Posts Tagged ‘awareness’
Your Child is a Guru
“Love conquers all things; let us too surrender to Love”
~Virgil, Roman poet and mythologist
A little over a year ago I culminated the journey of the Maiden and underwent the rite of passage that delivered me onto the path of motherhood. After 51 hours of labour I became the Mother, gifted with a baby boy who was healthy and bright and filled with magic. As all babies are.
This amazing passage was followed by dazed weeks of cuddling, waking, admiring and crying. Yes, crying. Sometimes I wept for joy and awe, sometimes for anger and confusion. There were so many questions, some related to baby, but many related to me. Okay, how do you get bright yellow poop out of crisp white fabric diapers? And, more importantly, WHEN DO I GET MY LIFE BACK?!?!?!
That was it, in a nutshell. Yep, spot the crafty, travelin’ hippie chick, now feeling saddled to a grindstone with no release in sight. No more writing, no more knitting, no more hiking…my life must be over now. Right?
My pregnancy had been all happy, it had been as “Ohm on a Mountaintop” as I could make it. But that was back when I had some control over my own days. This changed once my new baby was actually out of the womb and into the world. Since his arrival, my Motherhood was fast becoming a bit more of a “Silent Tears in the Bathtub” kind of journey. Not very happy at all.
I really thought this parenting thing would be all fun; kids laughing, everyone cooking together, playing hide-n-seek, decorating Christmas trees and reading bedtime stories. I never imagined a 6-month-old screaming bloody blue murder and tugging on my pant leg with snot streaming down their face while I tried, desperately, to make some darned oatmeal. “Am I am failure?” I would wonder. “Do my more pure, attachment parenting friends have clingy, angry babies too? Why can’t he just be humming in a corner, playing with his Ganesha statue or sit calmly and listen to my chant music? I mean, come on! This isn’t how it works, is it?”
Well that’s the truth of it. Babies are people too. They have personalities. They have moods. They have needs and wants and preferences. And they change as they get older. We are all human. Some days we are giggles and fairy tales, other days we are food throwing and temper tantrums. It is what it is.
Now, I wasn’t so much regretting my decision to have a child. We definitely wanted him in our lives, he had been planned and worked for. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was finding my way on this new and surprisingly more complicated path and not being able to find my own inner peace with all the changes. What I wanted was to make peace with parenthood, to not be afraid of it or overwhelmed by it, to be a better parent than had been passed down in previous generations of my and my husband’s families. But I also wanted to still be “me.” I guess you could say that I wanted to be a good parent to all of us, my son, my husband and myself.
But what to do with the tragic, shell-shocked, overwhelmed feelings that were dominating my days? I couldn’t ignore the truth of what I was feeling.
What I had to do was to go back to my base, which for me is always spiritual awareness. The spirit is always free and empowered and optimistic. So, I practiced quieting myself, over many days, taking a few minutes each day to listen within. And eventually my guides, or guardians, spoke, gently and clearly. They reminded me that I (my spirit) and my son (his spirit) had chosen each other as companions. We had chosen this journey of learning together and we had chosen this time and this place to meet up. And neither one of us existed in a bubble. We were to learn from each other. That meant that I am his parent/protector/teacher and that he is my spiritual teacher as well — my Guru. Our life together was to be the temple, or Ashram, of the Guru and it was therefore a sacred place of dedication and spiritual community.
In light of this message from my guides, I began to … Continue reading →
Impulse or Inspiration?
“Cleanse your emotions, passions, impulses, attitudes, and reactions. That is the essence of spiritual discipline as laid down in all faiths.”
~ Sri Sathya Sai Baba, South Indian Guru and Spiritual Teacher
While you are walking the path of spiritual development, slowly building a greater awareness of your spirit, personal motivations, actions and your effect upon the world, you are also learning to recognize the difference between a spirit-thought and an ego-thought.
The easiest way to phrase this is that you are learning to discern your impulses from your inspirations.
Sometimes these impulses are big things like the impulse to drink a case of beer at lunchtime or the impulse to jump in bed with a beautiful stranger behind your wife’s back. But often what we are faced with are the collection of small daily impulses that, when followed blindly, drain us of our energy, our focus and our self-esteem.
For instance, this morning, between the moment of waking, kissing my beloved, taking a sip of water, then using the bathroom (a sequence which took roughly 4 minutes) I had a total of four self-defeating and/or distracting impulses. All of which were completely unrelated to what my true spirit or a healthy, happy mind and body would desire in reality.
These consisted of several old friends such as: the go-back-to-bed monster, the fear-of-falling-down-the-stairs demon, the ghost of sugary-cereal-for-breakfast and the sucked-into-the-internet-inferno dragon.
Why do … Continue reading →
Knowing of the Divine Self
“I am convinced that there are universal currents of Divine Thought vibrating the ether everywhere and that any who can feel these vibrations is inspired.”
~Richard Wagner, 19th-century German Composer
The divine self is your inner life force, your true motivation for living. The divine self is what powers you and makes you wonder. It is the soul light at your core that chose to be incarnate at this point in time.
The divine or higher self is that part of you that is ever-aware. The divine self has been aware and thinking since your birth in this lifetime and since your birth in every other lifetime. The body and the physical realm, in which we dwell, are but a vehicle for the higher self.
You are here because you have chosen to be here and because the energy force, that is life and awareness, has lessons to learn and exchanges to make that can only be accomplished by taking human or manifest form.
All that is, is light.
Though it may seem as if the physics of incarnation, of being born and of living in the busy, colorful, physical world of manifestation would cut us off from knowing the divine self at our core, it does not … Continue reading →