A choice to change or stay the same...
This tiny piece of wood hanging around my neck has a story to tell.
Over the days that lead up to the Osho Leela Mystic Heart Festival that I attended last weekend I was feeling a bubbling sense of anxiety and apprehension.
It's such an incredibly intensive and powerful spiritual gathering. One that I know has the power to shift me on so many levels.
Yet this time there was another undercurrent that was playing out in my mind.
Last year I attended this same festival to co-host the very same firewalk gathering, and I'd brought my boyfriend with me. It was the first spiritual event he'd ever been to and I was nervous yet excited to share the experience with him. I needn't have worried as he absolutely loved it and it was it was an incredibly powerful moment in our relationship.
I was so wrapped up in love without any clue as to what would unfold between us over the following months...
So in the lead up to the festival this year, I so many feelings bubbling under the surface.
Since we split last November, I have found it incredibly tough at times. I thought he had been 'the one' and then it all came crashing down around me.
Over the last few months as I've made peace and dropped any anger and judgments I may have been holding on to, at times I still can't help but still feel so love for him. So much love, love for who we had been together.
I worried how it might feel being back in those familiar surroundings this time on my own.
On the first day I walked into one of the workshops, in particular, one that we had shared together last year and had found so powerful. During that workshop, we had discovered that the workshop leader also carved beautiful 'oghams' from various trees and that each one had a particular symbolism and intention.
We spent hours deliberating which ones we would buy, and we gifted them to each other, both wearing them all the time in the weeks that followed. I had even spent some hours scouring Hatfield park a couple of weeks later when his had fallen off during a run and he’d been upset as loosing it. I found it.
When we split, I could not longer look at it and had to put it away in a box, along with everything else.
When I arrived at this workshop, and saw all the various carve pendants laid out across a display table. I took a deep breath and knew instinctively that this was my opportunity to rewrite that story.
Start anew with a blank slate...
A shiny new chapter...
Shake off the residual fears and anxieties...
Let go of the 'what could have beens'...
At the end of the session, I shared with the workshop leader what was going on for me as something as a declaration and internal acknowledgement of my intention that this was significant moment of choice.
A choice to change or stay the same...
A choice to hold on or let go...
A choice to look back or focus ahead...
My eye caught this particular ogham carved into heather which symbolises community, friendships, family connections and strengthening of bonds with partners. All things I'm committing to draw upon and manifest more deeply in my life.
It felt the perfect way to read write the script and reclaim my story.
The shift was immediate. As the festival unfolded over the following three days, I felt myself feeling so much more connected, having conversations with ease whereas previously I struggled to initiate, forming close relationships with the girls in my dorm room, meeting people that I've met over the last couple of years and allowing myself to relaxing into their company, and even feeling the exciting spark of potential once again.
The energy of the entire experience became so much more than I could ever have anticipated.
All from that tiny moment of choice.
That threshold moment in which I claimed the opportunity to reframe my experiences and step into my power once again.
So this is a story of choice and a reminder that we all have choices in every moment. Threshold moments that have the potential to change the entire direction of out lives if we let them.
Yet our choices they often appears to us in the tiny moments, the moments that we can so easily overlook when life gets busy, moments where we hesitate and miss the calling as it passes by.
This is your moment.
What will you choose?
