Yes Virginia, I do believe in God.

WARNING: Long blog post

Okay… this is big day for me. After much thinking and deliberation, I’ve decided to come out. Yes, it is about time that I stopped hiding what those very close to me know but few (if anyone) knows in its entirety. Yes it’s time to come out as a … gulp… spiritual person.

Brace yourselves my beloved friends and readers because…  I…  believe… in God.

(Hides)

(Peeks out)

Still with me?

I don’t mean the Christian dogmatic God of coming apocalypses, hell-fire speeches, long white beard and big white hands type God. Nor Heaven of paved gold, mountains of hell fire God.

Actually, it’s more akin to the Buddhist or Shamanic tradition of a great unified spirit. And the Gnostic tradition of God is us and we are God. It’s a big word and a cumbersome one, because it comes with so much baggage and so much history that it is almost impossible to say to someone, “Yes, I believe in God” and not have them immediately judge you as an idiot or associate you with a hundred things that have nothing to do with what you actually think. Or simply look at you like they’re trying to understand why two great big ugly horns just grew out of the side of your head. Because quite often the opinion that you’re faced with in return is ‘well, there is no God… no life after death so you can believe whatever silliness you want (you suddenly crazy person that I had mistaken for normal), but that’s just about the beginning and end of it’.

It’s tempting when faced with that type of reaction to water my own opinion down – explaining it into meaninglessness in a sort of half-mumbled, wary embarrassment. Trying to use language that won’t offend or find common ground to build bridges and open minds. Well, I’m not going to do that here. I’m going to say it unambiguously: I believe in God.

(Hides)

Only kidding. Pull up a chair.

Let me go further to clarify because it actually does just come down to this – I believe that life continues in some form after death. Yes, I think we are more than just a biological machine. I think there is a larger, more essential part of us that exists, that we can tap into in life and that continues after our transition through death. I believe in spirit guides. I believe in guardian angels – or at least in those helpful universal energies that we give names to (whatever they may be) who are accessible at the edge of our consciousness and provide answers I could never provide for myself when I sit still long enough to listen. In my time as a Reiki practitioner (there’s another thing some of you didn’t know about me), I have experienced lots of those moments.

Recently someone said “It’s funny how people who don’t believe in Santa Claus can still believe in God”.  I understand why a belief in God would look the same as a belief in Santa when looked at from a certain point of view. Santa Claus is a big imaginary white man with a beard. God is a big imaginary white man with a beard. Both make as much sense viewed through a certain prism. How can rational people not believe in one and then believe in the other?

A lot of the  people nearest and dearest to me are atheists, so I understand this point of view. They are wonderful, awesome people and I have no problem with them believing differently to me. The problem comes when it’s assumed that I agree (not by them necessarily, but by others).
It can also be problematic when it becomes challenging and scary just to come out and say: “hey… I’m spiritual, I believe there’s something more out there, I think differently about this.”

That’s why it’s coming out day. No more hiding behind my atheist friends. No more avoidance of the topic on my blog or talking about things in round-about ways. No more half-embarrassed mumbles or simply avoiding speaking my truth.

I, Vicki Kyriakakis being a generally bright person, in full possession of my faculties, with a lot of innate wisdom and a functioning, rational mind do hereby declare myself to be spiritual.

(Phew…. That was something. Think I need a drink.)

Now here’s the thing, trying to talk about this stuff always ends up feeling like you’re about to walk into a linguistic trap of your own making. It’s a little like the mistake some atheists make when they compare belief in God to belief in a Big Flying Spaghetti Monster – thereby trying to draw attention to the ridiculousness of both. I assert that this is a false equivalence. Deep and honest spirituality has really nothing in common with big flying spaghetti monsters. It might make some feel superior about themselves and be a quick way to make fun of the God-botherers, but the comparison is faulty. Let me explain a bit more.

Chris’s son recently asked me if I was religious. I said no. But I am spiritual. He wondered what the difference was. Great question. Super impressive question from an 8 year old. And there is in fact a  difference – quite a big one.

My answer to him was that religion, for me, was about dogma – a set of beliefs and rules as determined by someone else (often restrictive and dated). Whereas spirituality was a lot more personal and more about how you turn up in the world. (My take).

Frankly, the  restrictive dogma that defines a lot of religions is not for me and has always grated. Spirituality, as I experience it, is much more about grounded, personal, connected  truth. It is more about connection, growth and health and less about a list of things I need to fall in line with or set of things I might believe. (It’s also the reason, by the way, that I’m pretty wary of a lot of New Age mythology and its Atlantis, Lemurian, Pleiadian believing dogma).

I should also clarify that I don’t write this to open up a can of worms. I’m not really out to convince anyone else to believe as I do. Nor am I interested in justifying myself to anybody’s satisfaction. I don’t think it’s a subject that can be easily discussed intellectually, actually. And that’s not because it’s a matter of faith rather than science.

It’s because spirituality is HEART work. Not HEAD work.

We try to understand and prove/ disprove it with our heads and words and language when it largely doesn’t exist in that realm at all.

Creativity and Education guru Ken Robinson puts it beautifully in his famous TED talk:

“As children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side. If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say “What’s it for, public education?” I think you’d have to conclude… the whole purpose of public education… is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? … But they’re rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them. There’s something curious about professors in my experience – not all of them, but typically – they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads, don’t they? It’s a way of getting their heads to meetings…”

Now I don’t quote this to suggest that Ken Robinson is spiritual. I have no idea if he is or not. Or that university professors are all essentially dead from the neck down. I know a lot of them, and all the ones I happen to know are awesome.

I quote this because he hits on a problem that isn’t unique to university professors but to mainstream culture at large. And that is, that it is the cultural norm to approach everything with the head (and slightly to one side) and to devalue wisdom that comes from other sources.

