end of the year

well, 2008 is coming to an end and 2009 is coming fast towards us. it's been quite a year for me personally, and quite a year on the national and international fronts. credit crunches, obama's election, celtic are currently 7 points ahead of rangers in the spl. all sorts of interesting things happening. but no time to comment on all that,
personally, the first half of the year was difficult. i did write about it earlier in the year. during my travels i hit a difficult patch of memories from my childhood. i wrote very openly about that both here and in other situations - shabda for instance. i wonder now if i was a bit too open because it seemed to lead to a lot of people being very concerned for my health and well-being. well, that was nice of course and i appreciated it a lot. however, i think perhaps some people ended up more concerned tahn necessary and even perhaps in a bit of anxiety about me. let me share here something i wrote in a different context:
thank you so much for your concern. Actually I slightly regret having written so fully as I think I left myself open to misinterpretation. My health is absolutely fine. I had quite a difficult start to the year because I suffered what I described as PTSD (post trauma stress disorder). It was helpful for me to use that term because it described something which was happening to me at that time. I (as most of you know) had a very traumatic childhood, involving physical and sexual abuse as well as dealing with having a mother who had mental health problems. So, over all i reckon i am amazingly sane and well adjusted all things considered. Anyway, every now and again i need to deal with the fall-out from this. In the 1980s I had therapy which helped me to deal with the emotional, psychological results from this early conditioning. This time round it was more physical. I had been having some cranial osteopathy and the belief in this system of alternative healing is that physical trauma remains in the body (especially repeated trauma which mine was). I think the work I did on this at the beginning of the year "released" memories held in the body, which was very strong and tiring because I was sleeping very badly.
due to all this, I decided to cut short my world trip and (as we know) did not visit the USA nor Mexico. I had been traveling already for over 4 months (leading retreats, giving talks, leading order events and seeing people) and I was not sleeping and was dealing with these physical sensations. any of those things would have been challenging but all together proved too much even for someone with my energy and stamina. So, I decided to give myself a break and come home early. This was a very good move as it gave me 6 weeks unstructured time during which I had a solitary holiday on a scottish island and attended a wonderful meditation retreat which had a great effect on my practice. I did have a traumatic time I think because I had given myself the space to do that. This period of PTSD lasted until the late summer - around september I think. However from june onwards I was following a full schedule as well of teaching and centre visits etc. Though I struggled at times (mainly lack of sleep) I functioned fine and my physical health was absolutely fine. One good thing which has come out of this period for me has been learning better how to give myself gaps in things and take a bit more personal space within the busyness of my life). I am someone who will always live with the fact that I had a very traumatic childhood. That is my life, that is who I am and I know well how to deal with this.
So, while I appreciate your concern I do think that my health and energy is pretty good. In fact for someone in my late 50s and given the amount that I do I'd say it was very good.

so, end of quote. i share that here because i did share some of the stuff going on at the end of the year.

and now, near the end of the year i have been appointed (think that's how to put it) as international order co-convenor. this has been an ongoing theme since late spring when dayanandi decided to stop being women's order convenor of the west (i.e. outside india). i was approached to see if i was interested, as were some other women order members. the order was consulted and some chapters and some individuals responded. all were favourable to me taking the appointment though some had concerns about the process and some had concerns about me - while still thinking it was a good idea that i took it on. they were concerns around what had been going on earlier in the year (the above quote is from my response to a chapter expressing this concern). there were others around how much i already do, how busy i am and some around my tendency to irritability. fair cop really, all of them. anyway, i responded as best i could to the more personal ones and mahamati (the other convenor) responded to those about process. i do think we have work to do on this area of process and mahamati and i are keen to do that.

oh and i dyed my hair!

anyway, i must finish there as i have an appointment to see a genius! problems with ipod and macbook synching

happy new year to all when it comes.