Becoming the Master of Self

The Sword in the Stone…

I’ve been thinking a bit about transformation and change lately. The other night a thought sprung into my slightly muddied mind. I had been pondering about the impending chemotherapy in a week’s time and of what will happen inside me.

A sudden vision of the duel in T.H.White’s ‘The Sword and the Stone’ popped into my conscious mind. The duel is between Merlin and Madame Mimm, he the mentor of the young and still unaware Arthur and she the Wicked Sorceress, a child stealing and thoroughly un-nice person out to eat the young boy.

The duel is all about power and the ability to change quickly, adapting to the present situation.
They metamorphose into different creatures, she a cat, he becomes a dog, each one besting the other.

It is a battle of wills and of inspiration because eventually Merlin becomes a microscopic bacterium and infects her while she is in the form of a dragon, her most powerful and intimidating form.

Very David and Goliath, if you like the biblical metaphor; because of course Merlin has won. By being very small and very clever he won the day and Arthur’s freedom.

The whole book is about the metamorphoses of a boy into a King; the journey from servant to master.

Each stage of his teaching he is ‘shape shifted’ into different animals so he may experience the world the way it is for each on in its own habitat walking a mile in the shoes of each one. Every lesson is a story and every story has wisdom dressed in metaphor.
Because he is so young perhaps, the boy accepts the magic quite happily and with each successive transformation the donning of the ‘shape’ becomes easier. The lessons are more accessible as the procedure gets into the muscle of the boy.

Eventually all the lessons will have a muscle memory, so that when the King requires an answer to a problem the muscle will flex and release the energy of the boy’s memory for that problem.

Accumulative knowledge is something we do not notice. We become good at something – it gets into the muscle of our memory and becomes an automatic process, available at our finger tips without so much as a thought process to prove itself.

It is strategy, and it is what we learn from conception onwards.

These days though sometimes we forget that we can do amazing things. Sometimes we will be reminded and if we are open enough to the idea of there being a muscle there to flex, then sometimes we will remind ourselves how to deal with the Madam Mimm’s of our lives.

We can shift our consciousness to become small and to enter within our selves and fight the dis – ease inside with all the magic we can muster.
We are learning machines; we just have to be taught a different lesson sometimes.

We all know something we do not know we know yet (Milton Erickson) and we need to be reminded occasionally.

Who knows, with the right learning and the flexing of the right muscle maybe we too can pull a sword from a stone.

To help someone pull a sword from their stone go to the just giving page and help us to help Macmillan cancer support.

journey to the islands

No not those islands! The Vancouver, British Columbia islands in Canada – that’s where we were.

thoughts on audacity

THE EARTH DOES NOT BELONG TO MAN MAN BELONGS TO THE EARTH..... ..... ALL THINGS ARE CONNECTED, LIKE THE BLOOD THAT UNITES ONE FAMILY, ALL THINGS ARE CONNECTED, WHATEVER BEFALLS THE EARTH BEFALLS THE SONS OF THE EARTH, MAN DID NOT WEAVE THE WEB OF LIFE HE IS MERELY A STRAND IN IT, WHATEVER HE DOES TO THE WEB, HE DOES TO HIMSELF Chief Seattle, Dwamish

M.E. and Ancient Healing

(shaman the one with eyes to see in the dark)

We are mind and body and Spirit. Why do we think that when one has dis-ease it will have no effect on the others? We are energy; we make it and transform it all the time; 60,000 years ago they made this connection. We made a light bulb and lost it! We focussed too hard on the machinery and forgot the fuel.
M.E is a dis-ease of the mind, the body and most importantly the spirit.
Shamanism is potentially an important factor in healing this dis-ease. The Shaman heals the Spirit as well as the mind and the body; one such healing is Soul retrieval.
At times of great trauma, stress, and long illness’ or of abusive situations the Soul fragments and parts will leave in order to protect themselves. This can happen at any time in life and the loss of this can bring a human being to their knees. They lose all interest in life and become wastelands of matter in the sea of apathy.
The Shaman is adept at accessing altered states of consciousness, which allows them to enter other world realities. It is within these other worlds that they seek out and find the answers, to do battle for the Soul part if necessary, to de-possess a person of less than totally supportive habits and to then journey back to the Seeker and teach them how to walk their path by connecting them with allies like Power Animals and Guides.
This also gives the Seeker back the power over the malaise that they may feel is at the root of the problem; releasing energy and allowing it to flow freely again.