That’s not to devalue the intellect by the way. Our intellects have gifted us with amazing things. But for me, that’s not where the answers for spirituality lie. The answer to the question of ‘Is there a God’ comes in moments of creativity, of body work, of breath work, of meditation, of stillness and no-thought, of mindfulness, of connection, of nature. The answer is there for me. And for me that answer is always ‘Yes’.

(If you want to listen to that extraordinary talk by the way, I can’t recommend it highly enough: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY)

As a culture, I think we’ve reduced ourselves to being mostly heads, using our bodies to get our heads from one place to another. We think everything can be understood or experienced from this narrow prism. I don’t think it can.  A big part of why meditation is so successful in improving health is because it shuts up that part of you that chatters ceaselessly, that part of you that you think is actually you but isn’t, for just long enough that something else can find space to breath, connect and discover new perspectives.

It’s a big part of the reason why (for me) people like Richard Dawkins will always get it wrong when it comes to answering the question “why are people religious or spiritual”. What I’ve read of his work (and granted, I haven’t read much as he grates)… but what I’ve read seems to put forward a fairly limited perspective on a journey that he has never taken, steps he has never climbed and a way of being that he has never personally opened himself up to, tried or experienced.

So I’ll state it again, for me: spirituality is HEART work. Not HEAD work.

By all means, connect with your own heart and go on an experiential journey of your own. Discover what resonates as true to you. Use language that works. I don’t think you don’t have to believe in life after death to benefit from a health spiritual life.  A sense of wonderment is really all that is required and a commitment to go where connection with whatever you think that thing is that I call ‘spirit’ takes you, and that’s available to anyone. That is also what I mean by spirituality is not religion.

But where you won’t find it is in a lab. It’s not something we can put under a microscope and pull apart into pieces and say, yes, here is how it works… we have the physical evidence now. We cannot prove or disprove it by experimenting with it under laboratory conditions. Some would say that is evidence that it’s all in our minds. I would say that it’s only accessible when you empty your mind, put aside all you think you ‘know’ about what life is and how it works and what is possible and impossible, and simply open up to BE. Amazing, unexpected and incredible perspectives and experiences are available in that space.

Spirit for me is about connection to life. And life never ends, but merely changes form. I have personally found nothing in the mechanistic way of looking at life that helps me meet life’s emotional challenges, be the best person I can be, take responsibility for myself, challenge my own perspectives, create healthier beliefs, manifest the life and love I want, uncover my inner truths, or discover my inner wisdom. All things which have brought incredible richness to my life that I would be much the poorer for lacking.

People like Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins have at different times put spiritual belief down to a weakness of the human mind. A reaction that is born from the horror of facing the fact that one day we might cease to be.

My dad died earlier this year, so I know this horror intimately. And yes, it’s something that is hard to deal with. But for me spirituality was not born from that. Nor have I rediscovered it out of that horror. The spiritual path is not the path of a coward.

On that contrary, a spiritual journey takes true courage, the willingness to meet challenges head on, the fortitude to look deep into the truth of yourself and face all inner demons with eyes wide open. It promises incredible growth but also more than one dark night of the soul.

It’s also been a fact in my life that some of the most inspiring, optimistic, healthiest and happiest people I’ve met in the world have all been spiritual teachers. In fact, there is so much richness in their teaching – so much wisdom – that I wish the benefits of that wisdom were available to everyone regardless of their beliefs. The fact that so many are shut off from it through a belief that ‘I don’t believe in God’ or ‘those people don’t have anything valuable to say to me’ is truly a sad thing.

The mechanistic world view gives me nothing to compare to that.

Our insistence since the advent of the Industrial Revolution of viewing everything as merely a sum of its parts, and ourselves as separate from each other, and nothing as connected has not led us to a happier, healthier world. It has created, in my opinion, a dysfunctional paradigm that is threatening everything around us – even the planet we live on. Only now are scientists starting to question that paradigm – and the evidence is starting to amass in quantum physics, the medical field, sustainability and more.

(By the way I’m not suggesting the latest science ‘proves’ God… only that it has challenged profoundly the idea of our separateness, and proves that we are more deeply and intricately connected that we have thus far allowed ourselves to acknowledge).

So on this other stuff about life after death and angels and things…. what if I’m wrong – what if at the end of my life, I simply finish and no part of ‘me’ exists. Well – for one thing, I won’t be anywhere where anyone can go ‘na-narni-na-na’. But in the meantime, I find a richness and a way of being in the world that truly brings out the absolute best in me, and a way of looking at the world that life continuously affirms for me as true.

So I would ask therefore before anyone poses the question: “How could you believe in God?” or makes the assumption that spirituality = irrationality, consider that it is about far, far more than that single, limiting question.

Yes Virginia, I do believe in God. And I believe God is life. Like literally – life. And life is us. And we are, in the most fundamental  way, all one. (Use the Force Luke). And what I do to someone else, I do to myself. Because you are me and I am you and all life is connected. And life doesn’t end. It merely changes. And whatever I change into at the end of all of this – whoever happens to be right about the question of what happens after we die - surely that’s pretty much moot point as long as we’ve lived our lives well?

Why waste time arguing, when we can share wisdom, exchange life views, delight in difference and revel in the fact that on a quantum level, you and me and all of us are all part of one big, undifferentiated, undivided primordial soup.

Viva la quantum particles!

Just a thought.

A very special blog post

I wrote this some months ago in January of this year. This post was written exactly 8 days before my dad passed away from cancer. At the time, I had neither the heart nor courage to share it. And it is still, very honestly, incredibly hard for me to post this. Reading it now brings all the emotions back with the added poignancy that he is no longer with us.

However, grief buried is grief that can wreak havok on the human heart. So here it is.

