My second job for the last twenty years has been as a yoga teacher and I know that when people hear about my second job they tend to naturally believe that I am helping others to be fit and well, whilst also supporting them to consider the deeper aspects of life. We all assume certain things about others based on our beliefs about what’s good and what’s bad, but what if good and bad don’t really exist? What if good and bad are figments of our imagination, conjured up out of our own connotations about what each word means?

As well as doing both my jobs I have always tried to help others out as best as I could. I have always strived to be a ‘good person’:  this started from a really young age with me trying hard both at school and at home to be a ‘good’ girl. I knew who the ‘naughty’ kids were and I definitely didn’t want to be one of them. At home I would help Mum by doing things around the house; I really wanted my Mum and Dad to see me as being a ‘good girl’. Being good became part of my identity and I never for one moment considered that there could possibly be any harm in being good.

As an adult, I would offer to babysit for my friend’s kids without them asking and I always tried to be as helpful as possible to everyone. Once a week I would race to a local hospice, having just finished a night shift and help out for a couple of hours before racing back across town to teach a yoga class, fervently believing that I was doing nothing but good.

My partner and I have sponsored a child abroad for the last thirty years and I have given both my money and my time to animal charities, staunchly believing that if only more people gave money to charity then we would eventually be able to address all of the imbalances and injustices in the world.

I can remember being fairly young when I rather anxiously asked my Dad if there were more ‘good’ people in the world than ‘bad’ and feeling a wave of relief when he said that there were. I bought into the belief that ‘if only there were more good people in the world then the world would be a better place’. But what I have come to realise is, as with all beliefs, this belief is not true and the reason for that is that ‘being good’ is not a true way of being.

I put an enormous amount of effort into being good, as opposed to simply just being me and this I did because like most kids, I was acknowledged more for what I did than for who I was. I was seen for being sporty, trying hard and being popular with the boys but equally, there were those who were seen for not being good at sport, dropping out in class and being ‘users’ when it came to relationships. We all had our identities but none of them had anything to do with the truth of who any of us were and everything to do with the external mechanics of how we looked and what we did.

Looking back I can see that even though I was heavily invested in being seen as being good – that what actually mattered was being seen as being something and in fact, pretty much anything would have done. This I know because over the many subsequent years the characteristics that I have been known for have changed many, many times. The array of identities that I have had has included being a very hard and aggressive person, a rather wild risk-taker, an overtly ‘nice’ person, a deeply ‘spiritual’ person, a vegetarian animal rights kind of a person, a dance party chick plus a multitude of other interchangeable personalities. Looking back I feel like one of those cut-out paper dolls that came with a whole wardrobe of different cut out paper outfits and throughout my life, I simply kept switching the different looks.

What I have come to feel in recent years is that there are many, many things in life that are not as they seem. In fact, they are in many ways the direct opposite of what they purport to be. I can categorically say that there was not an ounce of any true good in any of the ‘good’ things that I did, and not only that, my so-called ‘good deeds’ actually added to the very things that I was trying to eradicate because how I was being was not true – for all intents and purposes – it was an act even though I would have sworn blind that it was me.

The most significant contribution that I could have made to any of the causes, people and events that I gave my time to was Me, the real undoctored Me – but I didn’t, I took the tampered with version of Mini-Me wherever I went, the ‘Trying To Be Good Me’, the ‘Trying To ‘Be Calm Me’, the ‘Trying To Be Selfless Me’, the ‘Trying To Do The Right Thing Me’. I, therefore, walked dishonesty into every situation that I was involved in because I didn’t have to try to be me, in fact trying to be anything other than me will always take me away from simply just being me. And to add that I now know that by simply just being me, I silently encourage others to also just be themselves, which in many ways is the most valuable thing that I can ever do for anyone.

In recent years my beliefs around the concepts of ‘being good, being benevolent and being kind’ have crumbled away as violently as an unstable rockface and I have been left standing and looking around me, questioning all beliefs for their validity in truth. As I stand in the rubble of the rockface, what has been revealed to me is a woman who is deeply embedded in the beauty of life, a woman who understands that true caring comes through us and not from us, and a woman who can see and appreciate the innate beauty in us all.

So I have dropped the act of being good, I have let go of any intention of being kind and I certainly don’t believe that if only there were more good people in the world then the world would be a better place.

What I now know to be true is that all that’s needed is for me to be myself, the real and true me that I was born as – free of pictures, free of any ideals and free of any notion about who I should be or who I would like to be. The absolute simplicity of who I innately am is more than enough, in fact, it gets grander and grander by the day.
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By Alexis Stewart, team leader of an amazing team, mother of a beautiful boy, partner to a man who keeps revealing more and more of his incredibly delicate nature, an absolute lover of people and of Life, Sydney, Australia​

Touch between my son and I was rare and I’d like to say that it was more on his side than mine, but that wouldn’t be true. Now I appreciate that what I am describing might sound all very normal, considering that my son is a teenager but our relationship had been troubling me for a while, particularly because I have come to understand that relationships are like mirrors and that when we look into them, the reflection that we are shown is actually of ourselves. Given this immutable fact, I had been pondering for a while what it was that I was being shown about myself, through the reflection of my relationship with my son.

It is not always easy to be honest; often the things that we are shown about ourselves aren’t pretty but what I have found is that if I resist the urge to go into self-critique and choose instead to understand that what is being presented is an opportunity for great change, then it makes the process much easier. In fact, I have now come to a place where I actively seek the reflection that relationships offer, as I deeply appreciate the opportunity that the power of reflection provides.

