The Forty Pilgrims Project - Thunder and Lightning

Day 5

Simon has been walking for five days now. Perhaps he has completed today’s walk – of this I am not sure. What I do know is that he has already walked over 100km from Irun to Zenarruza in Northern Spain. Each day, he has held in his heart a prayer and poetic portrait for one of the forty pilgrims that are on this journey with him. As one of his twelve energetic guides, I have sat for five days, morning and evening, offering my small yoga practice, meditation and a prayer to him and the circle of 53, that we may join together in an energetic focus to support and heal Simon as he walks, adding considerable power to the dreams and intentions of the group as a whole.

The journey for each of us holds different challenges. Simon has the challenge of walking a vast distance and maintaining his intention to make peace with his temptation. For the rest of us, we are moving through our day to day lives, observing his journey and walking our own pathways through conscious reality, perhaps making changes, cleaning out our bodies or minds, affirming our goals or maybe just observing life as we live it.

I have been soaked by unseasonal rain. The delicate pitter-patter of dry-land drenching water has been music to my ears as the oncoming storm approached since yesterday. The gardens I have worked on all winter have offered a silent thank you to the clouds, as the land greets the sky like an old friend.

Yet amid that poetic staccato, my mind has been crashing against my own conflicts. Since the journey began, I have become far more motivated to sit for my meditation and gently stretch my amazing body. We all have an amazing one you know. I have been far more motivated in sitting to write yet as with all powerful journeys of the heart and soul, we must face our demons at some point.

I crashed against the rocks of conflict today. I found myself in an argument I didn’t want to be in. My body trembling, my voice quivering, my hands shaking. I had fear running through my body and I felt it as I had done when I was a child and teenager, locking antlers with my peers and parents.

It was an old feeling, one that I most definitely instigated and the Universe reflected back at me with balletic precision. It felt like a crescendo of the frustration from the last few days. A building of thoughts that revolved around struggling with life and not being valued.

Our hearts, bodies and souls are conspiring with the Universe at large to make us whole and healthy again. Just look at what happens when you cut yourself - your body begins fixing that cut. It doesn’t stop at physical injuries – the ongoing healing extends infinitely into our minds and psyche, as the Universe reflects and throws up situations that mirror patterns of emotion and thought within us that are ready to be healed.

This wasn’t just a day when someone pissed me off and I got cranky and sarcastic and they got angry and I got scared. This was a day when another being, made of the same stuff as me, triggered an emotional response in me that woke me up to an old forgotten part of myself that has been hidden and wants to be hugged and healed.

Yes, the rascal did piss me off, but… I chose the reaction. I also chose the ensuing aftermath - a brooding vegetable chopper with a vengeance. But vegetables are kind, and gave me the rest I needed for my mind. My beans, having been finely sliced and washed, allowed me a gap to see what was really going on.

A broken part of me, a young version of me, one that witnessed conflict, one that was scared and thus defensive, one that felt worthless and undervalued and taken for granted was making itself known through this drama. The conflict was a gift – I had to just see it as so, in order to acknowledge this lost part of myself. What was needed was listening… and love.

As I write about it, I can feel that lost child peering around a corner in my mind, wondering if it is safe to come out. I can feel the circle of 53 and the power it has. It is a supportive structure, and the support flows both ways. All ways in fact, from guide to Simon to pilgrim to guide to guide to Simon – you get the picture.

It took me a while to understand this. Most of the day in fact. When these kinds of dramas arise with friends and family, with my lover, I seem to move through them quicker – because I love those people. I do not want to be in conflict with them. Sometimes it can be hard when the person who is triggering emotional responses in you is a stranger. We can be less likely to see the gift that the drama is offering. Yet I genuinely believe that every moment has something to offer us, even strangers are friends. The harshest of circumstances will yield a silver lining eventually. It all depends on how present we can be and how much we can listen. Not just with our ears, but with our hearts and bodies as well.

Our own universe is talking to us. Our reality and emotions are giving us signals to acknowledge our states of being. To bring a little love into our hearts - for others yes - but maybe, more importantly, for ourselves. That is where the magic lies… in recovering those lost little portions of ourselves and loving them back into ourselves fully.

Love, love, love…

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'The Forty Pilgrims Project' series is a blog inspired by a journey. Simon Welsh, poet, writer and new paradigm adventurer is walking the Camino de Santiago - a simple mission to put one foot in front of the other. Carving out a journey over 1000km of trails, roads and pathways, he is heading for Santiago, and further yet to Finisterre, the ‘End of the World’. He carries with him 40 prayers, one for each day, one for each pilgrim that is energetically walking with him. He is supported by 12 guides, energetically supporting him from afar. 

