Namaste Insights January 2014

Namaste Insights Brought to You by Namaste Publishing

The Essence of Relationship When Children Become Your Worst Nightmare Parenting “Insides” “These Kids Today” Trusting the Currents What Living a Lie Teaches Us about Truth: Reflections from the Movie Kumaré Reading Trusting the Currents in the Light of Out of Control

January 2014

www.namastepublishing.com

From the author of...

Dr Shefali Tsabary with

Eckhart Tolle

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The ESSENCE of RELATIONSHIP

From the Publisher

Constance Kellough

This edition of the Namaste Publishing ezine focuses on relationships, especially family and parent-child relationships.

Fundamental to any relationship is what we in our essence bring to it. I remember when in my youth reading the statement, “A relationship is only as strong and healthy as the two individuals are who make it up.” At that time, I snickered an unspoken, “Well, no kidding. Like obvious or what?” Now, however, this seemingly trite statement has a measurably sharper relevance and depth for me.

Your relationships all go back to the individual you are in charge of— yourself.

Have you ever pondered, “What’s my essence? What is it about me that makes me unique—makes me attractive, in the largest sense of this word, to others?”

In other words, what would others miss if you weren’t in their lives? What do you bring to them that they value?”

If you don’t yet have the answer to these questions, you’ll need to go on a journey of self-discovery. Who are you truly? What’s your life’s purpose?

People who truly know who they are have a compellingly attractive air about them—a charisma, an energy people gravitate to. In knowing who they are, they stand for something.

You’ve no doubt heard the expression, “Your actions speak so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” It comes from that great American Ralph Waldo Emerson. Usually, of course, it’s understood to mean that the person’s actions contradict their words.

Well, I’d like to put a new twist on these words. When your life aligns with your essence—your unique expression of spirit—it’s more powerful than any form, including the words you speak, no matter how eloquent and relevant they may be.

Can you define “essence”? No. Your beingness can’t be captured, can’t be confined by words. When it comes to the really big things like God, grace, love, spirit, essence, one has to agree with Lao-Tze when he said, “If you can define It, It is not that.”

Can you define the essence of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Jesus the Christ, your beloved? No, because their essence can’t be

contained by what they do or say, although what they do and say, as the observable “fruits” of their life, are pointers to their essence.

Your essence is who you are beyond name and form. And as individual expressions of the One Divine Self, we share both a common divine nature and our own unique expression of it.

That’s why the essence of a person such as Nelson Mandela was so powerful and pervasive. He conveyed in his essence what is divine in a human. We can try to capture that in such words as compassion, vision, courage, forgiveness, justice, and so on. Yet using these words still in no way defines his essence.

These are word forms and cannot capture that which is beyond form.

This is also why, on the collective level, when those we have deemed “great people” die, when their form goes, their essence is freed to be fully expressed and picked up by as many as resonate with it, whether alive at the time of their passing or those born in subsequent generations—and perhaps for thousands and thousands of years to come.

It’s curious that often who we truly are becomes best known and more impactful to others once the form has died. It’s as if the body contained, restricted who we are in our most essential and authentically powerful self. Is this why, when Jesus was nearing his death, he tried to console his apostles by saying that only if he went away could God send the Holy Spirit (John 16:7).

When you look at your beloved, what do you “see” beyond their form set against the background of the events and experiences of their life story? Isn’t it such things as their goodness, joy of being, tender heartedness, never failing forgiveness, and all-pervasive gentleness?

So if you feel you are in need of more meaningful, loving relationships in your life, you know where you have to start: cultivating the highest and best spiritual qualities within yourself. And then the law of like attracting like will bring into your life a person or persons who match this higher resonance. Once you embody it, you both

attract it and recognize it in others.

In truth, there’s nothing authentic you can ascribe to another that you don’t already embody in your essence. So when you see the good in others, you are just seeing your own essential good mirrored back to you.

In all our relationships, we should be looking to see and honor the essence in the other—to break out of our roles and be with one another being to being.

