Cobwebs

Ingleborough, North face

Our lives, especially those millions of us who live our lives with many metaphorical cupboards, will gather cobwebs on a regular basis. And in whatever way we might utilise these cupboards in our day-to-day manner of being, it is essential we clear the decks regularly – for we are only human after all and we’re not weatherproof to the power of thought.

Thought energy comes and goes – and yet the moment we enfold any thought energy unto our aegis, we personalise it and it then becomes part of our thinking. And from that moment on, our thinking populates the cupboards and the whole cobweb cycle commences.

When we come to clean house and home from time to time, one of the good exercises to engage with is to clean the cupboards, wipe the dust off the shelves and blow away the cobwebs. 

It is very much the same with our Inner House.

The Cleanse

The "col" between Ingleborough and Little Ingleborough

I’ve just returned from climbing the mountain Ingleborough in the Yorkshire Dales, where I grasped the opportunity to blow away some cobwebs of my own! These had built up over the summer months since June and eventually I knew that only taking some deeper breaths then blowing hard, which included some shouting out at the top of my voice, would send the stale and dusty filaments packing once and for all. It was a very cleansing exercise!

(NB – I made sure I was sufficiently isolated so that no-one could hear me, but myself!)

Wardrobes and Cupboards

In my article The Wardrobe from November 2013 - http://pjwhypno.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-wardrobe.html - I wrote about the metaphorical clearing out of old clothes hanging in our wardrobes. Clothes we might have been keeping for a rainy day, but discovering sometime later, after many rainy days had come and gone, that they were just a waste of space. A waste of space, stopping us from populating our wardrobes with new clothes – the clothes that will fit us NOW, the clothes that are in style NOW, and not the clothes that wear that musty smell of age.

Whilst our clothes should only ever be a transient label, our cobwebs are a current label of unkempt and unattended cupboards. Cupboards of experience, of ideas, of thoughts and perceptions and occasional shibboleths of a bygone version of ourselves. Even the recent bygone-ness of just a few months – as it was for me!

Trig Point!

My resulting experience was akin to being able to really take in and enjoy that very first breath of new fresh air! Now, all my senses could properly translate the data I perceived around me – instead of being sullied from within. 

And that’s the first thing we notice after clearing away the cobwebs. Next comes a sense of feeling everything lighter. You could almost say it is enlightening! The baggage is no longer on the journey with us – and we realise we never needed it at all anyway!

And, as I started back down from the (by now) cloud-shrouded Ingleborough summit, my first task was to find not only the right pathway, but also to notice the precipices that loomed out of the clinging mist. For all was not yet as clear as you can see in the photo of the North Face I took the following morning!

No longer the scrambled mind

Scramble at Trow Gill

My “newest” cobweb, spun on the way up the mountain, was how might I negotiate the scramble at Trow Gill on my return journey? For some crazy reason I’d forgotten to wear the knee support this day, and I know that going down any climb is much harder for me, as I approach the age of 71 only held together by various neoprene supports!

With the lurking doubts blown away and with plenty of breaths of fresh air flowing through the cupboards, it was quite a simple and straightforward exercise – whatever had I been thinking and worried about!

Afterthought

There is no doubt that the way we breathe is the springboard to blowing away every cobweb that might by lurking in our cupboards … and a whole lot more besides! 

Breathe well, dear reader!