For the first five years of my son’s life I spent a lot of time with him, playing with him, taking him to the park, reading to him and being very conscious of the way that I parented him. I made a point of praising him a lot and often told him how special he was. I was naturally a very playful Mum and I worked hard to not show my frustration or anger. When I say anger, it was not a boiling over, ‘in your face’ kind of an anger, but more of a deeply buried one. I just about managed to keep a lid on my frustration and anger by dedicating myself to a strenuous exercise routine, peppered with a liberal sprinkling of all night partying. Had I chosen to acknowledge those deeply buried feelings, then this would have been the first vital steps needed in dealing with them but alas, I chose to bury them instead.

I had fairly set ideas about what I thought ‘being a good Mum’ was and I lived out those ideas pretty convincingly. I held the belief that I was a great Mum and my friends and family backed me up in that belief. At the time, I didn’t doubt that I was a deeply loving Mum and that my partner and I were bringing up our son in the best possible way.

However, what I have come to feel in recent years is that the pictures that we hold about certain things are so commanding that they superimpose themselves over the top of the underlying truth. My belief that I was a great Mum impacted on my ability to feel where I was really at. In hindsight, I can now see that there were many indicators that demonstrated very clearly exactly where I was at. One such indicator was that whenever our son was sick, it was my partner who would sit and hold him for hours on end, because the underlying tension that I lived with constantly made it nigh on impossible for me to sit and do what I perceived as ‘nothing’. I had a driving need to continually ‘get on and do something’ and it was this drive that kept me in perpetual motion.

The other major thing that I was unable to feel was my absolute exhaustion, an exhaustion that I hauled around with me from day to day and one that formed a rather shabby base for everything that I did. Knowing that children, like the rest of us, can feel everything that is going on in another person’s body as well as their own, I couldn’t help but ask myself “What had I been truly communicating for all of those years?” This question became key and was brought up one day by an amazing esoteric healing practitioner. She asked me to consider what was I truly communicating with my body when I stood outside my son’s door and, from my hard, contracted body, squeezed out the words “Come out of your room darling and spend some time with your Dad and I.” Great question and the answer revealed much. What I realised is that what I had been communicating with my body was worlds apart from what I had been communicating with my mouth. And what is crucial to understand is what we communicate with our bodies is what is felt by another.

This revelation prompted me to get brutally honest with myself about what I was communicating, not only with my son but with everybody else. What I realised is that what I expressed with my mouth was often very different to what I expressed with my body. This revelation, albeit simple, has been a life changing one for me, as it has enabled me to begin to bring real change to not only my relationship with my son but to all of my relationships, simply by getting honest about what it is that I am feeling in my body.
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When I am aware that my body feels like it’s wanting to pull away from my partner or my son in an attempt to ‘get on with something else,’ I try – to the best of my ability – to physically relax it, and although at times this feels quite mechanical, what I’m finding is that it’s leading to great change. Yesterday, whilst on my way to the shop, I bumped into my son coming back from school and he instinctively put his arms out for a hug and my response was to surrender my whole body into his arms.
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In much the same way as kids love to layer papier-mache around a balloon, we humans love to build stories around who we perceive ourselves to be. We think that the music we listen to says something specific about us; that the food we enjoy eating says something special about who we think we are; that our hobbies make us more interesting and differentiate us from others and that the way we dress is a statement that sets us apart from everyone else. Our shoeboxes are where we store the ‘physical evidence’ of our assumed identity, which is why, when I think about it, I carried my ‘shoebox’ around the world with me. Throwing it out would surely have meant throwing away the evidence of my existence…or so I thought.

I had lots of things in my shoebox: concert tickets, photos, love letters and cards with sentimental words written ‘just for me.’ They were mostly things from specific people, however I had a couple of things in my shoebox that weren’t written by anyone I knew but were words I had cut out of cards and articles that had for whatever reason struck me as being significant.

I suppose the best way to describe these keepsakes was that rather than solidify my sense of self they alluded to a deeper aspect of life, and although I wasn’t totally clear as to why I wanted to keep them, I knew that I didn’t want to throw them out. Looking back, I can see that for most of my life I had an inkling that there was more to life than met the eye and yet I was never able to put my finger on quite what it was. I can see now that what I was doing was scrabbling around for what felt like tidbits of the truth.

As a child, the deeper aspects of life never consciously occurred to me; and looking back I can see that that was because I, like most kids, just lived it. Life and I were one and the same – we just bumped along together effortlessly. Up until the age of about nine I lived life from my body. I ran, jumped, skipped, hopped and rolled my way through my days. Whether I was building a dam out of rocks and pebbles or playing on a building site, I lived life through my body.  

My fingers still remember how it felt to squeeze a berry from the Snowberry Bush and they can still recall the squishy feeling of pulling putty out of window frames in the new houses on the building site where we played. My nose remembers the smell of our compost heap down the end of the garden and the smell of gas still reminds me of being in my Grandad’s kitchen. When I hear a plane flying high up in the summer sky, my ears take me back to lazy days spent playing in the back garden and when I hear the football scores read on the telly, I am transported back to feeling my boredom on Sunday afternoons when the sport was on TV. My mouth still holds the memory of how sweet the stem of a blade of grass tastes and the taste of strawberry jam reminds me of my daily dilemma of which spread to put on my toast.  