Some day I may even be able to write about that last week and the days since.
Until then...

---

This is a very special blog post.

It’s January 2013, and my dad is dying.

My dad… is dying.

That’s a really strange sentence to write. In a way,  my brain still hasn’t caught up with the reality of what my family is now facing. I find myself confused, distressed, disbelieving. My thoughts run one way in one moment only to run the exact opposite a second later.

But that’s the reality of my today. Today, 30 January 2013, my dad is dying. He’s 72 years of age, and he probably won’t make it to his 73 birthday on 21 March. With terminal cancer that has spread like wildfire, he doesn’t have very long. His dearest wish now is that it happens as quickly and painlessly as possible. And now, for my sister, mum and I, that has become our biggest priority. To help dad die quickly, painlessly as possible, and with as much dignity as we can muster up for him.

It’s funny how things sharpen to a point at times like these. When a loved one is dying, suddenly time is all you have. Every moment, every second becomes infinitely precious. There’s no racing through the days. No wishing tomorrow would come. Right now, right here, that’s all that’s important. Right now, right here, I can still hug him and feel his warm back beneath my hands. Right now, right here, I can still put an arm around his shoulders and give him a kiss on the head. Right now, right here, I can still hold his hand and tell him I love him. Right now, right here… that’s all we have left. Maybe that’s all we ever really have.

My other priority, in all of this, is to not look away. If my loved one is going to face this, I will face it with him, holding his hand, telling him I love him and helping his spirit on to the other side.

(It’s funny – because I had always thought that he would be the one holding my hand, walking me down the aisle, handing me over to my husband-to-be. That’s not going to happen now. When I get married, Baba won’t be there in physical form. Instead, I will be there for him. And maybe that’s also the way it was meant to be. )

My dad and I haven’t had a very easy relationship over the years. He was a strict parent, and I was never backwards about telling him what I thought. It made things volatile and hurtful between us. But in the last ten years or so, we have both made steps to heal the rift and find resolution. It has meant that now, in this time, we are not busy mending fences. Those were mended years ago. Now we are busy telling each other ‘I love you’. I’ve been able to express regret for things I wish had been different and have him acknowledge and share that moment with me. I’ve been able to connect with him and share a loving space with him. I am so grateful for that.

My dad isn’t some famous Australian. He doesn’t have world-breaking achievements under his sleeve. He won’t be missed by anyone except those of us who know and love him. The PM won’t stop to make a speech about him. He’s just a family man. Someone who worked hard at a pizza bar for years to put his daughters through school and send them to Uni. That’s it. But isn’t that more than enough? Isn’t that really amazing?  

I don’t know how I’ll face the coming days and weeks. I don’t know what to expect from that final moment. I believe (through some personal experiences) that his spirit will survive, and I don’t know how to talk to him about that. I feel I have some spiritual gifts that can help him at this time, and I don’t know how to share them. There’s a lot I don’t know.

I do know: I love my dad. And I will always love him. Now and for always. I am lucky I get to tell him that many times I hope before he passes on.

I wish for you all LOVE, for today and for always. That’s all that’s really important anyway. Really. It is. Let’s not wait until it’s almost too late to realise that and live by that universal truth.

No easy answers on nurse's suicide

I was going to write a different blog post today, but this issue has been on my mind a lot in the last few days – so I’m having thinky thoughts instead about suicide, and about our communal failure to talk about the real issues.

Apology ahead of time – this is a complex issue, and my thoughts on it don’t easily fit in a small post, so this post is LONG. Possibly the longest I’ve ever written. You may disagree with some or all of the below. I don't mind and welcome comments. But please keep it respectful. :) Any comments that get personal, or focus on attacking people rather than addressing the content of the issue will be deleted.

(Possible trigger WARNING. If you are feeling depressed, please reach out! You are not alone. ♥ Lifeline: 131 114. Also, if you have had experience with a loved one committing suicide – you may want to reconsider reading the post below. Take care of yourself. My thoughts and love are with you.) 

Right now, across Twitter and in the mainstream press in the UK and elsewhere there is a lot of (I’m sure genuinely felt) disgust, vitriol, outrage, anger, and unhappiness being directed at two young disc jockeys employed at 2Day FM.

These two DJs (on instruction) made a prank call to the hospital that Kate Middleton was staying at pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles wanting to talk to their grand/daughter-in-law. I’ve read the transcript of the prank call and it was pretty stupid and thoughtless.

Okay – right off the cuff, let me be even more specific. I think most prank calls are stupid. They are adolescent and almost never consider the mental state or wellbeing of the people being pranked. They are fun for the people conducting the prank, and perhaps for some listeners, but only in a ‘aren’t I cool’ kind of way. They are insensitive and almost always lack empathy for the people being pranked. They are also wide-spread practice on radio stations around the world and audiences love them.

Having heard the interview with the DJs on ACA last night, I was struck by their naivety and lack of forethought. They were visibly shocked and devastated. But as equally clueless about the possible emotional ramifications for the people they connected with on the other end. They expected to be hung up on. That was it. They thought they were making fools of themselves. They didn’t intend it to be a joke on the nurses. They hadn’t connected the dots on the effect being fooled would have on the nurses.

This lack of empathy and wisdom is in my opinion largely cultural – both for that radio station but also the mainstream media and society as a whole. These DJs are a product of our system.
Does this make it okay – no – but as stupid pranks go this one was as innocuous as they probably get. Put on some silly accents and ring a hospital. Guaranteed that neither DJ expected to get beyond the person who picked up the phone. It wasn’t a personal attack. It wasn’t sustained harassment. It wasn’t sexual. It wasn’t abusive. It was stupid.

