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After latihan I sat and chatted with people for a bit. Rashid Carre came up to me and said he’d viewed my website and to come visit the next day. Also after Sunday latihan, people gather at a Warung close by, which is run by my Eco village woman, Murtianna. She is a gorgeous, sunny, sweet Indonesian lady who looks maybe 28 but is 46! I couldn’t believe it! But she has two teenage daughters so I have to, I guess.
Lunched with Hermia, her son Somali and his wife, two other volunteers, Halimah and Michael and Halim and Maya. Then went to rest, which turned into a process. I felt the masculine aggressor within and the feminine victim, but gently. But then there was a kind of physical shift in the base of my spine and I felt something release. That's all, except that Bapak said to me, “The story is over. It’s not a personal story any more, it’s a universal story”. That means if someone needs to hear something, then a part of my story may come up, in suitable form. I’ve been conscious that my story is finished - as if I’ve got to the core of the issues that the story has been showing me - and I pray that all that needs healing and sorting, gets done here. Again, Bapak said that by healing myself I heal the world, but, again, I do not get that. How? But I don’t get any clarity on the how of it. Every time Bapak is around I feel he is really here with me; it also feels so normal and natural and comfortable. Like greeting a friend. I hardly question the fact that it is all in spirit as it has a sense of reality about it that I cannot explain. Monday 19/3/12 Last night I had a dream in which I went to my father’s house. I remember that before we got to the house there was an area outside the house filled with empty boxes, just left there, higglety pigglety: from moving in? Or for moving out? I don’t know. I was with someone. We somehow started a fire. I felt we had to put it out as it was dangerous. And then I was in the house. There was some talk about the landlord, but I forget what. My father seemed happy but a bit doddery or demented. He was living with two others, a man and a women, both much younger than him. He would have been in his late 70’s/80. They were all moving out. The house was filthy, like it had never been cleaned or tidied or cared for. I thought it was nice that the two younger people had let my father share the house with them, but none of them had lifted a finger to keep the place clean and in good condition. In fact, it appeared that I was left with what was a mammoth task, and I began to hoover the grimy, filthy carpet. But their hoover was in bad shape. It too hadn’t been cleaned and the nozzle to clean with was the wrong kind, it was a small round one, bunged up with old dirt. So I had to clean the hoover and change the top to the large flat kind. Then it began to clean. The carpet under the filth was a rusty red colour. It looked like good quality wool. While I was doing this I realised that Emiria was in the house. At first I thought she was there to help me clean, but I soon realised that she was cluttering up the house some more with her stuff. By the end of the dream I’d managed to clean only a part of one of the rooms… and there were many, many rooms to do. The early morning school assembly was cool. Lovely to see the kids perform their stuff. The quality of their work is amazing, actually. Very intelligent children and versed in all the different subjects they study. All heir music, art, theatre, English and other studies seem to be of high quality. Tuesday 20/3/12 Last night as I lay in bed, I was blessed with another spiritual experience when a smallish ball of light entered me and I was taken to my spiritual home. I felt at the same time cleared of my past, just as, the day before, I’d felt Bapak tell me it was finished. The two realities of spirit and here/matter combined and I felt I was in both realities at the same time. I was told, this is how I can live now. In the spirit realm I was greeted with immense love and congratulations – again, there was this feeling from spirit of gratitude to me for work done whilst, for my part, I feel only huge gratitude for this immense gift. It felt like they were saying I’d come through immense tasks in this life. The dream I’d had was explained to me. My father’s house, so dirty, was the body I had taken on (laden as it is with ancestral flaws) and I had managed to clean some of it, although not much according to the dream. But last night I was set free of that house. I was given my name again – Arifa - and I was shown that I am one of the mothers; which means the mothering energy in the world. I then felt my baby, who didn’t want to be born into such misery. I was told that I was born to take