Those of you who have heard me speak know that the process I’ve been through since writing The Mastery Club has been quite transformational. I went from a place where my family was in breakdown and I had effectively given up on my dreams as a writer to having a renewed and much stronger family and realising some of my dearest dreams.
The journey I have been on since I first began jotting ideas for The Hidden Order has been extraordinary – confronting – intense – unsettling, and it has honestly transformed my life – again! But before I share that, I’d like to go back in time so you can understand why and how I embarked on this journey in the first place.
I have always loved writing stories – to me, writing is one of the most god-like actions a person can do: with the stroke of a pen – in the olden days; tapping of keys today – one can ‘create a human being’ and even a whole world. I utterly love that creative process.
When I was eleven I was invited to join a Creative Writing Club, and an innocent exercise to write a list of words we liked and a list of words we didn’t like planted a seed in my mind that words have energy; they affect our feelings and state of mind.
Then, as a teenager, I began reading the books on my mother’s bookshelf, books with titles like The Power of Your Subconscious Mind and Life & Teachings of the Masters of the Far East – and I was captivated by what I read in those books.
My mother had had a very traumatic childhood as a Jew in WWII in Poland, and as an adult she began to accumulate this very interesting library because she had questions about life – Why are we here? How can people be so cruel to each other? How can one develop an inner authority rather than being subject to the whims of others?
Her books included true stories about people who were experiencing health or relationship or financial challenges who declared a certain kind of statement either aloud or silently or in writing, and thus transformed their lives. I was hooked. I became fascinated that we can use language to create imaginary worlds for the purpose of entertainment, and we can also use language to deliberately create our world, the world we are living in.
I began to declare some of those statements or affirmations myself, and then I would look around eagerly for a result – for my world to change, and mostly nothing happened. So I came to the conclusion that these ideas worked for those people in the books, but not for me. I was longing for mastery but I was increasingly living like a victim, in reaction to everything.
Until I hit a low point in my life when I felt like a complete failure as a mother, a writer, a wife. Out of desperation I began to work with these ideas more deliberately and more persistently. I told myself I was going to stick with the process of affirmations until I saw a result; I made it a lifestyle commitment to saturate myself with the ideas I wanted to demonstrate – I declared affirmations while walking the dog, had books in the loo and tapes playing in the car…
I wrote The Mastery Club around that time – we teach what we need to learn, right? I was coaching myself. I wanted to be masterful.
Why did mastery appeal to me? Because I wanted to win immunity from difficulty. The war stories I’d grown up with had alarmed me. I was troubled by what I observed around me. I wanted world peace and for everyone to be happy and safe. I wanted to get rid of my unpleasant traits and only be good. Who can relate?
In the process of writing The Mastery Club, I discovered the work of Dr John Demartini, and my whole premise for life began to wobble. My book began to shift direction slightly in response to what I was reading and experiencing of his material.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. When I began to apply the principles I had read about in my mother’s books with real commitment, I began to experience magic in my life. Slowly, situations that had appeared to be stuck were transformed, first on the home front, and then in my writing. Derek and I self-published The Mastery Club and the response I received was so enthusiastic that I was certain it would be an international bestseller in no time at all. I would be rich and famous and life would hum along!
The response to the book definitely began to support my changing sense of identity from failure to success and some magic really did eventuate in my life, for example, being given a free trip to Paraguay and a free crusie as a speaker… But I also found myself facing even bigger challenges and I often felt overwhelmed.
You see, today’s self-publishing author must wear a great many hats. Not only are we the creative writer but also the marketer – both online and offline, the publicist, the sales team, the administrator, the speaker, the product development department, etc. My life, over the last few years, has been a process of running from one boiling pot to the next, stirring this, turning that, doing my best to cover all of these areas as professionally as I could but making it up as I went along because I was learning as I was going. And, needless to say, there were delays and rejections and poor decisions.
So a bit of overwhelm… The international success remained ‘in potential’. In the wake of publishing a book called ‘The Mastery Club’, I was forced to face my fears that I would be perceived as a ‘failed master’; that I wasn’t capable of demonstrating what I was teaching, of walking my talk. I began to back-peddle; I wanted to very clearly delineate the difference: I’m a WRITER, not a Master. I write about this stuff because I’m a good communicator – but don’t expect me to demonstrate it.