This is my journal of his 'Forty Pilgrims Project' - an observation from the outside, as one of his guides and friends. An exploration of my own journey by his side, as we connect in the quantum field.

Matt is a singer/songwriter, musician, poet and writer of words. He is exploring the forests of consciousness, time and space, and surfing the waves of thought, love and being. Getting lost and wiping out are adventures in themselves!

The Forty Pilgrims Project - Camino Caminito!

Day 1 and 2

Wednesday and the start of the Forty Pilgrims project. Somewhere in Northern Spain, my old friend Simon has begun his Camino de Santiago, a simple mission to put one foot in front of the other as he carves out a journey on foot, over 900km of trails, roads and pathways. He is heading for Santiago, and further yet to Finisterre, the ‘End of the World’. He carries with him 40 prayers, one for each day, one for each pilgrim that is energetically walking with him. He is supported by 12 guides, energetically supporting him, as indeed, does his circle of friends, family and unseen imps.

For me, here in Southern Spain, I am marking the beginning of his adventure, and the beginning of a forty day support network by walking my own Camino. It is short. Just 10km. Not much compared to the long walk. But mine holds challenges of its own. I am walking the Caminito Del Rey, a notorious daredevil pathway, just half an hour from my mountain home in Andalucía. The Caminito Del Rey was once known as the most dangerous pathway in the world. It was closed in 2000 due to numerous fatalities on the route. A crumbling pathway, stapled to a sheer cliff, running down a gorge into a glorious valley and back into another sheer gorge posed quite a lot of challenges for me. Fortunately, it has just been refurbished and opened in March this year to the masses. At least I wouldn’t be clinging to the sides for dear life…

My morning meditation was brief as I connected to Simon and his journey. I recited the prayer he had written for the guides for the first time and could feel, with delicate perception, the energy of the 53 people upon this adventure. It is a curious thing intuition. But I have found it possible, when you silence your mind and open your heart, to pick up signals and information from the depths of your being; the bit that is more connected to everything than the gibbering idiot that runs amok in the top paddock!

At this point, I am excited and full of love for the new circle of people I am about to connect with. I am also a little scared of the fact that I am on my way to a grand challenge for myself. It was my intention to reach the highest part of the trail and recite the guide’s prayer, offering my support to Simon and the group.

The day was full of promise, and even though we had a forecast of unseasonal rain, the weather was perfect and our walk through the gorge was full of joy. I felt supported and safe, even though I have previously had a rather large dose of vertigo and fear of large spaces beneath me. This was different. I felt the support and safety of the group and my own guides. True to my plan, at the highest point, a vertiginous bridge that crosses the gorge 100m above the river, I read the prayer. I connected back into the circle and crossed the bridge. I even stopped for a photo midway.

In my interview with Simon, we talked of many things. We are old friends and don’t see each other much. But he is a poet and I am a writer and musician. We have a lot in common. I have been on a grand adventure myself, travelling the world and such, but have always felt fear in the face of certain things relating to me. Most of them are creative fears which result in ingenious procrastinations of the highest degree. That is not to say that I don’t get things done. In many ways, I am living a charmed life. I am playing a grand game of manifesting and experimenting but most of it has related to me giving things to other people and forgetting about myself.

Sometimes, even though we might be surrounded by fantastic things, if we keep missing the mark of where our soul focus is at, where our true north and our hearts desires lie, then it doesn’t matter which paradise we find ourselves in, it won’t be enough.

This notion leads me to this. Our soul loves challenges; it is what gives life its zest. It loves to move through them, and move onto new challenges. Sometimes though, we get stuck on one challenge and we hit up against it so much that we become numb to it and forget it was ever there, naming it just life. Yet life can be so much more. That is just a moment. Our heart will continue to have desires. The potential for them to be met is always present.

For a long time I had a big old fear of heights yet yesterday I conquered it - it did not even seem to be there. It got me thinking, where did that fear live and where did it go? The night I got back, I started a yoga practice again. I figured, if Simon can put one foot in front of the other over 900km and forty days then I can manage 5-10 minutes of yoga every morning and night. I realised that what fears and dreams need is action. Fears need to be hugged. Dreams need to be stepped toward. We have dreams a plenty and we don’t need to work toward them all at once, we don’t need to fight them or forget them or think they are impossible. We do need to do something though. Acknowledge our fears and then step forward into our dreams.

