The Art of being Conscious in this Hay universe
Elena V Nezhinsky's Blog

Recently, I found myself in a situation that brought up a feeling I hadn’t experienced this intensely in a long time. I was responsible for the outcome. I had invested a great deal of time and energy into it. The consequences affected me directly — and yet at a certain point I realized I could not simply step in and fix what was going wrong. I was furious. Later I started wondering why the situation had affected me so strongly. And I realized that the situation itself was not the real issue. I recognized an old feeling: your energy is invested, the responsibility is still yours, but the power to change what is happening is not in your hands. That feeling can appear in many forms — in relationships, at work, with money, or inside any system we become dependent on. As long as everything is working, the arrangement may seem perfectly fine. It is only when something goes wrong that you discover how much power you actually have over what happens next. I also realized how many ways I used to have of adapting to situations where I had very little power to affect what was happening. You can shut down. You can detach. You can tell yourself that nothing terrible is happening. You can tolerate something far longer than you should. Eventually you can become so accustomed to having no influence that you stop noticing its absence. At one time, some of those strategies really did help me survive. But eventually protection can become its own limitation. And right now I have this image of a big wet dog finally climbing out of the water and shaking itself off. Drops are flying everywhere — old fears, the habit of adapting, unnecessary caution, other people’s expectations, and that old sense of powerlessness that I accepted for far too long as an unavoidable part of life. But now I have a very simple rule for myself:  If I cannot influence what is happening, I need to have a way out. If I cannot leave, I need to have a real say in what happens. And if I have neither, I no longer stay there.

Yesterday morning, while I was setting up my purple tent at the farmers market, a woman approached me. I had almost finished and only had two tapestry walls left to hang. “Did you come to see me?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. “I just need to finish these two walls. Come back in about five minutes.” She agreed and walked away, but never came back. I don’t know why she didn’t return. Perhaps she changed her mind about bringing a personal problem to someone she had never met. During our brief exchange, I could see that she was nervous. Sitting down with a stranger and speaking about something vulnerable is not always easy. But her disappearance touched something unexpected in me. I wondered how people might perceive me when they see the purple tent, the runes, and the words Runic Diagnostics. Do they imagine that I enter some mysterious state or communicate with invisible beings? The thought made me strangely sad, because it is so far from the way I work—and from who I have been throughout my life. I do not enter a trance or communicate with invisible beings. When I draw the runes, I feel nothing unusual—only a deep neutrality. In that sense, the process can look surprisingly ordinary: I draw the signs, study the configuration, and information about the situation begins to emerge. I am an engineer by education and an analyst by nature and professional training. Before I began working with human lives, I worked as a systems analyst. My job was to enter a complex system, understand its architecture, identify the relationships between its different parts, and see where something was no longer functioning as it should. That is still how my mind works. Even during years of intensive meditation, I remained grounded in direct experience. Vipassana meditation requires a rigorous kind of attention: you keep returning to what is directly present—the body, the breath, physical sensation—without disappearing into imagination. The natural world is filled with patterns. You can see them in the veins of a leaf, the spiral of a shell, the branching of trees and rivers, and the movement of larger natural cycles. Forms that appear separate are often expressions of the same underlying principles. Human beings have always observed these patterns. Over time, they developed different symbolic systems to describe relationships that were otherwise difficult to see. Astrology looks at relationships between planetary cycles and human experience. Other systems work with numbers, images, geometric forms, or ancient symbols. The existence of a symbolic language does not require spirits. A person who can recognize patterns within a complex system is not necessarily communicating with strange entities. Sometimes they have simply learned how to read a particular map. The runes are the symbolic language I learned to read. For me, they are also ancient living forces—fundamental movements that can be observed in nature, in the psyche, and in the unfolding of real events. Before I ever used them diagnostically, I spent years observing how these forces operated in my own body, mind, relationships, and life circumstances. When I learned to use the runes as a diagnostic instrument, I first applied the method to my own life, then worked with people I knew, and eventually with clients. I continued testing the information against what was actually happening, learning to distinguish what came through the symbols from my own assumptions and interpretations. When I draw the runes for someone, they reveal the architecture beneath the visible problem: opposing forces, hidden motives, blocked movement, unrealized possibilities, and the deeper pattern connecting events that may appear unrelated. Then my analytical mind, my experience with people, and direct conversation all come into the work. We look at the person’s actual life. We ask questions. We examine what fits and what does not. We bring the information back into concrete reality. I will never know why the woman walked away. But that brief encounter showed me that I carry a fear of being mistaken for something I am not. Perhaps the purple tent and ancient symbols make the work look mysterious from the outside. There is mystery in it. I cannot explain why these particular signs provide such precise information about a human situation. But mystery and fantasy are not the same thing. My work is grounded in attention, observation, pattern recognition, and an honest conversation between two people. No spirits are summoned inside the purple tent.  There is only a person, a real life, a difficult question—and our attempt to see clearly what is there.

