For the first half hour or so I managed to block their energy and do my own thing, but I must have had little holes in my protection barrier because I started to feel what they were feeling, and that feeling was not particularly pleasant. I tried putting in ear plugs in and mediating through it but unfortunately their voices penetrated my ear plugs so I blocked the sound out with my ipod and worked on discharging the energy.

The thing is, it’s not like they were complaining about hugely important things. It was more like it was for the sake of complaining, like they were getting off on it somehow. Maybe by complaining about others in their lives they felt more comfortable with their own shadow self, because it was a way of saying that it’s okay to not be perfect because look at these flaws in everyone else.

We need to stop complaining so much. When we endlessly complain we’re stepping into a very negative vibration. I’m all for releasing negative emotions and exploring our shadow selves, but this act of complaining is a little different. It’s a self manufactured destructive energy that feeds the ego more than anything else. It makes us feel yucky, it makes those around us feel yucky, and it very rarely solves problems. We may leave the conversation feeling better, but is that our higher self feeling better or is that our ego feeling superficially better for a while because we’ve talked ourselves into it by complaining about others.

So what do we do about it? Well there are a couple of things you can do depending on where you’re at in the moment.

Sometimes I catch myself complaining which is great because I can then choose to make a conscious decision to stop if I want to. It’s kind of like gossiping. When I gave up following mainstream media I still had a bit of the gossip bug left in me so every now and again I’d fall into the gossip trap. I’d have to consciously pull myself out of it whenever I noticed I was doing it. Even to this day both gossiping and complaining can be a little addictive so trust me, I’m far from perfect.

So when you find yourself complaining endlessly about something not terribly important – about the call center you rang today, the queue you had to wait in at the bank, the cashier at the convenience store, your friend who was late, the people complaining next to you on a plane (haha) … whatever it is, try stopping yourself. Instead, reflect on why that situation annoyed you while at the same time respecting the diversity in others. You can even delve a little deeper and look at what the triggers were and if there were any mirrors that made that situation annoy you so much.

The other thing you could do is reserve your complaining for a way of releasing stuff. This may mean you go and see a counselor or therapist and complain to them, let a tree know how you’re feeling (they can handle it), or write it down on paper. While I don’t feel that it’s a good idea to endlessly complain about seemingly unimportant things, I also don’t feel that it’s a good idea to supress any feelings either. So if you’re feeling particularly annoyed about something, get it out! But get it out in a healthy or constructive way.

A Healthier Way To “Complain”

When we’re in a tight friendship or romantic relationship, we often complain more to these people because we feel comfortable around them. In my most recent romantic relationship we had a very beautiful way of using our triggers for further self exploration. So if one of us had something to complain about in any area of our lives we’d have a conversation about why we thought that situation or that person had annoyed us and what we felt the root issue or cause could be. These loving conversations always felt like we were delving right into the shadow to find the higher self underneath. It sometimes meant that I had to come to terms with some nasty dark side of myself that I didn’t particularly like, but the more I became comfortable with my faults, the more learning I got out of each situation. I’d like to say that I became zen like and centered and nothing bothered me anymore but this simply wasn’t true. Sometimes I feel like the universe hits you with some harder lessons just when you’re getting comfortable and cozy with where you’re at!

So give it a go, watch your conversations and interactions with people over the next few days. And let us all know what you find…

Two weeks before I embarked on this journey I knew it was going to be a soul searching trip for me, and I’m happy to say I’ve already been answering some questions and getting some clarity on the direction I want to be heading in life.

When I first landed in New York and settled into my hostel, I spent a couple of hours wandering around my new neighborhood, checking out the cafes, bars and restaurants and was ecstatic to find three vegan restaurants, a handful of health food stores and two yoga schools all within a ten minute walk from my hostel.

The city of New York is amazing. There is always a very good health store within a short walking distance. I’m sitting in a cafe writing this and my macbook is picking up 30 wireless Internet connections. I don’t know if I’m going to have enough time to visit all of the raw vegan restaurants in the city during my stay and I walked into a clothing store the other day and bought the best ever organic cotton underwear that you won’t even find online in Australia let alone in a store.

In Australia I can list every health stores in my city on one hand. If my macbook picks up 5 wifi connections that’s a lot, and I have to drive over an hour to get to the one and only raw vegan restaurant in my state, and even then it’s on the border.

Over the first couple of days wondering around the city and discovering all of these amazing things, I honestly felt like I’d come from a small country town not the third largest city in Australia. I loved the availability and accessibility of everything I could possibly want or need, the close proximity of health food stores and the opportunity to buy a fresh juice or raw vegan snack whenever I felt like it. I was beginning to fall in love with the city all over again.

But then everything shifted a little sideways. I started to notice how concrete covered just about every piece of ground here like a huge blanket. Grass is reserved for fenced off parks which are harder to find than health food stores. Sure there is a massive park right in the middle of the city which is extraordinarily beautiful, but that’s in the middle of the city not entwined around the city which actually would be a lot better.