on a lot of humanity’s woes, and by clearing it in myself I was also clearing it in the world (though each time I hear this I don’t feel I understand how, at all, especially when I look around me and see that the world appears the same and full of incredible pain, far more than I have ever experienced.) It felt like last night was like an end, or ‘full stop’ to a large part of myself as I’ve known me as well as the beginning - but of what? So this will unfold, I guess. I do not feel capable of understanding yet. But I have begun, or embraced, the feminine (utilising my right brain now) and have maybe left the masculine, symbolised by the leaving of my father’s house. I guess I was trying to be a woman but not understanding the feminine. All I can do is be as open and willing as possible - to accept and grow into the new. In my dealings with people here I find I am understanding them better. It’s the feminine in play. I can see the difference, and it’s really interesting to observe. Before, when someone said or did something different to my experience, I wouldn’t understand and often I would react and take things personally, getting hurt or feeling angry or stuff. But now I am able to work things out in myself; something happens now and I begin to talk myself through it, learning to understand what it feels like, or means - wow! Now I understand that my ‘over-sensitivity and reactive nature’ was! Lack of understanding, a lack of processing from my right brain. I still have far to go. Thursday 22/3/12 It’s evening. Had a latihan. These latihans are so strong and deep. Tonight I was shown how I am drawn to attach to others, not to Source, i.e., to remain in my own flowing spiritual expression. I didn’t realise how much I seem to attach to others, or need their approval, etc. Being connected to my own flowing latihan/energy and following ‘God’ or the Source - not sure how to call what I am feeling - God seems not right somehow. Anyhow I was shown how to connect my I - that straight up and down flow that is through me - with the Great Source rather than whoosh my energy all over the place, either at others or soaking in stuff from others. I guess you could call it being self contained. It feels like there’s a pillar of light in which I reside, but I dissipate it by wanting to connect to others for my nurture (the old way I worked, looking all over the place to satisfy my needs). It’s all there, within this flowing energy, which gives me all I need, and is true connection. I’d seen Ibu Rahayu in Pamalang when we went there for latihan before I went to Bapak’s grave. Ibu was looking older and frailer, but radiant. When I saw her, I felt a burst of light and joy. This was the first time I had seen her and not felt dark and disturbed, so I was rather thrilled and grateful. But here in Kalimantan it’s like the family are here even when they are not. Friday 23/3/12 I walked home after doing latihan with a sister who had had a fall. I felt tired and lay down, started to feel Spirit very strongly. I was asked to receive how I experienced God when I was born, just one week old. I did and felt encased in spirit: complete and one with Spirit. Then when I was two weeks old, specifically at night, the first night I was home from hospital and left alone all night. I felt hungry and abandoned, overwhelmed by loss of it all - mother, Spirit. Then I was asked how I experienced God when one year old. I felt deserted and depressed. No connection. Then at the age of three when I was with my South African Nanny; and I was feeling that my nanny was God, in the sense that I attached the good feelings of love and Spirit to her. Then I was asked how I experienced God after the trauma of losing my Nanny, and the feeling was of madness, grief and despair. Then I was asked to receive, where was God in me at all those stages, and I felt God there the whole time, whether or not I was able to access the feeling. Then I was shown how it was with Grandpa. I felt shame, anger and confusion, because Grandpa was showing me love and giving me attention and I wanted it, but not like that! Then I was shown how God helped me through those times by taking me out of my body when it got too much. I was also told that I was guided in my inner at the time and told it was what I had to go through. Then I was given a huge healing of my childhood and baby. I felt it all being cleansed from my being. Then I was asked to check how was my baby now at all those stages we had gone through, and each time I felt whole and connected to God. It was incredible. Like, in computer terms, I was rebooted, without stain and connected to God. I feel unbelievably blessed by this gift. It is without a doubt the biggest gift ever. And so it goes: I’m so busy on the one hand, yet