‘because’ of these. Looking up from this, the world view fills up with acts of immense courage and healing, of dedication, of barrier braking, of creation, of life saving, of radical integrity, of love and survival in the face of unthinkable circumstances. For this too is what we are capable of, this too mirrors nature’s persistence in carrying on, infiltrating wherever it can, reshaping, recreating, getting through and over, finding ways, returning, producing miracles.

They don’t get broadcast much, we aren’t bombarded with them. Often, in fact more often than not, they are not even visible or known to most. I, for one, sit with many of these miracles, day in day out, in my therapy room, in other work I do, with people in my life, with the wondrous healing power of making music, dancing, singing together, feeling this is the real privilege, this constant remainder that hope is possible, not only, but that it is an inextricable part of nature, of life.

I am not a public talk giver. I myself this year have felt the need to reroute, to go and quench my thirst for inspiration from those writers or talkers in the realm of human spirit that could ignite my own hope, remind me of what deep down our souls know, and who will speak to souls in the ways in which souls can hear and then breathe again in recognition. Of those I listened to, one more than anyone else spoke to my own soul in ways that resonated so deeply it made me jolt from the haze of pointlessness everything seemed to be sinking in then. It was Joanna Macy and her ‘active hope’.

This spells out what sounds like a belief, but is in fact a process at work in nature as in human spirit in forms we can experience continuously at every level, if we let ourselves: the paradoxical truth that it is only when we allow ourselves to fully feel the suffering,  the ‘pain of the earth’ and its inhabitants, our own pain, only then we acquire the power of hope. Many of our ‘distractions’ , as well as our acts of blindness and destructions, are lead by the denial of suffering and despair, the denial of pain and mortality, by the fear of these. But if we can learn to fully feel the possibility of sorrow and mortality, then we become huge and spacious, we don’t need to shrink into temporary solutions, to contract into cutting off from it all.

If we can feel this and still remain open, then there is room for compassion, courage and hope. If we can weep with the earth than we are immensely powerful. If we can weep with our fellow humans and other beings, then we have nothing to fear. And when this happens, hope and change become possible.

This is therefore my wish for this year ending and for the new one beginning, for us all everywhere:

That we may learn to stay with the pain of the earth without flinching away until we get to the light

That we may know the true privilege of feeling alive and of knowing the daily miracles of existence up close

That we may create, keep and support the community of fellow life travellers around us that we need to belong, to nourish ourselves and to feel safe and sustained

That we may each find the gifts unique to us and our very own purpose and bring them to our lives and to the world with confidence and joy

That we may always, always know that hope is as natural and legitimate and constant as the setting and rising of the sun and the moon, and the pulsing of the earth, and the sound of the sea

Love to you all

Filo x

The words of Joanna Macy for you:

The post The Sound of Hope first appeared on AllThingsFlow.

As I typed the title in the banner it occurred to me that for the past seven years I have been living in a town full of bridges, including the one in its name, and it then just felt clear to me that this year has been, in fact, mostly about bridges.

So much has manifested for me and in the lives of many I know, that had been seeds planted a long time ago, a dream, a wish, unfinished business, uncompleted stories. Much of the ‘un-happened’ or hidden or trapped in all sorts of historical ties and circumstances, seems to have come to be, to complete, to take form, to make its place ‘out there’, seen, heard, shared, ‘dared’.

It hasn’t always and only been about exciting, beautifully experienced manifestations. I wish to honour and acknowledge also those completions and coming into being that have brought to a head, for myself or others around me, what might have formed or hid in the shadow from un-healed places, those streams that run in the more subterranean, dark places, unknown or un-detected, them too having to take shape out here for that is the only path to change and transformation, the chance for healing.

The bridges for me have to do with this, with what has been possible because previously burnt ones seem to have been rebuilt from the ashes and new ones have risen where there was none.

Bridges between parts of oneself that were separate and forgotten.

Bridges in the consciousness of individuals and the collective, between parts of the social body, the world, humanity, existence, spirit, that were neglected, disjointed or that were numbed, anaesthetised  and drowned by the loud noise of misplaced and misused power, by the misguided (and encouraged) identification with what we ‘ought to have’ to be ‘ok’.

