Today I am powering up.
Oh my word! What happened this week?!
Monday: In Spain, for the final farewell to the family home… and flight back to UK. Fall in to bed at 1am.
Tuesday: Up and out by 8.30am. Delivering training to the senior leadership team of a luxury hotel. They give me lunch in their beautiful brasserie to say thank you. I crawl home, cancel evening plans and collapse into bed.
Wednesday: Up and out by 8.30am. I run the morning section of a day of training for HR professionals, to mark World Mental Health Day. On the side, my daughter’s been interviewed for a popular national BBC radio station, on why she (and young people in general) drink very little. She cites her mother’s drinking as inspiration for her not to drink… Crikey. I head off to a music jam session in the evening, with my sweetheart.
Thursday: Go and meet my Job Coach at the Job Centre, for the bimonthly check-in necessary to claim the Universal Credit benefits which have supported my working while I recuperate from a period of physical and mental ill health. I’m ashamed to turn up without a sick note for the first time. I try to blame my GP practice changing hands – the lovely Job Coach tells me her parents use the same practice… Ehem. (The fact is, that I’ve been in overwhelm for weeks and failed to find or use the new number for the practice…)
I walk on through town towards my office (I have free access to an amazing co-working hub, as one of their business incubation residents). I pass a curious scene – a Hari Krishna type guy scans the busy street for someone to pounce on with his book offering and request for donations. Today I deftly put my head down and avoid eye contact. He spots a different target and goes for her – a middle aged women clutching her bag to her. She says “no, thank you” several times, and eventually, “Please, no, I’ve just received the most awful news.” And yet, eyes now glistening with this new piece of information…he goes in again! I step over and square up to him wordlessly… The woman and I exchange glances and she heads quickly off. Realisation: in the moments we are our most vulnerable and shocked and low on energy, psychic vampires can see us a mile off and they target us and we have very little psychic power to fend them off. It’s so important to learn to power up energetically, however we can, especially when life is tough, because vulnerability attracts predators. It’s a really sad fact, and one I’d have denied years ago… but I have lived it so very much. People smell vulnerability and it brings out something sick (or at the very least, dismissive/ uncaring/ judgmental) in way too many people.. In fact, I think, in most people. We humans seem to be programmed to recoil from (and even seek to feed off) those in need.
At my office half an hour later, hoping earnestly to get to the things on my list from two weeks ago when I darted off to Spain at short notice to help with the move, I receive a phone call. It’s the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, specifically the case worker who has been working on helping me receive the correct benefits for the last few months. He tells me they’ve just received a call from the BBC requesting help finding someone local to interview on the current hot topic of Universal Credit, for the national evening news. The BBC’s (famous) Deputy Political Editor is on the train, arriving in the city shortly. Could the CAB put me forward, I am asked? I say yes. Half an hour later a producer calls for a chat – and it sounds like I’m probably not quite what they are looking for, but she’ll call me back later. I relax and go back to work. Another 30 minutes later at my desk, my phone goes again: “Hello, this is [BBC Deputy Political Editor]. Could you tell me your story…? Uhuh…… Could you be at your house in 20 minutes for an interview?” I get a hasty media-training briefing from my (ex-BBC) business mentor at my office and jump in a taxi. When I arrive at my house, the interviewer, and crew of two, bundle into the house with me. They’ve invented some ruse about placing a camera in my ’empty fridge’ and how I will be filmed fishing out a lone milk bottle from said fridge, and pouring milk in our mugs of tea before a cosy chat. Fine. Cliched beyond reckoning but fine.
What’s less fine is that, though the interviewer and I had had quite a nuanced conversation on the phone, he has now scripted two sentences that fit his story, and that’s all he wants me to say. They ran like this:
- ‘There was a 6 week wait for the first payment, and I had to take a loan – I’ve never caught up.’
- ‘Any money I scrape together from working part-time gets pretty much taken off my benefits, and the money I do get just about covers my rent – it’s really tough.’
