Walking in the man-woman shadows

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Joy Hicklin-Bailey

Joy talking with a circle after a challenge from a woman to one of the men

(to a woman) – Your rage against man and not getting what you thought you wanted is glorious -and not the truth. Rage against man’s ability to let go more easily, his ability to be sexual without falling in love, his ability to stay relaxed, even empowered in a crazy, ‘too fast for feminine energy’ world is common. You also have your male. Find him and see. To be fully human, fully you (a woman), you must heal the wounded feminine (that which all women must or could do) AND then be alive to your male too (you dont have to act on all of it). And then you will see it is all innocent.

Can you joyfully love enough to acknowledge the pain of (this man’s) dilemma? knowing that growing and loving can have huge consequences, yet knowing one’s truth is to grow and love. This isn’t ‘fishy’ or immoral behaviour, it’s just real life happening. Can you find the love for this and in doing so find the love for your own dilemmas, all of you? women, ALL the men here, can be your BEST FRIEND, learn from him, dont miss the opportunity. And allow him to learn from you too.

And women, yes believe me I know men’s behaviour can sometimes apparently hurt. But respect for men and their different journey and resources is the only way to be free. As long as you know in any conflict that the blurriness, rage, murkiness, hurt or wobbliness is yours, or at least are willing to be open to that possibility of it being yours, then it is ALL so welcome. In your willingness to own your pain you have the power to touch man’s heart and bring him to his knees in surrender to what is bigger than him.

All that can happen through your ownership woman, is, in the end, through healing, consciousness and resolution, more trust in your nature, a celebration of your choices ANYWAY, whatever they are, opening to more freedom and truth and clarity and an honouring of your tender hearts, men and women both.

I encourage you to be here without reference to anyone. If any of you hold back for others’ sakes here, you limit each other. It isn’t kind or generous, it’s a deal and it makes others small ‘I wont hurt you if you don’t hurt me’, ‘I will keep my mask on if you do’.  Just keep being yourself here, allowing others to trust their darker shadows more and their shining truth more. Self-responsibility, full ownership is what makes it easier. It is safe to be you. Just make sure you see your blame and resentment of others for exactly what it is.

All of you, the mistakes must be yours. The choices must be yours. The consequences are yours. Made awake, not half asleep ideally! With a willingness to respect that in these circles you are all friends together in agreement that you are exploring. And good news the insights and openings are yours.

Sometimes the mistakes and conflicts take human beings far further than we can ever dream, I love the mistakes.

Secret Garden is not a dating agency. But there can be so much friendship here. and yes sometimes extraordinary love relationships blossom in these circles. It is a love and freedom agency!!!! Be willing to pay the fare of taking total responsibility and your Secret Garden can take you all the way to the destination you choose. Choose well and wide awake dear beloved ones.

Keep communicating, clear and unclear, loving and unloving. The more you show up here, the more you receive from life. You open to weave an even richer tapestry of love, being.

There is nothing to get – for your personality – from each other. And being together knowing that is everything. That is love.

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What is Joyful Loving about?

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Joy Hicklin-Bailey

Joyful Loving courses are designed to deepen your experience of what true love is, and to help every relationship -with family, partners, children, colleagues, with your own self. be happier, kinder, more enjoyable, and more loving.

You become wide open to love and create new love relationships

You successfully pinpoint your own  major life-lessons in the area of love and relating.

You learn about the FUNDAMENTAL defence mechanisms that sabotage love, and how to move through them or assist another to do so.

You release old  fears, limiting patterns and wounds about love and relating -self-forgiveness, self-love and forgiveness of past partners or family members is at the heart of Joyful Loving.

You discover how to commit to being the most loving person you can be.

You find out about different phases of relating – and how to undo common blocks and mistakes that can stop love blossoming.

Joyful Loving courses are practical days, weekends and modular trainings that guide you step-by-step through the essential principles of loving relating and allow you to safely explore structures that bring you fast, experiential learning and growth.

Do you deserve to live your life with tender self-love, and with joyful sharing of intimacy with others? Yes? Then join us!