My eyes are just as instrumental in remembering my past: colours, particularly the colour white, brings back the memory of playing marbles and of how each different coloured marble had a different effect on my body. The sight of daffodils transports me back to my childhood joy at seeing their emergence in the field at the back of our house.  

The body, the body, the body… I lived life from my body. 

So what happened to me at the age of 9 to literally sever my connection from my body? Well, my family moved from a small village in North Yorkshire (the road we lived in was called ‘Crimple Meadows’) to Watford, a huge sprawling town an hour north of London. My sensitive young body felt like it had literally been assaulted and in many ways it had. Not only had my beloved countryside been replaced with concrete, but I was also picked on at school.

Many of the kids were hard and aggressive and up until that point I hadn’t been exposed to either trait, not even in adults. It was the girls in particular that upset me: they used swear words that I had rarely heard before and although none of the girls actually hurt me physically, looking back I can’t help but wonder if a quick kick would have been better than the numerous venomous verbal attacks I received. But it’s the way I chose to deal with it that’s particularly upsetting, because I chose to harden in exactly the same way that the girls that bullied me had.  

The me that had been me up until that point–the young girl that had skipped and hopped her way through her childhood, the girl who had been as delicate as the spring flowers that she delighted in – chose to harden. And the reason why I hardened was in a desperate attempt to avoid feeling the pain I felt. Not just the pain of being attacked but the pain of feeling how awful it was to feel what had happened to the girls who had, at some point in their lives, been just as tender as me.

In hardening myself, I brought in a wedge between me and myself and in separating from myself, I also separated from the life that up until that point I had been part of. I subsequently spent the next 35 years living in separation from myself and therefore, from life. I feel to add that none of us can ever truly separate from life because life and us are one and the same, but by making our outer shell crusty, it gives us the feeling of being separate. This unclassified feeling of separation resulted in an almost permanent state of mild tension – a tension that I did a masterful job of covering up by managing to assemble myself into what can only be described as a ‘comfortably happy state.’ And why didn’t anyone notice what had happened to me? Well, because it had already happened to pretty much everyone else around me and living in separation from ourselves has become so normal and accepted that we neither recognise it nor speak about it. But deep down we all know that it’s happened and it is a pain we carry permanently.

‘Comfortably happy,’ would be for most a very enviable way of being and yet, deep down, I knew that it just wasn’t it. I had a sense of looking for something and yet was never quite sure what it was that I was looking for. I looked for this unnamed thing in some pretty strange places. I searched for it in extreme physical fitness, somehow believing that if my body was in what I perceived to be ‘pristine physical condition,’ then it would eventually lead me to some mystical elevated state.  

I explored the world of drugs, believing that an altered state could potentially open up a hidden trapdoor that I would be able to step through… ‘et voila,’ a hitherto hidden world would suddenly be revealed. I also dived headlong into the world of spirituality, feeling finally that I had found what it was that I had been looking for. But alas, spirituality eventually fizzled out in the same way as all my other fruitless pursuits.

At the age of about forty-three my previously athletic, buzzy body broke down. When I say ‘broke down,’ I mean that it kind of stopped going. It no longer wanted to power walk around the park; in fact it was so reluctant to even walk short distances that I had to start driving to the local shops. During this time, it seemed that I was suddenly able to really feel how my body felt and it felt like it had been hit by the proverbial truck. I literally felt like I had been mangled under the wheels of a semi-trailer! My body felt battered from the years of relentless exercise that I had put it through and it felt utterly exhausted from my fervently held belief that the more I did ‘as a woman,’ the stronger I was. There was nowhere for me to hide: my body brought me to the truth of my choices and I was left feeling directionless, despondent and in physical pain.

Surrounded by an ever-growing amount of crumbling beliefs, I began attending Universal Medicine workshops. Though I didn’t have any initial lightbulb moments or feelings of ‘coming home,’ I was none the less intrigued and have continued to attend workshops and presentations for the last 8 years. Over that time, I have come to realise many things.

One of the main things that I have come to realise is that self-care is crucial to evolution. The constant application of self-care has taken me deeper and deeper inside myself and has led to an unmistakable feeling of love deep within my body. An oh so familiar feeling and yet one that has a freshness to it that’s hard to describe. 

With self-care as my guiding principle, I have been able to systematically restore my body to the pristine condition that it was in when I was a child. A natural part of the process has been the removal of what doesn’t belong in my body. A bit like throwing ballast out of a hot air balloon, the majority of ideals, beliefs and pictures that I have imbibed over the years have been chucked overboard. With the removal of all that doesn’t belong in my body, I have been left with the truth of what does. And without any impediments to prevent it, I have discovered that the light of God is able to come through me, in the same way that it is able to come through all of us. The light of God is both extraordinary and at the same time very ordinary. It is what so many of us knew and never doubted as kids. It was, and indeed is, our natural living way, a way that is known intimately by us all.

So, the crumbs that I have been trying to follow my whole life and the small snippets of clues that I gathered and stored in my shoebox have been replaced by clear directions from my body. And it is by following these directions that I have found myself re-united once more with my body in exactly the same way as I was as a child. And it is through that re-unification with my body that I have been reunited once more with the body of God.

By Alexis Stewart, A woman who is actively engaged with Life in the understanding that it is our engagement with Life that will return us to the truth of who we all are.

