Responsibility and Freedom

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When we accept responsibility for our thoughts and actions, we set off a chain reaction. We are declaring to the universal mind that we are willing to accept our faults and rejoice in our triumphs. If something goes awry we look to ourselves for the problem rather than blaming others, therefore we give out the message that if we own the problem, we also own the solution. If we hold someone else responsible for a problem, we then depend on them for a solution. The former is energy giving, the latter energy draining. By taking responsibility for a problem we are open to finding solutions that will bring peace of mind, by blaming others we are igniting worry and doubt because energetically we are saying that we have no control over the situation. The road to responsibility may be a long one for those who never learned it as a child or young adult. This is not responsibility for younger siblings, chores or homework; it is self-responsibility, knowing right from wrong and owning our faults as well as accepting compliments in equal measure. Extreme behaviour comes from a lack of measured response to a situation, it is viewing a thing from emotional reaction rather than rational thought. Learning to channel our emotions in an appropriate way avoids their escape in a heightened situation which may lead to quarrel and dispute. This can lead to a disproportionate response to something that is triggered by suppressed emotions.

By using our inner-directive, we have a compass to guide us through change. When the mind slows down, the heart opens and everything becomes clear. Disturbance in our minds and turbulence in our heart obscures our inner-directive and we cannot tell in what direction we must proceed. Our true self is the unhindered, unblemished potential that came into the world. True self is deeper than flesh, it is a wholesome nourishment in the seed of the individual, propagated by truth and nature. A soul on fire, brave and true, breaks through the tough shell of mental inertia to become the exact fruit of its original design. We do not go in search of our true self, it is already with us, healing work is tending to the seed, encouraging it to germinate and cast off the husk of conditioning and unconscious beliefs. Taking responsibility is an important step towards realising our true potential. We must hold ourselves accountable for our thoughts, words and actions, which negatively impact on others, and on ourselves. Every damning word of our inner-critic, toward ourselves or others, shrinks the fulfilment of potential. The seed of potential must be nourished by daily mindfulness to expand awareness.

Collette O’Mahony 16/02/2023

extract from A Compass for Change

Navigating Change

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An extract from my upcoming guidebook – A Compass for Change.

When something cataclysmic occurs it has a direct effect on our mental health. This may be a gradual cause like separation and divorce, or an unexpected cause such as sudden death. The cause is the event, the effect is the feelings of loss and grief. We cannot undo the event no matter how much we may wish to but we can gradually process our feelings by giving them our attention. The effect of a job loss may shake our confidence and lead to financial uncertainty, on the other hand it may lead to better opportunities and increased salary. Preparation is the key to success in most fields of endeavour, it is similar for good mental health. Most people face a crisis when unwanted change is forced upon them through tragic or unavoidable circumstance. Similarly, those who try to avoid change reach a point where their health suffers due to a clash between their conditioned mind and their inner directive. The conditioned mind functions on schemas, the parameters laid down by learned habits, beliefs and structure. It arises from childhood and is influenced by family structure, schooling, regional and national thinking. On the other hand, the inner directive is our intuition, that which says something is wrong even if others try to convince you otherwise. Too often we allow ourselves to be swayed by what people think of us, or the mood of the collective.

Our initial response to enforced change is often resistance. This is understandable given how the subconscious operates. It takes longer for our subconscious mind to accept change, it runs on a conditioned loop compromising of our daily habits and cognitive learning, culminating in repetitive behaviour patterns. When these behaviour patterns are thrown into tumult through an unexpected event, the subconscious mind tries to default to the habitual patterns causing the thinking mind to struggle with the new situation. This is something that those who are bereaved struggle with, particularly in the early stages of grief, the conscious mind has to constantly remind the subconscious that their loved one is no longer with them. It can take several months for the subconscious to acknowledge the death, when it eventually does it reduces mental pressure. This permits normal functioning of the mind to resume and allow time for the bereaved person to process grief. Many bereaved people report feeling lost, confused, forgetful or think they are losing their mind; it could just be that the thinking mind is overloaded with functions that are normally designated to the subconscious. The subconscious will eventually register the change and adapt accordingly, but during the adjustment period there are feeling of loss and grief that require inner attention.

Many people take the view that free will is an illusion, and that our behaviour is governed by forces over which we have no control. Consequently, how we act or react is viewed as predictable or unavoidable. Our behaviour can be predictable, but that doesn’t make it’s inevitable. We can choose how to behave, but this is restricted if we determine we have to behave according to our structural belief system. As individuals we are free to choose our behaviour, we have a choice to act responsibly or irresponsibly.

Collette O’Mahony. 10/02/2024

Excerpt from the guidebook – A Compass for Change.

The Language of Dreams

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Last night a dream leapt up from my subconscious and forced me to remember that I have dreamed the same dream multiple times. The subconscious is a dangerous place full of hiding places for our fragmented souls and it launches an attack when our conscious mind is sleeping. The insomniac knows this trick and remains on guard throughout the long night. The subconscious is canny, it shows us a flash of a dream, enough for us to recognise it is a frequent visitor but then snatches it away in case our conscious mind goes to work on decoding its language. The language of the subconscious is in dreams and only the life force permeating our finite meanderings can understand its true meaning.  

Dreams like water have many fathoms, some skim the surface of our daily lives and others dredge deeply linking us to the unfathomable depths of infinity. There are dreams that are prescient in quality, forewarning us of the path we are about to take and others that excavate our emotional graveyard for buried trauma. Decoding dreams is a tricky business and the truth within them can only be felt, it cannot be told. In a way, dreams transcend death and mortality giving us a glimpse into a world beyond the waking mind and the repetitive noise that creates the rigid corners of our existence. Occasionally, we have a dream that presses a reset button and rids us, albeit temporarily, of our structured thoughts and beliefs. In these enlightened dreams, we can reach back in time to touch the great minds of the past, those unhindered by religion and societal constraints. It offers us a fresh objectivity on life as a whole, steering us past our cornered subjectivity.