The next Joyful Loving explorations you can book a place on are

a 1 day course at Hawkwood http://www.secretgarden.eu.com/page70.html

an Easter weekend http://www.secretgarden.eu.com/summeroflove.html

and a 6 module ongoing training http://www.secretgarden.eu.com/joyfulloving.html

Joyful Loving circles gather in intimate, private, beautiful settings. Singles can explore questions, dilemmas, blocks to finding their beloved. Couples can re-awaken or enhance intimacy, ,,,,and more!

All love to you all, Joy xxx

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What if this were the wake up call?

Posted on February 25, 2012 by Joy Hicklin-Bailey

Sometimes when I am in session one to one with a client or in a couples session there can be sharings where there is an underlying assumption of ‘I shouldn’t be feeling this,’ Im wrong to feel this,’ ‘something is wrong with my life if I feel this,’ ‘I must fix this’, ‘this isn’t my best self’ etc etc.

Who says?

What if deadness where an exquisite offering from life? A delicacy as beautiful as a rose?

What if a tense neck or cutting off emotions is simply an invitation to the miracle?

Of being this here now. Of having the luxury of experiencing aliveness as this shade, as this note, as this sensation…here, now.

What if hatred or jealousy (darling ….name……., how you are moving and healing!) is the sacred; feeling not ‘in love’ is Grace visiting. is an invitation into the silence, the ineffable love that Is?

What if betrayal was love in action? (just to tease some of you! Don’t panic Captain Mainwaring!)

What if even the feeling trapped in the conditioned self, trapped in the mind, was for now enough, for now a MIRACLE? a miracle wake up call to let go so deeply, to surrender so fully, that all there is, is silence and love unfolding?

Love yourself and there might just come the possibility of loving another, in the moment because love is always now and now.

And of course it is also true that consciousness and the self-responsibility necessary for the surrender, grows, ironically in spite of the learned resistance to the dark or dead.

There is nowhere to go. Nothing to become (yes practice is a total lie). In this all is revealed. It is too simple. Too exquisite. Too awesome for the mind. So so wondrous it cannot be told.

So ordinary one who lives it is totally misunderstood most of the time.

So totally easy to remember and blindingly obvious that it has to keep being repeated. You are the one you seek, whatever your colour of being.

What to do but keep good company and re-member. At least some of the time.

 

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Can a personality love?

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Joy Hicklin-Bailey

Joy writes to a participant about the fear of love -

In a Joyful Loving circle, where we are exploring in an area (sex, relationship, love) where our culture is most wounded, most judgemental and mixed up, most permissive (in the incorrect use of the word), misinformed, greedy and licentious, it is important to know and accept that true freedom (the opposite of licentiousness) is dangerous yet wholly innocent and life-enhancing and make allowances and clear, careful boundaries for this, so that all aspects of being are looked after in this circle, received and ultimately released – the traumatised child, the religious brainwash, the unintegrated adolescent, the harsh, ‘right’ judge, the tender heart etc etc.

So that awakening, healing and re-membering happens organically and as ‘safely’ and carefully as we can hope for, with respect for the stories and beings outside of our circle and respect for the lives you choose to lead outside of it. Only you all, separately, in your own carefully considered choices, moment by moment, can do this. Knowing of course that ‘you’ don’t exist.  Those true choices are respected and supported ALWAYS here.

Honour your choices and as healing happens, you will open to the love that is, anyway, alone or with a loved one.

When ‘you’ is around, love isn’t possible.  The surrender of the known and the controllable that love requires is feared. this is true in love relationships, in parenting, in caring for animals or land, in circles of transformation, in business-any arena where we drop the personal pretences and give ourselves to something bigger than the personal. You are all learning to love. Learning to let in the wholly terrifying nature of love. Where you see that another’s choices made in consciousness are wholly innocent and have to drop your desire to label and judge. In love you see that your monsters are harmless and energising rocket fuel for your knowing of life’s bitter yet oh so sweet and freeing truths. In love you see that any worldly achievement is ashes. Loving being betrayal is a gift you choose to give yourself. Loving being, you give up wanting what you thought was most desired.

