I had a 30 minute telephone consultation on Monday evening with a psychic called Sonia Choquette.
Sonia Choquette is a Chicago based psychic and “sixth sensory” intuitive who dedicates herself to furthering the emergence of sixth sensory living (living from one’s own intuitive wisdom, guidance and support) in as many people as she can reach. She is herself a model of the ideal of intuitive living which she holds out to others. Sonia is an incendiary speaker and a mover and shaker of consciousness in whatever setting she finds herself. (www.soniachoquette.com).
I was very late connecting with my call. This was not for lack of preparation. I had had the day off with laryngitis and had been at a low ebb mentally and physically (the first major doldrum of 2010 after the fading of the New Year resolutions). I had just enough energy to fuss and over-prepare like a cat on hot bricks. I had bought a pre-paid International phone card from my local grocery store. An hour before I had tested the connection with Sonia’s Business Manager’s office number. I had a notebook open. Since a pen could run out, I had three sharpened pencils ready to hand (in case any tips snapped!) This was an expensive call and the time was important to me.
Then at the appointed time I rang the wrong number! I left a frantic message with Sonia’s Business Manager. This was the only number I had recorded in my diary and my calendar. Not knowing what to do I left another message. Then I switched on my painfully slow laptop and went through the painfully slow process of connecting with the Internet through my 3 modem. I got into my hotmail account to e-mail Sonia’s Business Manager. He had already left an e-mail saying that I was 8 minutes late for my appointment and could I ring the number given straight away. It was 14 minutes into the session when we finally connected.
I mention all this because it is salient to what followed. I love Sonia Choquette and I love her writings. Early on in her first book “The Psychic Pathway” she had written “The most concrete block to a person’s intuition is having a disorganised life”. I had transcribed this and put it on my notice board!
But surface disorganisation holds a much deeper meaning beneath it, like an iceberg. I am aware that my general apprehension about having new dealings with the world leads me to states of anxiety which create dithering inefficiency and faulty actions like the one I just described. I had been given two telephone numbers and had recorded the wrong on. I had then (efficiently) deleted my past e-mails - to keep my e-mail system tidy - and had accidentally deleted the information I needed. Rookie error really. But it stems from self-doubt about dealing with a highly technologised, fast-moving, material world which seems just too much to cope with much of the time. Beating a retreat feels by far the better option.
The effect was a sense of rush and exasperation when we eventually got through to each other and having to work presto to compensate for the time lost. I was more affected by it than Sonia, because I know how longstanding a pattern this feeling of disorganisation and rush is on my part and how it is related to not having the first clue how to organise a viable system for daily living, maintaining things, planning, monitoring finances etc. The outcome is forgotten and missed appointments, lateness and inconvenience for all parties, wasted finance and the reinforcement of a sense of powerlessness and inadequacy in dealing responsibly with everyday practicalities. Like being a complete novice to everyday life. Inevitably, the key area in which this is reflected is in my relationships.
So, after asking for my birth date, Sonia spoke about my “lone ranger” tendencies, the outlook of a spiritual recluse to which I have clung all my life (to my increasing detriment), the deeply ingrained rags and deprivation beliefs of a renunciate which I have held (poverty, chastity and obedience) and the tendency to view prosperity as morally unacceptable to me.
It was not that I hadn’t previously considered these things, either individually or in relation to one another. It was that I had never had them
highlighted to me in this way. This is an inveterate impulse of my soul – to withdraw from the world in spiritual contemplation and retire into my sanctuary (bedroom).
There is also a counter-impulse deep in me which wishes to venture out, to show up, stand forth and speak out; to meet as many people as possible and light them up as best I can. I am the most extraverted introvert I know - a writer, speaker, performer, communicator and a creator with words and ideas.
My mind has to choose between these contrasting soul impulses and it has been my mind that has been jammed of late.
Sonia made it quite clear that it was not my soul that was in struggle about these different aspects. It was a “
mental block” – “There’s nothing great or small but thinking makes it so”. I might put it, that over the course of many lifetimes I have made a series of mental commitments which have prevented me from responding to my soul impulses to be open, loving, non-judgemental, open my heart and receive without resistance or defence, create, generate laughter and understanding, accept, enjoy and be happy.
What to do? I had not realised how far my mind has been allowed to hold sway over my intuitive awareness. Now that these mental decisions have been made more conscious, I can choose again.
I had thought that it was A Course In Miracles that was telling me “The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be as eternal as Himself” (Manual page 85 Section 1). But it has been my (unhealed) mind that has been giving its own (erroneous) interpretation of this (and other) sentences. (Including making everything psychologically real by judging it). It’s not the book, it’s my mind!
With the doorway to the secular world having been re-opened, will I actually now be able to change the habit of a lifetime and walk through it? What role have I to play? What part should I perform?
Sonia, of course, had something to say about this too. I love to travel and meet people. I like listening to their stories and, having a poetic outlook, it is natural for me to express back to people my sense of what they are saying to me. Often this seems very meaningful to them. They light up. I love it when people light up - and then light others up! It just feels thrilling. (I have not been so good at letting others light me up).