Here's where the blog was originally published and also where you can read heaps of other great blogs - https://truthaboutuniversalmedicine.com/2019/06/15/the-shoebox/

And although each one of them has communicated that truth in a style that has been particular to them, the truth that has come through all of them has been the one same Unified Truth. A truth that constantly serves to re-unite us all.

And although all of these world teachers have differed in age, in nationality, in gender, in level of wealth and in standard of education, what they have all shared in common is the understanding that their part in conveying the truth has been to act as a portal, no-thing more and no-thing less. Not one of them has ever considered that they have been the origin of the truth, not even for the briefest of moments.

I find this fascinating as, over the years, I have seen many gurus present on what they have purported to be ‘the truth’ and there has been something rather grandiose about many of them; a sort of self-important individualism that has been conveyed by the elaborate swishing of robes and the way they’ve silently welcomed the adoration of their devotees.
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And yet, what all the true world teachers have repeatedly said is that they are not special or different in any way and that every person on the planet has the same potential to be a portal for truth. In fact, Jesus went even further by saying that we would be able to do even ‘greater’ things than he!

So what is it that all the world teachers had in common that allowed the truth to pour through them? The answer is simple: they all chose to move in a way that ensured that the consciousness of God flowed through them. And when referring to their ‘movements’ I am referring not just to the movements that they made with their bodies, but also to those they made with their speech and to those they made with their thoughts.

At any given time, all of us are either being moved by a source of energy that seeks to permanently keep us in the illusion of separation, or a source of energy that knows that it is everything already and therefore seeks nothing.

Before meeting Serge Benhayon it’s fair to say that I was unaware (in any conscious way at least) of the two types of energy that exist. I was equally unaware (again albeit consciously) that it is our movements that are responsible for dictating which source of energy we pull in through our bodies.

Like most people, I was oblivious to the fact that I was caught in a vicious cycle of moving in a way that ensured that I kept pulling in the same source of energy that in turn ensured that I kept repeating the same movements… and so it went.
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What fuelled many of my movements was an ever-present underlying agitation: an agitation that had been in my body (and yet not consciously identified by me) for a good thirty years. My compulsive need to exercise, my regular overeating, my love of watching really crap TV and my need to get wasted in clubs were all desperate attempts to quell my inner angst.

Of course, none of them ever provided me with more than a temporary reprieve from feeling my symptoms, but what all of those ‘movements’ did do is that they ensured that I continued making the same choices, over and over again, even though those choices weren’t truly supporting me. Movements pull in movements from the same energetic pool as themselves and so it’s a little bit like being on a treadmill that’s going really fast – it’s almost impossible to step to the side and get off!

One of the many things that Serge Benhayon introduced me to was the possibility of making different choices – and because every choice that we make is in fact a movement, making different choices is changing the way that we move. Therefore, very slowly over time, by making different choices I have been able to shift the energetic source that I have been affiliated with. That energetic source has gone from being a self-serving form of energy that was constantly preventing me from feeling the truth of any given situation, to a form of energy that is in itself the living truth.
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It has been a gradual process and one that will never end, as like all of us, I am making choices constantly. There are many, many times when I don’t feel able to make a choice from the energetic category of truth and I know full well that what I am doing, saying or thinking has its origins in the energy that seeks to stall our evolution by keeping us in the illusion of separation. But that’s ok, because we have been granted as long as it takes for all of us to return to being the living portals of God that we were originally designed to be.

If you'd like to read more amazing articles, listen to incredible audios and watch brilliant videos then here's the link to where this article was originally printed

www.unimedliving.com/ageless-wisdom/about-the-lineage-of-the-ageless-wisdom/jesus-buddha-krishna-serge-benhayon-and-all-of-us-portals-for-truth.html/?

Now it would be very easy for me to validate my dislike of waste. I could talk about how wasteful we are as a society and about how much waste goes into landfill. I could talk about how our waste is a symptom of our lack of responsibility and how we only consider our immediate needs – and much of that is indeed true – but there would also have been a certain level of dishonesty for me to be able to share in such a way.

You see, my struggle with waste has felt almost pathological. It has been all consuming at times and it’s true to say that it has caused me more strife in my life than almost any other single component. I have despised waste and that loathing has had a very significant effect on my behaviour and how I have felt, which in turn has affected those around me.

I couldn’t even begin to imagine how many times my issue with waste has affected me; how many times for example I have eaten something that I haven’t really wanted to eat, simply to avoid throwing it out (and that includes food that has been going mouldy or that I have dropped on the floor). Not only that, but I have used my power over others to force them to eat food that they have clearly not wanted to eat, purely because I haven’t been able to handle the prospective anxiety that I would have felt were I to throw the food in the bin.

I have sat in team meetings and thrashed around when presenters have handed out wads of paper printed on only one side. I have painstakingly re-used plastic sleeves for documents rather than simply getting new ones. I have spent a long time trying to put broken sections of staples into staple guns, rather than simply getting a brand-new strip and fitting it with ease.

I go around the house moving rubbish from bin to bin, rather than run the risk of a bin going out that is only half full. It makes me anxious when people put something in the bin that could have been recycled. If someone throws the toothpaste out before I have had a chance to run the straight edge of the toenail clippers along the tube to methodically get every possible squeeze of paste out of it, then it really annoys me. I turn all bottles upside down before throwing them out, just to make sure every last drop has been extracted.

I can’t bear people running the dishwasher or putting the washing machine on unless it’s full and I remember violently lunging towards my son as he was about to start the washing up because I anticipated that he was about to use too much washing up liquid! Do I need to continue? No, not really, you get the picture – my pathological dislike of waste has infiltrated every single area of my life and pretty much every relationship as well.

