Monday 29 November 2010

Every day, Nirvana

My 3G connection failed - as it regularly does - on my walk to work this morning, interrupting my joy at listening to a Tubular Bells/Christina Aguilera mash-up on YouTube. Unenthused with most of the music on my iPhone at the moment, I put on a meditation recording.

Instantly I was whisked away from the cold, the traffic and my fellow commuters, and the soothing voice took me up and away to a higher place where I started to feel untouchable. I felt surprisingly relaxed very quickly and was beginning to feel connected when suddenly the voice was cut off and my phone started ringing into my earphones. Urgh. It was the estate office where I live so I figured it could be important - was my flat flooded or on fire? Reluctantly I answered it. When am I going to pick up the parcel that was delivered last week? So, not even slightly important. How irritating to have been grabbed from my path to Nirvana and thrust onto the concrete plaza in front of Canary Wharf station.

Not that the estate office shouldn't have made the call, they're just trying to clear some space for the inevitable rush of Christmas deliveries. But the point of the today's rambling is that this just made me realise how much I need to be away from what is increasingly appearing to me to be pointless, banal crap.

It's not that my life is stressful, oh no, far from it. I've got it pretty easy at the moment, things are going well for me, I have nothing whatsoever to complain about. It's just that I feel the urge, the need, to be in a higher place. I'm starting to see a lot of stuff that goes on around me as truly worthless. Not that I'm coming from a negative place; I'm certainly not seeing things from a depressive perspective, and I don't feel at all jaded. Just a lot of things I once took as red and never questioned seem so superficial to me now.

Seven years ago before I moved to London I stared at the ceiling above my bed and said out loud to myself, "There has got to be more to life than this." And I found that there was. I removed myself from the Northern town I lived in and discovered the exciting metropolis that is London. I've travelled and partied, met some incredible people and done and seen things I'd never imagined I would or could. And I'm still discovering and learning and it's still exciting and I do still love it, I really do. But in parallel to that I find half of me in a similar headspace to seven years ago, only a step up, if you like.

I need to connect with our life force and I need to be around people who understand this. I don't mean I want a weekend at Centerparcs, I mean I need to get right back to basics, to the very root of what we're made of. I want to be creative and feel I must listen to the voice inside but, I'm struggling to hear what it's saying. But I do know it's speaking.

I'm going to a meditation workshop next week presented by one of the practitioners who introduced me to reiki. I'll use this to help me decide whether I will take the opportunity early next year to cut myself off from the outside world and spend ten days at a meditation centre. I want a piece of Nirvana and I want to be able to access it every day. Only then, I feel, will I be able to hear what my inner voice is telling me.

2 comments:

  1. I think the best way to live is to work out what's really important to you and focus on that. Sounds like you're well on your way to doing that. Kudos to you, Ms Cherry!

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