One of the most challenging relationships to do this is in the parent-child relationship, since the very strong role of parent can get in the way of relating to our child simply as they presently are—not as “our child,” but as a unique expression of the divine.

It’s an interesting exercise to imagine yourself wearing a robe for each role you play in life: wife, mother, boss, school teacher, sibling, grandparent, painter, neighbor, and so on. The robes are put one on top of the other, with the top robe representing the role you most identify with in your life, followed by the next most important role. Then imagine yourself throwing off a robe, one role at a time.

When you discard your first robe, let’s say the role of parent, what do you feel? Do you feel relieved of your responsibilities? Who would you be if you didn’t have those responsibilities? Do you feel frightened that without that robe you wouldn’t know who you were? If so, could you be so identified with this role that you have “become” it, so to speak, and in the process covered up who you truly are?

Continue to throw off the next robe and role, then the next and the next, until there are no more robes on your back. What do you feel like now, stripped

of all those roles, and with them responsibilities and certain ways of responding to others and life experiences? Is there a greater sense of freedom, clarity, and peace about yourself? Are you more readily able now to feel the pure essence of your being?

It’s through our relationships that we have the greatest opportunity to grow our essence, as nothing challenges us in the way relationships do. Here we are face to face, soul to soul with another. We have attracted the very people into our lives to mirror to us our goodness, but also areas where we are wounded and still need to heal. That’s why some of our most challenging relationships are those that aggravate us the most. In order for diamonds to become brilliant, they need to rub up against one another.

When we find ourselves reacting in a relationship instead of responding with awareness, this is a sure indicator that there’s something within us that still needs healing. Look at the person across from you then as a mirror showing you where to find that place to which you need to bring more self-love, self-understanding, self-acceptance.

It’s those closest to us—our children, our partner, our parents —who provide us with the most fertile fields to mine for our own growth. And the more challenging the relationship, the greater the gift it offers us in terms of a growth opportunity. This is what Ram Dass was referring to when he said to a group of his students, “If you think you are already enlightened, go live with your parents for two weeks.”

All relationships are a gift, and if “used well”—meaning to help us grow in love of self and the other—they will prove to be not only our greatest teachers but also our greatest treasures.

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THE LEAP softcover

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Meet Your Inner Grower eBook

Dr. Shefali Tsabary Author of OUT OF CONTROL

When Children Become Your

Worst Nightmare

When children misbehave, act in a juvenile manner instead of responsibly, talk disrespectfully to us, yell at us, or pitch a fit, it can be utterly frustrating to a parent.

If a child’s behavior deteriorates further—into failing classes, going behind our back, lying, or heaven forbid stealing—the connection we inherently have with them can quickly morph into anger, perhaps even rage. A part of us almost wants to disown them.

In other words, as a child’s behavior spirals downhill, the child we so love can become our worst nightmare.

Whether our reaction to such behavior is that of anger, guilttripping, grounding, or loss of privileges, the “discipline” we administer is rarely the last word on the issue. The child’s response isn’t usually, “You know, you make a really good point; I want to change what I’m doing.” Instead, the problem generally intensifies, taking one of three forms.

Some children become compliant, conforming to our wishes because they want to keep us happy or “please” us. Often only in midlife do such children wake up to the realization they are merely going through the motions of a life that was pushed on them. Children with this temperament may become a battered

wife, an abused husband, or a man or woman who experiences a midlife crisis because they sense the life they built isn’t at all true to who they really are. Life then feels meaningless.

Other children can’t be made to “fit in” quite so easily. In their case, the behavior we are trying to “fix” may go underground. They become sneaky, untrustworthy, deceptive, and perhaps mean and bullying to other kids.

Whereas we thought we were teaching them values such as generosity and kindness, we find them backhandedly grabbing a cookie off their friend's plate or saying the nastiest things to their sibling. Thinking we raised such a great kid, we find our “angel” has been lying to us about their homework and hasn’t turned in an assignment all semester.

