Good job I don’t write for a living;  the muse has well and truly deserted me of late, and this empty sheet of paper has looked increasingly scary by the day….three previous attempts to regale, inspire and ideally amuse, have left me feeling a more than a little irked by my lack of inspiration this month.

Must be the time of year… a bit of a seasonal low, perhaps?

Which is all a bit laughable considering that my first career choice in the days of yore was journalism…. though, admittedly, what the eighteen-year-old L.J. really wanted wasn’t so much a creative outlet but a lifestyle;  you may have gathered that I was once a bit of a wild child, all long purple nails, a penchant for ear-splittingly loud music, liver-annihilating cocktails, and those coquettishly coloured cocktail cigarettes with gold tips…ah, those were the days!… but faced with increasing pressure to evolve some sort of a ‘grand plan’, I seized upon my vague ability to string a sentence or two together, and decided I quite fancied myself as a rock journalist, an aspiration I rather naively shared with my school’s taciturn career teacher one afternoon shortly before my A-level mocks.

And mock was indeed the word….though it was one of those silent, sarcastic roastings, achieved with a mere sniff and an icy glare over the top of her glasses.  I defiantly met her gaze, but she’d squared up to such recalcitrant prima donnas before, and wasted no time in swooping in for the kill.  “Well then, my dear, I suggest you learn shorthand and typing.  We’ll enrol you for secretarial college.”  Job done. 

And so it came to pass that my illustrious, post A-level career began in a typing pool.  It was, of course, only intended to be a stepping stone onto bigger, better and more exciting things, but dreams are funny things, and somewhere in between the endlessly exhausting commute and reliance upon an increasingly fat wage packet which spawned a designer wardrobe and a certain Mr. Tevor Sorbie as my hairdresser, I succumbed to the compromise of a monotonously grey 9 to 5, and NME was thus spared one more groupie who thought she could write. 

It’s probably true to say I wasn’t exactly the best secretary in the world.  As well as a stormy encounter with my typing teacher over her insistence that my beautiful nails had to be chopped off, in those dark days before any laws about sexual harassment in the workplace had come into force, chauvinistic office politics rendered the word ‘secretary’ an acronym for ‘doormat’.  That wasn’t something that came easily to me, and my battle of wills with the Evita-esque Senior Buyer of Marks & Spencer’s Ladies Blouse department became the stuff of legend, and even though I hated both her and the job, I nevertheless dug my stiletto heels in, and steadfastly resisted all attempts to get rid of me.

Was I happy?  No.  No way.  So why on earth did I hang on?

 Maybe it seemed easier, maybe it was conditioned expectations, or maybe I just wasn’t meant to marry David Bowie after all, but somewhere along the way, I forgot my lofty dreams and aspirations, and towed the line – just like the vast majority of my equally bright and ambitious class mates, all of whom ended up in more-or-less the same boat…willing victims of a Matrix-like world where we had all the trappings of a certain lifestyle, but very little in the way of satisfaction or inner fulfilment. 

It took me several years to turn things around, and even longer for the inevitable realisation to hit me that, ultimately, the only person my tenacious grip had really hurt had been me, but when it did so, I moved effortlessly on…and embraced a new life of motherhood with gratitude, relief and a rather surprising aplomb (at least, I was surprised… before having any of my own, I’d thought I didn’t much like babies). 

And it was to be a conversation with some other young mums at one of our kids’ birthday parties which proved to be the pivotal point in my life, as it was slowly and uncomfortably revealed that no less than five of them were on anti-depressants…. these nice, normal, yuppie-types, all decked out in designer labels and proudly driving their little darlings around in various status symbols on wheels (and yes, we were as bad; my husband owned a Porche), were bascially being drugged into silence, compliance and acceptance of their lot in life. 

Desperate Housewives…?  I knew them well.

 There and then, standing in that kitchen, I resolved it wasn’t going to happen to me.  And the rest, as they say, is history.  Instead of swallowing diazepam, I elected – Neo-like – to take the red pill, and began to claw my way out of the Matrix.

It wasn’t always easy of course, and the world often seemed to conspire to prevent me ‘bucking the system’.   As well as enormous gifts, there were huge sacrifices, and although I tried to process the ‘stuff’ as I went, I nevertheless hit the wall many times. 

Ah, life!  Such a little word for such a big experience.  And that’s surely what it’s meant to be…surely we’re meant to engage with it, feel it, be touched by it, and sometimes, be buffeted by it.  Goddamn it, we’re meant to live it.  And sometimes it’ll be great, and sometimes it won’t. 

But the question is, what happens to all that ‘stuff’…?  Just where do all the disappointments, betrayals, broken dreams and disillusioned expectations go, and what happens to all the hurt and emptiness that follows in their wake?  Swiftly moving on isn’t necessarily freedom;  in fact, doing so under the illusion of freedom, when in fact, we’re actually completely blocked by the invisible and oft unacknowledged shackles of inner bogey-men, can be just as stultifying as any amount of ‘grinning and bearing’ it ever was in previous, less ‘enlightened’ eras.

Author Caroline Myss says that our ‘biography becomes our biology’ – in other words, that our un-integrated stories and unhealed wounds become the energetic matrix onto which our continually renewing cells bind themselves, and that therefore, unless the energy blueprint is kept clear, the overall structure will be compromised. 

I too have no doubt that our vital juice gets dammed up by all the energetic, psycho-emotional junk…and to return to where we began this little essay, I think it’s that – not any seasonal dip – that has been my problem this month. 

Stuff.

 

Healer, heal thyself, I hear you cry!

Well, it’s begun.  It’s not finished, but it’s definitely underway.  I admit I did initially resort to flight mode, but then – thankfully – got down to some real work, and deployed a combination of meditation, ‘tapping’ (T.F.T.), massage and, the other day, I ran up to the top of a hill near my eldest daughter’s house in Devon, and there, in the middle of nowhere, put myself through the paces of Bioenergetics, a little-known process that I first became acquainted with a couple of years ago, that is brilliant for clearing the mental and emotional crap!  Wow….I raged and roared and let go…. and it felt utterly fantastic!

And today….well… it’s a whole new world.  How much of myself do I reveal to you on this blog….?  Suffice to say that I think I’m now about 90% of the way towards manifesting a little miracle.  And I can see my initial excuses were just that;  in the end, it was just me getting in my own way….but now I feel so much clearer, my creative juices are flowing once more, and I can set about co-creating my life and my world.

It might not bag me a rock star, but I think it will prove to be a more stable, infinitely more satisfying kind of rock. 

And, as ever, I know the freedom is within me, not outside of me.

And if you too want to try a session of Bioenergetics, join us at Juice on the 24th October, where two extraordinary ‘Energy Plumbers’, Raks and Ishan, will be with us to guide you expertly through this amazing process.

See www.juice-kent.co.uk for further details.

And we’re also celebrating Halloween this month too with a fancy dress party, so after you’ve cleared the junk, you can wear some – the weirder the better!

And  lastly….as it’s Halloween….forgive me for sharing one more thing – and I know that for some of you, this will be really scary….

Bowie’s seminal masterpiece ‘Scary Monsters’ is thirty years old this month.  Uttterly terrifying.