Love is the stuff of which life is made. Yet so often love is missed or avoided because it is a threat to the status quo, to the conditioned self, the personality.

A personality (however socially skilled or conditioned to be ‘good’ or ‘giving’) cannot love. A personality never experiences intimacy. Personalities judge -Does life judge? Personalities do deals -Does life do deals? Personalities blame and shame – Does life ever blame? Personalities hold back to keep safe – Does life hold back? Personalities accommodate to keep safe – Does life accommodate? A personality can make deals that ‘work’ to some extent. But those deals don’t reach into -in fact they veil and hide – the core, the vast empty beingness – where, there is no moral code, simply aliveness, nature. There our animal, woman, man lives present and alive and awake. Your nature is innocent. Nothing can hurt, all is well. Nothing is known. Even boundaries and agreements are irrelevant (though they might be still maintained) in that spaciousness. This is love, this is compassion. It is raw and it is truthful and it is uncompromising. It is not for the faint hearted. It is dangerous. It is life. It is death. It is sex. It is love. It is destructive. It is creative. It is where nothing is needed, nothing needs to be done or had or looked for, no one is considered.

So it is whole and innocent.

And it may contain total activity, actions, business, personality, feeling….

 

 

 

All love to you all, Joy xxx

The next Joyful Loving explorations you can book a place on are

a 1 day course at Hawkwood http://www.secretgarden.eu.com/page70.html

an Easter weekend http://www.secretgarden.eu.com/summeroflove.html

and a 6 module ongoing training http://www.secretgarden.eu.com/joyfulloving.html

 

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right or wrong

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Joy Hicklin-Bailey

Let us meet beyond any thoughts of what is right or wrong, feeling what is felt, knowing the awe-ful aloneness in it, we choose to connect, to discover what is here, to celebrate being together.

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Wishing you all a heart and soul filled Christmas season and 2012

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Joy Hicklin-Bailey

Dear participants and those who may participate in Secret Garden in future

I write in deep gratitude for the love and friendship shared between us and offered to those I write to whom I haven’t yet met. Thank you all for valuing what cannot be measured. It is such a testament to your care and love, courage and honesty that so much healing, friendship, breakthrough and celebration happens in this Secret Garden. A community that isn’t held together by belief systems or rules or expectations, just by shared valuing of that which cannot be spoken, the nothing that is everything. And shared respect and care of and sensitivity to the fragile extraordinariness of being these humans we are.

At this Christmas time, if we open to it, we can feel, if we listen, the world slowing, even stopping very soon. We can feel soul in the whole western world’s population. For once in the year, our culture en masse is invited into gratitude for home, family, friends – and also invited into celebration of spirit. The form doesn’t matter. The belief systems dont matter. The trappings of material madness and the trivia certainly dont matter.

Deep down at this time, and despite every one of those human challenges – genocide, rape, war, credit crunch, divorce, illness, loss, conflict – that tragically haunt so many, so much of the time, and yet are perhaps increasing collective awareness of reality creation, most are engaged at Christmas, at some level, in shared celebration of the mystery of what it is to be alive, what it is to open to something bigger than personal preference. The love at the silent heart of creation.

It’s beautiful to gather, whether with family and or friends or alone in a church congregation where noone knows us….to gather and mark and acknowledge the power we have EVERY single day to step back and

………listen, with every sense we are blessed with, to life and its mysterious prompting towards what is bigger than the personality. A sacred mystery, the biggest gift.

In whatever Christmas you choose to play at, find a little space to just listen with every ounce of being. Wake up. Wake up into all that you really are.

Gratitude and celebration can open into being. Its a wonderful’present’. And if you just aren’t in touch at all with even that possibility, love who you are now!

There is nowhere to go, nothing to achieve, nothing to become in this endless play of nothing being everything. This is it! Now and now, this heaven calls.

Just being, this silence and stillness, this Christmas joy.

I wish you some of the sweet, silent space of Christmas in your heart and being.