Most people – including Prince Charles – were until last week either laughing about it or calling for the two nurses to lose their jobs. Yes – the biggest outrage being expressed last week was by people calling for these two innocent women who fell for a prank to be disciplined and to lose their jobs. And perhaps the UK rags were also feeling a bit put out that these two ‘colonials’ had gotten information that they hadn’t been able to get yet.

Well may you ask why we should bloody care about Kate Middleton’s pregnancy dramas, but in our celeb-worshipping culture many do. And most of them – outside of the hospital itself - last week were calling for the heads not of the pranksters but of the women who fell for it.

Jump to a week later, and one of those women has apparently committed suicide. (Not confirmed yet by the way – perhaps she took sleeping pills and accidentally overdosed? The autopsy report hasn’t been released yet. We have no idea how she died). So the outrage this week is about the DJs having ‘blood on their hands’… and calling for them to be ‘permanently unemployed’ or ‘jailed’ or ‘shot’ or ‘hung’ or ‘strung up’. People want them humiliated. The faceless jokers who call themselves ‘Anonymous’ have proclaimed themselves judge and jury and judged them guilty of murder.
I understand the outrage. It is a horrible and tragic thing. But the over-the-top reaction makes me feel lost in the face of societal anger, hatred and lack of wisdom.

If this poor woman did commit suicide, we will never fully know why. Did this prank have something to do with it – very probably. Was it the prank itself or the outraged/ incredulous reactions of the hospital or celeb-hypnotised masses that contributed to her stress? I’m going to place my vote with the latter.

But you know – the truth is – this is a complex issue and as much as we want to be able to grasp onto simple explanations and find someone to blame, that simple explanation just doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. And no – we can’t have this conversation in 140 characters on Twitter. It takes a lot more words. And a lot more compassion. And a lot more wisdom and thought.

Which brings me to my next point. Suicide.

(If this issue is a personal one for you, I would lovingly suggest you may not want to read further).

[SPACE]

Suicide is a terrible thing. It is – in my compassionate opinion – a tragic act committed by people who are so deep in the bowels of despair and depression that they are not able to fathom the ways in which their act will hurt and devastate the ones they love. I’m not placing blame here by the way – I understand very well the depths of despair that an individual must feel to think they have no other way out. Many even believe that their loved ones will be better off. They are in a seemingly never-ending spiral of despair and unhappiness for which only one end makes sense. It is a terrible place to be in (for some it is clinical) and those people deserve our help and compassion. But that doesn’t change the devastating effect it has on family and friends. It burdens surviving loved ones with an intolerably painful legacy. All of the grief that people feel when losing a loved one is magnified and complicated when a loved one suicides. Most people feel incredibly guilty – could I have helped? Did I miss the signs? How could I not have known? What if? What if?

So yes – let’s talk about suicide. Let’s talk about both the causes of it and the repercussions. Let’s help both those who are feeling suicidal and the families and survivors of people who have committed suicide. Survivors have to deal with oceans of guilt over these very types of issues we’re grappling with here. Mostly they don’t get the easy answers. Suicide is an act of violence on the self that ripples out and hits everyone associated with that person.

But let’s not kid ourselves here – we don’t get a ‘get out of jail free card’ on an issue like this. We don’t get to blame this suicide on two clueless DJs (who cannot have conceivably imagined that this stupid prank would end in this way) and thereby avoid having to talk about all the many cultural and personal contributing factors that would lead to such an act. We bear some collective responsibility for this through our celebrity obsessions, rancid media, cultural shaming and much more besides.

Some questions we could be asking ourselves (that could help us learn and grow from this) but aren’t, include

- How and why do we as a society make it hard for people to admit they’re ‘not coping’?
- Why do we make ‘failure’ and ‘mistakes’ such a big deal?
- What is the nature of ‘shame’ and how do we unravel it?
- Why are we fixated on celebrities and royalty to the extent that this nurse would have felt her life wasn’t worth living simply because she accidentally put through a false call?
- Are our nurses, carers and those in the helping professions sufficiently supported in the very difficult and stressful jobs they face?
- Why are we so hard on each other? So mean? So judgemental? So quick to anger? What are we hiding/ running from/ projecting away onto others? What would happen if we were to face it instead?
- Why does it take a tragedy like this for people’s hearts to be opened? Why do we close our hearts for the most part? How can we support each other to be more compassionate?
- How can we better understand suicidal depression and what can we do to help those suffering from it?
- What can we do to wean ourselves off our societal addiction to drama, negativity, the 24 hour news cycle, and meaningless gossip?
- And yes, should pranks be done away with or at the very least, better regulated? What is the appropriate level of responsibility for radio station who pull pranks?

Questions. So many helpful, useful questions that we could ask.

So – lets blame the DJs instead. Better that than take communal responsibility for our general insensitivity, for our success-obsessed culture which makes failure of any sort shameful, and for our celebrity obsessions. Just last week people were pouring over every detail of Kate Middleton’s pregnancy… juicy, juicy, juicy. Kate Middleton. Royals. Ooo err. Climate change? Whatevs. Royal pregnancy and morning sickness – now there’s a story. New Ideas and Woman’s Days were flying off the shelf. Give us more. Give us more. The prank made us laugh. We re-tweeted the shit out of that sucker. Details of her morning sickness were poured over.

So what are we really horrified over? Are we horrified at the two DJs – really? They pulled a bog-standard prank – the type of prank that is conducted by radio stations the world over. They asked the questions that every media outlet would have given their teeth to get the answers to, to satisfy a hungry horde. If the Daily Mail or the Sun or any of the other sanctimonious British tabloids making money out of leading the ‘outraged’ charge against the Aussie DJs could have gotten access to those answers from Kate’s nurses, they would have printed them in a blind second.