The third way children react to many of the usual forms of discipline is to rebel—especially as they enter the teens. Drinking under age, doing drugs, engaging in early sex, and cutting up—or cutting out—at school become the norm, and we’re left wondering how a child from such a “good home” turned out this way.

In the worst case scenario, which can happen in connection with any of these reactions to discipline, a child may begin to self-harm. This can take a variety of forms, including bingeing, anorexia, cutting, and ultimately suicide.

Parenting has tended to revolve around either requiring children to “toe the line,” or letting them run wild as we tell them we want them to grow up to be a

“free spirit.” The evidence that neither polarity works is all around us in the confusion, depression, dysfunction, and hostility that mars the lives of so many of the children for whom we had such high hopes.

As a clinical child psychologist in New York city, I’ve had an opportunity to witness firsthand in countless homes how disciplining our children simply doesn’t work, any more than a laissez faire approach to raising children works.

Dr Shefali Tsabary

And, too, from my own experience with my daughter, I saw that none of the popular methods of raising children—the tricks and tips of the countless books on bookstore shelves—are truly effective. Which is what led me to awareness of a quite different way of parenting, which I call

“conscious” parenting.

What all of us desire for our children is someone who grows up to be aware.

By “aware,” I’m referring to knowing their own mind and being able to connect from the heart.

We want our children to become young adults who both hear their own inner voice and can express it. We want them to learn about themselves—what makes them tick, what’s unique about them, and what they truly enjoy. For only when a person values themselves, believes in themselves, and loves doing whatever they may be doing are they truly happy. Plus, only to the degree that we love ourselves and our life are we going to be able to love others and want to make their lives better.

For a child to find fulfillment, it’s crucial they discover the difference between their heartfelt feelings and the tendency we all have, until we learn to train ourselves otherwise, to react to situations with untamed emotion.

In other words, a child who grows up to true to themselves, contributing to the family and the broader society in their special way, is a child who engages in self-discovery coupled with emotional containment and self-regulation.

With a self-disciplined child, no one has to be on their case. They don’t require shaming or guilt-tripping to get them to do things. There’s never a

need for instilling fear in them, being angry with them, grounding them, or inflicting any form of punishment.

Conscious parenting doesn’t resort to discipline—ever. Rather, it’s built on the two pillars of consequences and connection.

The moment I mention “consequences,” many of us tend to think in terms of how we need to “figure out a consequence” for what our child may have done.

But when we as parents step in to devise what we call a “consequence,” we aren’t allowing consequences to do their vital work. In fact, we’re doing the very opposite. We’ve resorted to punishment—and punishment always builds resentment, which doesn’t bode well for a child’s chances of growing up to be self-regulating.

Consequences are never imposed. They aren’t something we have to think about or “give” our child. Rather, they are the natural outcome of a person’s behavior. When consequences are allowed to do their important work, a child learns from the simple correlation of cause and effect.

The big challenge we have as parents is not to intervene to rescue a child we love from the consequences of their behavior—unless life or limb are threatened.

To illustrate, a child who doesn’t complete their homework assignment doesn’t learn to be selfregulating when we nag them, impose restrictions on them, and in other ways cajole them into getting the homework done. We have made completing homework the goal at the expense of the more important life lesson of natural consequences, which is terribly—and often tragically—shortsighted.

Neither do children learn to be organized if, whenever they are so

disorganized as to run late, we repeatedly bail them out by driving them to school or some other event because they missed their ride.

If a child speaks to us in an ugly fashion, where’s the connection between taking away their computer or cell phone? These aren’t consequences, but impositions that will be resented and generate further hostility and negative conduct, eventually leading to either depression or truly dysfunctional behavior.

Parents have a hard time with disrespect. But a child’s disrespect for us is no different from the way we often speak disrespectfully to one another as adults. Do we take each other’s cell phones away or shut off the other’s computer? Of course not. And neither should a child be subjected to such punitive—I would even say sadistic— behavior.