Sonia said that my purpose was to light up others wherever I was and that I had the characteristics of a poet and writer. (Sarah de Nordwall, poet in residence for BBC Worldwide had said to me at the end of last year that I needed to be writing poetry. (
www.bardschool.co.uk) Again, a good psychic consultation may simply have the effect of “lighting up” and re-clarifying what you already know, but may have come to overlook).
Although, at the best of times, I see a sacramental dimension to everyday events, the worthiness of people’s intentions and the worthwhile-ness of everything and everyone, I’m inconsistent and often retreat into reclusiveness and judgementalism when I feel overwhelmed.
I like a text called “A Course in Mastery” , which has a sentence saying that the world itself is the most perfect Ashram you could ever wish for. That’s not how I have treated it. I’ve stuck too long to the bricks and mortar of actual Ashrams out of a sense of disillusionment at what the world is up to and what it has to offer. The effect is a form of denial and hiding. The cost of seclusion from the raw edges of the world and relationships may well be a reduced capacity to learn to deal with them without either fleeing or judging. It could be a co-dependency towards ones “keepers” who deal with all the externalities for you and it might also be a lost opportunity to test out the actual practice of bringing your true self to the world without self-compromise. To learn how to be authentically in the world but not of it. It could well mean a sacrifice of self-initiative, creativity and the opportunities of taking an equal place with others to promote a new world struggling to be born. We pay for our security.
I have chosen security over the challenge to make my way in the world. In my late 40’s it’s almost embarrassing to acknowledge how little I have engaged and how much I have to learn. “O Brave New World…..!”
However, like any turning point, it all begins with a commitment, a new decision. Goethe wrote “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness…….the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too”. Hopefully I have seen the pattern clearly enough as a result of my brief conversation with Sonia to understand the ramifications of my way of thinking to date, the inertia that’s going to be involved in trying to turn it around and the future consequences of not doing things differently. If that doesn’t stimulate a new commitment, I don’t know what will.
It’s important to be gentle, not brutal with ourselves. My way of retreating from the world was there from the beginning. At Nursery school I watched the teachers and pupils around me, listened to their conversations and heard their preoccupations with a look of bewildered disbelief. Were they really concerned about these things or were they just putting it on? I couldn’t understand why everyone was giving the kind of importance to things that they were.
The strangeness and discrepancy between my perceptions and those around me hasn’t really changed, although my reactions to it, unfortunately, have. Instead of initial innocence and curiosity, a note of cynicism and despair has begun to sound more and more strongly. Judgementalism has crept in and made a settled home for itself in my mind.
Such habits are not changed in a day even when a fundamental decision has been made deeper in the mind to let go and allow change. That’s why I have entitled this Blog “Fundamental Change”.
Sonia spoke of a step by step opening the heart and starting to try and forge friendships. “Join the human race”. “Love the world and get into it”. And - most difficult for me – she advocated that I consciously allow myself to be loved (Eek!).
I feel like a neophyte in this area. Re-learning to engage. I think a lot of shy, separated and divorced people go through a similar process of “re-entry” and apprehension about how to do it. I shall read Susan Jeffers “Dare to Connect” .
Sonia said that without engagement with others we do get sick. Freud wrote (In “Civilisation and its Discontents” I think) “in the end we must love if we are not to fall ill and if we do not love we will most certainly fall ill”.
I have thought a great deal about venturing much more visibly into the world, but I hadn’t understood clearly what within me was holding me back. The need for security at the cost of self-development and self-expression. Shyness and unfamiliarity in dealing with the world. A need to protect myself against being engulfed by what I didn’t understand. A separatist purity, distance and aloofness which prevents what can be learned through the hurly burly of everyday life.
Most particularly, we need others to bring us to fruition. It’s the way we are made. In isolation, my creativity has fallen back on itself and expressed itself on the canvas of the body in the form of severe, debilitating and increasingly frequent respiratory problems. Luther described the fallen state of man as “incurvatus in se” - “Bent in upon himself”. I know from first hand what he meant. “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. But if you do not bring forth that which is within you, that which is within you will destroy you”, (Gospel of Thomas).
There is a strong connection between our breathing and our creativity. (“Breathing lays bare the continuity between inner and outer” – Winnicott). My respiratory difficulties had been the principle reason for my contacting Sonia at this time. I hadn’t fully related it to my withholding my creativity and my chronic habit of self-imposed isolation.
We looked at some ways to restore the broken connection. Getting myself massaged, Transformational Breathing Work (www.transformationalbreathing.co.uk) and a book by Michael Brown called “The Presence Process”. (Strangely this too, I believe, had been mentioned to me the Friday before by Avrill Carson (
http://www.successintelligence.com/). I asked if she might witness my working through the book if time allowed.
But the main thing is venturing out through the bands of fear. I think it was Steven Levine who said “to heal is to touch with love that which we previously touched with fear”. Fear is the shadow side of love’s willingness to extend.
I love Marianne Williamson’s inspired passage in “Return to Love” (1991) which was passed on to Nelson Mandela by his speechwriter at his presidential inaugural speech four years later:
“Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light not our darkness, that frightens us…
….Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
So that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
….And as we let our own light shine, we consciously give
other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others”.
That says it all.
JD Wednesday 03.02.2010
