Geoff Thompson: Writer – Teacher – Martial artist

When I was struggling with my writing and that vital breakthrough was eluding me I remember thinking, ‘but I’m doing the work, why am I not getting the breaks?’ I felt as though I was constantly taking one step forward and one step back. So I meditated on it and in my reverie I was directed away from my actions and towards my talking. ‘Monitor the words you speak,’

I was told by my internal observer. So I monitored my words over a day and over a week and I was surprised to see that whilst I was very positive and doing the physical work demanded for successful living – up at 5.30 am every day, writing diligently, putting in the hours – I was not vocalising success.

I worked like a professional scribe, but I talked the talk of a recreational scribbler, some one that wrote at weekends and prayed for the lottery win of a Hollywood contract. My work was religious but my words were full with defeatist phrases; the usual, ‘I can’t break through,’ or the conspiratorial, ‘the system is against me,’ sometimes the self pitying, ‘I can’t earn any money at this,’ or even the desperately insecure, ‘no one seems to respect my writing!’ I was not talking like a winner, I was talking like a whiner!

So, having clocked the negative dialogue, I monitored and I changed my talk and I started to speak of winning, of success of gratitude and of aspiration. I drained the defeatist bilge, I eschewed the conspiratorial and I stopped whining like a beaten dog but…I still did not break through. Again I went back to that quiet place, where I closed my eyes and once again spoke to the Lord of Song. I asked, with no little agitation, ‘what am I doing wrong – I am talking the talk and I have been walking that walk for as long as I can remember and I am still not seeing the fiscal results.

This time I was directed to my inside man, ‘listen to your seed thoughts,’ I was advised. ‘they are the creation and they are destruction of your universe. Worlds are built with and worlds are bombed by your thinking.’

So I listened to my thoughts. And I was shocked; I heard a wild pack of disparate and contradictory mutts yapping inside my head, it was like Question Time in the House. One voice spoke of massive potential, another of doom, one talked about the dark and recessionary world, another of infinite galaxies, there was one brazen and courageous speaker that wanted to be an individual and challenge and question everything,  another was depressed and frightened and begged to be left alone in its comfortable place. My voices – and there were many – were not congruent, not with themselves and certainly they were not congruent with my external dialogues or my worthy actions. So I worked on quieting The House with cries of ‘order, order.’ I quieted the dissent, placing a top dog at the lead and dissolved all the yapping dogs that would not be brought to heel. And finally, after much work on my shadowy internal vocals, I brought a connection to my holy trinity – my thoughts, my words and my deeds – and my breakthrough occurred miraculously, as though it had been there all the time, waiting for correlation.

As Wael the poet says, We cannot have three until three has occurred, so until we find congruence between what we think, what we say and what we do, success will always be someone else’s lottery, and our lot will remain a purgatory of frustrated wanting.

Be Well.

Geoff Thompson.