The last few months have been absolutely frantic for Dan and I as we have gone back to being students of a new healing modality called D codes. This has been a wonderful learning curve and added a new dimension to our healing work. It hasn’t been easy though. The energy demands although they weren’t huge, were enough to send me into complete overwhelm after week 1!

This meant that I couldn’t interact or engage as much as I would have liked and as time crept on, the pressure only increased what with the course being shortened by a month halfway through, and assessments coming upon us faster than we had anticipated.

Now, as every good D coder knows, you need to be flexible enough to roll with change. And yes, we rolled accordingly – but outside of  D-codes other demands and responsibilities were piling up even higher and heavier than before.

By mid-January, I emerged from overwhelm enough to throw myself into the last four weeks of the course. I learnt a s##t ton and thoroughly enjoyed the experience, but it was a massive relief when it ended. Woo hoo and FREEDOM!

Except – NOPE! – outside pressures were still nearly flattening us and then… war started up. Wow! By this time, I was squashed flat under the weight of circumstances and the horrific events happening in the outside world just made it worse.  As for feeling free… it was a very distant memory.

However, I had been listening to various You Tube talks by Thich Nhat Hanh during this time and was very aware of my lack of meditation practice and the need to get grounded and back to the present moment.

He advocates something called walking meditation; walking slowly and deliberately, in silence, feeling the ground under your feet. On one of our local walks there was a time when Dan was talking but I (for once!) was not. Yes folks, it can happen! Anyway – I decided to concentrate on taking one step at a time and appreciating the world around me, instead of letting my mind (or mouth!) wander.

I was 4 steps in when I got distracted. Yes I am a terrible student of mindfulness! 😉 BUT that’s all it took for me to notice a difference. Thich Nhat Hanh was right. Freedom is possible if you dwell in the present moment, rather than the past or the future. Somehow in those few moments of mindfully taking each step I experienced the feeling of pure and absolute freedom. It was a revelation!

It was the understanding that right in that present moment – “the only moment” as ‘Thay’ would tell us – that I realised that nothing else existed. Not my worries about the future, or the heavy weight I was carrying – not my criticisms of self, or the stress of the world situation. Right in that moment I was completely free. And every time I wanted to feel that, I just had to be present for the next moment, and the one after that and the – wait – was that a squirrel?!

But anyway, the great thing about the present moment is that you can keep coming back to it over and over again and something like walking, which is repetitive, can help to remind you to return back to it with each step.

For all the Buddhists and mindfulness students out there, this may not be news! But for me it was an ephiphany. Freedom was right there within my grasp all the time. However heavy the burdens you carry, however big your problems, you can still escape it all for a moment, in each moment, in every moment.

When we exist in the present moment, we are completely free. It is what some might call the zero point field. The space where everything exists as potential and everything is possible. That is the true nature of reality.

It’s hard to remember when things are tough, so get into the habit of including some mindful steps when you’re out and about; it’s an easy way to connect with self and with the limitless field of potential that you really are.