This is what Jennifer bought me for my 60th birthday.

Hand crafted by wonderful Sydney jeweller John Tarasin.

The scallop shell design is based on the large shell on the side of the Santiago Cathedral. I gave John the shot below and he worked off that.

If you want John to make a piece of Camino jewellery for you, I can put you in touch. He's been a friend for many many years, and is an extraordinary craftsman and artist.

The ring is so special. I just love it. It won't leave my finger now, ever.

Thank you, beautiful Jennifer.

I listen carefully to words.  The words people use, and the words I find myself using, are endlessly fascinating to me.

Here is an example – yesterday I overheard Bill, effusive in his appreciation of help from a  work collegue  say: “I am eternally grateful to you.”

It struck me as an odd thing for him to say for two reasons –

1. Pre-camino Bill would never have used the word “eternal” or “grateful” and –
2. The expression “eternally grateful” itself.

How does such an expression exist in our thought processes? We, as a group of human beings believe ourselves to be finite – we are born and then we die. It’s a consensus belief, one we all agree with.  In fact we often say that death is the one thing we can be sure of.

And yet we carry this expression eternally grateful in our thought and language. But in this expression we acknowledge the opposite. We acknowledge our ability to be grateful to another person for all eternity. We say I am eternal and you are eternal.

How is it possible for us to carry an expression like this within our group thought structure?  It goes against all society’s accepted ideas of our finiteness. It denies “death” as a possibility. And yet it exists within our language.

Could it be that when we say “I am eternally grateful,” we are remembering who we truly are?

Eternal beings…?

So the feedback you gave me was very encouraging, thank you!

Enough for me to now start giving this some serious consideration.

What I'm thinking is this –

• The Camino Portuguese, starting in Porto.
• Approx 250kms in 2-3 wks. (Would need to lock down a schedule)
• No more than 20kms a day most days.
• Group to be approx 15 people.
• Camino Portuguese is relatively flat and a very beautiful walk.
• http://www.caminoways.com/destinations/camino-de-santiago/portuguese-way—rural-portugal-unspoilt-scenaries.html
• April 2014
• Schedule permitting, Sister Clare would be involved, doing Centering Prayer sessions daily for anyone who wanted to attend.
• I would do daily photographic tutorials, and be available during the walk each day for photographic advice.
• My wife Jennifer would be there as well. She is a “sensitive,” and would be on hand to discuss PGS etc, as would I.
• We would have a mini-bus to drive people to the next stop if they wished.
• Tour costs, yet to be determined, could be structured on a land only basis, or could include international flights and all up cost.
• The tour would go through a registered and experienced travel agent who has done many of these kind of spiritual tours in the past.
• If possible, I would like to try and structure the tour to include a visit to the Bom de Jesus church and grounds in Braga. ( although it's off the traditional Camino route)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bom_Jesus_do_Monte
• Accommodation would be private albergue standard.
• Ending of course in Santiago, so you could get your Compostela.

Please let me know your thoughts on all this, in particular doing the Camino Portuguese.

This is a gift my wife Jennifer gave me, some time ago.

It's a mantra, and it's very simple,

But incredibly powerful.

It's for when you've had a bad or uncomfortable experience. For when you've had a disagreement or fight with someone. For when you're feeling angry. Or simply for when you need a pick-me-up.

It can be used when you're feeling low. When you have doubts.

It can be directed outwards, or inwards.

When things were tough for me on the Camino, I would say it over and over, and it would make me feel better.

See if it works for you…

I'm sorry,

I love you,

Please forgive me,

Thank you.

I got an intriguing email today.

It was from my travel agent, a bloke I've knowing for many many years. He organised my flights etc for my Camino in April.

He contacted me and asked whether I'd be interested in hosting a Camino tour. He organises a lot of spiritual tours to Brazil, for John of God followers, but said there would probably be interest in my taking a tour group on the Camino – for maybe two weeks or so… not necessarily the whole pilgrimage.