Bridges in our soul, allowing the ancestral memory of the enduring, resilient, unbreakable, untameable nature of our core, for this is the universe itself, it just ‘is’. I believe Soul cannot be destroyed, but it can be ‘sent away’ in exile, out of our consciousness, cut off, disconnected, we dry up and whiter the same as a plant whose roots are not nourished and watered. I have witnessed and experienced many soul-returns this year, over a newly built or reconstructed bridge, and life returning too, leafy, lush, rich, creative and joyful life.  And HOPE!

Bridges to my ancestry, my roots, my homeland, the sounds and rhythms that make my flesh and bones.

Bridges between people in communities. Bridges through music, dance, drum, beacons of communication, fires on the hills to tell one another ‘we are here’ .

And the bridging force is the most potent, the simplest and most unfathomable of all. The bridging force is LOVE.

I believe this is already happening in the collective too, in parallel ways at different levels. The uprisings and the new creativity around surviving, thriving and visioning new ways of sustainable life, are signals of all this. I know, I wouldn’t make the news with this piece of hopeful vision, and I do not wish to deny the suffering that is still gripping such a big part of our Earth, which we have caused and contribute to.

My intention is to light a torch for the process of healing and transformation that is happening, everywhere, not because this exonerates us from taking care of what needs attending to, but precisely because it is more and more urgent that we do so, because with CONSCIOUSNESS comes RESPONSIBILITY.

At a point in history were we say goodbye to one of our Mahatmas (Great Souls), Nelson Mandela, as he moves on to his ancestors path after his work here is done, we are left with no excuse to ‘not know’. This to me  does not mean we all need to undertake large scale social missions, to be hard core activists, to act at mass exposure in the same form as him and those like him. To each their own, to each what their are best at.

I just think it is time, now, to dare be, speak out, get our hands and feet dirty, full on into the juice of life, make it happen, in every way and everyplace it is our power or talent to do. And being who you fully are, and let or help others to, is big enough part of this.

So here are my wishes and thanks as this year goes through the exit door and turns into a brand new one:

Thanks to my beautiful tribe of drummers, dancers, family , spirits and friends older and new, for having been the carriers, the vessel and the path to love and innumerable gifts into my life and soul.

Thanks to all my clients and those in search of healing whose path I have crossed in different ways, those I could and those I could not be of any help to.  You are my greatest teachers, everyday. I am humbled and honoured by every stretch of the intimate, delicate journeys you allow me to share and witness, and I am left richer by every encounter, in so many ways, always. I wish at least as much to you in return and for your courage and determination.

And thanks this year to all those who have joined my dancing, and this way found something beyond the dance that opens portals to greater joy.

May we have the courage of our visions,

the help to carry them through,

the innocence to believe in them

and the child’s joy to show and share them.

May we know that be it Human, Spirit, Nature, Animal,

Planet, Universe, Town or River,

there is a place in ourselves or out there we can call

Home,

and always somebody we can call a Friend.

And when we get lost

– because we will sometimes –

may we find the beacon that takes us home,

that tells us we are not alone,

and may the lost path be the best thing

that ever happened to us,

for the new one and the bridges that we find because of it.

May we never be afraid to be ‘together’,

if we can do this as a way to empower

and honour each other,

And may we never be afraid of being ‘alone’,

as a way of finding and listening to soul, purpose,

vision, rest and belonging to all that is.

May you all dance the dance of life

with compassion, gratitude, joy, wisdom,

passion, resilience and love

this year and always.

From the very centre of my heart,

Have a soul finding, bridge building, love gathering,

abundant, healing, joyful

2014!

Filomena x

The post Bridges & Fires first appeared on AllThingsFlow.

the crossing of paths and their parting,

what’s been found and what’s been lost.

May it all enrich our Soul

May we find our path and those we can walk it with alongside,

our tribe, our soul companions, our spirits

and all that sustains growth and endurance.

• Protect LOVE
• Let LOVE find you & radiate on
• Protect and nourish LIFE
• Do not be afraid of Darkness nor Fire, for without them, life has no roots and no force for change or creation.

Be the Warriors and Fire Keepers this year requires us to be, stick together, love yourselves, take care of each other.

With Love at the crossing of the Year

Filomena x

The post Crossing Over first appeared on AllThingsFlow.

COME AND START THIS EXPERIMENT WITH US

Sunday 12th September,

2.30 – 4.30

at

Lower Blackshaw Head Farm, Blackshaw Head, Hebden Bridge, HX7 7JQ

 We ask for a £10 contribution per person. Future meetings can be agreed with the group on the day.

