Friday 18 September 2009

Every morning I wake up with the same question.....how badly do I want to be a Landmark Forum leader for children and young people

The title of my blog entry is how I wake up each morning. Having declared that this is what I want to be I am finding myself so challenged by everything. I am doing this training in the grip of huge physical and emotional tension and also with much more awareness than I have ever had before. I have written of how I was gripped to do this when I was sitting on a tube. I had a flash and a strong inner instruction that this is the path I am to go. How do I know this? How can I be so sure that it is an instruction from higher intuition. I know.... because it is not the first time it has happened. The last time it happened....it resulted in my book.

In 1988 when I first heard the Buddhist concept of the Bodhissatva I was gripped with a burning desire to be a Bodhissatva and I remember the inner shift that came with that desire. But because it was something I had never experienced before I quickly forgot about it and lived the life I lived which was to study and practice Mahayana Buddhism for nine years. That intense desire was not kept active by me but it must have been the power of the initial desire that has brought me to where I am today. Where I am today has happened in spite of me really and not because of me. Yes, I believed firmly that enlightenment is possible in one lifetime, the Buddha declared this and there was no doubt in my mind that it is achievable. I still have faith that this can be accomplished.

What is present for me now from this powerful inner intuition or instruction is that it is going to take something from me to achieve. What it is going to take is a massive breakthrough in structures and statistics, things I have firmly relegated to the left brain which I maintain I have a very poor functioning of. It is also going to take me keeping active a burning desire for this result and to take actions to make it possible when I least feel like taking any action. In other words, it is going to require a level of co-operation from me that there hasn't been in the past. In the past I was guided, this time it is down to me and to how badly I want to be this kind of leader. One thing I am clear about, is that I am serving a purpose, the exact nature of it I am not sure but this is always the way it has been through history. The Divine has a purpose or more to the point a game for the consciousness, a receptive consciousness becomes the vehicle for the game, but the game is not personal. The vehicle is there for the game, for no other reason and when the game is over, so is the vehicle through which the game was played. And yet it is the ONE playing a game with its many parts, one part playing a more significant part than the others for a certain time and then another of its parts at another time. But ultimately there is no tragedy because it is only the ONE which has split itself into parts to play the game.

I have to be aware too that I am living with a raised and awakened kundalini. Some of the energy is in my heart and is what gives me my connection to people, but some is also in my brain and is giving me insights and intuitions. I am aware that this energy has also been linked to mental illness and I am careful always to have the witness - that which watches me have different thoughts. I must also be careful to maintain balance. The kundalini energy can manifest as obsession. Yes, I want to be a Landmark Forum leader more than anything but what is it that is really driving that - what am I being used as a vehicle for. The moment I lose sight of that distinction is when my boundaries and my world as I know it disappears. So the level of self-awareness I have these days is painful in its clarity.

I've informed Landmark Education about my book and about this blog. There are policies for graduates on mentioning Landmark in their websites and I want to be clear that I am not breaking any policy with what I am writing. I don't feel I am but for some reason I am feeling very uncertain about the impact this blog and book is going to have at corporate headquarters. I feel like I did many years ago when I was in boarding school and a young girl was caught reading a book she shouldn't have. The girl under pressure confessed that the book was mine. She came to find me distraught that she had said who the owner of the book was because I had warned her when I gave her the book that if she was caught with it, it wasn't mine!

I reassured her that it was OK but my heart had plummeted to the floor. I went back to class and waited for what I knew was inevitable now. I watched the corridor through the top of the window. I watched and waited. It wasn't long before I saw the figure of a tall woman all in black sail up the corridor and knock on the door. She came in and said something to the nun who had been taking the class. The nun looked shocked and then the eyes of both of them bored into me. The nun who was the head of the school came up and asked me to leave what I was doing and go with her. The rest of the story is not important I just want to illustrate that awful feeling of sitting... waiting for something.... to happen.

Now again...so many years later as I wait for something to happen I have those awful feelings of uncertainty. What is it in me that is driving me to make life so difficult. I am giving everything I've got to make a difference to human being in a world which has no idea what it is I am trying to show never mind take on in a serious way exposing the game of human being so that the consciousness can move to the next level. Looking at it rationally it is completely mad. How much easier life would be for me if I turned my back on all of this and played small........but something won't let me do it.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very engaging Blog Margaret - but you need to write a fiction novel and create characters to give it life - if that does not sound to cheesy - JJ Coolevin - C/Bar

Margaret Dempsey said...

What a great surprise it was to have a comment from a very good friend. Thank you so much and I will give serious consideration to what you propose. It's not cheesy at all. A novel would definitely make the subject matter easier to treat!

Many thanks and love to your gorgeous wife and brilliant children

Margaret

Aanshi said...

lovely... I too aspire to become a landmark forum leader.
"A forum leader" is a distinction in itself..

Margaret Dempsey said...

Thanks very much for that comment. I assisted on the Landmark Forum for teenagers this weekend and what I saw has made me even more committed to do whatever it takes to train to make a difference to children and young people.

Friends say to me 'if you want to make a difference to young people, why don't you work as a volunteer in a childrens' hospital'. There is nothing wrong in this suggestion.

The whole point of my life is to use the technology of Landmark Education which is a technology of distinctions (where something is seen that wasn't seen before and in that seeing, everything shifts.

I liken it to that great spiritual truth that says 'there is something we don't know, the knowing of which would change everything'. It is the same with a distinction. The seeing of a distinction shifts one's whole context for life, and when the context of life shifts so does the experience of life.

Those teenagers shifted their context for life this weekend and the new and powerful possibilities they created for themselves and their lives will draw to them new experiences and their experience of life will transform.

This is why I am such a stand for this work and will be until it is my turn to be put in a box and to have dirt thrown on my face....