I'd not given any thought to this kind of thing – but as you all know, I have from the outset approached the Camino using my PGS to guide me.

I'd not intended for this blog to be of interest to anyone other than family and friends, I'd not intended to keep it going, or to start a forum, and I'd not intended to write a book. I've just been guided by my PGS with all these choices I've made.

And so when this email landed in my Inbox today, I just followed my PGS and it said I should take it further.

So, I thought I'd seek your feedback –

Would any of you be interested in coming on a tour that I would lead? I would make it a PGS The Way tour, and so we'd all be using our intuition on the tour, and I'd teach you how to do that.

I'd also teach you how to use a camera too!

It would all come down to cost, of course, and I'd need to figure that side of things out – but in the first instance, can you let me know if it's of interest?

I'd be thinking mid to late April next year, and a small group of between 10-15 people. No more than that.

The way I see this, the Camino – and my PGS – has just put this in front of me as a possibility. Let me know if you think it's a good idea.

Bill

This blog follows on from the blogs on hoarding –

Fear of Lack – 

We all suffer from this fear. Probably even Rupert Murdoch suffers from it.

One of the greatest fears of lack is fear of lack of money. That’s a big one for a lot of us. There’s an argument to be put that fear of lack in fact is a positive motivation for you to get out and do things – to be more productive.

That it spurs you to create, and that it’s like a cattle prod that kicks you into gear, or keeps you energised. Keeps you focused.

I don’t agree with this.

Then there’s the fear of lack of love. We all have this fear too. We have a need to be loved. But some of us fear that love being withdrawn from us – through death, or through separation, or because we don’t trust it. And so we push it away.

We push away those that are trying to love us, because we don’t read the signals right, or they don’t express their love in a way that we understand, or can fully appreciate.

Then there’s the fear of lack of potency. This is most clearly reflected in our being scared of growing old. We hanker for our youth, when we believe we were at our most potent, whether that potency is reflected in physical strength, our capacity to love, our capacity to provide for those that we love, our capacity to be capable and competent.

At the basis of this fear of lack is our mistrust that we will be provided for, that we will be nurtured, that everything will be okay. Perhaps we’ve had some bad experiences, and it’s tarnished our glass-half-full approach to life. We now see the glass as being cracked, and leaking like a sieve.

Rupert Murdoch I suspect might wake up in the morning, in luxurious surroundings more magnificent that we can ever comprehend, and he might have gnawing fears just as we do. Does his wife love him (clearly not), do his children love him (depends on his how his will is written?), is he getting too old to run his company proficiently, are his shareholders happy with the way he’s running things?

None of us, no matter how rich or powerful, are protected from our fears of lack.

I have written this before but I’ll write it here again – and I believe this most powerfully:

WE ATTRACT WHAT WE FEAR THE MOST

If we fear lack of money, then we’ll go into lock-down mode. We’ll become tight and defensive, we’ll be anxious, we’ll become moribund with fear, we won’t spend, and we’ll close ourselves to opportunities and possibilities.

Our anxiety and our fear will push people away from us. Some of those people could be existing clients, or people offering business opportunities. But who wants to work with someone who’s always uptight and scared of being poor?

As well, our fear mentality will close down our creativity, and our capacity to produce and originate new ideas, new products. In other words, we will attract what we fear the most – we will attract a diminution of income streams. We will lose money, we will lack money, because that’s what we’ve feared.

Same with love.

If we’re scared that we won’t be loved, or that we’re not loved, then we’ll become aggressive, or maudlin, or we’ll lose sight of our true nature and try to be something we’re not so that we can grab or cling onto the love that we seek. And in doing so, we’ll push away that love. It won’t come near us.

Who wants to love someone that believes no-one loves them?

Same with potency. We all grow old. We all lose our physical strength, our youthful good looks. Our bodies lose their firmness, our skin becomes wrinkled. There is nothing we can do about this, other than stave it off for a while with cosmetic surgery. But that’s just the outside. There’s no cosmetic surgery for growing old on the inside – for holding onto crusty old fashioned beliefs. For thinking we’re old.