Like a lack of academic motivation or a lack of organization, disrespect is something to be discussed—just as we discuss these issues with a spouse, a friend, or an employee. Questions need to be asked such as what’s triggering the disrespect, so that we get to the underlying issue. Are we perhaps in some way imposing our agenda, causing our child to feel invalidated? This is often what leads to disrespect, disconnection, and friction between couples, for instance.

Honoring a child as a unique person, with a right to pursue their unique path in life instead of having to bend to ours, requires that we know our boundaries as parents. We don’t walk all over our children, either verbally or by forcing them to go contrary to their nature.

Neither do we allow our children to walk all over us either verbally or by such things as violating curfew. If their manner and tone dishonor our personhood, we don’t take it lying down. We address the issue, allowing any

consequences to flow naturally from the situation itself. But, for instance in the case of a curfew, we don’t get into it that night. Instead, we express our happiness that our child is home safe and had a good time, then talk about the curfew at a calm moment the next day or the next time an event requires a time limit.

Emotional containment is crucial in such situations. If we hit back when a child is rude or disrespectful, we descend to a primitive level and teach nothing about being adult.

If our child is yelling at us, perhaps even cursing, we don’t try to control them. To one-up them at such a time by telling them “don’t talk to me in that tone of voice, I’m your mother,” only escalates the problem into a fight, while ignoring what’s really driving the disrespect.

Instead, the key is to model a mature response by containing, restraining, our impulse to react. Rather than either venting our emotion on our child, or alternatively stuffing it, we let it be known calmly that we aren’t their punching bag. In this way we become an example of setting appropriate boundaries.

To make it clear what I mean by this, a child who is deprived of attending a friend’s birthday party because they spoke to us disrespectfully learns nothing about respect, only to resent us all the more. This is because there’s simply no connection between being told, “You can’t go to Mary’s party this weekend,” and being spoken to disrespectfully over an issue having to do with, for example, turning the television off because it’s bedtime.

When they are little, we may overpower our children in this way, showing them “who’s the boss.” But this approach comes at the cost of building resentment. When they get into their teens and we can no longer so easily

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overpower them, they will likely “show us.” Or they will do it at a younger age by becoming underhand, bullying, or perhaps failing in school.

A natural consequence of a child talking to us disrespectfully would be to withdraw from the situation. A parent might state calmly, “I don’t like to be spoken to in this way. I will be in my room. If you would like to discuss this matter, you are welcome to join me and explain your point of view whenever you feel ready to do so.”

The key is to engage our children on a moment-by-moment basis. We don’t drag up what happened yesterday. Neither do we inject our fears over what might happen in the future into the situation. Rather, we seek to understand, and be understood, as we increasingly negotiate with our children in an ageappropriate manner. We must never forget that we are the parent, but we must simultaneously remember that neither are we our child’s overlord.

To be able to negotiate is one of the primary skills a person needs for success in business, romantic relationships, social situations, and just about any arena of life. To invite our children to talk with us, truly hearing them, and explaining ourselves to them instead of resorting to power plays such as “because I said so,” is how negotiation is learned. There is a back-and-forth, until a win-win solution emerges.

It comes down to the fact that connection, not correction, is paramount in any relationship, not least of which is how we relate to our children. As adults, we don’t enjoy being called on the carpet and often resent it. No less is this true of our children. We all long to be understood, and to understand.

Parents have a huge ability to influence their children. But this influence needs to be along the lines of encouraging them to engage in self-discovery, asking questions, developing their initiative, and experimenting with their natural tendency to be creative.

When I say “encouraging” them, I need to make it clear that I don’t mean in a way that pushes a child, which will ultimately have the opposite effect and create resistance, but in a way that simply provides an atmosphere conducive to self-development.

As we learn to honor our children as real people who are our equals, guiding them in an age-appropriate way, we will discover all the ways in which we grew up to dishonor ourselves. In this way, both our children and we ourselves learn what it means to be whole people.