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One day, a woman walked into my purple tent—the kind of person who usually comes to the Sunday market for vegetables, fruit, honey, and bread, not to sit down with me for clarity on whatever is going on in her life. She was well in her seventies. Her life was established. She had investments, several rental properties, and from the outside it would have been easy to assume that everything was fine. Women like her usually don’t walk into my little circus tent. They already have their own system in place—doctors, attorneys, financial advisors, people they call when something goes wrong. That Sunday, I was working at the market as usual. I had just finished setting up my tent when I stepped outside and noticed a woman on the other side of the parking lot. She was looking at me as though something inside her was saying, Go over there, but she wasn’t quite sure. I looked at her and smiled. She, as if she had stopped resisting, walked toward me. She looked distressed. She was sweating from anxiety and almost shaking. She was in such a state that she was willing to try almost anything. That is how a woman in her eighties, who would normally have had no reason to walk into my purple tent, ended up sitting across from me. She sat down and began telling me a story that sounded like a bad dream. Her husband had died. She was living on income from a few rental properties they had invested in together years ago. One of her tenants was an attorney. And now he was suing her. That first day, she was so confused and overwhelmed that it felt as though life itself had simply blown her into my tent. We talked for a long time. After looking at the situation, I told her that selling the apartment now did not look like the right move, it would only add to her stress. I was worried that if she kept pushing in that direction, she might end up in the hospital. I didn’t tell her that, I just suggested to take the apartment off the market. About a month later, she came back. This time, she came specifically to see me. She said, “At first I didn’t believe you. I thought, how can I not sell it? The easiest thing would be to sell the apartment and get this man out of my life.” She tried to sell the apartment, but the tenant made it difficult. Showing it to a potential buyer required certain legal paperwork through her attorney, and every time that happened, it cost her hundreds of dollars. After several attempts to show the property this way, she did end up in an emergency room with heart palpitations and high anxiety... And then tenant made her an offer to buy the apartment himself—far below market value. She began looking differently at everything that had happened over the previous months and suddenly she saw the whole picture. All the expenses, restrictions, and pressure had been leading toward one point: the moment when she would become so exhausted and frightened that she would finally agree to his terms. And something changed in this tiny woman. She said to me, “I understood what you meant that day. I decided I’m not selling this apartment. I’m going to fight for myself.” She decided to sell another property, raise the money that way, and fight for this apartment to the end. The woman sitting in front of me was no longer the same person. The first time she came in, stress had made her almost helpless. Now the strength she had probably carried through her entire life was back. There was a spark in her. A determination to restore justice for herself. She is tiny. But she is a lion. I have enormous respect for her. I told her I wanted to share it even in our small local community, because I think there is something here worth seeing. She was happy for me to do it and gave me permission to tell her story. After meeting her, I started thinking about women of her generation, women now in their seventies and eighties. They have lived enormous lives. They worked, raised families, built things with their husbands, saved money, bought property, invested—often for one very simple reason: so that when they became old, they would remain independent. Today, we look at them and sometimes see only one word: landlord. She owns several apartments? Then she must be wealthy. Privileged. And this is where something begins to happen to our ability to feel another human being. I understand why laws exist to protect tenants. I know there are landlords who abuse their power. I am not trying to turn this story around and present landlords as some newly oppressed class. But sitting in front of me was one particular woman. She is is that last stage of her life now. Her husband is gone. She is alone. And now she has to navigate courts, attorneys, contracts, and a tenant who, because of his education and profession, understands that system far better than she does and knows how to use it. He is an attorney himself, so he can prepare his own legal paperwork. Every response on her side means another bill from her lawyer. And he decided to use that advantage. Her pain was real. She told me how difficult it had been to find an attorney willing to defend a property owner, and that, from her perspective, the system already sees someone like her as a person who has enough money and enough property to protect herself. And suddenly I saw how easily we do the same thing. We stop seeing the human being once we have decided which social category they belong to. Tenant—vulnerable. Landlord—powerful. Poor—deserving of compassion. Rich—they’ll be fine. But human life does not work that way. Sometimes behind the word landlord is a tiny woman in her eighties, shaking from confusion and powerlessness. And sometimes the most important thing you can do for her is to help her find her own strength again.

