Alive

I am alive in this moment, right here, right now. The rain is pattering on the wooden roof on the boat, it's cosy within with our new solar lighting (clever hubby is already spending his work-free days wisely!!). There are seabirds calling as they come in to roost on nearby rooftops. Our kitty, back from the brink of imagined impending doom by some overzealous vets, is eating chicken in our galley kitchen. He's fine and happy, loving his cuddles as ever. We went out to sea today for a crazy wild sail in a friend's boat - the sense of thrill and adrenalin is still within when I remember the boat ripping through the waves tilted on its side. Shit, I was scared!!! But I was also excited and felt completely, fully alive and alert. I felt/feel in awe of the vastness of the oceans, of their changing moods and colours, their drama and danger. How a beautiful calm blue sea can turn into a frenzied grey whirlpool in moments...

Sometimes, like just now, when I lie on my bed in the boat, I imagine all the creatures beneath me, right down to the murky depths. The sea pulsing her sweet rhythms on the underside of our boat, the fish moving as one beneath the hull.

I have been having a beautiful and weirdly wonderful connection with all the babies I've seen in the last few days. When I pass them in pushchairs and prams in the shops, we stare at one another for what feels like ages, their eyes following mine as we go our separate ways. I say weird simply because I thought a baby's range of vision didn't extend that far... But it feels special, sacred, as if they can sense something or know something I have lost a connection to. These wise souls just arrived, they know it all.

good conversation

Two interesting conversations I had yesterday and today:

1). Yesterday, I saw a client who I have known and treated for nearly five years and who has now become a good friend as we both write. I started seeing her towards the end of her TTC journey four years ago when I didn't really understand (I also wrote an article on holistic health for fertility around this time that still makes me cringe!! - as with all things, you kinda have to experience it to get it!) but tried to treat her with love and compassion.

I didn't see her again until she was pregnant with her child who is now 2. I saw her yesterday and she is pregnant with her second. Although I don't usually tell clients about our journey, I recently told her because, as I say, we'd transcended some of the therapist/client boundaries by becoming friends anyway! She told me that she had tried EVERYTHING under the sun: acupuncture, nutrition, healing, reflexology (from me - eek!) and, finally, IVF. Eventually she decided to go back to university and study and set up a band. Within six months, she was pregnant (after a night out with a few drinks and unhealthy food!). The same happened with her second though this time they weren't really trying at all as they'd been told it was medically impossible. A birthday party with friends and whoops, along comes number two! True magical miracles. Her story really made me feel good.

2). A lady came up and chatted to me today when I was sat on the deck of the boat. Funnily enough, her friend subscribes to the magazine I edit so we were talking about that and then about her beautiful daughter asleep in her pushchair. She told me that she didn't think her daughter 'would have come along' unless they had moved to a boat and pursued a simpler, far less stressful life. Soon after they sold their house and downsized to a peaceful boat, they conceived. Well, you can imagine that was music to my ears!

Only 4 days until R leaves his job for good and we are together...I picture long cycle rides along the seafront, fish and chips on the beach, time to laugh and talk with one another, picnics in the park...we'll have much less cash but much more bliss. I can't wait.

Really getting into the Abraham teachings channelled through Esther Hicks - books such as 'The Law of Attraction', 'Ask and it is Given' etc. If this all sounds a little loopy and not really me, it's not a cult or anything. I was hugely skeptical when my friend M got really into their stuff years ago and for a long time I tended to filter stuff out when clients raved about it. Eventually my sister (wise one, always gently pushing me forward on my path) was talking about some of the stuff she'd learnt from them and she bought me one of their books.

I was lying in the park having had a long conversation with a stranger about her not being able to have children. She was 51 and resigned to a childless life so we were talking about adoption and fostering and then we naturally moved on to our beloved pets and how much they mean in our lives. I was playing back all the things we had said to one another, all the ways in which we had affirmed our status in life as childless...our conversation, having sprung from nowhere really, made me very thoughtful. I pulled out the book my sister had given me ('Manifest Your Desires') and turned to the first page I was drawn to. This is what I read:

'If there is something that you desire that you currently do not have, you need only put your attention upon it, and, by the Law of Attraction, it will come to you. However, if there is something that you desire that you currently do not have, and you put your attention upon your current state of not-having-it, then the Law of Attraction will continue to match that not-having-it vibration, so you will continue to not have that which you desire.'

I knew this in my heart of hearts. I think that most of the time I live my truth, I think I fill my mind with positive, hopeful thoughts. I think. But there I was having a conversation with a perfect stranger about my not having children. I think about that far more than I think about a blissful future full of children. I was amazed that this lesson was thrown onto my path at this auspicious moment. I lay in stillness, watching sunlight reflect off the black feathers of a bird, smelling the rich brown earth and thinking 'wow, I am alive! In this moment!'

So I began listening to some of their CDs, I don't want to slavishly follow their stuff, I just love to accumulate more beautiful thoughts, ways of inspiring and uplifting myself and those around me... And it has reminded me to listen to my lovely fertility hypnosis CD which includes visualizing R and I and a baby, and a baby growing in my womb. It feels good to channel my energies into these pursuits rather than on feeling angry/sad/resentful for what hasn't yet manifest. That makes me feel stuck, depressed, heavy, grey.

I am learning to put my intentions out into the Universe and to trust that all will be okay. I needed that reminder to float into my life just now.

So, I just cancelled my place on a baby massage instructor training course. I thought it would be the ideal thing to compliment my work as a pregnancy massage therapist as I tend to gradually lose touch with my clients after the babies are born. I so enjoy meeting their babies for the first time, holding them when I have come to know them so well in the womb and connected with their phenomenal wise energy. But at the weekend I suddenly just thought about being faced with a whole room of new mums and dads and their little people and realised I could not do it. Yes, business-wise, it'd be great. But emotionally I think it would be a step too far.

Somehow, without realising, we've entered a new phase of waiting to become a family. Moving onto the boat heralded a new chapter and all the immense changes and challenges it threw up meant our attentions were focused elsewhere. We did not chat about fertility so much, my fertility vitamins ran out and I forgot to buy new ones, the acupuncture petered out....

And here is the strangest part; family and friends seem to have accepted our childless status. When my cousin's wife became pregnant, my dad told me without the usual quiet acknowledgment of our own emptiness. Friends on their second and third pregnancies are no longer careful what they say. Hey, I'm not saying I want everyone tiptoeing around me but it seems so odd that it's been completely forgotten. As if R and I had said some time back we didn't want kids or something.

And around us, friends and family become pregnant, give birth, have houses full of toddlers, birthday parties are celebrated, the years keep on ticking by....

I feel strange today because an old client got in touch as she's in her last trimester and wanted to book pregnancy massage up until the due date and I thought 'hang on, when did that happen?!' With those first pregnancies of friends and clients, I was right on hand, massaging, allaying fears, supporting, sharing birth books, cooking nourishing food for new mum, rocking babies etc etc. I would bake cakes and draw pictures to decorate the nurseries and now...well, these days it seems babies pop out of nowhere - I'll bump into a non-pregnant friend and ten minutes later I'll see her again and she'll be 6 months gone. Hmmmm, know this says more about my general reclusiveness than anything else. But today I feel sad and that's just how it is.