Today has been a rather productive day for me having begun writing this journal series about The Forty Pilgrims Project. I have been faced with the usual challenges of my day to day work life and I keep coming back to my heart. I keep looking at life just a little differently than I did yesterday. I am already more motivated, having stepped into being part of this circle, crossing a wobbly bridge, creating more and marking my day with joys lived rather than frowns endured.

Every now and again, I check into that energetic circle of 53, silently offering up a prayer to Simon, wondering if that was him asking for a bit of support and energy. And yeah, I did manage 5 more minutes of yoga this morning.

Love, love, love...
 

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'The Forty Pilgrims Project' series is a blog inspired by a journey. Simon Welsh, poet, writer and new paradigm adventurer is walking the Camino de Santiago - a simple mission to put one foot in front of the other. Carving out a journey over 1000km of trails, roads and pathways, he is heading for Santiago, and further yet to Finisterre, the ‘End of the World’. He carries with him 40 prayers, one for each day, one for each pilgrim that is energetically walking with him. He is supported by 12 guides, energetically supporting him from afar. 

This is my journal of his 'Forty Pilgrims Project' - an observation from the outside, as one of his guides and friends. An exploration of my own journey by his side, as we connect in the quantum field.

Matt is a singer/songwriter, musician, poet and writer of words. He is exploring the forests of consciousness, time and space, and surfing the waves of thought, love and being. Getting lost and wiping out are adventures in themselves!

The Forty Pilgrims Project - Introduction

Yesterday began the start of The Forty Pilgrims Project, a collective creation in the realms of time and space. It involves my old friend Simon Welsh walking the Camino de Santiago for forty days, clocking in over 900km on foot.

I read about his venture some four weeks before and was compelled to take an interest. His idea is to take on board a spiritual journey of sorts. A vision quest and a clearing, a pilgrimage of quantum proportions; not just for himself but for others too. He is wrestling with some demons and dancing with angels. Some I have no time for, some I have met and some I have probably yet to meet. 

As he embarks on this quest, he is taking with him the prayers and intentions of forty pilgrims. He bears their weight, if it can be said as so. To assist him in this odyssey he has called upon twelve guides – we could call them spiritual guides, energetic support, light warriors – yet in reality, they are human beings, offering their strength, love, compassion, energy and most likely, healing, reiki or some such other long-distance magic. In any case, we are all connected amid the quantum field so can easily offer him support, love and daisies.

I am one of his guides. I was compelled to add my focus and strength that I have been gathering over the last few years. This is not to brag that I am magnificent, but to affirm that I am, indeed part of a magnificent continuum of energy of which we are all magnificent within. Once we can focus upon that part of ourselves, we begin to realise this magnificence and can use it for the benefit of others. It is this role then, that I chose to offer Simon, and in joining into the collective, I add my energy to a grand circle of 53 – one courageous walker, poet and visionary, forty pilgrims with dreams and intentions bound up in his pack, and twelve spiritual guides supporting his energy, holding intentions and making conscious changes as the footsteps and days go by.

Simon, as far as I know, interviewed all forty of the pilgrims and wrote a specific poetic portrait for each of them. Within this portrait is held issues, hopes, intentions, and energy needed for transmuting into new paradigms for each of the pilgrims. They are not physically walking with Simon. That is his undertaking, and his journey into his own unknown. He is the physical anchor and catalyst for helping himself, the pilgrims and guides to manifest and make changes within their lives; the eye of the storm so to speak. Each day he will focus on one pilgrim, walking an average of 25km, reading their prayer somewhere along the way. At the end of 40 days, on day 41, he plans to reach Finisterre, ‘The End of The World’, where he shall read his own prayer and burn his clothes, shoes and words in shamanic ceremonial offering. Hopefully he won’t burn all his clothes as I am sure he'll want to come back! 

The twelve spiritual guides are primarily there to assist Simon in gathering his strength, offering support and adding to the circle. Again, as far as I know, we were all interviewed and I identified a key issue within my life that I would like changed and added it into the circle of creation that is carried within Simon’s reality bomb backpack! I am sure each of the other guides has gone through some such process. I told Simon what I would be sharing with him and the circle in terms of support, giving him free access to my channels of reiki, violet flames, munay-ki, white fire, rescue flames, heart and violet flame chakras and diamond seed chakras.

Whilst this all sounds a little woo-woo and out there, there are some fundamental quantum happenings going on here. I believe that we live upon a quantum field of pure love, potential and possibility, and that reality as we know it is co-created out of this field by us, by our imaginations, thoughts, words and actions. It all comes back to thought and being. There are layers and layers of amazing reality interwoven into us. Layers of light, matter, emotion, thought, atoms, molecules, quarks, bosons and auras, chakras, energy, and creative possibility.

