 Dear Friends,
Welcome to our annual Star Titles collection – all your favourite titles from the last 12 months. We’re also proud to announce our latest Cygnus publication, which we have produced exclusively for you. It’s a book that’s on everyone’s reading list at the moment, and will have huge appeal to ‘What the Bleep’ enthusiasts, and anyone who wants to expand their awareness of some incredible biological processes only now being discovered. These discoveries provide incontrovertible proof that we are not frail biochemical machines controlled by genes, but powerful creators of our lives and the world around us. Entitled The Biology of Belief, this book was until now only available in the UK in a rather expensive American hardback edition. We wanted to make it more affordable for you, so we’ve published our own softback edition. Easy to read, and written by an expert in bridging the spiritual and the scientific, you’ll find it by clicking here.
Well, looking back over the past 12 months, it certainly seems as though far more than a year has passed! What a grinding process we’ve all been through. It certainly seems as though the Universe and our higher selves want us to hurry up, doesn’t it? This year, it hasn’t been enough for us just to ‘dissolve away’ obstacles to our growth; often, they’ve been torn away, ripped out in a way that probably you, like us, have often found rather painful, actually. Right now, we’re feeling like we’ve been vacuum cleaned, by a cleaner with particularly powerful suction.
Things seemed to come to a bit of a head for us when, in April, we had a really interesting workshop here, given by Manda Clements, during which she took us on journeys to reconnect with the innocence of our higher selves, and harvest the experience of our personal selves. Before going on the journey to meet our higher self, Manda asked each of us what was our deepest wish, so that our higher self could give us some light on how to realize it. Mine was very simple: just to be able to rest, and have more time to enjoy my family and home. This was something I was absolutely gasping for, but had no clue how to achieve. Well, then I went off on my journey and was rather surprised to meet my higher self in the form of a very big girl! In fact, she was so big that, while her feet were on the ground, her head was right up above the clouds. She was striding along in her seven-league boots, and nothing was difficult for her. When I asked her how to realize my dream, she simply couldn’t understand what I was making all the fuss about! ‘Just do it!!!!!’ she said. OK, I thought, but I still don’t know how.
Well, as normally happens when one ignores ‘instructions’, my body decided to communicate more forcefully the wishes of my higher self. I became ill. I’ll spare you the boring details, but the salient point is, I had a pain I couldn’t possibly ignore, even to sleep. And that’s when the penny finally started to drop. We could ‘just do it!’ Indeed, we had to! So now we’re in the process of passing on most of our routine tasks to other members of staff, with a view to spending only 30 or so hours a week working at Cygnus, instead of our traditional 50 or 60. Then we’ll have time to play – not just in our home and in the midst of nature as we’ve always wanted to do – but time to ‘play at Cygnus’, too: thinking, planning and being creative. As you can see in the photo above, taken during our recent holiday in Pembrokeshire, we are very happy in our new life! That permanent undertow of tiredness and anxiety has left us at last, and we feel free to appreciate and savour life.
We realized that so much of the pressure we had created for ourselves was due to what we now jokingly call PEST – Protestant Ethic Syndrome Trauma. The Protestant Ethic was so deeply ingrained in us that we felt guilty about resting and enjoying ourselves. Yet, we finally realized, what are we here on Earth for, actually? Why have we been given this unique opportunity to live a human life? Surely, when you’re given a gift so profoundly precious, you should above all, enjoy and appreciate it – delight in it, in fact?
We are often told that ‘it is better to give than to receive’, and of course that’s partly true. However, Geoff and I have now learned the very hard way, that if you don’t first receive properly, you can’t give either. So the task the Universe seems to be setting us at the moment is this: simply to receive into the warm tilth of our grateful and appreciative hearts all the seeds it has so graciously given us. Then, watered and fed by our delight, they will grow, flourish, and give abundant fruit.
With much love from Geoff, Ann and all of us at Cygnus
Photographs © Cygnus Books 18-Aug-2006
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