Or are we really horrified instead at our own societal psychopathy – a psychopathy that places importance on unimportant things and then laments when someone falls under the wheels of it. A psychopathy that enjoys the pranks and making fun of people and public humiliation, until something goes horribly wrong. Didn’t many people laugh at this prank last week? Didn’t many think it was a bit of harmless fun? Didn’t it go viral? Don’t many of us eat up that New Idea/ Woman’s Day garbage about Kate Middleton’s pregnancy, and how fat Kirstie Alley is now, and whether Rihanna will go back to her abusive ex-boyfriend?

Think about what this hard-working nurse potentially killed herself over. A prank that led to some information being released about some lady’s morning sickness. Is it just me or does this seem shamefully meaningless? Doesn’t it make you want to weep?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that out of everything that could have contributed to this poor woman’s state of mind – the prank call itself was not the worst or even probably the biggest contributing factor. Yes, had it never happened – she could possibly still be here. But here’s another ‘IF’… if we didn’t care as much about royalty or celebrities, if the press didn’t make as big a deal out of the whole thing, if the press hadn’t hounded her, if she personally hadn’t felt humiliated over it and instead had been able to laugh it off, if the hospital had supported them unconditionally and gotten them the emotional support they needed, hell – if the hospital had even put in place the proper and obvious protocols around answering calls to do with the Duchess … if, if, if… she would also possibly still be here.

(You know what IS foreseeable? Prank calls to get information on royal pregnancies.)

If we’re talking contributing factors to scapegoat – there’s a hell of a lot of room there to share the ‘blame’… if blame is the game you want to play with this. And I guess my point here is I don’t think we should.

Let me be even more specific here – someone else, someone who wasn’t Jacintha Saldahna, may not have committed suicide over this. After all – the nurse who gave away the information, and easily made the bigger mistake, has as far as I know not harmed herself as a result. So there was something personal for Jacintha that caused this ‘humiliation’ to feel so extreme and so terrible that she could see no other way out for herself. Her personal head-space and the cultural meaning she associated to the act was as much if not more of a contributing factor to her suicide than anything else. Can we take communal responsibility for that? Should we take communal responsibility for that? A bit. A lot. I don’t have any easy answers. (Also my point).

The two DJs and their radio station ARE guilty – they’re guilty of failure to imagine that the person on the other side of the line has a different emotional reality, set of values, set of stressers, physical preconditions, and whole life going on. But that’s hardly unique. In fact, I’d say it’s at fucking epidemic levels. It is a problem that is wide-spread and largely facilitated, supported and tolerated by the masses. (And being demonstrated so aptly at the moment by the ‘outrage’ brigade).

Where does scapegoating end and communal or even personal responsibility begin? What do we learn by projecting our societal madness onto two people? And what is the logical end-point of seeking to find someone to blame, thereby avoiding the complexity of the issue?

The media collectively shamed this poor woman because we the people think Kate Middleton’s pregnancy is so bloody important in the scheme of things happening in the world today that it was nigh on horrific that her privacy had been breached – and that was a story that would sell. We also possibly humiliated her by going on about how ‘unbelievable’ it was that she fell for it and by shaming her for being so ‘stupid’ and making the mistake. And then when she apparently commits suicide from despair and humiliation (again – not certain, only postulated), we can’t cope with what that says about us as a society – so instead of having the conversation we could be having, we project our collective guilt onto the two people instead. Much easier. And mostly missing the irony of being abusive and horrible to two strangers for something we considered abusive and horrible.

Today a family is grieving and asking themselves ‘what if’ and ‘why’. They may never have the answers. We certainly never will. In the manner of many suicides, we probably won’t ever know what was going on in the mind of someone who felt so at the end of their tether that ending their pain was the only thing they could think about. Beyond family and loved ones. Beyond anything.

Our focus should be on doing whatever it takes to make her family’s journey easier. Not on spewing out even more negativity, hatred and vitriol. Lending the inner blackness of our rampant human and societal egos to an ever dissolving public discourse.

A tragedy happened here. Let’s treat it with the reverence, wisdom and compassion it deserves.

Just a thought.

PS. So much more to say… so much already said. I may also do a blog post some time about the phenomena of projecting personal grief onto a stranger’s death. But that’ll do for now. If you’re after a good read on this issue, Bernard Keane breaks it down well in Crikey:
http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/12/10/resisting-the-witch-hunt-on-the-royal-prank-call/

A Thank You For Strong Women

As a little girl, I wanted to do something important with my life. In stories and movies, I always associated with the hero (usually a male). I was always opinionated and passionate. I always cared very deeply. I wanted to do something extraordinary – something that would shine and inspire others. Something that would change the world for the better. I wanted to climb mountains. Scale battlements. Inspire the masses. Storm the castle. Give me golden armour and a sword; and maybe a gypsy earring. Let me dance by the open fire in a forest. Let me howl at the moon with the wolves. Let me paint, act, sing, dance, tell stories. Let me suck the marrow out of life. 

As a little girl, this all seemed possible to me. I refused to believe people when they told me life wasn’t like that. I refused to listen to those who told me to be more ‘realistic’. I had no concept, as a little girl, that there were different rules for women than for men. I had no idea of it. Despite my dad being quite a traditionalist in his personal life and relationship with my mum – with his daughters he tread a more liberal, progressive, and enabling line. We were to get an education and be able to take care of ourselves. While he didn’t believe that I could quite do anything I wanted to (starting with being an actress, astronaut or archaeologist), he did believe I should have a career. Marriage was less important.

As a little girl, I believed I should be able to do anything and I fought against anyone who tried to tell me differently. My mum had always told me I could. There was no reason to think otherwise.

It took some time, an introduction to some very conservative views in the Greek-Australian community at University, and the slow dawning of the mainstream media on my consciousness to realise that a lot of the rest of the world didn’t agree with me.