And the people here are beautiful (and very well dressed!) but the energy here is not good. Collectively I can feel a very short, sharp and intense energy everywhere. It’s exhausting and stressful. New York has extremes of everything and that in itself is tiring. I’ve experienced a higher than usual number of cranky people than I have in any other city that I’ve visited around the world (and yes, that includes Paris!).

I have had some lovely people stop and ask if I need help when I’m standing in the street peering at a subway map, and I even had a woman walk past me and tell me I had awesome hair .. but there has been a lot of crankiness too. I was scolded in a yoga lecture for not taking enough notes, scolded on the subway for not understanding how to use my pass, talked rudely to by shop owners and ignored in restaurants. I don’t feel as though any of these cranky people were bad people, I think they’re just tired, busy and stressed. And honestly, who wouldn’t be in this environment.

So the big lesson I’ve learned in my travels so far and the reason why I now know I came here, is to get out of the city. I’m craving nature, prana, peace, love and spirituality. My entire nervous system and energy fields wants to take a breather and I wish I didn’t book seven nights here because it’s way too much.

This clarity also moves to where I want to take my life in the future. I’ve often played with the idea of moving out of the city and living permanently in the hinterland with a community of like minded people. Now I’m absolutely sure that’s what I want to do. I’m no longer a city girl and I feel super comfortable with my decision. It’s time to work on my dream and make it happen. So thank you New York for helping to give me certainty on where I want to take my life. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

While I’m traveling I’ll be sharing with you my experiences, teachers, lessons and of course the great food I’ll be eating. So don’t worry, you won’t miss out!

The first of many that I want to share with you is a lecture I attended last week in Byron Bay. The lecture was by Nassim Haramein who is an incredibly spiritual and intelligent physicist. I’m not going to be able to do a very good job at explaining his teachings so I recommend you check them out for yourself. A great place to start is a radio interview on KKCR in May this year. You can listen to the interview with Nassim by clicking here.

Nassim talks a lot of big numbers and a lot about the universe and space. I followed a couple of friends along to his lecture now knowing who he was or what it was all about. As soon as the lecture begun I was mesmerized by his speech and his theories on life, the universe and all the stuff we’re often curious about. I even found myself fascinated by the technical discussions even when I had trouble following them! Somehow Nassim’s big heart and spark of intelligence for some of the great mysteries in life has turned science into a topic that is exceptionally entertaining and even enlightening.

I guess one of the biggest teachings that stood out for me was the concept that there would be no time without memory. And how we’re constantly creating and changing the past through our own memory of events.

Think about it. If we could truly only live in the moment, in this absolute second AND without any memory of a past or of a projection into the future .. time would be irrelevant wouldn’t it. There would be no concept of yesterday or last week because we’d have no recollection of it. And I doubt we’d be scheduling in or even stressing about future plans. Because as one true moment passed it would dissolve into the absolute. We’d be completely present.

So our minds eye creates time. It creates a past and it projects a future. It makes everything “appear” linear, as if we’re traveling along an invisible line from point A to point B. When really, perhaps it’s a lot more fluid than that.

But I’m not a physicist or a spiritual teacher, so if you’d like to hear Nassim’s own explanations, here is the link to his radio interview, enjoy!

I have an internal tug of war going on with this concept. A large part of me feels like I need to act a certain way because I’m 30 years old now, and therefore officially a grow up. But there’s also this little child in me that wants to bust out sometimes. It wants to run around the garden, do cartwheels, laugh a lot, wrestle, tickle my friends and dance freely.

I feel that somewhere along the line we learned to lock up this child and never let it out. It’s a beautiful freeing feeling letting that child within us loose. Letting it run around and skip and play.

When a friend and I were walking down the street yesterday we decided to play with this idea a little. So we skipped, walked sideways and jumped down the road. Sure we got a few strange looks from people but both of us ended up in laughter. And it was that deep satisfying, healing belly laughter that comes from playing around and being silly.

That’s the thing – play can be extremely healing. It can bring on laughter, it can move energy around your body and it’s just plain fun. We all know how incredibly healing laughter can be. There are even yogic groups that get together to weave all types of laughter into their practice as a form of healing! And moving the body means moving the energy around. This movement can create more of a free flow of energy throughout the body and help dislodge any blockages. Especially when we move our body in a completely different way to what we’re used to. Try playing with moving every single muscle in your body at once. You may be surprised at how little movement you have in your every day life.

But you don’t have to be as lame as my friend and I. There are no rules to this game. You can play around with anything that you child wants and desires to have fun. Mine is usually tickling, poking and laughing with my friends or dancing around the room (what I call “kid dancing”). What’s yours? I’d love to know.

And here is a video that you may or may not have seen already. It’s a perfect example of this concept, of how having childlike fun can bring more joy and magic into our lives.

Lovely huh. Maybe a lot of us usually take the escalator because it’s WAY more fun than the stairs. So if the stairs were more fun perhaps we would then choose to walk up the stairs.

Happy playing and mucking around x