The Inner Voice

I was in Bodrum for four days last week to attend Lions Clubs International Turkish Council meetings.  Before moving to Fethiye eight years ago, I used to go to Bodrum more often. Especially during the summer.  Before going to Bodrum last Wednesday evening I have been travelling in various cities in Eastern Turkey. Especially Malatya and Elazig. I have been going to Malatya since 1992.  And To Elazig since 1981.

I usually travel alone.  Travelling gives me time. To think, to question, to observe.  Mostly the thoughts in my mind. I like travelling.  Some call it waste of time. For me, travelling gives me the space to slow waiting there, being in the plane, at all these times, I am not able to do much.  Maybe I read or talk on the phone, or check my e-mails, but usually I have more time than these can fill up.  I use these times for Reiki and distant healing a lot.  I give Reiki to myself, check how my family is doing.  I check the energy of my clients.  I always remind my Reiki students to make the most of the idle times of waiting, in a taxi, at a doctor’s office or in a line in a bank.  These are idle times that can become precious through Reiki or other self-help and healing methods.

And I can catch myself in moments in which there are no thoughts in my mind.  My hand might be  on my chest or leg, I would be giving Reiki to myself and I would find myself looking into my thoughts and I would see an clean white page in front of me. I usually get this image or ideas that excite me start to come up and I realize that I was not thinking about anything prior to these new ideas. Unexpectedly, I would be coming up with solutions that were not that apparent with my regular mind.

Meditation is one of the methods that give us that space to hear our inner voice.  Meditation slows down our thoughts and allows the thoughts that we were not aware of to appear.  Allows a breathing space for them.

As I had more and more of these “aha” moments, I started to realize that my travelling times were my meditation times. While waiting at the airport, or sitting in a plane or a shuttle bus, out of nowhere I get clarification.  Maybe that why I am able to travel this much.  There are rewards to the continuous packing and unpacking.

In all that we do, there are rewards.  There is an intention behind most of all our thoughts and actions.  Not always.  Sometimes other people’s thoughts and intentions affect us, control us, manipulate us.  Maybe I’ll write about these effects in the coming weeks; however, there is a positive intention behind most of the good and bad that happens in our lives.

I fall an hurt my ankle.  I have to rest for weeks while work piles up.  Bad luck? Could be.  But also maybe I needed the compulsory rest.  Maybe I was not able to say not to the demands of my family or my boss.  If we are not able to say no to things that we really do not want to do, or that we cannot handle, usually we find other ways to say no.  And the other way is usually “making ourselves ill”.  We are not aware of it.  Our subconscious knows. Our soul, our energy knows.

The biggest gift we can give ourselves is to say no when we need to and want to.  We may refuse to do a thing and still have to do it.  Yet, this is different than seeming to agree and accept what we simply can’t.   This is one of the topics that we work on with most of my clients.   This is one of the most important healing points in my own life.  Saying yes to what we want to say no to kills our inner voice that we desperately need.

For the next few weeks, I would like to leave you with some more questions and observations:

1-      What traumas, injuries, negative events do you share with other people regularly?

2-      How often do you do this?  What is the intention behind sharing these?

3-      What would you most like to have happen in your life?  Be specific and describe in as much detail as you can.

4-      What is the most pleasurable and fulfilling thing you could to with your day tomorrow?

5-      What kind of people do you have the most trouble with? How do they make you feel?

6-      What are your common feelings?  Track and jot down your changing feelings for a day or longer to observe the changes.

*

We will look into the answers of these and other questions in the future.  May you have many pleasant discoveries.

With love,

Zeynep

Quote of the Week:

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”                                                                                                                                                                                                              Howard Thurman

Insights

I had been learning English since I was thirteen.  The times that I am abroad or in English speaking trainings or groups, my English improves fast and I feel very connected to the language. And then come times when I feel like I just did not learn enough.

Among all of the words that I have learned, ‘insight’ was a word I used or was even aware of until I read “The Celestine Prophecy” by James Redfield over ten years ago.  Since I was a kid, I had had experiences of synchronicity, feelings of déjà vu and amazement for the strange coincidences that show up in my life at unexpected times.  Then after reading James Redfield,  few years later, the word ‘insight’ would this time appear in game developed at the Findhorn Eco village in Scotland.  As a part of the amazing “The Transformation Game”.  In time ‘Insight’ became for me a word that meant a world of personal discoveries.

As I look back, I cannot pin point exactly when I started to be more aware of the surprising coincidences in my life.  That there is something to them, about them that needs to be discovered. It probably was after I went to the US for college.

Then books started to show up in my life.  The first book that I can definitely say was an eye-opener for me was “The Road Less Travelled” by M. Scott Peck.  That book stayed touched something in me and made me look for more. I went to Boston for my first Thanksgiving to visit the sister of one of my best friends.  And in Boston Renin gave me this book. “The Road Less Travelled” touched something in me and made me look for more.

Then Erich Fromm and Rollo May started to interest me.  For the first time I was reading about psychology.  In junior high and high school, I had read only novels.  At least one per week.  I loved reading. I loved fiction. In that fall of 1988 in Boston, something started to change.  My focus of attention was starting to change suddenly in my first few months in the US.  I had come to New York to study engineer.  I always thought I loved math and numbers were my calling. And now I was discovering that my real interests seemed to be very different from what I had chosen to learn for my future.  Away from home and in new territories of all kinds, I guess I was terrified to even consider that I was not on the right track.  And I ignored the signs, until I could not.

From that autumn in 1988 in Boston to 2013 naturally a lot has happened.  Looking back, my life seems to follow a path like what James Redfield is writing about in his books “The Celestine Prophecy”, “The Tenth Insight” and his other books. Following and discovering the insights he wrote about.

There are many signs in our lives.  Call them whatever you like corner stones, lighthouses, wake-up calls, warnings, dilemmas, coincidences, synchronicities or insight.  There are signs in our lives that seem to try to lead us to events, people or situations that will makes us happier, healthier and more satisfied.  Listening to them, seeing them, choosing to see them and accept them makes a difference.

And may be the coincidences in our lives are the answers to our prayers.

*

Some questions from James Redfield to leave you with for the next few weeks:

1-      Were there any particular coincidences or signs connected with getting your current living space (significant house numbers, encounters with neighbours, delays in negotiations, mixed-up phone calls, special street names, or any other odd detail)?

2-      How did you get your past or present job? Think back to how you found out about it, to whom you talked and what messages you might have received?

3-      Describe how you met your most important relationship. What led up to your being in that place at that time?

4-      Do you see a pattern in how things come to you? What was the similarity, if any, between meeting your significant relationship and getting a job or a place to live in?

                                                                                              *

Wishing you many delightful coincidences and sought after insights.

With love,

Zeynep