“Coming to my essences…”
Just over a decade ago I returned to this New Zealand valley in which I was born. A few years into being back here I went through a period of intense turmoil, and in need of some sanity I began to walk the valley road daily.
Day after day I walked and slowly I began to reconnect to my environment and body through my sense of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste.
As I walked the valley I notice how I was particularly drawn to the deep blue sky and also the delicate roadside flower petals. I became curious about just what it was about these things that so drew me into them..
I soon recognised it was the qualities that emanated through them, qualities like spaciousness, softness, and aliveness. I began to call these qualities essence qualities.
One day when standing on the bridge looking south into the deep blue sky, appreciating these vast qualities emanating through it, I realised that to see spaciousness I was also seeing with spaciousness. The spaciousness out there was a reflection of a deep spaciousness within. I knew I had just become aware of my true essential Self, a sort of deep witnessing presence that had been hidden within my own seeing. A presence I could know through its qualities. It turned out that being a lost and confused girl in the world was not the whole picture.
For the next few years I followed this essence quality thread. I was on a treasure hunt for these qualities both in the world around me, and in the way I met life. Gradually I found myself meeting the tender, stuck, and scared parts of myself with these qualities, too.
A few years after that pivotal bridge moment, I plonked myself down on my lawn after my “meadowtation” walk one morning. While looking softly up at the fluffy clouds in a single blink my perspective totally changed. The qualities I had been collecting through individual things revealed themselves as one whole field, a spacious luminous field that had always been here, and of which I essentially was.
That lawn moment was several years ago now, and since then life continues to bring things to the surface to be met, welcomed, and alchemised. Over this time, and alongside others, my path has become simpler, more ordinary, and more embodied. It is still a journey but one that is more and more loving, playful, and generative.
For me this coming home to myself has unfolded as a braid of waking up, growing up, and cleaning up. It involved reclaiming what I hid and projected, of both my shadows, and my golden shadows. And all of this happened right here, through my senses.
Ultimately, I learned the extraordinary is found in the ordinary.
This “essence way” is the essential ground that I now bring to accompanying others. As a fellow traveler I have both an appreciation of the terrain and a deep trust that each person holds their own way through.
I am warmly open to offering Essence-Way companionship for those on a deeper inner journey. If this resonates, I would love to hear from you.