Even although it is well over 60,000 years old it has applications to the modern dis – eases we suffer from.
M.E. also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which can advance to include Fibromyalgia; which attacks the muscle fibres themselves, causing a great deal of pain and an almost complete inability to function.
The M.E stands for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, it attacks the immune system via the brain and spinal chord. It can be a frighteningly debilitating dis-ease ranging from bone crushing exhaustion to in extreme cases long periods of hospitalisation.
Sufferers describe their symptoms as severe exhaustion, inability to do even the simplest of tasks like brushing their own teeth or washing and dressing themselves. Even completing a coherent sentence is a gargantuan task.
They become isolated by their inability to have enough energy to socialise or go shopping; even talking to people on the phone expends energy they just do not have.
I know this – I was finally diagnosed with it in 2002, but it has been with me now since at least 1976. Sporadic bouts in between long periods of remission, if you are lucky you may stay that way, if not the periods of remission become shorter and less frequent as the dis-ease relentlessly takes over your life.
M.E. is triggered by a lot of different circumstances and these are usually based in traumatic and or abusive events during childhood and through early adulthood, constant exposure to virus’, not taking time off or going back to work too early would result in consistently high levels of cortisol being dumped into the body. Myalgic encephalomyelitis is akin to battle fatigue. You can only be on your guard for so long before your body has to rest, if you do not – you wear the body out and the immune system with it.
What has this got to do with Shamanic healing?
People who have had traumatic, abusive incidents/ accidents or emotional breakdowns, whether through outside influences or self inflicted often will come to a Shaman with symptoms of M.E. they bandy around words like void, emptiness, fatigue, apathy, headaches, always catching colds, feeling ill all the time, they are just too tired to fight anymore.
The belief that during a time of trauma or abuse the Soul will fragment and part of it will leave the body in order to protect itself is also a part of Buddhist teaching – they describe the first trauma as that of birth. This would possibly be the first fragmentation, personally I think that it can happen in vitro and even if conception was not as loving as it could have been. If it is traumatic to the mother, then the foetus will experience it as trauma too.
The amazing burst of energy and vitality that happens when a Soul part is returned can be seen on the physical plane. The recipient not only feels the whole thing happening but the changes physically are immediately apparent.
They walk differently; there is a spring in their step, a light in their eyes and a lilt to their voice. Sometimes there are tears of joy or relief, recognition of a long lost friend returned home.
The job does not end there, of course, the Seeker is taught how to connect to themselves and their own Universe inside and out, but that is another story…
It is not for everyone, nothing is. This is a very subjective look at a subject that is personal to me. Shamanic healing saved my life in more ways than one, it is not a cure, but it is a healing. I am a work in progress and through becoming a Shamanic Practitioner the progress is coming in leaps and bounds.
All things are relative and what worked for me may not work for everyone, but it will work for some.
You don’t have to be ill to see a Shaman – we have lots of fun things we do too. It’s really intriguingly Quantum.

Eyes to see in the Dark


The Tungus tribe of Northern Siberia coined
The word ‘Shaman’ to mean a healer, or one with
Eyes to see in the dark. It’s quite a talent, to see in
Dark for there are many different kinds of darkness.
There is the darkness of depression, low energy and
Low self esteem. The darkness of apathy, life is passing
By and all you can say is ‘so what’.

There are many different ways to be healed, there are no
Instant cures. Shamanic healing will take you to
find allies and give you resources to enable you to
find the passion that you once had; giving you a way to
Say goodbye to the past while still honouring it’s
part in your life’s journey, and your life is a journey, how you proceed with it will depend on you and the choices you make along the way.