And if I justify my dislike of waste as being ‘right or appropriate or even desirable’ then it prevents me from seeing the destructive effect that it has had on me, as well as on those around me and on Life as a Whole.

You see, now I know that it is what we feel in our bodies that gets registered. We like to think that if our “intentions are good,” or if our “heart is in the right place,” then this somehow makes it all ok, but this is simply not true. What gets registered by The Universe is what we feel in our bodies, therefore on all the hundreds of thousands of occasions that I desperately tried to avoid waste, what got registered was a rather distasteful cocktail of anxiety, annoyance, anger, frustration, intolerance and at times out and out rage. That was my contribution to Life in those moments and there is no getting around it by dressing it up as some environmental crusade.

And it is the knowledge of the absoluteness of this fact that has helped me to prise the fingers of this behaviour off my life because when I feel myself going into the well-worn grooves of my lifelong dalliance with waste then, to the best of my ability I choose to not entertain it. What this looks like practically speaking is for example, not eating food simply to avoid throwing it out, not opening the pantry at work with the intention of inspecting the shopping for excessive purchasing, putting a wash on before waiting for a full load, etc. Basically, registering when I am about to contribute an emotional and contracted body to the “All that we are” and consciously choosing not to.
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Our bodies are an intrinsic part of the Universe –– a Universe that is made up of the collective consciousness of us all. It is therefore our individual responsibility to consider, at any point in time, quite what it is that we are contributing.

This blog was originally posted on a site called 'Everyday Livingness, this site is packed full of incredible sharings from incredible people, check it out ​https://everydaylivingness.com/waste/

Then, at the age of nine, in a desperate attempt to avoid the emotional pain that came with a change in house and school, I actively changed how I naturally was and it was at this point that I lost my connection with myself. In losing my connection with myself, I simultaneously lost my natural connection with God.

Nearly forty years later my relationship with God has been re-instated and it is my relationship with the esoteric that has supported me to get back to the effortless union with God that I had as a child.

I use the word relationship because I am undeniably in a relationship with the esoteric; in fact, other than my relationship with God, it is the most intimate relationship that I have in my life. My relationship with the esoteric is my relationship with the innermost part of who I am, which is the same as the innermost part of who we all truly are. It is an almost moment-by-moment relationship, a back and forth communication that is always looking to take me deeper into life… a relationship that is forever drawing me in.

As I go deeper within, so too, in many ways do I go further out. My contracted view of who I thought I was has been replaced by the irrefutable expansiveness of who I know myself to be. And who I now know myself to be, is who I now know us all equally to be.

But even though my relationship with the esoteric is currently one of great intimacy, this hasn’t always been the case, far from it in fact. When at the age of nine I stopped living life from the absolute ease of my body, the esoteric and I became strangers. I started to invest an enormous amount of effort in trying to control what was going on inside of me by desperately trying to control what was happening around me. I pulled in ideas about how life should look and I began to set the pace of my life to fit in with these assumed ideals. I also began imbibing beliefs and in doing so, started to allow them to shape all aspects of my life.

I viewed myself from the outside in, which often led to my feeling inadequate and disgruntled with life, or falsely superior and insensitive.

Over the years I continued to adjust the way that I was living, according to the constantly changing stimulus that streamed in from outside of me. I managed to assemble myself into a place where I felt that I had achieved the pin-up of what society commonly touted as being successful. I had a long-term partner, I worked full time and taught yoga as a second job, my child was academically talented, as well as being good at sport; I had enough friends and of course I was slim, because according to the pictures of societal success, you can’t be successful and overweight, right?

It took the breaking down of my body for me to review my perspective on life. A bit like a pit pony that collapses from years of being made to work gruelling hours hauling coal up and down from the mines, my body broke down in an exhausted heap. It was this that forced me to start to take a very honest look at the beliefs that I was modelling my life on.

Through my involvement with Universal Medicine I was formally re-introduced to the ‘esoteric’. I say ‘formally re-introduced’ because in truth most of us, if not all, have lived in deep and natural connection to our esoteric origins before.

I was reacquainted with the practice of making choices from the deepest part of me, a place that works in tandem with the body. The esoteric and the body operate like Siamese Twins, a powerful duo whose purpose it is to keep folding us back to Truth. And it is that folding back to truth that has knitted me deeper and deeper back to the truth of who I know myself to be. A process of continual reviewing, refining and discarding that has bound me closer and closer to myself. The deeper I have gone, the simpler the process has become. Initially the things that were not true weren’t always that easy to discern. I was easily confused by the deliberately deceptive way that our society has been set up. A false shop front that has been carefully orchestrated with the specific intention of keeping us as far away from the truth of who we all are as possible. I, like most people willingly gorged myself on the beliefs and pictures that abound in every culture and with each notion I imbibed my connection with myself got a little hazier. But with each step that I have chosen to take towards the esoteric, the fog has gradually lifted.

Each step taken towards the esoteric has revealed the next step and this process continues to repeat itself and has no end; we are all constantly being supported to go deeper and deeper into the belly of life.

And deeper and deeper we shall all eventually go, until such time as we arrive back at our starting point – that starting point being the lived understanding that collectively we make up the Living Body of God. At one point in the past we all chose to venture off and disconnect from our innermost knowing. It was this understanding that we all turned our backs on. But in all of our venturing, exploring, wandering and searching, our umbilical cord to that understanding has never been severed.

