I returned to Brighton early yesterday and it was a beautiful sunny evening when I emerged into the street from the station. I was waiting for a bus and connecting with the blueness of the sky which was truly beautiful when a woman with a buggy and 2 children hanging from the handles icame up and handed me an all day ticket for the bus which she had finished with. I thanked her and took the ticket. Sitting in the bus going along the coast road and seeing the clear blue sea and the brilliant blue sky I had such an overwhelming feeling of love and gratitude. The sea has the power to take my consciousness to the point of nothing. To the state where there are no thoughts there is just experience. There is just a beingness and a connection with something that is so much bigger than me but yet that loves me unconditionally.

I let myself into the house and the family were so warm and welcoming. It's still a challenge to live with a family and not be a part of it but I know that they are becoming more relaxed around me and I am with them also. Sooner or later though I will have to look seriously for a place of my own. Today has been the first Sunday that I have spent here since I started my course and it was such a lovely day. The weather wasn't as good as yesterday evening but that made no difference to me. I could get out and spend time in the company of the sea and as always all the turbulance that was in my mind was calmed just by being in the presence of the sea. I consider myself to be so lucky to be living so close to it. I went back to the cafe where I can sit undisturbed and gaze out of the window.

I could have spent the day doing shorthand or studying my public affairs notes but instead I have spent much of it reading everything I can on Vortex Healing(r). The more I think about it the more right it feels for me to understand more about it. There is something about the way the card for this healing came to me which won't leave me alone. I had been deliberately shown it. I had not come across it in a shop window but it had been shown to me, not because of what it was but because the woman who showed it to me had picked it up because she wanted to know who had printed the card. But the moment I saw it I was drawn so deeply to it that I spontaneously asked her if I could keep it which is not like me at all.

I looked up the main Vortex Healing energy site and I have been amazed at what I have been reading. It's a complicated system to learn and there are lots of modules but the gist of it is that it's about clearing out the channel for the kundalini. This makes so much more sense to me. What was also interesting was that I speak about the energy that is released when we see and give up ways of being that don't work. This healing works in the same way but instead of it being free to create like I assserted, the blocked energy which in this system is known as conditioning is transformed into Divine light and Divine consciousness.

I'm really looking forward to starting the classes. I feel like this is my next step on this spiritual journey. It is at times like this when I'm at yet another crossroads that my mind thinks of a teacher but this is my journey and as long as I stay true to myself I will be protected. The biggest thing I have to watch is my own tendancy to create others as separate to me and me in some way superior. I can't and won't deny the experience I had of being drawn into a vortex but any conclusions or meaning I put on it is not the truth and certainly doesn't make me better than anyone else. My identity at the moment is playing dirty and I know that it is not personal. To understand about the witness and to be able to stand apart from the thoughts in my head and be an outsider with enough clarity to write about it is a great gift for me.

I'm trying to write and be unrestrained but I still find myself going back after every paragraph and editing it. You would think that given this obsession that I would be a good sub-editor and if it didn't involve manipulating text and pictures so that they fitted nicely on a page I would, but the last lecture session on using In design almost saw the end of me. Everyone else clicks a button, the bloody thing does what the lecturer said it would do. I click the same button (obviously wasn't!) and I lose the whole thing. Then I have to annoy the guy beside me who is doing gymnastics with his copy, the speed with which things are coming into and going out of the screen. I feel the jealousy well up in me like bile and I smile wryly to myself. My inner voice led by my identity seizes the opportunity and all of a sudden I have a barrage of thoughts that go something like 'you're absolutely useless, everyone else can do it and you can't'. I acknowledge they are there and smile. Then they have no more power and they like everything else they too go and I am left peaceful and calm but still with a frustratingly blank screen.

One thing I don't think I have given any credit for in my difficulty around gadgets that operate on logic is the fact that I am partially sighted. The cells in my right eye have never developed. I remember vaguely when I was a child having to wear these horrible ugly black rimmed glasses from the NHS that I point blank refused to wear. From an early age I struggled with maths. Then in my late 20's my vision started to blur and I went to the optician. He explained that my right eye has never developed and my left which did have perfect vision has now started to deteriorate. He could give me a prescription for my left eye but not for my right eye. In my book I go into a lot of detail about the possibility that my right brain has overcompensated for the lack of stimulation going to my left brain from my right eye so that the right brain works harder. Spirituality has been associated with the right brain and for many years I was convinced (a little bit of me still is if I am to be honest) that my ability to understand spirtual truths and the experiences I have had is more a function of an overdeveloped right brain and less to do with the Divine throw of a dice. I wrote letters and emails to many people psychologists and optometrists to see if there was any evidence to back up what is a perfectly reasonable explanation to me. But all of my queries came to nothing.

I think this is why I am so hesitant to assert myself as spiritual. I think I am some kind of quirk of nature. I always ask myself 'would I have had the experience of the Vortex if I had two proper functioning eyes and the truth is that I don't know'. I can't for definite say yes or no which leaves me somewhat in limbo. I liken it to when one kidney stops working, the other will take over its function. But because both kidneys do the same thing no differences are seen. The left and right brain do different things and if I am working more of my right brain to compensate for the left then differences are going to be seen. Where people dip in and out of the right brain (i.e. access it through meditation, trance, channelling') I live there by virtue of the fact that the left brain is not being stimulated. I have no evidence for what I assert, it just feels like a more honest explanation to me.

What all this preamble is building up to is that I am now going to start speaking about what I realise is a disability. I am partially sighted, this is a disability. I didn't want to think of myself as having a disability because in my head that meant damaged. I realise now that it doesn't mean this and if I have the courage to begin to speak about being partially sighted and the challenges it brings especially around computers then I can allow myself to be supported instead of beating myself up and labelling myself as stupid. I can accept what is and that is that I have a disability and I will need additional support around technology. How much of an irony is this.. to face up to this at the start of a journalism course where having multi-media skills (having a video clip on an article as well as text and graphics) is so important for landing that great journalism job......suddenly living all alone half-way up a mountain is very attractive......