Have you ever wondered what would have happened if…? There are many theories on this subject and it is now no longer in the realm of the impossible and not even in the improbable it now lies in the possible. Quantum physics is daily pushing the boundaries of what we suspect to the edge and beyond of what we know. For some, these have been revelations, for others merely justifications of long held beliefs now becoming fact.
Not just anecdotally but specifically and proven by eminent scientists, the quantum worlds are waiting for us to jump right in and find out how many ways there are to calculate the probabilities of what is in the box.
Otto Schroedinger could explain that one better than I.




More than 50,000 years ago, there were people who didn’t know what a box was, so they didn’t put themselves or situations in one. They saw everything as a new possibility, a new challenge and they went out to meet that challenge with a specific outcome in mind. How do I know this? Cave paintings and artefacts found at archaeological digs prove the posit that positive thinking is nothing new, it is in fact something we have had to learn all over again. We kind of lost it somewhere in the era of industrial enlightenment.
The day they switched on a light bulb something inside of us switched off.
The dark is a verdant and amazing thing, light casts only shadow which is such a flimsy facsimile of the dark that we seek to control.

The shadows are places of confusion and there lie the monsters. There are no real edges, no markers in shadow; everything is ephemeral and constantly shifting with every small change of light. So, really, depression and apathy are shadows. In the most part for some reason we are taught at an early age to fear the dark – the creatures of the night are weird and wonderful, but usually deadly… at least to the others in their nocturnal world.

Things that live in the light fear things that live in the dark; if light is so wonderful why is the womb, the safest place you will ever be, not illuminated somehow?

Or is the dark of the womb the light of creation?
©Sleepy Dragon December 2006

Schroedinger's Cat,and the start of M.E?

This was written in the latter part of 2005.





For the past few months, longer even, but particularly these past few months; my mind has been meandering, slowly, inextricably back to my past.


I have never really left it, or perhaps it has never really left me, the reason; well if I explore it fully I’m thinking that I might realise that I cannot become someone else without fully recognising who I was before. A Rite of Passage before the past is left behind?

All this sounds very mysterious, it’s not at all. When you think about it how many of our thoughts come out in plain obvious thought, without the leap of faith style jumps of logic, you realise there are very few because thoughts are a bit like quantum string theory, there’s no real beginning and no real end.
There are no straight lines and ultimately there are many variations all occupying space at the same time in different aspects, and all this happens in a nanosecond.

Is that the energy that is left when we die? Are these electrical impulses the basis of the soul that goes on? Who knows?

This is just another tangent that, having swung onto can take a while to get ourselves back on track.

And so it begins.

I was born, whether the usual way or the product of someone’s imagination, whichever makes no real difference; it will go the same way. Firstly, there’s baby stage not much going on there really, cause I can’t remember much of that period, except for having inoculations, that must have been quite traumatic as the memory has stayed with me since. I once asked as to what age I was when I was stuck with needles and all they could say was that I was far too young to have remembered that so I must have imagined it. Even if that is true, trust me, it doesn’t make it any less valid.

My next memory really is my sisters wedding - again I’m assured that there is no way I can have such excellent recollections of the day, but I maintain always that I have. There are a few fleeting memories of little blue Ford Anglia’s and my sister sporting a very fetching Astrakhan coat, (which always made me think of a large, soft, shiny tightly permed black poodle; I do remember once musing that perhaps it was a poodle - but was assured it was some kind of exotic sheep kind of woolly thing, whatever it was I was fairly taken with it).

But, I digress, I do that a lot by the way, but bear with me it will make sense in the end, well ish…

Anyway, I was sporting a pair of what I called “Smarty Sandals”, these were of soft red leather and a very pale crepe rubber sole, and when new, they smelled sublime. They were not, however, the sartorial elegance required by my mother and she insisted that I put on my shiny patent shoes that pinched and I could not move in without causing a blister, not to mention that they should never be smudged or scuffed; the merest chance of which brought on a fit of the vapours; which could very well escalate to a good smack round the ear. Not that much of a problem really unless there was a blunt instrument involved; this was often the case and a situation to be avoided at all cost. Unfortunately, I for some reason, inspired this behaviour to reach it’s greatest heights, and Mothers powers of improvisation never failed to impress, oft times quite literally!