Our umbilical cord is the esoteric, a guaranteed, hand over hand way of finding our way back to the beginning again.

This blog originally appeared on a fantastic website called Unimed Living, here's the link
www.unimedliving.com/the-way-of-the-livingness/what-is-the-way-of-the-livingness/the-esoteric-the-umbilical-cord-to-god.html/

There are some jobs that I love to do and will do first, and others that I will procrastinate over. And then there are some that feel so uninviting that I don’t get around to doing them at all. Cleaning shelves is one example. There’s something about having to take everything off a shelf, dust it and then replace it, that simply makes me want to just give up. But I know there are people that love the whole process of dusting.

What this then leads me to understand is that the things that each of us procrastinate over are specific to us. And therein lies a jewel. If the things that each of us resist are different, then the origin of those things must be coming from within us. We are each therefore the creator of the things that we either procrastinate over or resist completely. Hence we can trace everything that exists in our outer world to an energetic starting point in our ‘inner world’ –– our inner world being the energetic starting point within our bodies.

Tackling my almost pathological avoidance of technology is a great example of how, by addressing something in my peripheral world, I was able to simultaneously work on my inner world. What I discovered was that the energetic starting point for my resistance to technology was my investment in identity. I was heavily invested in being seen as a rather quirky woman, who was going against the grain by not being on social media or having a phone that did much more than texting or calling people. By addressing my resistance to technology, I unearthed my investment in identity and lanced a boil that had been festering for years.

But there’s more. Addressing things in our outer world deals with the inner blockages, and so then frees up space within us for more clarity and more flow.
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As my awareness around this topic has grown, so has my determination to explore the effects of committing to doing the things that are way down on my invisible to-do list. In the beginning, tackling the jobs, chores and issues that I was avoiding was as palatable as swallowing a mouthful of gristle.

However, I have been able to apply myself consistently enough that there is a part of me now that actively embraces tackling the things that make me falter. What motivates me is the fact that I can feel how when I get stuck on something in my external environment, it is reflecting an inner stagnation: one whose rot sits within me, whether the job is on my invisible to-do list or not. The things that ‘dropped off’ the bottom of my to-do list, because I never got around to doing them, never really disappeared. They continue to sit deep within my body, like a fungus, until such time that I eventually get around to dealing with them.

What I can feel on a very physical level is that when I finally get around to tackling something that I have been procrastinating over, this then opens up an incredible sense of space and freedom in my body. It’s then that I realise just how energetically congested I have been, even though I haven’t been consciously aware of it. So now, everything that I am resisting gets flagged, and to the best of my ability I work through the steps that are needed to complete the task.

Last weekend I went to the hardware shop and bought a washer for my laundry tap (fixing my dripping laundry tap is something that I have been procrastinating over for months). A wonderful shop assistant took ages showing me how to change a washer, and the next steps are for me to learn where to turn the water off from, and to then to go down to the garage and find the tools that I need. By completing another job that I have got stuck on, I will free up even more space in my body. But space is not empty: on the contrary, it’s crammed full of communication – communication from the Universe. Universal Communication knows no bounds and carries with it the answers to every problem that man is currently facing and indeed will ever face.
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By working on our internal energetic congestion, we open the valves that allow Universal Communication to flow freely through us. And it is by restoring the flow of Universal Communication that we will begin to restore true harmony on Earth.

There’s a dinner that we shared that stands out for me and not, unfortunately, because of how great it was. It was about seven years ago now, and I had started to become very aware of how little quality time we spent together as a family. ‘The boys’ tended to eat separately to me: I would eat my meals in the kitchen in front of the computer and the boys would eat in the living room, in front of the telly.

At the time I put it down to the fact that we generally ate different things and at different times but now, looking back, I can see that it had much more to do with the fact that we were all choosing to check outwhilst we ate, rather than to connect with one another. So, spurred on to instigate more quality family time, I suggested that we have a few meals together in the kitchen. The analogy ‘pulling hen’s teeth’ comes to mind, however, reluctantly, very reluctantly, they both agreed.

Sitting down and sharing a meal was, for us, often uncomfortable. On the rare occasions when we did (which was usually only when we ate out), it would invariably end up with our son doing or saying something that derailed the whole evening. At the time my partner and I thought that he was just being difficult, but now I can see that he was reacting to how uncomfortable it was for us to all share a meal together, without the distraction of either the telly or the computer.

So, to make this particular meal more comfortable and to aid the flow of conversation, I assembled a collection of photos that I hoped would be good ‘conversation starters.’ I think I managed to share two of the photos before being heckled into submission. The conversation then reverted to what had become our default conversation topic: ‘football.’

It would have been so incredibly easy to just give up. The inertia in those early days was a veritable force, and one that I would have gladly backed down from, had the alternative not been worse. But the alternative was worse, far worse: it was to continue as we were, living life as three separate human beings, albeit under the same small roof. What’s fascinating is that up until pretty much that exact point I would have put my hand on the Bible and sworn that we were a close and loving family.

But that is the dark side of all beliefs – they blind us from the truth.

The truth about our family relationships was just one of many truths that had been revealed since starting to align to The Ageless Wisdom through Universal Medicine. The beliefs that I had previously encased myself in had started to fall away and, as uncomfortable as it was at times, more and more of the truthwas gradually being revealed.

