Welcome to 2023!
Last year went by so quickly and I realise I haven’t posted for a while. The main thing which took my attention and time was moving house, which was a drawn-out affair, lasting most of the year. The little home we have moved to needs a huge amount of work so we are still far from sorted.
I was also beginning some exciting new work with Alternatives, the inspiring company which showcases so many wonderful spiritual teachers and healers. As well as the talk at St James’s, there was an online series followed by a workshop in London, with a second workshop before Christmas.
That, plus retreats, one to one work and spending time with my dear family, meant that I rather neglected these posts. There are more on my Facebook page which I invite you to join if you haven’t already: https://www.facebook.com/CarolineBliss.TheCompassionateHeart
A Word About Hope
As we enter the New Year, there is often hope that the present year will be better than the last. Certainly, we have been through immense upheaval, in this country and throughout the world, and it feels as if humanity is losing some of its resilience, and with that its trust that things can indeed get better.
Hope is a precarious thing, and we each approach it differently. There are those who dare not hope in case it’s unfulfilled; then there are those who hope with an ongoing belief that things must surely get better, and those who desperately hope for a relief from suffering or hardship.
But hope can be unhelpful sometimes, unless the inner life is examined. We are finding it harder and harder as a species to face the ‘what is’ of our lives and have invented ever more distractions for ourselves. Fuelled by these endless activities, whether checking a phone, incessantly reading the news, working long hours or filling the day with busy-ness, we cling to a hope that at some point life will have meaning and we will find peace or fulfilment. Then we can bask in a sense of loving Being, free from the aching worry or anxiety of being human.
In this way, hope can set up inner conflict as it is a movement away from what is.
There is a different kind of hope, however, one which inspires us to face our deepest selves and our various problems. This hope is not a resistance to challenge, or to the feelings they engender, it is a deep sense of the rightness of life, a trust in the intelligence at work holding the whole tapestry of existence together.
This hope gives us the courage to move through the intensity of our inner world, our feelings and beliefs, until we find the nugget of wisdom at the core of our experiences and hold ourselves in unconditional compassion.
Out of this compassion for the self, comes a movement of love for all selves, shifting the perspective totally from the subjective/reactive state of separation to one of seeing the whole picture. In this state of Being, we experience the sense that we are all One, moving together through time-bound consciousness which itself exists as part of the Infinite.
Grounded in Being, we are no longer either hoping or fearing for our future, but at peace with what is, however challenging life continues to be. Free from inner conflict the energy of loving acceptance ripples out from our core into our lives and the wider consciousness.
May your year be transformed by this loving energy even as we navigate a precarious future.
*