I didn’t realise it was more important to the mainstream community that I be lady-like or ‘feminine’ than that I have opinions about the world. It dawned on me quite late, that getting married was a very important sign of ‘desirability’ and acceptableness in the world. When an ex-boyfriend of mine at university angrily opined that he wished I’d stop hanging around with the guys talking politics, and go talk to the ’girls’ about ‘girl stuff’ (e.g. shoes) instead, I gaped at him like he’d grown two horns on his head and pooped out an elephant.

But the more I saw of this stuff, the more I realised I didn’t fit in. Only in later life did I realise how many damaging things I’d internalised over the years. And the beliefs were pretty insidious:  

• Strong women aren’t loveable, men find them too intimidating and frightening. I was a strong woman so I must be unloveable.
• ‘Feminism’ is dirty, dirty word. I’d have to let go of that if I was ever to find love. If only I could let go of this idea of ‘feminism’ I’d be able to twist a man around my little finger. But ‘feminism’? A man’s ego wouldn’t allow it.
•  I had a chip on my shoulder. I was too angry.
•  I wasn’t lady-like enough. I was too opinionated. I didn’t care enough about how I looked.
• Dreams were a waste of time. The world was run by money and self-interest, and I’d need to lose my idealism if I wanted to get by. My dreams would die under the harsh light of the ‘real world’.
• Expressing myself authentically makes other people uncomfortable. I should try for less of that, and more of getting along well with others. Then I’d get whatever I wanted, but first I needed to learn how to ‘play the game’. My straight forward manner was problematic. I was problematic.

I don’t particularly blame anyone for these opinions by the way – it is just the stuff out there in the mainstream narrative that I internalised without realising how deeply those beliefs stood in my way. And society doesn’t mean it to be damaging. Even your parents – when they tell you these things – are only trying to protect you and keep you safe. Most of the time people want what’s best for you. Everyone is doing their best. Many people are themselves living in the shadow and limitations of these beliefs.

I can’t quite put into words what this is like though, when you feel the pressure of this narrative on one side and the siren call of your own soul on the other. I’ll only say that it creates a dichotomy – a splitting on a deep soul level – between who you feel yourself to authentically be and who you end up trying to become in order to please the world and ‘fit in’. In order to make people less uncomfortable. For many years, I tried to squeeze the complexity of myself into a box labelled ‘acceptable’. Of course, it made me miserable and I was never very good at it.

Anyone who has ever felt out of step with mainstream values and societal norms will know the loneliness and often the sense of helplessness this can engender. It is lonely to feel yourself at the fringe of society and to not see yourself reflected in the world around you. 

I only decided to take the long journey into reclaiming my essential self after my second serious relationship broke down. It was only then – at about age 26 – that I started to question everything about who I was, where I was going, who I’d allowed myself to be, what was true for me and what was not. The next decade was about this slow, crucial reclaiming of myself – culminating in finding impro in my late 30’s and returning to my most authentic self. And still, there have been demons to fight, personal dragons to slay, and childhood traumas to heal. The process isn’t over yet. It probably will never be over.

So I am extremely grateful today to reflect on all of this and realise – looking around me – that I am suddenly surrounded by strong, capable, confident, talented, spiritual and connected women, who model for me both on stage and in their own lives the kind of woman I love and have always hoped to be. And they are incredible. They challenge everyone around them (men and women alike) to rise to their level – rather than forcing themselves to sink down into the box society calls ‘acceptable’. They shine brightly, and unapologetically, and in so doing inspire all around them to shine too.

So to those women I today give heartfelt thanks – you know who you are. You rock my world. Thanks for existing and for being in my life, so that I can now look back at little Vicki and tell her there’s absolutely nothing wrong with her. That she is perfect just as she is.

And somewhere in the deep past, a five year old girl looks up and gives me a bright, world-changing, wolf-howling, loving grin.  “Head up, kid. You’re not alone.”

No Alan Jones. I am not a cyber-bully.

Thinky thoughts today about Alan Jones and the furore that has erupted both over his comments and the unprecedented social media campaign around them.

People have many different opinions about this and it’s not all straight forward lefties on one side and righties on the other.

But there is an argument out there that the social media campaign that has sprung up targeting Jones’s sponsors is threatening our freedom of speech (and perhaps association). Jones and 2GB themselves have railed today against this ‘cyber-bullying’ and how this is putting innocent people out of work and damaging business.

Allow me to vehemently and completely disagree.

We live in a world where much of our public policy is affected by private money and corporate influence. Where radio personalities like Alan Jones can and have wielded out-of-proportion influence to the audiences they represent. And where this does and has had a very, very real impact on our world, on what we’ve been able to achieve and on how we’ve been able to tackle very important and challenging societal problems.

The all-powerful narrative of the buck and the market means that everything these days must be reduced to a dollar figure to be understood and valued. We are treated by both politicians and the market as consumers first, and human beings very much later.

This reality has meant that people like Jones, and the big corporates have been able to ride democracy their own way for a very long time. They have big pulpits  bought with big money and with big microphones that they use to push their own (mostly conservative) agendas, often at the expense of the facts and the best interest of the rest of the community. The rest of the community – numbering in our millions – have had no real voice at all outside of the voting booth and our ability to band together over common interest.

Jones in particular has used his big microphone to sprout religious intolerance, racial vilification, sexism, and the most vile abuse towards a Prime Minister I’ve witnessed since I can remember being old enough to be politically aware.

And up until now he has done it with complete immunity and without the consequences that most of the rest of the world would have to wear for disgracing themselves and their employers.

Let’s face it – Jones has had a pretty sweet (and free) ride – up to now.

Social media changes things. It gives everyone a voice. Anyone with access to the internet can post a comment, send an email, tweet or facebook their thoughts. We can blog – and many bloggers have bigger audiences these days than traditional media personalities. It’s the way of the new world. It poses incredible challenges (such as how rife actual cyber-bullying and trolling is). But it also poses incredible opportunities for free speech such as we’ve never seen before. Now anyone who can write can have as big a microphone as Jones has enjoyed for years.

