So in an effort to still my scrambling mind, I turned to YouTube, my old friend and advisor, who knows me so well. Even the adverts he shows me are about wellness and meditation. And tonight YouTube tells me to watch this interview with Mooji. Yes I think I need to get a bit transcendental today.

Within the first fifteen minutes, he goes straight here:

‘Remain as a detached witness to your thoughts. Consider the idea that you are not your thoughts. Just look. The thoughts are coming up. Don’t take them personally. Let them arise. Pay attention. See if you can look without identifying with them. Without logging in to them. Let them run like you’re watching a movie. Stay out of the traffic for a moment. Experience a kind of spaciousness. Instead of trying to change them, let them swim up. You did not order them. Imagine they are auditioning for your attention. Or they are thoughts you have given attention to before. If they don’t get your attention they collapse into oblivion.
Let the thoughts come. Let them show themselves. Don’t suppress them.
Now you’re observing the subconscious things. Don’t subscribe to them. But try simply now to be aware of what’s coming up and be aware that there is a perceiving of them. Be aware of the awareness itself. Then a shift takes place away from the traffic noise as though the attention comes back to where the seeing is arising from. It’s possible to just be here. Aware that you are aware. Observe without trying to control or direct the traffic. Become self aware not activity aware.’

After that I already felt calmer. Just listening to his gentle beautiful Jamaican voice was calming. The concepts were a little abstract, my mind wandered, I tried to watch my thoughts instead of feel them, I tried to be fascinated that this particular human brain has refined skills of producing anxious thoughts, and while wondering how to get over that, Russel asked Mooji to do a guided meditation.

Mr Mooji invited us to imagine that nothing exists except you. No earth, no past, no present, no opinions, no identity, no judgements. And when you strip away everything, what’s left?

And I got an image of a bright pure white little star sparkling just in front of me. A small perfect point of beautiful clear light. No judgement, no fear, no end, no beginning. And as Mooji described the infinite nature of all that is, I realised he meant that this ‘is-ness’ is supposed to be an inseparable from yourself. So I invited my pretty little star to come closer and to be held in my hands, at which point I felt such a gush of universal love from some eternal source of beauty and love, and I started to cry. By the time the light had ‘moved’ into my heart I was sobbing. It was so beautiful, all forgiving unconditional pure an dperfect love. For me. And I got a glimpse of this beautiful perfect magical love that connects us all, and I remembered what it was like to believe in God. Just so much love, for me, always and unconditionally. How wonderful it was to be able to close my eyes and get in touch with a source of abundant limitless love and wisdom, absolutely any time, anywhere. How peaceful and easy it must be to believe in God.

I had a similar thing when I went to the Good News Church once years ago. I was often working in the town hall on Sundays and could hear their singing upstairs. They invited me so many times that it was the polite community minded thing to do to sit at the back and join in the songs while strangers kept turning round to smile and nod at me. And in a joyous song about the father’s eternal love I found myself weeping all over the song sheets. I could feel the nearby congregation members revelling in my spiritual enlightenment and my tears quickly turned to fury. How dare they trick me with the promise of fatherly love that a I never had in order to get me to join their silly controlled group? How fucking devious and manipulative all religion is, to promise some non existent magical source of love, forgiveness and acceptance, knowing that that is what we are all painfully bereft of, and package it in the form of a benevolent unconditional (non existent) father figure, which we are all childishly longing for.

When I was a moonie it was hard work, there was all sorts of sacrifice and suffering, but I always felt so incredibly loved. My first ever panic attack happened the day after I left the church. Full blown trembly shakey sickness. Due to the removal of this safe source of eternal love.

But tonight, I have it back. The belief (even if its a mind trick) that I am loved. Regardless of what errors I’ve made or how undeserving of love I feel, I have this bright beautiful source of love in my heart right now and it is magical in its impact. Imagine having that all the time? Imagine how you’d cope with life’s challenges if deep throughout your entire neurology was a conviction that whatever happens you are loved and safe. Which I have only had when I believed in God. And without God, I had very little sense of self love, so I turned to various sources – work, boys, volunteering, more work – to try to fill this void. Standard procedure. Everyone has this to some degree.

So the absence of my parents 35 years ago has caused a gaping hole in my heart where a sense of safety and love should be, and while I was in the church I patched that up with a fierce devotion to God, which I no longer have, hence my 42 year old tendancy towards anxiety, which is really the dread fear of a small child who believes they are unworthy of love or protection, and will therefore be left to die, because her parents keep fucking off.

It makes sense that anxiety comes from an absence of love, in which case the solution is to fill your heart with love. And it’s not safe to pin that need on a man, as he may let you down (not because he means to, but because he is human) in which case you need to find that love for yourself, sort out your self esteem, remove your negative beliefs about yourself and decide that you are worthy of love. But that is REALLY hard if your brain was formed so completely from the age of 9 months to 9 years with a belief that you don’t deserve love. So then the safest source of constant unconditional love is a belief in God.

But Russel, Brene, Mooji and a lot of voices in the self realisation world say that God/spirituality is not an outside being but is that beautiful sense of connection and love between all of us as a human entity.

Connection.

Is that what God is?

And then that’s just a neurological system of concepts that engender a sense of connection which is what we need to feel safe.

Either way, that’s what I have tonight. And we are listening to Helm’s Blues Brothers show and I am laughing and singing along with all the love and bubbly happiness of my usual self.

Thank you for today’s anxiety that has pushed me to seek out some loving truth tonight.

I just need to hold on to this now.