constantly finding myself laying on my bed going through some of the deepest purifications I’ve ever experienced. The energy here is so thick with spiritual energy that it is possible to move mountains. My life is being reshaped, put right, as Bapak said at the grave. I am understanding how upside down I’ve been. And what he means. This is what ‘heaven on earth’ feels like. I’m in heaven, hell and earth here. That God accompanies me to my hell and sorts it all out has me grateful beyond words. I feel Bapak near me all the time - the real Bapak, in Spirit, not the ‘Bapak says’ Bapak that pisses me off (why should I be pissed off about that? Perhaps because it takes us away from the real Bapak who can accompany us in our inner feeling? “Ya, ya,” says Bapak. “You worry for Bapak, but you don’t need to. Bapak can take care of himself.” Aaah, ofcourse! I nod my head and worry less; perhaps I won’t get pissed off now, on Bapak’s behalf!) Anyhow the spirit Bapak guides me lovingly; he is like my loving guide through to my true nature. I feel so much faith and trust in God and this process which is beyond my wildest imaginings of a best case scenario healing. So much has shifted. So much that is not me is leaving. I am dropping off who I am not, and what disconnected me. A true Arifa is emerging. Saturday 24/3/12 I wake up knowing I am loved through all eternity by God… but I do a little check. How does my baby/child perceive God. It’s true! I feel love. All I feel is love. What I forgot to say in yesterday’s writing, was that after ‘Mammy,’ my black nanny, I presumed God only loved the good and hated the bad. She was religious and had taught me that ‘God loves good little girls and not bad ones’ - something like that. Her leaving had been traumatic and involved me finding her with her husband. This wasn’t allowed and he took her away, but not before being very angry with me, so I was bad. Yesterday what I felt and know is that God is love. To be connected with God is to be connected with love, and everything that is connected is connected to love. Simple as ‘the rain that falleth on the just and the unjust’ God is love. God is like the rain, all through us. We are the judges of what we consider worthy or unworthy… we decide what we think is worthy of ‘God’ and unworthy. God is the rain. It is. Love, pure and simple. So it was me that disconnected with that love. Trauma, shock, pain, shame, guilt, erroneous beliefs, etc. The pillar I had been feeling and receiving about recently… that comes up from below my feet, through me up out of my head to beyond me: that is the “I”. That is what I am now asked (and wish) to live in. I was told that this is like the central pillar in the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life., to read about it when I get home. It’s what Bapak talks about when he says to surrender to the One Almighty God. It is like a shaft of light that flows through upwards and downwards like the inner breath of the being. Later I rested and did some more spiritual work. I’ve been feeling a pain around my lower ribs behind the left lung. I asked what needed healing there. The feeling of my attachment to him came strongly (still!). What I understood was that my worth as a woman was attached to him, caring for him, I guess. I let my attachment to him go, completely. I received that my worth is in myself/God. It felt so much more self-contained, not beholden to circumstances, and I realised it was the first time I can remember experiencing a feeling of real self-worth that wasn’t attached to action or a person outside of me. Then I felt my thyroid - very strong. A lot of fear and anger and mixed emotions of a child, not understanding. It was also shown to me that it was about faith and the lack of it. “How can God let me suffer like I have?” was the question and the child’s conclusion, “Because I’m bad.” I was told to go to my soul and let my soul explain to my child what the suffering had been about. My soul began talking. I felt an inordinate amount of love from my soul towards my child. I felt my soul as a masculine energy at this point. He told my child that he had made mistakes in former lives and with the help of this body and these circumstances, was righting them. It had been done. My soul was so proud of this child for her strength and endurance, for surviving and for being so loving and beautiful a being. Together, we saw how much faith it had taken! That we, indeed, had had faith. And my child was beaming in pride in herself. She was saying over and over, ‘I’m good.’ Wednesday 28/3/12 Emily is leaving unexpectedly, and for a while I considered staying on before eventually deciding against it. Interestingly in the latihan yesterday I had felt that this process had been for my mind, which can be very controlling (rather mindy in fact!) I had felt where my mind’s need to control came from; the child feeling out of control and insecure in the world. So I let go and felt a lot of compassion for my child as it left. I felt a sense of letting my mind surrender. Let it be open and wide and empty - to receive. In effect allow myself to not know, be in the unknown, trusting I will be guided. I also felt my mind’s desire to rule. I was aware of a strong male energy that felt Islamic, which then got lighter. After that left I began to walk in a completely new way. It started as a swaying of my hips from side to side which seemed to be unblocking the tension I hold in my hips. Then I began to walk slowly, swaying from side to side, in such a feminine way. Slowly and deliberately sashaying and swaying my way around the room. I could feel the tension release all around my lower spine, around the waist and my hips. My legs felt lighter. I didn’t |
realise how stiffly and straight and unbending my walk was - rather masculine? It seemed that my aches and pains around the hips and legs were melting away with the walk.
Thursday 29/3/12 I realise today that I am glad I am going home. Even as I am utterly grateful for this journey; especially the inner one, I feel happy and relieved that I will not be staying much longer. I’m kind of wondering how this deep healing time will manifest in my future life. Will it change my world around, will I be different and in what ways? Will it even be noticeable? Another amazing latihan. I felt my lower back was broken from burdens of guilt and felt it leave, how loose it felt after and how much lighter I felt. Friday 30/3/12 It’s night. I woke up very dizzy this morning. Perhaps dehydrated as it was hot all night; the rains didn’t happen to cool the night. Drank copious amounts of water all day and, eventually, the feeling faded and I felt normal. More spiritual work came: I was lying down. Since my leg had been hurting recently I asked how parts of my body functioned and how should they: the actual words I use are: how does … worship God…then I ask: how best can … worship.) Right Hip: Self judgement and condemnation. (No surprise) It felt like I had made mistakes and had to pay for them for ever. It was like God was asking me, gently: Did I make the mistakes over and over or did I learn? I answered that I did learn and sometimes I made them over and over. The response was: So why aren’t you proud of yourself for making the effort to improve, time and time again? I didn’t know. I realised that I had got stuck in hating myself for my mistakes and not balancing it with loving myself for my achievements. Aha! Self-esteem! I then felt bathed in love and self respect and how it felt to value myself. Left Hip: I felt so sad that my children had grown up. I yearned and grieved for the past and my little babies. I cried and let go. Right and Left legs and Buttocks: cleared some heaviness from them. Sex organs: Did a big healing of Ancestral heaviness and wrong doing. Also heavy with Ancestral grief. Womb & Reproductive Organs: That was huge. So much grief held there at not being a mother anymore, and I didn’t realise it until I did the left hip. I cried and cried and just let the grief out. It was such a powerful thing to do. I would like to continue doing it on other parts of my body. Note to myself to continue, either here or when I get back. Saturday 31/3/12 How do I marry the spiritual experience of such depth, breadth and fineness and the compound, with its good, bad and indifferent. I guess I need to ask spirit: This is what I wrote from spirit: We said for you to really look at and behind people’s masks. This is what you are doing. Very few people are ‘real,” i.e., connecting in loving ways to themselves and to others. So they make comfortable places in which to hide and live, and so do not grow. If you can bear to see the hard ones for you, you will grow more. For, again, the hard ones trigger things for you, like cliques. You did that too with your children. A safe place to be. It’s still hard for you to embrace rejection – because of early childhood/baby abandonment. It makes you yearn for inclusion in every situation/area in which you find yourself. You still need to forgive and love yourself more so you don’t feel separate in yourself when faced with outside rejection. (It’s true… I want to be a part of everything) Inside is growing up well, but not yet firmly connected to self-love and self-acceptance. When that happens you will be at peace anywhere, any circumstance and with any rejection outside. It just won’t affect you. Everyone and everything is there to teach you who you are, and who you are not. It is up to you to take each gift and grow more loving inside. Then you will