Dr Shefali Tsabary talks about her new book

Click HERE to watch a two-minute introduction to OUT OF CONTROL

Excerpted from the introduction to

Lessons in Loving: A Journey into the Heart The audiobook Lessons in Loving is about rediscovering the child’s heart, which is at the heart of Dr. Shefali Tsabary’s new book on parenting, OUT OF CONTROL.

The Little Prince was written ostensibly for children, but it is to the child’s heart in each of us that it appeals. It seeks to reawaken in us the imagination, excitement, creativity, and forthrightness we once enjoyed as children. It invites us to recapture the fascination with life, the sense of wonder, and the fun- loving exuberance of children. All that is so wonderfully genuine about children, but that as adults we have lost, needs to be rekindled if our relationships are to sizzle.

The little prince’s invitation to rediscover the child’s heart isn’t an excuse for babying yourself by excusing your immature behavior, however. It’s a call to grow up emotionally, which poses a serious challenge for many of us. This is because, when we get mad, snap at our partner, pout, or withdraw, we feel we can’t help ourselves. We tell ourselves it isn’t our fault we behave in dysfunctional ways, it’s because we were hurt when we were children.

To blame infantile behavior such as temper tantrums and sulking on the fact you were hurt when you were a child doesn’t change your behavior because it doesn’t get to the root. Quite the opposite, it intensifies such behavior. Your focus now becomes being “understood.”

You treat yourself--and expect to be treated--with kid gloves.

There is a world of difference between a child, who isn’t capable of managing emotions in a mature manner, and an adult who behaves like a child. As long as you think of yourself as a “wounded child,” you will excuse yourself when you lash out or pitch a fit.

Because the little prince knows the real reason you behave in an infantile manner, he issues a wake-up call. He asks you to admit how terribly childish much of your behavior is. Then he challenges you to finish the journey of growing up by getting control of yourself and taming your emotional reactivity. The message of the little prince is that few

My dog-eared copy of the story that inspired the audiobook Lessons in Loving—A Journey into the Heart, available exclusively from the Namaste Publishing website. If you haven’t read the book, and listened to the audiobook that comments on its meaning for our everyday lives, you are missing out...

- David Robert Ord

grownups have ever really grown up. This is why we have trouble in our relationships—why romance fades and passion wanes.

Like the little prince, if you are ever to have a fulfilling relationship you must face up to your childish emotional reactions and come to grips with the way you want to be close to someone one minute then distance yourself the next. Such infantile behavior shows you are emotionally enmeshed with those who matter to you, which is a pseudo form of “connection.” You bounce off each other, but heart doesn’t touch heart— at least not in a sustained way.

As long as you can’t stand on your own two feet emotionally, no longer reacting to your partner, you won’t find the enduring romance and deepening passion for which you long. Only by getting in touch with your core, where you will find the strength to rein in your reactions regardless of what you partner says or does, can you afford to get truly close.

Maturity is a matter of being able to be true to yourself even when your partner tries to get you to cave in and sell yourself out. As long as you need your partner to prop you up emotionally, you’re going to react when support for your decisions isn’t forthcoming. Such reactivity makes consistent closeness impossible.

To face up to infantile behavior is a painstaking task. This is reflected in one of the chief traits of the little prince—once he asks a question, he never gives up asking it and can’t be diverted to another topic until he has his answer. We must each become like the little prince, facing up to ourselves at every turn, confronting infantile behavior wherever it pops up.

Again and again in this book you will encounter the concept of personal growth. But I mean something very different from what is usually mean when people speak of growth. I’m not talking about improving your self-image, or in fact about any kind of self-improvement.

I simply mean discovering that you have never known your real self, and letting this essential you emerge. This is very different from “working on” yourself. In the world of the little prince, you grow by entering into the blissful state of being, which, though you haven’t been aware of it, has always been your essence.

In this apparently simple child’s story are the keys to fulfillment.