So colour me unimpressed that Alan now feels he’s being cyber-bullied.  No Alan – you’re not. You’ve mistaken my right to do business with whom I choose with bullying. Real cyber-bullying is very different.

Here it is in a sentence– after decades of turning us all into consumers and using that power to make over our society in the corporate image and damage those things that many of us hold dear, no one now has the right to turn around and claim I’m bullying them by exercising my right as a consumer to do business with whom I want.

You cannot make me into a ‘consumer’ and then cry foul when I use my ‘consumer’ influence to stand for what is important to me. You don’t get to be that much of a hypocrite.

I’m sure it must get up their noses. I’m sure it must really make them mad – this idea that we ‘consumers’ have found a way through all this corporate bile to utilise the system to stand up for a more decent and respectful societal discourse. They built a cross for their own backs, and now they don’t want to carry it?

That’s the power of social media.

Let me make it clear – I don’t deny Alan Jones his right to say whatever he wants. But by God – I claim my right to use the methods at my disposal (social media and the power of my dollar) to talk as loudly as he does. And to stand, finally, against the religious intolerance, science-denialism, anti-environmentalism, sexism and hateful rhetoric that he sprouts on a daily basis. If that has the follow-on effect of losing Jones and 2GB money and perhaps even shutting his show down, then he and his corporate mates own responsibility for that. Not me or those like me who are merely standing for what we believe in. He has the option after all of expressing his different opinions in a more respectful, polite and non-sexist way. I have a right to not do business with companies who support him while he chooses disrespectful and damaging rhetoric.

That doesn’t make me a cyber-bully.
Nor does it make me a danger to freedom of speech.

In fact it makes me a champion of free speech.

And actually that’s not just a thought.

Over and out.

We Fucked UP! Hooray!

Thinky thoughts today about joy – about how we wait for it. About how elusive it sometimes seems. And about negativity. About the way our thoughts get mistaken for reality.

Nothing new here in these thoughts. But occasionally in life you have the moments when things coalesce for you a bit. When life seems to sing out a song of ‘you’re onto something’. 

Today is one of those days. Okay I admit – it helps that it’s a beautiful sunny day and there’s probably something in that which has affected the chemical mix in my brain and organised things internally so that some thoughts come more quickly to the surface than others.

I’ve never been one to dwell too much into the depths of the genetic and chemical makeup of the human being. That’s for others. For me, reducing everything to mere physics and biology doesn’t help to navigate the practicalities of the world. My ocean is one of emotions, thoughts, spirituality, essence.

So today I want to talk about joy.

I’m a big one for creating our own realities. I think that what we believe becomes thought and what we think dictates action and how we act pulls things in towards us or repels them away. So you can really want to be very rich but if you hold problematic beliefs about the nature of money, then you will probably find yourself unable to manifest it for yourself or hold onto it for very long.

Similarly for love and almost any human endeavour.

This isn’t about sugary positive affirmations to cover things up – this is more a genuine, conscious relationship with your own inner world to learn how your beliefs affect what you’re experiencing in the world. No number of positive affirmations in my opinion can disguise what you really think and feel.
But that way of being in the world relies on always driving the creation of things in your life. And sometimes driving them very hard.

And today I’ve been thinking about joy. Which seems to me to be less about driving and more about being. Less about actively creating our lives but of about enjoying them. And it seems to me that joy also comes with acceptance and an openness to something other than what you think you need in life at any given moment. 

If we’re driving really hard to Point A we may miss that Point B is infinitely more interesting. If we think what we really need is to be X, we may miss the joy that comes with being Y.

We’re a bundle of contradicting cultural and social pressures, us humans, mixed in with genetics and parenting styles. In amongst all that, joy can seem utterly elusive. Look outside of yourself for one moment and you’re bound to be assailed by countless different perspectives and many of them will tell you what’s completely and utterly wrong with you and the world we live in.
You’re bad because you’re single. You’re bad because you’re a woman. You’re bad because you don’t have a kid. You’re bad if you’re a man and you cry. You’re bad if you’re too thin. You’re bad if you’re too heavy. You’re bad if you buy this t-shirt. You’re bad if you don’t. You’re bad if you’re this sort of artist. You’re bad if you’re that sort. You’re just bad.

Don’t paint your toe-nails? Bad.
Paint them? How superficial are you.
Didn’t finish that bit of work you had to do? Lazy.
Work too hard? Work-a-holic loser. Life is about spontenaity.

Yes, it is pretty much guaranteed that in this emotionally and psychologically damaged cultural collective that you will find someone who can pinpoint twenty reasons in five minutes why you should be really down on yourself. They’ll also probably tell you how to fix it. Now do you have a bunch of stuff you could be doing better and more effectively? Probably. We all do.

I, for instance, am probably the single most disorganised person I know. I can’t organise my way out of a bucket. It’s problematic because I have so much I want to achieve but I’m just goddam lazy sometimes and other times I genuinely don’t think of things ahead of time. Things sneak up on me and suddenly, as much as I think I’ve got things sorted, there’s twenty things I need to do and I needed to do them yesterday. 

Fines collect up on my desk because I forget to pay them. I have a jacket in my cupboard which has needed to be taken to the dry-cleaner for about twelve months. I’ve got shoes I don’t wear because I haven’t gotten around to fixing them. Yup, I’m my parent’s most disorganised child and a cause of much exasperation.

And yes, there are emotional issues I should be well on top of at this point. Well on top of. I mean how old am I? Five? 
But you know what – I’m pretty freaking awesome anyway. 

