By Elisa Novick
I am not going in sequence in reporting my travels, but with what is going on inside me, having returned from Europe and moved into the Hermitage at the Omega Institute. Outwardly life seems to proceed from past to future, but when we read it from other dimensions of awareness, actually we zig-zag around most of the time, and so that is the privilege I take to myself here.
As I look at the months leading up to the first leg of the Thriving Planet World Tour in Europe and the six weeks I just spent there traveling to eight places in four countries, facilitating six workshops, I am already looking for meaning and I suspect it will come forth in layers over time.
This journey for me began with a set of purposes: to do the Lightwork as guided, to bring more people and trees into the work I/we had already been doing, and for me to have a new adventure in my life. All of this took place, but there have been some unexpected learnings as well.
I look now at the many times in Europe I felt that I had gone past all endurance on the physical level, and the thousand little shocks each day of learning how to negotiate the various cultural aspects of each place and each person I was with. So many nights I fell into bed wrecked, only to resurrect myself the next morning.
I believed at the time that most of that fatigue was from dragging a heavy suitcase, walking further than I normally can walk with my somewhat arthritic body and the general assaults on my immune and nervous system, from being out in freezing cold winds on much of the trip, and cigarette smoke (Paris), diesel fumes, industrial chemicals, and bicycles whizzing by (Amsterdam), even neurological switching from the cars driving on the other side of the road in England. I knew also that being an instrument of transmutation of negative energies was part of it, and shifting plans and moment-to-moment decisions, as well as the business end of holding workshops.
What I didn’t fully take into account was something I teach, which is what all of us are doing all the time: coming into relationship. In the Laboratory of Life workshops I facilitate, it is all about coming into relationship, over and over and over. How we come into relationship, move out of relationship, the nuances of relationship. We are continuously fine-tuning awareness, having realizations about the patterns we have learned and created, and then dismantling, refining, enhancing or re-creating these patterns. We put on display themes that present in life, from the micro- to the macroscopic, and the new learning comes through the relationships.
Everywhere I went in Europe, I was in someone else’s world. I stayed in people’s homes, one apartment, a room in a Bed and Breakfast, a mom-and-pop-run elegant manor and a spiritual community/New Age center in a castle. My wonderful hosts and hostesses in each place were either clients or people I barely knew. Even the first week, in a rented apartment in Paris and the two nights I rented a room in Salisbury, England, I was in someone else’s space.
When one visits another’s place, there is so much going on, on so many levels. I want to be a good guest. She/he/they want to take care of me well. Everyone wants appreciation and validation. And relationships are always vying for a balance of giving and receiving. Each person or group has habits, ways of arranging households and schedules, kitchens, sleep time. Each has their tolerances of how much time they can be with others, how much energy they have for the various activities. There are night people and people who go to bed early, people who can sleep through anything and others who awaken at the slightest noise or light. In some households you shouldn’t flush the toilet in the middle of the night, in others you must.
And then there is the development of the relationship, the changing of the roles. We move from being relative strangers or healer-client, to learning about each other, sharing experiences as they show me their cities and towns, to friendship and/or colleagueship. With a couple of people I am present as they go through the transcendent experience of taking initiation with the spiritual line of energy I am part of.
I’m being myself and sharing myself, rather than just the mostly one-way energy of a counseling session. Yet I am still teaching most of the time, through stories and in demonstrating what I am doing energetically and spiritually as we go along. I’m present as they go through the cleansing and learning and transformation resulting from that teaching and the workshops and sessions we do. They are with me as I learn about their cultures, and go through my own changes as I absorb and integrate, as I struggle with the weather, stress, a very different diet and too much time walking in the cold. All in unusual intensity.
Relationships that might normally take weeks or years to develop, now forming over the space of a few days or a week, with the resultant growth of intimacy. By the time I leave we are close, they are sparkling, I am grateful, and then suddenly we are parted. I’ve spent more intensive time with each of these people than I do living at home with a partner.
We don’t always take into account how much our relationships, past and current, play through our fields, inform us and form us as we go through life. We take in and sort through impressions. Growing in mastery, we learn to choose or fend off or throw off impressions, those we take in and those we leave. Our dolphin-like senses receive the echos of the effect we’ve had on those we are with.
The processing, sometimes conscious, often not, can create a logjam if not fully completed. I feel now, as I continue to travel and form new relationships with people and places and hold new classes, with only short periods of rest, that I am living a current life while working to catch up with myself. It is a training camp in which I build strength, increase capacity and processing speed, and expand my loving to embrace it all.
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Elisa Novick, MSS does profound work as a healer, teacher, counselor, coach, minister, and facilitator of workshops and trainings in personal, professional, and spiritual development. She can assist you to clear personal, karmic and genetic patterns that have limited you and teach you exquisite attunement skills so you can become the magnificent master of life and Light that all of us are destined to be. Elisa has been assisting people in their growth since 1982 through her counseling practice and in facilitating over 1,000 workshops in holistic health, human development, family constellation, systemic constellation, organizational dynamics, planetary healing and spiritual awareness. You may email her directly at elisanovick [at] thrivingplanet [dot] org.
Hi Elisa: Would love to hear about some specifics about the individual cultures you visited, such as the foods, architecture, energies of the plants, trees, etc and different cultural nuances of the people you met. As someone who travels constantly for work, I’m always interested in any information/different perspectives travelers have.