These keys will unlock the door to meaning and happiness in your romantic life—and in all your relationships.

With your own copy of The Little Prince alongside you, step with me now into a world of make believe . . . and discover a deep dimension of yourself that can connect with your partner, and with other significant people in your life, as you have never connected before.

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Parenting “Insides�

by Catherine Bell and Paul Zelizer

Examples from a

Mother with

Two Sons

and a

Father with a

Daughter

In this article we explore some of the daily

routines of parenthood and some of the “big” events such as death and divorce.

My name is Catherine. I am a mother of two boys, wife to Kent (a trailblazer in renewable energy), a founder of BluEra (we build evolved and awakened teams), a Social Entrepreneur and Community Advocate, and also working on a book in collaboration with international leaders.

Needless to say, my life is never short of the boys needing a ride to a practice, an idea in the making or a project happening, or a board meeting for people in need.

My life is in precarious harmony. Our sons' names are John (age 10, grade 5) and Michael (age 8, grade 3). To say I have never experienced extreme mother's guilt would be a complete lie.

Kent and I schedule our lives around our boys' schedules, and it’s quite a bit of fun knowing where the big priorities in your life lie.

Here are two of my tales from the insides of parenting.

The Math Test I start sweating on the inside with excitement. Our eldest son John declares he has a math test. The following conversation ensues.

“Are you going to study?” says me, thinking he has a study plan laid out.

“No,” says John. I immediately turn a brighter shade of pink.

“Well, why not?” I ask “Because I know the material, Mom,” says Johnny.

Internally this went against everything I was told and professed, yet I never really studied until I got to university. I didn’t want my son to fall into the same trap that I did and be awakened to the idea of “school” in first year university, when I learnt the skills of studying. I didn't want him to learn the hard way that I did.

Also, what if he bombed his exam? Oh well, I would have to let it be. I choose not to take any action or say anything, even though this ate me up on the inside.

John forgot about when his math test was, and was surprised when it happened. He returned home with his test score, having achieved 98%.

My immediate concern was: Well, what about that 2%? How neurotic a response is that?

Instead of saying something, I asked him how he felt about it. He said he felt fine, and that for next time he would review the details better, because his mistake was just not taking enough time with the questions.

“The parent has to learn to step back and allow life to be the teacher” Out of Control Dr. Shefali Tsabary

I told him he did a good job on the exam and demonstrated his knowledge of the material.

His lessons are his lessons. They are not my lessons. If he had failed the exam, that also would have been ripe with learning for both of us, as was this experience. We both learned something. In my case, it was that I didn’t need to repeat the words of my mother to my son.

Michael and the Piano Getting giddy from keystrokes. In the middle of a piano practice with our dear piano teacher, our son exclaims, “Mom, I hate the piano and I am not going to play it anymore.”

His statement struck an off chord with me. Something didn’t feel right about this situation.

The piano teacher exclaimed, “I’m not going to teach your son if he hates the piano. I want him to have a positive feeling about piano.” I asked the piano teacher to leave so I might have a few moments with Michael.

I then sat with Michael in his “hate” for the

piano. He was really angry. I asked him what was really going on within him. Suddenly, the floodgates opened and he communicated some things that were happening at school which were affecting him deeply.

Bingo! That’s what the “uh oh” in my tummy was all about. Now we could discuss the roots of the situation.

Michael chose to write our piano teacher a sorry note, and also to figure things out at school, with some gentle support from home. I also gave him the option of discontinuing piano. He chose to stick with it. To this day, he is continuing his piano and loving his piano experiences, whatever they are.

“Touch the hurt at its depths. Only when you do this does it become possible to address the external behavior without having it morph into some other dysfunction” Out of Control Dr. Shefali Tsabary

My boys now get to choose which activities they participate in. I notice they are a lot more engaged as a result. There’s a lot less stress in our home, and a lot more life-fueling energy surrounds us.