So are you – whoever you are reading this right now, no matter what’s going on in your life, with all your ‘problems’ and challenges and fuck-ups and failures – you’re pretty freaking awesome. Hey – as we say in the impro world – we fucked up! Hooray!!! Maybe that’s joy.

You know what else is joy? Being easy on each other. Not telling ourselves or each other off for shortcomings. Allowing someone else to fuck up without making it important that they did. Letting someone be human. Letting someone be imperfect. Loving them anyway. Letting ourselves make mistakes and loving ourselves anyway. Doing the wrong thing and forgiving yourself. Allowing yourself to forgive someone else too. Yeh, that’s definitely joy.

And I reckon what we create from that space is infinitely better for us and our community. 

Lets free ourselves from this misery of having to be anything other than exactly who we are. Lets just be joy.

Just a thought.

Is Anybody Listening?

Thinky thoughts today about communication (and about how greed has poisoned our world and could prove to be the most deadly of the seven deadly sins – but let’s leave greed to another thinky thought, shall we). 

First about communication. This thing that is called exchanging information.

It’s brought home to me daily, by virtue of what I do, that communication is at the centre of much of our dis

tress as a human race. The way we speak and write. The things we say. The things we mean. The things we don’t mean. The things we do mean but pretend we didn’t say. The things we want to mean but don’t want to come outright and say or take ownership of. All of the above in one big cesspool of miscommunication. 

Or we could just call it a missed chance at communication. 

It was brought home to me today again because of some copy I’ve been editing. Several pages of very important information from one of our scientific programs here at MSI. Scientists have this fabulous way of writing that makes everything as clear as mud. Because nothing in science can be definitively stated, everything must be qualified. So in the end you end up not really saying what it is you really want to say but trying to say it anyway and trying to sound sort of definitive about that even though you really can’t be definitive at all.

You got that? 
Yeh, me neither.

It does drive home for me though how incredibly important it is – this communication thing – and how very often we take the process for granted. Too often we think that the important part of communication is that we have said what we’ve wanted to say – even if that saying is illegible to someone else or no-one’s listening. Whereas the important part of it – the most important part actually – is that the recipient of that communication has understood us.

There’s a few things that I say to my peeps over here at MSI about communication, and have said throughout my career as a Paid Communicator cum PR person, that it occurs to me apply deeply to our personal lives. 

The first of these is that – when instigating this process of communication - you should probably make sure that the person or people you are talking to want to listen or have any vested interest in listening to you at all. All too often we make the mistake I think of assuming that because we’re talking, someone owes it to us to listen. Nothing could be further from the truth. And even if you have somehow managed to shanghai someone into ‘listening’ to you, there’s no real guarantee that they are actually ‘listening’ to you at all. In fact, according to the International Listening Association (www.listen.org), most of us are distracted, preoccupied or forgetful about 75% of the time that we pretend we are listening and immediately after we listen to someone, we only recall about 50% of what they said. 

(Have you ever continued to talk at someone even after you’ve become peripherally aware that they’re no longer really listening but are just being polite? I have.)

The second thing that I often tell my peeps over here is that if you are going to communicate something, and you’ve scored the bonus of having someone who wants to listen and they are doing a half-way reasonable job at it, then you ought probably to try to say this thing of yours in a way that makes sense to them or approximates as closely as possible what you actually ‘mean’. By which I mean that just because you said it and they heard it, doesn’t mean they heard what you said.

(Have you ever talked to someone using your own ‘metaphor-rich-language’ only to watch people’s eyes glaze over as they struggle to understand the intricacies of what you mean? I have.)

It strikes me that both of these things are super-applicable to our lives. It starts by acknowledging that we all have an individual language that we all speak… that we all use words in a way that makes perfect sense to us and carries with it a lot of inherent and implied meaning that we forget to double-check the other person has understood. 

I constantly forget to check that what I’m saying has been understood by the person I’m saying it to. I also make the mistake in reverse of assuming that someone meant what I think they meant without checking. It’s gotten me into trouble in love and life.
How many times have you had a conversation and ‘agreed’ on something with a loved one, co-worker or friend only to find that actually you both had a very different memory of what that agreement was – sometimes a diametrically opposite understanding.

How is that possible? And yet it happens so often. What might you currently even be thinking you understand about what someone has recently said to you that is completely wrong? Ever been insulted, only to find out that the person in question hadn’t intended to be insulting? Where does the insult lie then – does it lie with the person, who didn’t mean it, or with you who carries around embedded meaning in your psyche that makes that thing insulting? Or somewhere in between? And when we feel insulted, what is it that hurts us? (Ouch, my poor head.) 

It’s on a continuum of course and depending on what example just sprung into your head, you may think you know the answer to that question one way or another. 

But let’s expand this out to broader conversations – national conversations. Jesus – are we even having one? Suddenly, the disaster that is our politics comes into clearer focus. What are we yelling at each other? And when I yell, is the other side even listening? If they’re listening, what are they hearing? And so, why do we yell? The speed with which we all take offence and fumigate and posture makes even less sense when seen through this prism. I mean, what are we trying to achieve? Who’s winning here? Can we all just stop yelling now? 

And even more questions zooming around in my head today about this: What have I assumed I’ve understood about what I’ve heard or read today? What am I actually reacting to? Is it what someone has written or said or is it what I think they’ve written or said and the implications of that given my values and the meaning I construct in the world? 

Most importantly - have I made any important decisions about someone or something based on what I think I’ve understood? Have I checked this understanding? If not, why not? Crikey – I bet I ought to check that understanding before I get pissed off at that person or people.

It’s a bottomless pit this communication and language thing I tell you. Once you jump into it, you’ll not quickly jump out. 

I mean do you even know what you’ve just been reading? Maybe I don’t even mean what you think I mean at all. 

Just a thought. 
;)