So, quantum wise is there a me who was never at a sisters wedding? Was I too young to remember it and what I have in my head is an ability to connect to another space time dimension and integrate it to my memory. Or was I really just precocious enough to remember that day, because that was the day that one of those life changing moments happened? I've had quite a few of them over the years.

My wonderful dog has cancer. He is mostly responsible for my continued sanity. He kind of saved my life. I can’t even come close to saving his. The irony of it is tangible, here I am a veterinary nurse with supposedly unlimited resources at my disposal, and the favours owed to get access to others not so accessible and the people to make it happen. I won’t though. My dog has cancer - or to put it with slightly more validity - cancer has my dog. This is the situation. He has not the ability to cope with the inevitable intrusions to his life and his body and as his owner it is my responsibility to make sure that he has as little stress as possible -stress makes it worse, as with most things.

He will get as much treatment as I can give him that does not upset his fragile temperament. When the time comes I will be the one to do the deed when it becomes necessary, (very occasionally will they just fall asleep and not wake again, but that is extremely rare). Then I will be the one to berate myself for all I did not do and the grieving will begin.
But no, I’m in the position to begin the grieving process now - at this time - here while he lies in the bedroom, on top of the duvet. While I try to work around him and take him to his favourite walks. While I try to come to terms with mortality and all that comes with it. And I have to come to terms with letting him go; to give him the only thing I have left to give that will free him from this disease. For he has completed what the Universe brought him into my life to do, and he deserves my utmost compassion and duty of love. I have to listen to him and know when he tells me it’s time for him to leave, and allow him the dignity and grace that is all he deserves to go from me as peacefully and as painlessly as I can make it for him.

Is there a reality somewhere where cancer doesn’t exist? Where death is not the ultimate experience. I was going to write “human experience” but that is just too arrogant; everything in the universe must experience things perhaps not in the way that we perceive it but effect is caused by experience is it not? Is not that the reason we have a universe at all?

What if all we are really waiting for is all the strings to come together again? Perhaps once a gazillion eons ago there was a great pair of cosmic shears that snipped the universal string into small pieces making them part of a whole but again totally independent and singular. What if they run concurrently and in a cosmically bound tango the music for which a very few can faintly hear in the distance of a dream?

What happens when all the strings come back together? Will all the worlds then be the same because all of the beings therein will have experienced the full gamut of life. They will all have been all colours, will all have been rich or poor, good or evil? Will all have been everything they need to be, to be whole.
Is that the reason for different dimensions and the reality that lies within them? Was that what Nostradamus meant when he said the world would end?
Is that the meaning of life? Or is it just something that keeps our brains ticking over trying to make sense of it all? It’s all in the box. Otto Schroedinger’s box; and like Otto’s box, life is never certain until we unpack it. Only when we recognise what is in front of us and give it a name does it become true. So, until the box is opened there are so many different connotations of what is going on inside the box.

It was actually a highly distasteful experiment as they tend to be. I will not repeat it here but it is mentioned in ‘The Universe Next Door’ by Marcus Chown and I believe in Brysons’ ‘History of Everything’, and the basics are that anything is possible until proven otherwise by direct experience. An experience that we as humans have deemed true by mutual consent.
So, we really do make our Universe on a second by second basis, but, we limit what it will be - by mutual consent.
I revoke my consent. I want my Universe to be better. I want global warming to cool off, I want proper seasons where they have always been. I want to keep my beautiful dog who has the soul of an angel. I want that we discover how to keep our cells from betraying us - or is it we who betray our cells.
I want us to learn from our mistakes and refrain from making them again and again, for that is a sign of madness is it not?

I believe that if I connect with my Universe at a cellular level, (see works of Deepak Chopra) and begin to make the changes from there that that is how the expansion takes place and it grows and fills all of the void and then moves onto the other realities. As above so below, as within so without…
And of everything in between, we have an effect on everything and everyone we come into contact with and that means we are responsible for how that turns out.
The mind effects the body, external events make internal repercussions. What kind of impression do you want to make in anothers future as well as your own?