The only way to combat that is to change your thinking. See yourself as young, as being potent. Work a little harder to keep up with things. Don’t allow yourself to become old. You can make a choice in the morning. Are you going to wear jeans, or are you going to wear track pants?

Think about that.

What the Camino teaches you is that you will be provided for. It will keep you safe, housed, fed, loved. You will have everything you need. Unless you believe in lack. If you believe in lack, then you’ll get lack.

Isn’t it better to believe in abundance? Someone once said – Enough is as good as a feast. It’s the kind of pithy aphorism you used to find on daily desk calendars. But it’s actually true.

Enough is as good as a feast.

Hi all –

horrible spam attack tonight. I got into the spam filter settings in WordPress and tightened them up – and hopefully now that’s put an end to it.

Apologies though if you got inundated with email notifications –

Although I guess it wouldn’t have been a problem if you wanted to buy a Hermes bag!

Again, sorry for that –

Bill

The blog is being bombarded by spam tonight.

I've been doing everything I can to block it – but it still keeps getting through.

I'm very sorry for this – will keep trying to find a way to stop it. It's getting late here in Australia and I'll be hitting the sack soon – in which case I'll follow up again tomorrow.

There is a spam filter on this site, but obviously it's not powerful enough to stop this particular spammer.

It's driving me nuts.

Sorry.

Bill

Just to expand on the previous post –

I came back from the Camino eschewing plastic bags not so much for environmental reasons – although I think plastic bags are incredibly damaging, and in the oceans are killing all sorts of sea life.

No, my reason for not collecting plastic bags anymore was because I’d lost my fear of lack. 

I think fear of lack is at the heart of hoarding – you collect things, or hoard them, because you think there’ll be a time when there won’t be enough of whatever it is you’re squirrelling away.

It is like squirrelling – squirrels put nuts and food away for the winter – for a time when they know there will be a lack of food. In that instance, it makes a lot of sense. It’s been programmed into their survival DNA to keep the species alive.

Hoarding plastic bags doesn’t keep the human species alive. But it does stem from a fear of not having something when you believe you’ll need it.

What the Camino does is it forces you to face that fear.

You can’t hoard on the Camino – it weighs too much! The wonder of the Camino is that it makes you consider everything you’re carrying. And if something is unnecessary, then invariably you ditch it, because it’s additional weight.

The other wonder of the Camino is that it does provide. You learn to trust that when you need something, it will be there for you. You just have to trust.

So I came back from the Camino having lost that fear, and gained that trust.

I used to collect plastic bags.

I never threw out a plastic bag, and so consequently I had a closet full, and several drawers too. Stuffed into the smallest of crevices in the kitchen and laundry.

I was a plastic bag hoarder.

I never knew when I'd need a plastic bag, and I never wanted to be left short.

I used plastic bags the way other people used shoulder bags. I used plastic bags when I was travelling, instead of a toiletry bag. I used them to keep my dirty washing in, and to stuff into the sleeves of my jackets when I packed them into suitcases. A little trick to prevent wrinkles.

Just in these few sentences, you can get some idea of the multitudinous uses of plastic bags. Is it little wonder then that I hoarded them so assiduously?

All that came to an end though when I came back from the Camino.

I no longer had an irrational need to keep several hundred plastic bags in a cupboard where, by rights, saucepans should have resided.

I can't tell you the exact moment on the Camino when I shed myself of this need to collect plastic bags. I do know that during the walk, on the odd occasion I stayed in a swanky hotel, I did collect feminine hygiene plastic bags.

They were just the right size for my toothbrush.

Anyway, it's one of the great mysteries of the Camino for me – that I came back no longer needing to hoard plastic bags.

I'd like to tell you that I took all my plastic bags into the back yard and had a ceremonial burning. That didn't happen. There were so many I was afraid I would have burnt down the house.

But my wife and I have been slowly using them up, and soon there will be none. And I will feel a free man once again. Thanks to the Camino.