We will be preparing for the Online ISM Retreat this month, which is a most exciting time, and in general April promises to be very busy, so there certainly will be conflicts. It will be good to face any conflict with a light heart, armed with this Theme!

My strategy for doing things differently is to not puff up to cover up for either fear or sense of inadequacy. ;)

Please enjoy Lady Elizabeth's inspiring sharing!

With all my love,
(BH)
Milen

~~~

My dear friends,

Happy full moon! Happy month! Happy April!

It's been a full month since I arrived in Bali and life has turned out in unexpected ways. Last year when I was here, I spent a quiet time healing mind, body and soul. It was fairly quiet and mostly peace-full.

This year I had hardly arrived when I started to receive deadlines from the auditors! First, it was a vat return, then it was a month end, then it was an audit request for the year end, then it was another month end - and so I found myself on a day-to-day basis getting stuck at my desk instead of being out and about doing things any other tourist would.

I started to feel a lot of inner conflict and there were some times when I felt quite overwhelmed and hard done by. Lol! Normally, these requests wouldn't affect me at all because it's the nature of the work that I do having been a deadline kid since I was 17. It comes with the job. No surprise there but this time around I was finding it quite intrusive.

I needed new knowledge!

What I saw was that this year my spiritual family have all arrived in Bali and we are traveling for the first time together at this time of the year - all living in the same neighborhood, all in our own accommodation, which is very different from attending a retreat or a conference together.

We aimed to spend a lot of time together with activities and meetings and I wanted to dedicate my time to this special space that we were in. Yet day by day I was being distracted by all the daily doings from the auditors. There were times when I felt overwhelmed with what my diary looked like.

Until one day very early on in the process I decided to cooperate intelligently with my dreamer to find out what the conflict was REAL-ly all about.

My aim - to use the conflict to get to the harmony which means that I had to practice intelligent cooperation -that is, between my inner male and inner female. In digging deeper I was resenting not being able to spend more time with my friends.

We've had anything up to 30 years together as friends. A friendship is the hardest relationship that there is on this planet to build because as a friend you can leave at any time there is conflict - and you don't have to come back! Whereas with a biological family nobody's going anywhere, so it can be less difficult to work with family conflict.

So what I discovered was that I was feeling excluded from certain family activities. This did not surprise me as I had often experienced this sense of exclusion in the corporate world and particularly because I've been working in the male world since I was 17 years old.

In those days I would conceal how I was feeling. I wouldn't express it to anybody, the resentment would increase and obviously it would come out in different ways, but I never let on that I was actually feeling hurt.

But I trust these males in my life with my life and so I knew that none of them were waking up in the morning every morning with a specific intention to hurt me so maybe there was a different way to look at things if only I would share how I felt. I prepared myself with the intention that my approach was to find out what the new knowledge was - there's something that I was missing. There must be a third picture that we can create - the missing link, the new knowledge.

And so on that Saturday morning I expressed how I felt and it was not long before we started to explore as a group, knowing that our intention was to uncover the new knowledge.

During and after our explorations, I felt at peace knowing that I had got all off my chest. The conflict was out in the open and we now had a new way of relating to each other, a new way to explore.

“Because of people's low self-image, the Law of Harmony through Conflict is mostly ignored. Instead of men and women welcoming the challenges in their lives, they tend to bemoan their ill-luck at having so much conflict to cope with. Yet, as we have already pointed out, without conflict the evolution of awareness would cease, and life would rapidly become empty of all meaning and purpose. To understand this is really not very difficult, provided that we look at life with total honesty, for if we do, we quickly enough come to realise that any conflict situation is merely an opportunity to practice intelligent co-operation, either with another person, or simply with the world around us”

Have fun with our theme this month, my friends.

With all my love and warm Bali hugs,
Elizabeth