However the old childhood urge to be a master wouldn’t let go. It’s as Caroline Myss says, once we are calibrated to a certain idea, we can’t go back. We resonate at a new level of consciousness and we see everything through that lens. I couldn’t go back and I had to unpack this idea of mastery much more thoroughly, and this process took me even more deeply into Dr Demartini’s work.
I had written stories and articles in my 20s and 30s that explored
– the duality aspect of life;
– that the world is our mirror (we see ourselves reflected in the people and events around us);
– that we are destined to experience what we judge;
– that living responsibly, as if we are the deliberate creators of everything that is happening in our lives, is the most powerful position we can take;
– that the purpose of life is growth, not happiness;
… but it wasn’t until I began to deeply study Dr Demartini’s work in my 40s that I found myself joining the dots between many of my intuitions and beliefs, and discovering how to live these principles.
His work made me face aspects of myself I didn’t want to face – but in doing so, I came to appreciate them. The principles he teaches made me face reality about how the world actually works. We hear that life ‘should’ be nice – we should have world peace, people/parents should treat us a certain way, etc., if there’s a God, He/She/It ‘should’ intervene and fix things and protect us – that’s a recipe for doing your head in. Because Life and people ARE a mixture of happy/sad, kind/cruel etc., and while most of us acknowledge that consciously, we are secretly addicted to a desire for a one-sided world.
In fact, I always thought it was our job to create that one-sided world – to change and improve the world – but as I studied Dr Demartini’s work, I learnt that the downside of life is not a mistake; it’s not an indication that things are ‘broken’ and need fixing; the difficulties are designed in. They are purposeful. They serve us. His work has, for me, seeded the question: What if the world is already in perfect order?
What if the thing that needs fixing or changing is our perception of it?
What if, when we can see the Order, we become so grateful and humble that we experience life in a state of grace?
What if circumstances are transformed not so much by our efforts to change them, as by our appreciation of them exactly as they are?
There is an immense degree of Intelligence in the cosmos, whether we are talking about the design of a human being in the way, for instance, that each body system mirrors the whole; the way food is coded with information about which body part it serves and heals; the way that the subatomic dimension mirrors the celestial. What makes us think that the Intelligence we witness all around us breaks down at the level of human experiences? What if every detail of our lives, the good and the bad, is there on purpose and it all serves us?
We’re all familiar with the Law of Gravity and none of us would choose to argue with it. We all know that if we leap off a building, unless we’re strapped to a hang glider, we’re going straight down.
On the other hand, few of us are really familiar with an equally valid universal law, the Law of Polarity, or another – the Law of Conservation, and most of us spend most of our lives arguing with those laws… and suffering the consequences.
The Hidden Order attempts to explain these Laws and Principles – through story – so that they are clear and make perfect sense and so that it’s easier to live in harmony with them. In brief:
• The Law of Polarity states that every single phenomenon has a positive and negative aspect. Sometimes we are blind to one of those polarities, such as when we view abuse as only negative, or a promotion as only positive, but the other (complementary) side is always there, albeit ‘hidden’.
• The Law of Conservation states that nothing is created or destroyed but merely changes form. Most people believe that they are the victims of loss and that things are ‘missing’ in their lives; Masters have the ability to track these changing forms and to recognize that nothing is ever missing.
Taking these principles all the way we eventually run into some confronting applications, as you will see in the book, and we can either say that the Law doesn’t work in that area, or we can assume that, since it’s a Law it must apply, and go look for how it does.
Masters are clear about these laws because they understand that mastery is not about cutting ourselves in half and tossing away the ‘bad’ bits; it’s not about condemning half of life. Mastery is about the centrepoint; the balance. It’s about appreciating both polarities equally, and consciously, deliberately, bringing oneself back to centre. As Dr Demartini says, it is the ability to find divine order in every event, to instantly recognize that every crisis is simultaneously a blessing.
I originally wanted to be only good and live in a peaceful world and be a master because of my fear and judgement of that other darker side of life; what I have found, paradoxically, is that the more I embrace and appreciate life as it is, the less fearful I am and the more smoothly my life seems to unfold.
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