We can enter into contemplation, a relaxed open state of mind allowing ideas to germinate and grow, rather than an active thinking mind where constant mental activity leads to a hurried pace within and without. When we are engaged in constant mental activity we enter a treadwheel of finite possibility, when we are in contemplation we are on the precipice of wonder. Contemplation is not mental laziness, it is a state of vibrational activity and offers fertile soil for new ideas. The means by which these new ideas bounce into life is by enthusiastic and creative response.

And so, back to my dream, a tool to circumvent my active thinking mind that is moving along life’s middle lane and missing out on contemplative opportunities. In the dream I am driving a car, an illusion of control, until in a flash I am moved into the passenger seat and trying to steer from the side-lines. I need to indicate and pull off the motorway, it’s time to allow the life force at the core of my being to take the steering wheel from the middle-of-the-road conscious mind. My acquiescence finally allows the dream to decode in my conscious awareness. I am not in control. I am in control. The dichotomy of my existence rests on this axis. The former occurs when I am trying to control my life through active thinking, the latter comes about through contemplative openness. Dreams are powerful communicators from the source of intelligence if only we would allow that source to work through us.

Photograhic credit: Rekha Garton.

Time: Friend or Foe?

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Time swoops into focus, nudging us with a ticking noise, ‘keep moving’ it says, ‘my survival depends on motion’. The mind, wired like a ticking clock, swings between right and wrong, swayed by excitement and an avalanche of opinions. One day, it’s taking sides in a political debate, the next it’s swallowing every story of the digital age. Pierce through the stories about fractious nations, warring families and rising inflation, climb down from the pendulous left to right motion that is stealing your valuable life.

Solitude is the enemy of time sitting still among the swirling edifice and finding the eye of the storm where sanity prevails. Seek nature, walk in the forest, climb a hill for the views, in ten years, even twenty, these are the shining moments of joy that decorate our lives. Daily news stories that readership devours will be assigned to the scrapheap of our minds. Every step we take in nature reduces this mind-fill and allows us to live life on our terms rather than become fodder for the beast.  In fifty or even a hundred year’s time no one will remember the irrelevance of commentary on insignificant stories, only facts will remain. Put down the phone, turn off the TV, step outside and take a deep breath. This is truth. We need air. We don’t need a constant drip feed from media outlets. Breath connects us with something greater than the news channels and apps that decorate our phone screen, it provides us with life. No one, ever, reached to check the latest news story when they were choking or in cardiac arrest. Breath is all important.

Every country has their headlines, every social network drowns in opinion swaying from left to right, we want free speech but only on our terms shouting down those who disagree. The online platform allows us to hide behind its shield and let our fingers do the talking. If we enter the slipstream of time and motion caused by outer phenomena we are in a state of reaction, positive action comes when we act from a place of stillness within.

Time moves at a speed corresponding to our mental activity. Slow the mind and time expands, fill the mind with news threads and we find ourselves swinging mercilessly upon the pendulum of time. If we wonder where the year has disappeared to, then we have consigned much of it to the scrapheap of our minds. If we can look back on the year and pick out several cherished moments, we have brought some balance to our lives. If, however, we sit in this moment neither looking backward or forward, we have achieved the magic moment that always exists, taking us beyond the boundaries of time into the very existence that pervades all life on earth and the universe.

Collette O’Mahony

January 2023

Perpetuum Mobile by Matjaz Jerman

Nomadic Gene.

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The nomadic heart feels confined in a world of borders. Nomads are a direct lineage from the ancient Hunter-Gatherer tribes that once colonised the earth. The nomadic gene lives on in the heart of anyone who loves to travel and dreams of far off places. The explorer, the tourist, the writer and anyone who saves the Travel section of their newspaper, share a wandering gene that strains to visit foreign lands and see sunsets on new horizons. While we have settled into generations of permanence in the form of walls, windows and doors, there is always a part of us that gazes at the stars and dreams of faraway places.

Contentment is a word often associated with security and belonging, it’s a feeling of knowing and understanding your environment. When contentment nudges into boredom it becomes predictability and wants to stray across the fence to a world without borders. The Hunter-Gatherer gene survives in us because evolution takes millions of years and we, in evolutionary terms, are the grandchildren of the nomadic races that once roamed the earth. Nomadic tribes vigorously embrace mobility, the right to roam without constraints of political borders. The senses not the clock, the sky not the roof, and travel not history were the tenets of nomadic life.

Climate change, drought and famine caused Hunter-Gatherers to trans migrate, seeking better conditions in new lands. Many Hunter-Gatherer traits survive in our nomadic gene, however, they are linked to emotional response to an environment rather than if there is a bountiful berry crop. In a world where ideas and thoughts are pooled into one giant watering hole, the internet, there is a worry that we will become complacent and cease to use the nomadic gene that propels us to new experiences and heightened sensation in our natural world. New ideas arise from change. Drinking from stagnant waters causes malignancy. Evolution springs from new waters, out of the need to change. New ideas leading to shifts in consciousness arise from a mind that is not corralled by habit and predictability. Enjoy your house, your settled life and all that comes with it, but every now and again embrace your nomadic gene and live life on the hoof.

My new novel ‘Beyond the Two Doors’ is a modern-day story intertwined with stories from the Celts of Britain and Ireland, and the Scythian tribes of the European Steppes. Available worldwide on Amazon.

Collette O’Mahony 24/05/2022

Nomadic tribes of Mongolia.