The following piece of writing is adapted from its first publishing on 19 March 2025 on my substack Learning to be Water! Freedom is the calling of my soul! 

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I woke up this morning around 3am. There are many different beliefs around why a person would wake up at this time of the morning and I choose to not believe any of them. It is now my position that we are constantly placing ourselves within a multiplicity of ‘belief systems’ about which we have no absolute certainty whence they came!

I have believed many things over my 58 years of physical existence on this planet – in this realm. Some of these beliefs strictly led and guided me for a major part of my earthly life. Some of these beliefs were so deeply entrenched that at one point they were indivisible from me as I was fused into them and vice versa. I was a true believer – I had drunk the Kool Aid – I was a disciple, a devotee, a student, a teacher, an ideological mind-slave to a religious worldview which drove my thoughts, decisions and actions. But I was also on a ‘journey of discovery’ to use a worn out phrase and my journey brought me to the edge of the universe – well my universe so to say and such as it was at the time – and when I got there I found a door, a door which I started to open and on cracking it open I discovered it was light outside (and was not the outer darkness of gnashing teeth and eternal torment that I had been threatened with for decades). Over the years I tentatively kept opening the door wider still, allowing more light to shine in! This light has shone so brightly that it has facilitated the dismantling of an entire belief system, which has not been without its emotional and mental pain.

If you ever watched the film The Truman Show – the door I metaphorically opened is not unlike the door that Truman opens at the edge of his known universe, the world he believed was the truth and which turned out to be a stage-managed show for the entertainment of others. And on another level a social experiment perhaps?

It was sometime in the year 2012 that my husband Colin and I started to open our respective and collective doors. Not necessarily in the same way, although there were shared activities such as reading books together, and not at exactly the same rate. However in the year 2015 we had both reached the edge of our shared universe and together we stepped through the now unified door and walked into a space of brightening light, a place of awakening as though from a period of manipulated consciousness, a developing awareness and understanding that all we had believed in for so long, all we had spent the best of our vim and vigour on, all we had sacrificed everything for, was not what we were first led to believe.

It was time to wake up from the dream.

It was time to ascend from the miry clay.

This was time for the expansion of our conscious awareness.

This was the inevitable result of starting out on the pilgrimage of purpose and meaning, truth and enlightenment.

Aren’t most of us looking for the truth?

What is the truth?

Awareness takes time…..and as we journey forward it is in looking back that we can usually see how everything is exactly as it should be. We are learning how to hold fast to nothing, learning to let go of identity and realise our oneness with everything and all.

The pilgrimage continues as it should. Many years ago, whilst we were living in Zimbabwe, an American couple shared with us a ‘prophetic mental image’ of a boat on a river and our boat decided to change course and follow a different channel. It is in the looking back we can see that there is a definite space where all is known and is accessible. Some call it the Holy Spirit, some call it the Field, some call it the Aetheric, some call it the Akashic, and of course there will be other ways to describe this place of expanded awareness that can be tapped/plugged/tuned into.

And for us we found our change of direction on the river carrying us northwards and to a space and place in time where we flowed into the Ecovillage Findhorn Community. Another story to be written at another time.

In early 2025, having journeyed outside the silo for 10 years now, and finding that we can breathe the air, that we can touch the ‘unclean’ without fear of contamination, that there are actually no taboos, those mind-worms of fear which were designed to control, modify and manipulate human behaviour but that we ourselves in our universal sovereignty have the physical, mental, spiritual and emotional faculty to make decisions which we learn from, and in this learning we inform universal consciousness which in turn becomes the collective wisdom that can be universally accessed through intuition. At this moment, which is all I have, this very present now, my awareness is that authentic compassion and unconditional love are the most important values that we can be imbued with and express and that these values are those which I wish to be fused together with and to be indivisible from. At this present moment, this ‘now’ it is my intention to not be divided from these values and to reach conscious realisation that this is who I am, and who we are. The simplicity of this statement does not do justice to the profundity of the concepts. It is my present understanding that there is a diving board that extends out from the edge of the universe across an endless expanse and from which one can choose to step or leap off and Be.

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Image credits:

Image on the top, Sunset; for the other two I used a free online enhancer.

Laura Shreenan

Born in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Happily settled in Kinloss. Married to Colin. Various life roles…various hats! Grateful for all that my life’s pilgrimage encompasses.