Social Dreaming, or Dream Matrix – as it has also been called – was ‘discovered’ by W.Gordon Lawrence between the 70’s and the 80’s, but it’s in fact an archaic practice, where individual dreams are considered, used and shared as a resource for the entire community as well as for the dreamer. Recent social dream work is based on the fundamental idea – portrayed within different schools of thinking, each stressing particular aspects – that individual dreams also contain ‘information’ about the social group surrounding the individual and about what is trying to emerge and be ‘digested’ by both, useful information that can be found beyond what we think, speak and know consciously.

The Dreamer’s world and the Others’ world exist together.

Our group will involve the participation of a horse to facilitate this experience.

Just bring a dream, current or past, that you are happy to share with others.

Note: No previous knowledge is required and we pay attention to creating a safe environment, but you will need to have some familiarity with working on your awareness of yourself as this experience can be stirring.

Email us via the contact form or via Unbridled Potential if you want to participate, we will need to know how many are taking part by Friday 10th at the latest!

The post Dreaming with the Horses first appeared on AllThingsFlow.

FLOW Weekend – 25th & 26th September 2010

A new  format for this workshop, now featuring a day of Equine Assisted group experience on the beautiful moors surrounding Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire, UK.

See the details on the Workshops page and/or contact us to know more!

CORE-BEAT Rhythm Time – 9th October 2010

A day of rhythmical creativity and discovery through drums, percussion and activities aimed to bring us back in contact with our own innate rhythmical  nature and more in tune with our lives and our vital energy. No skills required, just bring your curiosity to the lovely, spacious studio at Hoot, Bates Mill, in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire and drum up the creative you!

Poster and details on the Workshops page  or  contact us for more information! 

The post New workshops for this coming Autumn! first appeared on AllThingsFlow.

Hello reader…

This very minute, as my All Things Flow blog is being planned and set up, I am in the middle of a FLOW situation, a synchronicity of accidents, decisions and opportunities that have manifested as one of the biggest pieces of teaching I could ask for in the past months. How timely! What better way to open my own era of blog (a huge step for the internet/mass exposure phobe I am known to be), on the closest theme to my soul, than for the blog to begin itself as a result of this? Mysterious? Bear with me.

This blog walks the talk. In the best personal growth tradition, it begins by modelling the very concept it wants to present. It speaks of FLOW and FLOW gives birth to it, right here, in the most unplanned circumstances. I shouldn’t even be here.

Here’s the story, are you sitting comfortably?

Flowing towards the first blog post. PART I:

During the course of a significant life transition I have been travelling through for a few months,  I seek vessels to a much wanted transformation, part of which is about daring to bring myself out there into the world more fully in my own voice, believing that what I have to say is enough.

One appears in the form of a 3-day seminar with two of the most inspirational figures in my recent universe, Arny and Amy Mindell. Of course, in my diligent and trustful interpretations of the clues I find along the way, I completely feel this is the chief vessel, the one that will show me the way ‘home’, the place and time where I will be helped to find the gate to my metamorphosis; it will place me well and truly on my path. I am excited, moved and grateful that this has presented itself to me at this point. I’m on.

Two months later, the day of the seminar approaches, I have feelings, dreams and experiences that tell me my psyche is preparing for the big event. Then Earth strikes. “An Icelandic volcano, dormant for 200 years, has erupted, ripping a 1km-long fissure in a field of ice” (BBC News, 21 March 2010). The ashes from the eruption paralyse the globe’s air traffic and humans’ unimaginable reliance on it.  Our teachers don’t make the flight to UK, the seminar is cancelled, I fall into some incredulous distress, am lost and feel completely abandoned.

Clue number 1: On the personal level – the core of my transition is about a dormant, forgotten truth, a part of me making its way to the surface through layers of learned strategies, defences, adaptations, undermining self-beliefs stratified over the years for perfectly good reasons, but now coming loose under the pressure of long forgotten truths (as good work has been done) which makes it time for this to happen.  All attempts to push against this, is damaging and in vain.

For me to have purpose, to be whole and fully alive, I have to give that part of me its rightful place here, now, those long forgotten parts of me have to RETURN HOME.