love, accept and have compassion both inside and out. The people you don’t like struggle, like you, to face their demons, and hide from them too, like you. Different proportions. Different stories. Same essential ingredients. Some are fast asleep. Some half-asleep. Some are waking up. Very few are awake. You are waking up. Be glad of that. (Thank you – I don’t feel so cross) When you are cross it’s because you are not feeding yourself from God/inner, but trying to feed from others. This is such an important lesson for you to learn. (Oh… I remember doing work on that! Oops! I really need to be aware of that and work at it) Write a book about motherless children. All the wisdom and understanding will teach you as you write. This is what you do when you get home. Make it really about coming home to Mother God, which is lost in society. To help all the traumatised children of the world. Do it with spirit; then it will work. These notes are a part of it. You are one of the Mothers of the world. Time to feed your children. Make it courageous. Make it real. Make it from the right place. People will come to help you -not the writing, but you - to grow. The right people. Souls. It’s time to branch out. We will show you the way. Have faith and follow. Sunday 1/4/12 Another incredible latihan. I shall miss them!!!! I can only pray to still have such incredible latihans whereever I am. Each one is like the University of Latihans. 6 p.m: I went to rest. I closed my eyes and ‘saw’ three paths in front of me. The left side path was the path of Art. The right side path was the path of the Healer. And the middle path was the path of Surrender to God/higher force. I realised I was to choose a path. I chose the middle path; of surrender. I really felt this was the only path I could truly follow. I was shown that if I’d chosen the left path I would have chosen my desires in this world. With the right path it was my desire to Be God. Then I was shown how my father had moulded me and how, because I wanted to be loved, I took on what he had told me I was. Then I felt it lifted from me and I felt more in myself and in spirit. Then I was shown my sister. I was shown a dark bird on top of her head. I was shown how I had taken on that dark bird as my own; again because I wanted to be loved by her (and she’d rejected me) so I had tried to be like her. I was unable to get love and connection from my mother, so I’d tried with my father and sister. That too was lifted from me and I felt a real shift. A shaft of light shining through my head and through me. Then my maternal grandmother came, then her husband, my grandfather. I was shown how they were traumatised by their lives and had traumatised in turn; passing it on to their children and, through my mother, to my sister and me. That too was lifted, and I prayed that all that I too had passed on would also be lifted from my children. Interestingly, I didn’t see or feel my mother. Perhaps this comes later? My feeling is that it’s the hard one! As it all lifted I felt a sense of being me, becoming me, free from the influence of my ancestors and sister. But I also got the feeling that I don’t really know who I am. A feeling of strong spirit flowed through all my body, connecting me deeply to the earth, through my feet, and the sky, through my head. I felt like a pillar of light. After that ebbed, I was told to be very quiet and rest and sleep and allow the huge healing to shift my body into its new beingness. I think I slept but not deeply. I remember a conversation I had with Harris earlier. He said a few interesting things. He was talking about what Bapak had said: One: That when you are perceived as bad, for instance ((or good, or rich or famous) that is what you become, and that is all the perceiver sees. I found that really interesting and elucidating. Two: That Bapak had said that the reason Bapak had been able to take the latihan and grow was because he surrendered so much to God. Three: I think he said Bapak had said this, but I’m not sure: the way to Heaven is through Hell. Again, I like this one too. I can relate. It reminds me of a Lennon quote: The deeper you go, the higher you fly. Evening: I took a trip in spirit. When Bapak talked much earlier about taking a trip to the Source in the three weeks he meant here, whereas I was expecting to go to the seven heavens or something. But I think this is what he was talking about. I haven’t felt the personality of Bapak for a while; perhaps it was just a welcoming ploy earlier, or perhaps I don’t need to feel a personality behind the spirit or I just needed to know it was Bapak at the beginning. I was taken through the baby and back to before I was born - like the opposite of birthing. I found myself in a kind of bubble/chamber. I was my