Well after almost two years of silence I am back. The years have not been wasted – I have been working on finding a way to create lasting change. My problem was that, after a world record, intense reading and some awesome courses, I still felt like little old me. Yes, I had found empowerment, but it seemed to only exist within the world of diving. I needed it to extend into any moment of any day, especially those moments where life got difficult (you know the one’s, where you get a phone call saying your husband was in a car crash and you feel the floor fall out from underneath you).

I knew that my world record held the key, it felt like a map, all I needed to do was decode it, then I could disconnect it from diving and be able to apply its lessons to my entire life. The result has been not one but two books, Conscious Enlightenment (which describes the journey and lessons I took from my record to create the change I was looking for and is still in progress) and then a work book called Living Enlightenment, which is something anyone can use to develop new habits of awareness and consciousness.

Asides from my world record there have been two other major influences in this journey of mine. The first is a book by the Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness – A Handbook for Living, which was my first real introduction to the concept of Enlightenment and the release from suffering it promises. The second was a series of courses without which I would never have been able to escape where I was. These are the Awareness courses run by Marc Steinberg through his company CCI (www.consciousnesscoaching.co.za). I can say that without those three influences, my record, that book and Marc’s course I would never have been able to get here.

So where is here? Here is a place I call Conscious Enlightenment. I found that the thing I feared most was not being able to control my life and I realised that I never would have control over the events I experienced. It seemed rather obvious when I finally got to this point, I had a lifetime of memories in which there was nothing I could do – watching my mother in intensive care, watching my husband to be battle to recover from his car accident. These were just two of those events where I felt totally lost. Instead of reaching for a therapist, I reached for my life coach and she asked me one question that really hit home, “What do I want? What do I want to be feeling?” In a moment she turned my life upside down. Until then I had always been focused on what I did not want. Until then I had been focused on things and events outside of my life to create a new feeling, a new set of experiences. Now I had no control of the outside world. If I wanted to escape the state of suffering I found myself back in I would need to stop focusing outside and focus on me. It was a scary thought. I did not know who ‘me’ was. I had never been taught to even look toward me for an answer.

That was when I knew what I wanted, the person I wanted to be was Enlightened. For me enlightenment held the answer. If I could just understand how to become Enlightened without having to sell up my life and wash myself in orange on a mountain somewhere.
The end result is Conscious Enlightenment. It is a practice that enables you to slowly transform your wisdom and experience into a series of practical habits with a focus on who you would be if you were already Enlightened. It is not about being Enlightened, that is a state of being I am still starting to slowly accept that one day I may get to, but rather, it is about becoming MORE enlightened.
Who would  you be if you were Enlightened you would be calm, at harmony, kindness, joy, laughter, trust, tolerance ? How would that change your everyday life ?
I wrapped all this into a practice called Living Enlightenment which allows you to start to practice, no matter where you are at. It uses a set of 21 Enlightenment Intentions (which are simple words that you can easily keep in your awareness during the day ) as focus points for creating change. The process leverages the skills I learnt as a Consciousness Couch and is based on the key learning’s from my world record. It is simple, although not easy (creating lasting, personal change is never easy).  Living Enlightenment is about creating choices in any and every moment because it’s only when you realise that you have a choice no matter what the moment that you can truly step into your soul and into your power and that is was Conscious Enlightenment is all about, creating authentic empowerment. 

So welcome to my new project, The Enlightenment Project.