In this world of exhausting alternatives, there’s nothing more woke than ‘Manifestation’.
You can, we’re told, manifest health, wealth, love and perfect self expression, or you can’t.
Affirmations and Gurus are now part of everyday life.
But, they say, it requires a life time of gratitude to get the angels to bale you out.
I may be obese but if I say ‘I deserve to be like Kate Moss.’ unless you stop eating like a fat fuck then the affirmation won’t work.
So when is it when an expectation becomes an unrealistic demand?. Praying to be Pope for instance, does not make you the Pontiff in Rome.
Dusty Springfield sung about wishing and hoping. Despite being gay she wanted a geezer to come into her arms. (I don’t think it meant spilling his seed). If she wished and hoped long enough her partner would appear. We all started wishing and hoping for our knight in shining armour to rock up on a white stallion with big stirrups. But then didn’t every girl in the 60’s wish and hope for their husband to emerge. The trouble is when they did it invariably ended in tears.
Be careful what you wish for…..
Wanting your bank balance to change just by saying ‘Dear Whoever you are give me abundance.’ only works if you put in 10.000 hours and work your butt off.
The expression ‘hope for the best, but prepare for the worst’ is optimism born out of fear. Fake it till you make it kinda thing.
My kidneys, or should I say lack of, has taught me that I have to listen to my innards.
When I am quaking, lying on a bed in a mouldy hospital with doctors who only see my fibroid, when my innards start shaking I prepare for the worst but hope for the best.
When the diagnosis comes it is what it is. Wishing and hoping is one thing, facing the truth invites in all softs of real. And then what?.
Mantras and affirmations are for those who require an external or emotional leg up.That’s me.
Feeling you can’t do it on your own, knowing there is some sort of invisible world that helps.
Every time my heart defibulates, or my ankles swell, or my breathing is fucked I prepare for the worst and blah blah blah.
I don’t know the true efficacy of New Age practices but it’s whatever floats your boat.
I learnt to meditate thirty seven years ago.
I wanted a baby, but I knew if I didn’t calm down the child would grow up with a nutcase for a mother.
I went to Royden Hall, in the middle of nowhere.
The silence around the building pulsated. I’d never listened and heard abolutely nothing before.
I argued all the time with the teachers.
‘Maybe there is no such thing as luck,’ I said, ‘Maybe your life is mapped out for you. Maybe this is all just a load of old bollox’.
They’d heard it all before.
But they listened and I was given my very own mantra.
That word is the only secret I have kept from the old git.
‘Telling anybody your mantra will disempower it.’ they said.
So one word, my word, was introduced to me in the silence of the Kent countryside.
‘It’s like walking through a heard of elephants the first time you use our mantra’ they said.
And to be honest I did feel an overwhelming peace, but that was the first and last time.
For thirty seven years I’ve been trying to locate it again.
When you start down the meditative, manifestational, affirmative route there’s a mountain of expectations.
Keep at it and you can win the lottery, they don’t tell you you have to buy a ticket first.
Dump the negative and believe in the affirmative. For most of us it’s easier said than done
The dawter was born through meditation. The midwife thought I was courageous for refusing gas and air. I wanted no pain relief, didnt trust it and anyway I wanted to experience the whole shooting match.
‘I’m knocking off at seven so get a wiggle on.’ she said.
I hit my mantra and rode the contractions. For four and half hours I transcendentally meditated.
I was considered a primigravida – it meant I was old. I was thirty eight.
They put me on a foetal heart monitor.
‘Will you cease your shouting’ said the midwife
I introduced my mantra started and the peaks and troughs on the monitor disappeared.
‘What’s just happened?’the midwife panicked.
‘Don’t worry, she not dead’ said the ‘oosbind dragging on a roll up ‘she’s just meditating.’
.
My dawter was very obliging and entered this world at six fifty five, five minutes before the midwife knocked off.
Five years later I went to a sweat lodge.
In a field in East Sussex. The prairies it ain’t.
A wigwam was erected, a hole dug out in the centre of the floor and a boiling hot sand stone sunk into the pit.
We filed in and sat round in a circle. Out in Montana the roof of the wigwam has buffalo hides and sacred blankets thrown over it. Our tent near Tunbridge Wells was covered in anoraks,Burberry raincoats and greased Barbars.
We chanted and sweated. The stone was exchanged for a hotter one, the white Anglo Saxons dropping like flies. I could withstand the heat being a Semite. .
Over three rounds of prayers we were told to give away something. Some gave away anger
Some gave away resentment. I gave away fear, if I had known how fucking terrifying it was I would have given away my driving licence.
I felt I had shed my skin like a snake, ‘Until it grows back’, they said, ‘You’re be raw.
And so I was.
Maybe some of that malarkey does work
I can ride my fear, like my contractions, like Calamity Jane on a bucking bronco I’ve learn to hold on to the
reigns and not give a shit.