For as long as I can remember I've felt trapped inside a bubble that was so real I almost felt like I could reach out and touch it, push against the membrane it created around me. When I was a child it seemed to surround the village in which I was growing up and I felt suffocated by it; I desperately wanted to break out of it, to expand the narrow horizons of my world.
The desire to escape the village and the bubble was overwhelming and was one of the reasons I opted to join the police. I saw it as an escape, but I also believed that I would be able to help people and somehow contribute to making the world a better place. Silly girl! What I discovered though was the bubble followed me and the effect of joining the police was to make the membrane become thicker and to contract around me. An unhappy first marriage contracted it even further.
I knew there was so much more beyond the membrane, a whole different world, a different way of living and so much more I couldn't identify. I used to envy the wintering seabirds that came in land and wished I could take to the sky and soar with them, totally free. That was what my soul was crying out for – 'Freedom'.
My nervous breakdown set me free of both the police and marriage and for a while the membrane expanded and I could breathe again, but I know that I can't escape it entirely. Even when I thought I had set myself free from the way of living in the UK, where it's all so driven and materialistic, I discovered that the bubble was still around me in Sri Lanka. For a while I couldn't reach it, but as my depression started to take hold again and circumstances became difficult here I began to feel trapped and the bubble closed in pretty rapidly again. I tried to last as long as I could, but in the end it got too much and I fled back to the UK where I thought the freedom that we experience in the west would alleviate the suffocation. It didn't.
For the last 8 years I've been exploring my spirituality and trying to 'walk the spiritual path'. Most of the time I manage to stay on it, but sometimes I stumble and sometimes I get lost and stagger off in the wrong direction. In the last months I've observed my bubble from a spiritual perspective and I realise that I can control its dimensions by altering my perceptions of things. But I think that I have discovered something far deeper about this bubble which is that I am actually sensing the membrane between this reality and all the others. There is a definite connection between my opening spiritually and the vastness of the space within my bubble which allows more in; when I've got lost along the way is when it shrinks to remove any room for other possibilities. I also think I sense it so strongly because I remember an existence where I lived beyond it, where there were no restrictions and where I could move a pencil just by looking at it. I never understood why I couldn't do that as a child.
That recognition and acceptance has pushed the boundaries of my bubble to where I can hardly feel it anymore. I have room to breath, I don't feel trapped and there is so much space for new possibilities.
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