Years on, and

Its been years since I published a blog post. I’ve drafted many though. I couldn’t connect with the person I was when I originally set up this blog. I had to change the front page (from a happy-go-lucky-follow-your-dreams fairies-and-rainbows travel blog) so that I could feel like I could write authentically again. Don’t ever ask someone like me to put on a face to be something that I’m not feeling. There’s not much authenticity left in this world so I refuse to perpetuate any ounce of doing something just to get a positive result. Rather, the more we can share from our hearts, the greater the chance we have to make a positive change.

Coming back to the city was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Fitting in got me down. Being part of the system got me down. Being a cog in the machine that I didn’t align with pained me to no end. Yet I kept coming back for another beating, knocked down and somehow then brushed off to take it again. I lost myself so far that I forgot how to find myself again. I surrendered the clarity that I had found and I feel that loss, nearly every day.

How to get back, to that level of health that I had when travelling? The high of the insight, the motivation and action coming easily. People say that travel changes your life. I concur, it certainly does. And it can spoil you for life. Unless you numb yourself, unless you forget or unless you can figure out a way to create the level of meaning, light and significance that you once had when travelling, effortlessly.

I chose the latter, hence the struggle which continues, three years on. But it has gotten better. And I recognise that I am learning these lessons with the opportunity to put them into action, in a difficult daily life, which I am grateful for.

Right now there are several challenges, which face me around every corner. The themes are, external validation, the place of women in our society (and in construction / engineering), and the balance of disciplined routine (masculine) and the ideal level of feminine flow/ feminine freedom.

I am also philosophising and pondering the implications of healing from mental stress and the impacts of a negative workplace environment from a neuroscience perspective, namely Chapter 5 from ‘Am I Dreaming’, where James Kingsland describes the top down prediction errors versus the bottom up sensory information and how previous prediction error bias can become a more deeply ingrained pattern in certain circumstances.

More to come, perhaps?