Clue number 2: At the collective level – many of us live pushing the uncompromising power of nature into the depth of denial and oblivion, forget who we are, where we come from, our inextricable connection with the rhythmicity of nature, inward and outward. We create filters, defences, powerful means to predict and overcome barriers, or to break through them, often well beyond the legitimate purpose of assuring safety and survival.

We spin, whirl, move fast, fill every gap, quick fix every cracks, keep going, keep living as if the surface was all there is: if we keep fixing the cracks, we’ll be alright. The depth of the earth under the ice erupts, not to spite or punish anybody, but simply because pressure’s on and it’s time.

The cracks slam open. Our plans to defeat space and speed go to pots. Pushing against it, pursuing the delusion of omnipotence, causes more damage and in vain. Creativity, fluidity and resilience are called for, to work ‘with’- not ‘against’ – the new emerging forces.

Then a circular email sent by the seminar’s organisers, brings a brief message, reading at the end: “[…] However, for us there is a message in all this. The message is: ‘Stop the world’ (as the shaman don Juan said). This means relax your everyday identity and plans. Our total message was ‘Stop the World, and let your deepest earth based experience guide you’. Plans are important, but not the final truth” (Amy and Arny Mindell, email sent via RSPOP London, on 20th April 2010 – Thanks Amy and Arny for authorising this quote!)

It rings true and yet something in me still protests: ‘…BUT I wanted YOU to show me HOW!’. With this, a shift occurs. It’s my birthday, and I begin to see how my special treat, my special journey, can still happen, only elsewhere. I still can and want to STOP THE WORLD, the spinning, whirling, I have been living in, eroding my grounding, my sense of purpose. I imagine myself sat by lake waters, on soft grass, lying on it, napping in the sun, reading, writing, letting the earth nourish me, effortlessly, freely, generously.

I want to go to the Lake District,  as sure and powerfully as I had been heading for the seminar. A gift – given months earlier – from the sweetest of friends, allows me to go. This friend also takes me to lunch that day, unasked, and gently helps me out of the loop of disappointment I had sunk into, my old familiar messages about the fate of my best plans (!). Loving gestures for my birthday (and incredibly thoughtful, unexpected gifts from close friends) also re-ground me.

INTERLUDE

“The Master leads

by emptying people’s minds

and filling their cores,

by weakening their ambition

and toughening their resolve.

He helps people lose everything they know,

Everything they desire,

And creates confusion

In those who think that they know.

Practice not-doing

And everything will fall into place” (Tao Te Ching, ch.3)

Flowing towards the first blog post: PART 2

The day after I drive to Cumbria, with a growing sense of joy that fills me completely as I arrive, park my car, settle in my room at the guesthouse.

As I walk light and smiley straight towards the lake, I feel home, freed, happy. I even manage to buy the only ticket left for an amazing Celtic band (Peatbog Faeries) for that night; a gig, sharing in the joy and laughter of the rest of the audience, which becomes a celebration of both my arrival and my RETURN. 

• The return of my earth bound, trees and wind-loving childhood, the joy of this bubbling up to surface.

• My return to this very place, where I fled to and found grounding a few years back, when another plan was cancelled, as my suitcase was stolen on my way to catching a flight to Italy – just recovering from an impossible loss.

Clue number 3: the most significant changes, gifts, have come when important plans, plans I was very attached to, failed, only to uncover possibilities I would have missed, blinkered by my insistence on that one particular form. Paths were found when following the stream round, under, over, through, rather than getting stuck on the boulders along the way (but also resting on the rocky surface to take stock and ground, sometimes), as an ACT OF FLOW.

From the shores of Northern waters I begun to write this. Seeking flow and the forgotten parts of myself, I find both by the water on the solid earth and rocks of this landscape, just as it was to begin with, just as it was every time I needed to re-join my path and my pace. I am returning to telling my stories, as it was at the very beginning, as a child, talking and singing to my dogs, to the trees, then writing journals, songs.

That part of me – like most children – knew about rhythm intuitively, naturally. All I ever did then that made me feel alive, worthy, happy and purposeful, was singing, dancing, being with the earth and telling my stories. Familiar? She’s  back, securely anchored to the rest of me, peeking through these pages, ‘daring’ to write, with some trepidation, again…

…Just so you know that the writer is as much a seeker and a learner of life’s teachings as the reader and that we are all out here doing our best.

This is my invitation to FLOW.

The post AllThingsFlow – What’s the story? first appeared on AllThingsFlow.