As we wake up to ourselves, we begin to see the effect that we have upon our reality; that we are not random fluctuations living in a random universe, but that we are meaningful and purposeful focal points of Universal consciousness, creating pure experience out of pure potential using mechanisms such as thought, perception, genetic memory, imagination, generational patterns and influences such as parents, school, television and newspapers.

We are vast beings of thought, capable of projecting our imaginations from the dawn of time into the vastness of Space and beyond. We are composed of a history of all our lifetimes and all our connections to life. We are beings of Earth and beings of the stars. We are children of nature and of love. We are locked into a duality, the yin yang of existence. The up-down, left-right, black-white, mine-yours, virgin-whore, hero-cad, happy-sad see-saw that we call life on Earth.

We have the choice to live by default, on a seemingly out of control roller coaster, that is terrifying and exciting, with no way of getting off, subject to the chaotic storms of life, subject to horrors, fantasies, hopes, and disasters. We have a choice to feel powerless. We have a choice to feel helpless. Of course, when we are here, we often don’t think this is a choice.

We have the choice to stop and take stock. To start questioning our reality. To start asking questions about why things are the way they are. We have a choice to delve deeper into the reality of nature and the darkness that resides within us and thus 'without' us. We have a choice to try and discover the nature of that darkness, whether to embrace it or fight it. We have a choice to see the darkness outside of ourselves, the darkness that dwells in plain sight, in economic systems, politics, corporations, education and society. We can see the poverty, disease and pollution in our midst and wonder where it comes from. We have a choice to wonder whether there is a link between our own inner darkness and that which we see laid out upon the green grass of the quantum field.

We have a choice to explore, to experiment, to play with our thoughts and emotions. We have a choice to wake up to ourselves… slowly realising that we are not so powerless after all. We have the choice to stand up and claim our creations. We have a choice to search for silver linings and see beauty and majesty within it all. The process begins with self-love, expands into compassion and maybe has no end…

So that is where we are in humanity… in three places. Once upon a time we were only at the first stage. Now people are bridging all three ideas. The darkness, the awakening, and the empowerment. It would be trite of me to try and lump all our experiences into such small boxes because humanity is vast as are our collective experiences. We all count and we all matter. All our dreams expand the Universe as we step into joy. All things benefit from more smiles in the world.

Here we are then, upon the threshold of a dream. A new cycle of experience. A paradigm shift so vast, people are rapidly awakening all over the world, slowing piercing the veils of illusion that have long hung over humanity. We are awakening to our true potential and power and The Forty Pilgrims Project marks one facet of this grand experience. The circle of 53 touches not just the 53 people directly involved, but the people Simon meets along the way. It touches our loved ones, our friends and family. It touches the people we tell and the people that are affected by our own internal changes. It touches all who witness the new smiles we create within us and others. As we transmute our own barriers and realise our own potential, it will inspire yet more to seek their own awakening. A light in a room of darkness is a source of light none the less. Our beautiful planet, society and individual communities all have the potential to change through elevated thinking, compassion, love and dreams made manifest. This is the power of thought, spirit, love and transformation and maybe the point of existence itself. Hmmm… ahhh…

This is a journal of one of the twelve. An account of the journey from outside the focal point. A documentation of the changes, insights and connections made throughout the forty days of Simon’s quest. It may be personal to me, or I may be led outside of my own experience as I meet and converse with other pilgrims and guides, my social network, community and of course, Simon himself. Above all, I hope it to be an honest portrait of self-inquiry and a joyful adventure into the biggest co-creative experience I have ever embarked upon. Happy travels dear friends. Happy, happy travels.

Love, love, love...

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'The Forty Pilgrims Project' series is a blog inspired by a journey. Simon Welsh, poet, writer and new paradigm adventurer is walking the Camino de Santiago - a simple mission to put one foot in front of the other. Carving out a journey over 1000km of trails, roads and pathways, he is heading for Santiago, and further yet to Finisterre, the ‘End of the World’. He carries with him 40 prayers, one for each day, one for each pilgrim that is energetically walking with him. He is supported by 12 guides, energetically supporting him from afar. 

This is my journal of his 'Forty Pilgrims Project' - an observation from the outside, as one of his guides and friends. An exploration of my own journey by his side, as we connect in the quantum field.

Matt is a singer/songwriter, musician, poet and writer of words. He is exploring the forests of consciousness, time and space, and surfing the waves of thought, love and being. Getting lost and wiping out are adventures in themselves!