A couple of days ago I posted a story, and afterward I noticed that my heart was pounding. The article took about six hours of my life. Six hours of attention—rewriting, cutting things out, putting things back in, checking whether one sentence changed the meaning of another. The story itself wasn't complicated, but there was a real person behind it. When someone tells me something important about their life, especially when they are vulnerable, I take that seriously. And when I later write about them, even with their permission, something in me becomes extremely alert. Did I tell it truthfully? Did I accidentally make the person smaller than they are? Did I turn them into a victim? Did I make them into a hero because it made the story better? Did I use their life to make my own point? Sometimes one small detail can change the entire feeling of a story. I removed quite a few legal details from the article I was writing. Some of what I deleted was interesting, and some of it helped explain what had happened. But at some point I realized that if I kept all of it, the reader might begin analyzing the legal case instead of seeing the woman. And I wanted you to see the woman. Writing about real people never feels casual to me. I want the person to still be there when I am finished—not reduced to a symbol, a social category, or material for an article. A human being. I have also been writing about people I meet at the Carmel Valley market, where I am with my Purple Tent every Sunday. And even with these small stories, my heart sometimes pounds when I press Post. I care about the story, but I care even more about the person behind it. ~~~~ The link to the story about this woman: https://www.elenanezhinsky.com/she-is-a-lion

For a long time, my way of knowing came through practices. Meditation, yoga, silence, direct investigation of consciousness. But even that had a beginning. Before I was a year old, something happened that I can only describe as a complete shift out of the body and into Consciousness. Along with it came an extreme sensitivity. The environment I was growing up in did not feel safe enough for that sensitivity, so I shut down. In a way, that explains why I could not really begin with people. There was too much identification with the character, too much sensitivity, too much protection around it. So first I had to go inward. Spiritual inquiry and practice became the way to step outside that character enough to see it. Then life changed the curriculum. My learning began to come through circumstances. The character had to be dragged through life for a while, so to speak, and tested there. Choices, losses, changes of direction, consequences. A lot of learning happened alone, but no longer in the protected space of practice. These days, I seem to learn most through relationships. Not only intimate relationships. Friendship, work, clients, collaboration, family, strangers. Some interactions are easy. Some are confusing. I am learning. Interesting, for many people the order seems to be almost the opposite. They begin with relationships and all the mess that comes with them. Then circumstances force them to question themselves. Eventually they may turn toward spiritual practice or inner investigation. Apparently I needed a different sequence. First, get out of the character enough to see it. Then let the character be trained by circumstances. Then bring in other people and see what happens. Some of it goes beautifully. Some of it goes crooked. Seems like this is my current practice.

The Analytical Mind, Awakening, Ancient Forces, and the Return to People