I have been in Yorkshire for the best part of the week, to attend a five day course on behalf of the School. It has been odd to have little internet access and even my phone, which is usually a reasonable back-up, decided it wanted to laugh at me and refuse to co-operate, in spite of being in a city that is no doubt buzzing with wi-fi.

So it was no surprise to switch on the PC when I got home and find over 1100 emails gleefully jostling for my attention. And that is just one of the various inboxes….

It has, however, been a hugely productive week for the School… and a nostalgic one at a personal level. Being so close to my own home city it was, of course, inevitable that I would visit my mother and one or two places that have a deep root in memory. In a way, you could say that in the few hours at my disposal I relived the most poignant and formative episodes of my childhood.

‘My’ part of the city, the part where most of my early years were spent, is a fairly condensed area, with traces of many generations of my family. From my primary school to the place I learned to dance, from my great-great grandparents’ home to my mother’s, it is all very close… walking distance.

We had, of course, been working on the deeper principles upon which the School is founded and these were very fresh in my mind as I touched all these memories, happy and painful alike. Walking through the years in this concentrated fashion it was astonishing to see so clearly illustrated how the personality, in all its strengths and frailties, forms from our response to external events. And even more, perhaps, from our subsequent emotional response to those reactions. It is one thing to know it at an intellectual level, quite another to watch it unfold on the visual screen of memory when the emotions are engaged by the attachment to place, and the senses remember in vividness.

It is even odder when you realise that these memories are not truly accurate and objective depictions of events, but merely a memory of our perception of them, both at the time and amended, overlaid with acquired layers of experience.

It is quite impossible to wipe the slate of memory clean without also removing the lessons learned as a result of experience… and why would we want to? We have lived them, loved them or survived them, sometimes in utter joy, sometimes by the skin of our teeth. We have suffered the falls and bruised our emotional knees, but have, somehow, picked ourselves up and moved forwards again, carrying with us whatever we have learned from the experience… and often the seeds of further learning to come as we grow in time and understanding.

We can look back and feel again the fears, the pains, the laughter and the tears…but we are looking back. It is no longer now. The only way it can hurt us is if we attempt to live in it and allow it to shadow the present, allow the security of the familiar pain to rule the present. But we are stronger than that, if we allow ourselves to be. It is only the memory of fear that clouds our vision, no longer the fear itself. We observe from a distance.

It is true that there is a lasting effect, as all the events of the past have shaped who we have become today, through our choices, actions and reactions. Through love and laughter, through forgiveness and acceptance, through anger and fear. Yet we do have a choice, every second, as we stand at that ever-shifting crossroads that is the moment of now.

Why, after a lifetime of experience, should we stand and allow life to happen to us? It is your life, my life, and though we may not control the circumstances around us, we do control who we are within them.

One of the early exercises in the course we attended had us looking at people and defining our first impressions with a word, that single quality that shines out from each of us as we walk into a room. It was a useful thing to see through the eyes of strangers, yet most will only see one of the many masks behind which we hide our true selves. More telling still are those words that come from the mirror of friendship, if we take the time to feel them and understand what they are seeing. Yet there is only one person who can truly know who we are, seeing us without the masks and defences, the veneers we wear to mould ourselves closer to the perceived desires of those we love, and that is ourselves.

There is that still, small voice of inner truth within each of us. Even this we choose, so often, to bury ever deeper under negative emotions like guilt and self-blame, or we dress it in holiday clothes and pretend it is saying something other than it is. Yet, in our heart of hearts, we hear it regardless. And if we step into it, we find it is not a small still voice, but a great well of Light where we can Be ourselves and face our own reflection in Love.