Aloha, with every breath there is love, here, now.

All love

Joy Hicklin-Bailey


 

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A response to ….Am I self-indulgent to want to go on a retreat again?

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Joy Hicklin-Bailey

There are times in life when it is right, natural, appropriate and wonderful for you to focus almost primarily on spiritual ‘growth’ and transformation into the nothing and everything of being. Once you taste awakening of course you love to be in spaces and with those who love awakeness too! (tether your worldly camel too of course in whatever way you need)

There are ‘windows’ over the course of a life (a life which belongs to no one) when everything calls out for this work and for a sense of comradeship and community along what is an arduous and sometimes painful ‘journey’ (to nowhere) and when it is time to be dedicated and focused, held by others’ friendship and given reflection as you experience, break through, share, heal and celebrate the unique things we need to at a soul level.

There is no need to apologise for or keep in check this pull to beingness! If you need a reason beyond being, then think of the problems created on your planet because most human beings don’t value beingness but instead place their focus on what they can ‘get’ from ‘’out there’. Our mainstream culture does not support love, truth and presence. It is actively encouraging you to lose the truth of being, to reach out ‘there’ to ‘get something’. This sabotages relationships, family happiness, our wildernesses…….

Give yourself what you value. Know your tribe. Surrender to what is good, innocent, intelligent.

You might even go so far as to say (I would) that the whole way throughout life there is nothing of more value, beauty and joy and nothing more likely to be for you an excellent investment of time, money and energy, that always delivers huge returns, than this work. That is because inner reflects outer and in your wholeness you are so vast and such a creative force! So self –realisation is very practical!

If your practical circumstances and life priorities allow, go for it and allow yourself as often as you can the spaces that support you to create opening, vulnerable honesty, the inner realm, deep and true connection with others, total uncompromised aliveness, full self-responsibility and most of all the realization of that which cannot be measured.

aloha, Joy xxx

Joy is running a Huna Retreat from 30 Nov to 4 Dec 2011. Click here for details.

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Dare you trust the creativity and infinite possibility of the simple?

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Joy Hicklin-Bailey

How would it be to ask yourself ‘what can I do to make my day or week or year simpler?’ How can I rearrange my current life experience so that it brings me more joy and less stress? Have the courage to trust simplicity and let it enrich the joy in your life.

Hawaiian Huna healing and esoteric truth is totally aligned with nature. Being in harmony with natural  rhythms is  a real challenge in your fast moving world.  Simple presence can prove to be difficult to experience when our lives become overwhelming or chaotic, where events are not fully digested.

Nature is a beautiful mirror, invites us to let go, heal, fall into being. So, squelch through autumn mud, sit by a river….   kālelemuku (relax, chill). and join us Nov 30-Dec 4 for a residential retreat, an initiation into oneness, an opportunity, without distraction and with the beautiful support of spiritual community , to wake up out of the subtle trances of who you think you are, into being. From that boundary-less infinite consciousness, extraordinary creativity and possibilities emerge and can be empowered consciously.

At a Huna retreat you are far away – emotionally and physically – from many daily decisions and demands that are considered part of your ‘modern life’.

Where cooking and cleaning are done for you, where you can completely disconnect from the speed and urgency of computers and mobiles if you so choose, life is vastly more simple.

I love to witness the transformation that occurs for participants in that simplicity,

where there is space and happiness arises for no reason.

How would it be to ask yourself ‘what can I do to make my day or week or year simpler?’ How can I rearrange my current life experience so that it brings me more joy and less stress? Have the courage to trust simplicity and let it enrich the joy in your life.

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Do you truly have Self – Love?

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Joy Hicklin-Bailey

This apparent world which is both real and unreal, both something and nothing, is simply love, aloha, unfolding.

So to ‘love oneself’ and to always celebrate the precious life you are, is the first massive step towards being.

There is no one, there is no separation, all there is is this, here now which is beyond time and place (the words cannot speak it).

You all love this truth, that is why you are drawn to this secret garden.