soul/spirit making my decisions about being born in the vehicle of Vivien (my birth name). I was feeling how it felt. Spirit or spirits were talking with me about the journey ahead. Here it gets fudgy, but I do remember understanding that my life was about Surrender: That my body was so good for what I needed and that my soul loved me (body/this personality/me) so much, so deeply and had learnt a lot with me. Then, at some point I was asked to be with my soul, to know it in truth. I felt so ashamed of being full of faults and frailties. It was at that instant I realised that I had rejected connection with my soul out of shame. That my soul loved me in every way possible. I also learnt that it was two-way. The lessons the soul was learning in this incarnation was just as hard as the lessons I, this unique, one-off person, Arifa, was learning. My fears felt quietened and the strange quality of being both soul and immortal and person and mortal is quite a huge development in understanding for me. The pain in my lower back - which I fear is cancer - came up. It seems it is an old wound from another life with Grandpa, who was my friend then, but who betrayed me and stabbed me in my back in that spot. I forgave him and asked forgiveness. Tuesday 3/4/12 More and more I wonder at the blessing and curse of Subud. It is both… such a danger if not used right… like fire. Such a blessing if you take it. Then I remembered something else Harris had said. He said he saw blobby shapes in latihan, on the floor…he explained; as Subud people lose their drive and become blobs themselves. Something like that. Aldous Huxley was opened then left. He said that he felt it was good for three years and then it turned against one. That, perhaps, was his experience. I feel that I have only survived my time in Subud by not following ‘the Subud way’ and by very clearly believing I should surrender to God, not Subud, as well as having the courage to question the morals and judgements so rife in Subud. But why, after leaving for three years, did I return and why do I stay. Not for the belief structure. I have a great respect for the latihan… yet I do find myself doing what I call spirit work alone and in a far deeper manner than just with latihan alone. It’s how it has developed in me over the years and, with courage and faith, I have followed. So I don’t see myself as a Subud member as such, although I still go to Subud. I love my Subud family (what’s the saying: I can love some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time). My family and my Subud family are the people close to me who by virtue of that bring me my daily lessons in living and loving. When I can really love ‘all of the people, all of the time’ I imagine I shall be free. But, until then, I need my family to show me what my strengths and weaknesses look like. It could be a church, or a society - all are valid. It’s Subud. The latihan is different. It’s connection. I am so grateful for it. But do I believe it is the only way, or even the best way. No. It happens to be a part of my way. Wednesday 4/4/12 Thank goodness Murtianna woke me at 4 a.m. I’d set my phone to go off, but hadn’t realised the clocks went back an hour on the Sunday. Being incapable of resetting my phone to Indonesian time, I had just been deducting four hours every time I looked. We waited in the dark for the taxi… which was late. I panicked a bit. Murtianna phoned the guards to see what was happening. The car arrived 15 minutes late. I got to the airport with time to spare and was soon up in the air looking down at the river that snaked through central Kalimantan. Still flying over Kalimantan I experienced a vision. I had just closed my eyes for a bit and I saw women behind veils, they grew older in front of my ‘eyes’ and their veils were a part of their faces, kind of etched into them. I felt sad that so many women’s voices have been silenced (like my brain was) in a world that is only sitting in the masculine aspect. Ideally the ‘God and Goddess’ need to become equal partners. In effect, we all worship the male aspect of God. In my book Eve and Lucifer, he said, that in his home God was a trinity: father, mother & child. I guess that is what I consider to be the manifestation of ‘God’ - not just the masculine. I have used the word God a lot, but this is because I don’t know a better word. I wish I did as I don’t actually like using that word. It’s perhaps a laziness that I do. Anyhow, I was musing that all the prophets of yore were men, when the inner voice said ‘There were female prophets too.” People don’t see them as such, because the female qualities aren’t revered like the masculine. But what about Mother Theresa, Joan of Arc, Mother Mary, Mary Magdelene . . . And with that I fly out of Kalimantan. |