We do a couple of takes and it’s a wrap. It’s now 3.30pm and they have to film a street scene in town, and edit the whole piece and send it to London for the Six O’Clock News… They’ve gone. And I’m at home wondering what hurricane just passed through my day.
When it goes out on the BBC News at Six, I watch in astonishment, thinking what have I done?! I’m wodged in there, as the hard-up housewife in the suburbs, between interviews with the Tory Home Secretary, the ex-Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader… I console myself that a) I put out some bold messages on social media ‘owning’ the piece before it went out, and b) “Who watches the News at Six any more?!”
My sweetheart comes over and we process it all together. Messages start to come in. What I don’t know at this stage, and won’t til the next day as I’ll be asleep on the sofa by 9pm tonight, is that the segment will also go out in the lead story on the BBC News at Ten. Which, yes, people do watch.
Friday: Wake up to some 40 messages (mostly from my astonished and supportive siblings) and the news that I was on the News at Ten too. I try to get on with my day… But to be honest, I’m feeling completely knocked out…
Saturday: Today. Reflection time. So, dear Heart of my Being, wtf…? How on earth did I manifest this particular week? Day? Life? What am I invited to learn from it? I am so very much aiming to simplify my life. Why is it ever more complex and way-out?
Excess potential. Reality Transurfing teaches that if you pour too much energy (effort, importance, attention) in to anything, you create ‘excess potential’ which invites and summons ‘balancing forces’.
I think of it as too much electricity in a circuit and the switch tripping to divert the excess…
And to protect the system. This is why a church spire has a lightning rod. Should it attract lightning, being the highest object around, it can easily ground the electrical charge.
Ah. Grounding. Right? This is why I need to do qigong, to discharge excess potential, to ground the electrical charge into the earth…. Why don’t I? Am I addicted to having my systems fried and on fire? (‘Slow down, you’re going too fast; you’ve got to make the morning last..’)
It’s not so very much about the grounding or discharging of energy, as it’s about the gathering and directing of energy.
Like a kung fu master?
Like a qigong master.
Aha. Yes. How can I gather and direct energy better? How can I CEASE to be the ‘vulnerable’ one who attracts predators, who allows herself to be the patsy picked for telly…?
Hang on. The national media coverage you had this week was not about making a victim of you, or even for the ‘healthy dose of public shaming’… But it was about ego purification. Don’t underestimate the gifts therein.
Back to the energy conversation. We’ve talked about electric circuits and energy flow. Try thinking today about batteries: charging them up, or better, think about powering up the batteries.
Yes. This is the heart of the MEDS Project! If I Get This Right, I can foster enough power in me that I shift into a different paradigm energetically.
A couple of years ago, the idea of being a poster girl for welfare claimants would have horrified me. But, it happened, and the world has not ended. In fact, I feel somehow freed from the compulsion to mask/pretend to the world that
a) everything is fine
b) I’m a self-sufficient professional
c) my health is fine…
There is permission to be more authentic, however complex, unexpected and far from societal approbation the reality has turned out to be. And in owning one’s truth, one stands in sovereignty, and one’s apparent conditions do not lend themselves to that ‘vulnerability’ that the predators seem to feast upon.
Tell me about powering up the batteries.
These are matters you know about. Find the will to have. Find the determination, the pure intention, the calm desire to attain / magnetise / reach out and take… the means. Ponder on the meaning of ‘powering up’. Rest with this phrase for a couple of days. No rush to move past this one. Ok?
Yes. Thank you. Very much. I like this. Amen.
Today I am powering up.
********************
Meditation:
15 mins silent breathing with a timer
Exercise:
None… :/
Diet:
Brunch: Coffee with cream. Leftovers from supper(s).
Evening: Amazing dinner at my dearest friends’ house after an evening at the theatre – Salmon, veg, salad, sweet potato fries, chocolate brownie, wine…
Sleep:
Screens off: 1am
Lights out: 1am
Wake up the next day: 7.45am
Total sleep: c6.30h
********************