Diary: 7 Mar 2010: Patterns, painting, and pressing the pause button

Julia's Diary

My weekly diary page is written on the essence of life taken from moments from my everyday life that have inspired me! The aim of the piece is to give you the courage and skills to embrace whatever is in front of you and so find meaning and purpose in your lives – or it could just be a pleasant diversion from whatever you happen to have been doing before…

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7 Mar 2010: Patterns, painting, and pressing the pause button

07 March 10

Yesterday I drove to Arundel to have lunch with Wendy, my oldest friend. We met when we were 4. Today she is 51! I can still remember her coming to my 6th birthday party in her Heidi dress and she looks just the same to me! But then a person’s essence and vibration is there when they are little and often more evident and shining. In Wendy I see that her essence is more vibrant now than ever – she is an artist and she has been re-connecting with her gift in the last few years.

With her four children more grown up, Wends and I travelled alone together to Nice four years ago. I had travelled to Nice and onto Villefranche a day or so ahead of Wends – and when her plane landed I received a text from her to say that her bags had been lost! I texted back that it would be part of the ‘story to tell’ when she arrived home and she said that when she got my text, she laughed and relaxed. The bags were promised the next day – so Wends got in a taxi and appeared at our hotel with nothing but her handbag, which contained some money, a book and a prawn sandwich!

We had the most wonderful three days. We talked and read and ate and wandered. Her bags never appeared – after a day of wearing my clothes, we went on a shopping spree!
During those three days, where, significantly, Wendy was in a foreign land with nothing familiar (except for me!) not even her clothes, she had the time and the space to recognise the pain within her from not painting. We also both recognised a pattern that we mirrored, but in the Yin and the Yang of not allowing ourselves to express ourselves fully through our gift. I was supposed to be running a half marathon that weekend – but as was quite a common pattern then, I had pushed my training too hard and had injured myself. Wends accessed the pattern within her of not actually starting. Both of us could see that it was the deeper fear that we were not good enough or deserving enough and so sabotaged ourselves in an area that was most important to us: me through over doing and she through under doing. Four years on and Wendy is expressing herself with grace and beauty and flow from her heart through her artwork – and I am running free.

So what changed? We did some deeper work on ourselves – and still keep doing the work. It is a never ending journey to go deeper within, to take responsibility for what we are creating. If there is pain or a pattern that is causing us distress, we need to stop, take notice, resist blaming anyone else and see what work needs to be done.

To live from the position that you can make a difference to your life is an empowering feeling. Even if it looks as if the other people or circumstances around you are making it ‘difficult’ or ‘impossible’ – this is the time to press the pause button and ask the question – what is this to do with me? What part of me is projecting the difficult or impossible onto the situation, what do I need to do to clear the difficult and impossible within me?

Taking responsibility and turning the questions around gets to be a habit, and a practice that becomes habitual ultimately shapes our destiny.

So taking notice, minute by minute, can change our lives because in the taking notice we start to see what we are saying and what we are creating by these words. Also creating space to explore, whether that is by engaging in a conscious and intentional dialogue with a friend with the understanding that you want to work some things out, or with a counselor, or in your journal. It is in the pauses that the possibilities present themselves and the inner voice has a chance to be heard instead of having to try and shout loudly against the noise of daily life and scripts that we might have got caught up in.

Seeing your life as an adventure unfolding and with possibilities and learning always available along the path can make each day hold so much more excitement and promise. Your life is your blank page each day for you to write – or paint, design, shape into whatever you desire!

See more of Wendy’s art at www.wendyrichardsart.co.uk

Julia's Diary

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7 Mar 2010: Patterns, painting, and pressing the pause button

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