However, although my intention was to bring a deeper level of connection to our family, I often lacked a deeper level of connection with myself. And as it is only by first establishing a deeper level of connection with ourselves that any of us are able to bring about a deeper level of connection to others, it meant that my attempts were thwarted before they’d even begun. The main saboteur to my connection with myself was judgement – I was steeped in the stuff. I didn’t even need to open my mouth for others to feel the scorn of my judgement: it seeped from my pores.

Manipulation and control rode on the back of judgement to produce a nasty combination that ensured that ‘quality’ was nowhere to be seen. For months, my night time routine was to stand at the living room door on my way to bed and sulkily ask my partner if he was going to come to bed too. I, of course, knew full well that he wouldn’t but when he confirmed that he wasn’t, I would slouch across the carpet and kiss him goodnight reluctantly, before slouching off to bed. What a setup. Really, what an ugly setup, and one that guaranteed that my partner would never come to bed because, seriously, who would?

So those early years of trying to instigate change were difficult, very difficult indeed, and for all of us. The boys had their ways of dealing with life and I was trying to haul them away from their tried and tested ways of coping.

The game-changer came in a single sentence during an esoteric healing session. I was talking about my struggle with the amount of time that my son spent on his screens and the practitioner said, “it’s what you communicate with your body that counts.” I knew instantly that what I had been communicating to both my son and my partner was a general air of displeasure, mixed with a liberal sprinkling of judgement and scorn. So truly, what change could possibly come about from that, other than both of them getting pretty fed up with me?

It was from that point on that I started to get honest about what I was really communicating with my family and I did this by getting very honest about what it was that I was communicating with my body,something that I hadn’t, up until then, been choosing to pay attention to.

If, for example, I was about to bowl into my son’s room and interrogate him about what he was watching, then when possible, I stopped myself. When I felt myself ‘too busy’ to stop properly and greet my partner when he came in from work then again, to the best of my ability, I would stop what I was doing and be present with him. When I felt the next thing on my to-do list pulling me away from lingering on my son’s bed, I would resist the urge to jump up and instead commit to a few minutes more of gentle touch. And although my body could not always be convincing in what I wanted to communicate, this stage was a very necessary one.

In some ways it has been a slow process, but in another way it’s been quick, especially considering how profound the changes have been. My family feels completely different now, and both my son and my partner have changed beyond recognition, as have I. What I have come to feel is that change in one person provides others with an open invitation to also change, but only when the change is an offering and never when it is enforced on another.

It feels like we’ve all gone from being one dimensional cardboard cut-outs of ourselves, to newer, fuller and truer multi-dimensional versions of ourselves. The rather dead staleness that I found so suffocating in our relationships before has been replaced with an aliveness that is palpable. An aliveness that starts with each of us, and one that we then bring into our relationships with all others.

As long as I don’t have any set ideas about how our family should look, and as long as I keep being honest about my contribution (what I bring with my body), then I know that the quality of our relationships will keep refining and deepening.

And one of the wonderful things about it all is, there is no end to where we can go in our relationships with one another.


Published with permission of my son and partner.
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If you fancy reading more fantastic articles then go to where this blog was published https://everydaylivingness.com/my-family/

My judgmental ways have taken various forms. There have been the out and out verbally expressed judgmental snipes and the more surreptitious forms of judgement, such as a pregnant pause, the raising of an eyebrow or the shared look with a fellow staff member in a team meeting. And then there have been my judgmental thoughts, of which there have been an infinite number, silent by nature but registered in exactly the same way as an out and out attack of words.

So, who have I judged? It’s perhaps more pertinent to ask, “Who haven’t I judged?” I judge everybody – the rich and the famous, the down and the out, my family, my friends, my work colleagues, absolute strangers in the street and those I have neither met nor seen.

What is it that I judge others for? I think I can honestly say ‘everything.’ And the ridiculous thing is, what I judge others for is often the opposite of the same thing. For example, I have judged people for being too fat and too thin, too loud and too quiet, too stupid and too intelligent, too ugly and too good looking, too sensible and too reckless. I was going to say that I could fill a book with a list of the things that I have judged others for but it’s much truer to say that I could fill a small mobile library with my judgmental ways.

And the utterly ludicrous thing is, I have recently come to realise that my supposed viewpoint from which I cast my judgement is completely arbitrary– a moving platform that has changed so radically over time that I can’t even identify any more with the platform on which I once stood. The staunch platform on which I stood in my twenties was built on the belief that vegetarianism was the healthiest way to eat and that strenuous exercise was good for the body and therefore I naturally judged others who ate heaps of meat and who chose not to exercise. But now, twenty years later my views have changed… I no longer believe that vegetarianism is healthy for everyone and I currently hold the belief that strenuous exercise isn’t good for anybody. So, if I were to judge others from my current standpoint, then I would be judging those that were choosing to live life like I used to.

And the word ‘choosing’ is a significant one because what all judgement boils down to, is judging another for the choices that they are currently making, which begs the question, “Who are we to judge another’s choices?”

As part of my growing awareness around my judgmental ways, I have started to feel the effects of judgement on my body. It feels like an attack, not only on those that I am judging but on myself. When I judge another, it feels like I simultaneously harpoon us both, freeze framing us in time and space. Judgement relies very heavily on time; it tries to insist that another be somewhere other than where they are, which, when you think about it, is utterly ridiculous – how can any of us be anywhere other than where we are now? The Universe is forever expanding and as part of the Universe, so too are we being pulled to expand, but judgement tries to pin us down to the tiniest of specks; it prevents us from seeing the deeper and grander aspects of each other.