The truth becomes corrupted by even well meaning parents or educators or politicians and through language, because in various ways you are told and might take in (it would be extremely hard not to) that love is conditional and has to be earned.

This isn’t true.

The FIRST most important step in Huna (it means the hidden knowledge that brings enlightenment) or Hawaiian healing is self-love. Without this you are not aligned with life.

To say ‘I love myself’ is not the deepest truth but it is a MASSIVE transformation. To say I love the dark, the light, the frailty, the physical limits, the raw wildness, etc etc!!! This is so huge and so fundamental. And who feels better to be around? Someone who knows their dark and is tenderly ok with it, or someone who either denies it or fights it or has no choice but to express it?

It is deep soul work down the aeons, through the galaxies of consciousness. For most it is life’s work if they DARE!!!

Then there is so much more! Falling off the cliff into no-thing……

But to love oneself really means to discover that all there is is love. To chip away chip chip chip at the pretence of being anyone or having problems. This requires great compassion from friends, the spiritual community you create for yourself, in the circles, and great authenticity and self-honesty. It is much safer to be ‘together’ ‘sorted’ and to know who one is, even though it is all made up!

You ask about whether to energise the goal of being with a man…..Self-love is so much more essential in being happy than the love of man (or woman)

You can choose to energise a goal of being with a man. But there are some good questions to ask oneself about that first. Simply energising with out clearing first is a good way to manifest all your limitations in the mirror of a partner –but that is exquisitely perfect learning of course. (first noa then noho) What a  beautiful way to learn that all there is, is love! Or you can keep peeling away the layers of resistance to being with a beloved and just see if life brings someone.

Either way is fine. Either way the doorway to truly Joyful Loving begins with using the first key of self –love.

with great aloha

 

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Who are you?

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Joy Hicklin-Bailey

‘You’ –and your challenges – are vast, boundless, empty fullness, unconditional love unfolding. What is, is perfection. Including suffering and challenge and delight. When oneness is seen, the ordinary is a miracle. The most mundane thing we can ever do is truly extraordinary.

Love is what you are. You are light. You are life. You are intelligence. This radiant and absolute joy is immediate and quietly underpins and embraces all pain and separate self. On top of this joy is ‘you’ in existence, the world, all your circumstances, challenges, mistakes, self-doubts and achievements. The world cannot give us freedom. Your roles are not what you are, your self-judgement is not what you are. This is an unavoidably human journey and all the choices are ours. Life accepts them  unconditionally whether you do or not!

For those who wish it, here at Secret Garden is the art of living happily, whatever one’s apparent personal circumstances.  This work is natural and profoundly humane. As a by product, the rewards are greater freedom, ease, effectiveness, joy and happiness in relationship, work, life. However the message is that there is nowhere to go, nothing to get, nothing to become. And to love what is, love yourself like your own best lover. Love what you feel right now. Let what is, be. Rest in the silence beyond stories and time and discover that you are endless joy without reason.

Give up the fight with yourself, with your responses, with your nature. Working on yourself doesn’t work!

Every experience, every feeling, every circumstance, is an invitation  to let go, and be the love, the aliveness now. This realisation is always new. Dogma and belief are nothing to do with this. You are not required to give anything up, though things may fall away.

For 19 years I have been sharing with others the joy of being, beyond the separate sense of self, and beyond the mind’s ideas of identification with world and cause and effect, in residential retreats, day gatherings, evening meetings, and, most richly, in ongoing groups. Join us and discover the truth of being or deepen that Self-realisation.

Let the circles give you space to explore how to live a spiritually awake life that is also an embodied happy, authentic, earthly, natural one. Enjoy! There is a Wild Wolf Woman day on Sept 23 and that is followed by Be An Ordinary Mystic Sept 24 and 25.

I would be delighted to meet and work with you if you are new to these explorations, and to see you again soon if you are an old friend. It’s my privilege and profound pleasure to walk with those who love and value beingness.

In endless gratitude to all my teachers and guides and to all those friends who bring their own particular beauty to our circles and with all love to you.

 

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