Judgement is also rejection because each time we judge another, what we are in fact saying is, “I do not accept the way that you are choosing to be.” And this rejection is likely to push another even further into disharmonious ways of being, because rejection is an attack that most of us recoil from. Acceptance on the other hand is gifted with grace and allows others the freedom to move and change at their will.
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Everything in life falls into one of two categories – it either supports us to return to the Truth of who we all are, or it hinders the process of return. Could it be as simple as understanding that judgement hinders our return, whereas acceptance speeds us on our way?


This blog was posted on the Words on Serge Benhayon website, a website that has tonnes of great articles, here is the link to get you there wordsonsergebenhayon.wordpress.com/2018/09/23/judgement/

​I used to think that I was good at it. I genuinely thought of myself as a very loving person and if I was truly honest, I would say that I had a certain hidden smugness about just how ‘loving’ I thought I was able to be, particularly considering how hard it seemed to be for most other people to express love.

I truly believed that I was good at expressing my loving feelings to others, be that in the cards that I wrote or the words that I spoke. I also believed that many of the things that I did were loving, e.g. buying people thoughtful gifts, helping them out, listening to them when they needed support etc. and although I would like to say that I am not totally writing off thirty years of ‘loving acts,’ I, in fact, am. Not only am I writing off every single one of those supposed ‘loving acts’ as having had nothing to do with love whatsoever, but I am clearly stating that my feigned ‘loving acts’ contributed to the web of lies that we have spun and continue to spin around the subject of love.

At the time when I considered myself to be my most ‘loving,’ I was also my most self-abusive. I had two major beliefs that conjoined in my body to fuel the relentless motion that I was in: one was that “the more that I managed to do, (particularly as a woman), the stronger I was,” and the other was that “our self-worth is measured by the number of ‘selfless loving acts’ we do for others.”

Fuelled by these two major beliefs, I pushed my body relentlessly through my days (and nights). I worked full time as a disability support worker, doing forty hours of night-shifts a week, I taught yoga during the day and managed to squeeze in a couple of hours of voluntary work at the local hospice. On top of all of that I would volunteer to babysit for friends and family, so that they could go out and have quality time with their partners. Oh, and I should also add that I had a partner and a son of my own, both of whom I thought that I was in loving relationships with.

Without love in our bodies, there can be no love in anything that we do.

The body that I hauled around with me to do my ‘loving’ deeds was totally bankrupt, but the real problem with the way I felt was that it just felt so normal to me that it never entered my mind that there could possibly be another way to feel.

Love is naturally within us all: it is literally the energetic building blocks from which we are all made and yet I was completely unable to feel even so much as a skerrick of the stuff within myself, because I abused my body from the moment I woke up to the moment that I collapsed into bed at night. So a question I ask myself is that if I was unable to feel any love in my body, then where did I think the love that I imagined I was giving others was coming from?

It took my body breaking down in an exhausted heap for me to begin to see that much of what I had held as true was in fact not. I started to see that the way that I was living my life had been propped up by beliefs and now that many of those beliefs were crumbling in front of my eyes, so too was the ramshackle structure of my life. I had no choice but to go back to the drawing board and look at things afresh.

With the guidance and support of Serge Benhayon I started to introduce self-love into my life. Not the reconstituted version of self-love that is touted in magazines and the health industry but its true form, one that is governed by the body and the body alone.

I began asking my body what felt loving to it and what didn’t. I asked it if it was self-loving for me to eat salad and my distended belly was my body’s clear response that “no, it wasn’t at all self-loving to eat salad” at that point in time. I asked my body if it was loving to push through my days and not allow myself to sleep when I needed to. The feeling of utter depletion that sat deep within every cell of my body was my body’s clear response that “no, not allowing myself to sleep when I needed to” was completely devoid of love. I asked my body if it was loving to force it to exercise, when all it really wanted to do was to lay down? Once again, my body answered very clearly, this time through its painfully aching muscles, that to have exercised at that time would not have been at all loving.

Little by little I started to cut out choices that did not support my body. At first those self-abusive choices were glaringly obvious ones, like forcing myself to stay awake when my body was desperate to sleep, but what I found is that by staying connected to the honesty of my body, my body constantly revealed to me choices that I was making that were not self-loving, — and what’s interesting is that those choices became more and more refined.

For example, I am now aware that my body really dislikes hearing swear words and so when they play music at the gym that has swearing in it, I will always ask them to change the channel. When I am at work and someone has filled and boiled the kettle in an anxious rush, I will take the time to lovingly refill and boil the kettle before making myself a cup of tea.

Cutting out self-abusive choices is an ongoing process and one that feels like it has no end. With the removal of each non-loving choice, a little more love is revealed. This process is a gradual one and one that repeats until such time as love reveals itself in all its resplendent glory, without so much as a blemish.

You see, love is who we all are, it is the very fabric of our being, it’s just that we do such a good job at covering it up constantly with our non-loving choices that it’s totally obscured from our view. But the fact that we lose sight of it does not mean that it’s not there. In fact, it can never not be there, how can it be?

Love is who we all are.

By Alexis Stewart, a woman who has remembered the truth of who she is and in remembering that, she has remembered the truth of who we all are – the Glorious Collective Consciousness of God.

If you would like to read lots of other amazing blogs then check out https://wordsonsergebenhayon.wordpress.com/2018/06/29/riddle-me-this-batman/​