My name is Paul. I’m the father of Rachel,

age 13, and husband of Francesca. I’m also the founder of two wisdom-based businesses —my own global coaching company called Success for Spiritual Entrepreneurs and, with three colleagues, I’m now in the process of founding a global company called Wisdompreneurs.

As both Francesca and I own our businesses, we have the ability to schedule our lives such that volleyball practices and sleepovers at a friend are rarely an issue.

Still, learning to balance parenting, work, time as a couple, and self-care has been one of the biggest challenges of my life.

Here are two of my tales from the insides of parenting.

Death and the Three-Year Old When my daughter was three, we lived on a beautiful farm along the Rio Grande. We grew a big garden, tended two dozen apple trees, and—most interesting to my daughter—raised a flock of about thirty chickens.

As often happened in the autumn, the fall of Rachel’s third year we had an influx of mice in the house in which we lived. They would be out on the farm all summer. But it gets cold in Northern New Mexico in the winter. So when the colder weather began to arrive, our house became very attractive.

Each day for several weeks, we set mouse traps around the house.

Most mornings we would wake up and find one, two, or three freshly killed mice in the traps.

Part of our intention of living on the farm was for us all to learn a deeper understanding of the cycles of nature. Nature doesn’t waste. Nature doesn’t “throw it out.”

So we took this fresh source of protein and fed it to the chickens, who ate them with great relish.

One day during this period, we were visiting with a neighbor. She told a story about her father, who had died the year before, and how he loved to be in the woods of New Hampshire in the fall.

When our neighbor finished talking, curly-haired Rachel asked, “Did you feed him to the chickens?”

“You would know the secret of death.

But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the health of life?”

The Prophet Kahlil Gibran

We’ve had many experiences of death since then. Neighbors. Great grandparents. Beloved cats and dogs.

Having the embodied experience of living on a farm has given us a reference point and a vocabulary for death. It’s still painful when a person or animal we love dies, but I’m deeply grateful that Rachel has had an embodied experience of the cycles of life. It makes the still-challenging conversations about death and the meaning of life much, much easier for us to stay connected through.

“Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf” Rabindranath Tagore

The Stepmother and the Stilts When Rachel was six, her mother and I divorced. This very painful event was compounded by the fact that I moved ninety miles away from her in order to start a business (we had been living very rurally).

Suddenly, Rachel went from her dad being more than 50% of her parenting experience to having a weekend dad. It was a challenging time for us both.

About fifteen months after the divorce, I met the woman who is now my wife and Rachel’s beloved stepmother, Francesca. But even though Francesca and I started spending quite a bit of time together after several months of dating, we deliberately held off with bringing this up to Rachel (who was now eight).

“Our children aren't the problem, our unconscious-ness is. It is not our children’s to inherit, but ours to excavate” Out of Control

Dr. Shefali Tsabary After about nine months of dating and feeling like I could trust Francesca to be mindful with Rachel’s heart, we decided the time had come. The big introduction happened at an outdoor community event with lots of activities for kids.

Rachel and a friend were particularly inspired by the stilts at the event. They spent hours walking about the grounds laughing and experimenting. And we adults were right by their side to catch them when they started tipping over.

Today, six years later, Rachel and Francesca have an incredibly sweet relationship. For instance, when Rachel’s periods started, it was Francesca she told first. They have an ease and depth in their connection that’s uncommon among the stepparents I know.

When our kids are going through major transitions in their world, we adults tend to forget two things: 1. That adjusting to change often takes time 2. That play is one the best ways to connect with a child.

By giving Rachel and me time to heal and adjust in our connection before introducing Francesca, I think we cultivated the ground for Rachel and Francesca to enjoy the depth of connection that they do now. And by incorporating plenty of opportunities for play and laughter in their first meeting, I think we co-created a pathway for them to get their relationship off to a great start.

We hope these experiences from the inside are helpful or point to some kind of inquiry for your own parenting journey.

“These Kids Today”

by Andrea Matthews

More aware, more lost, truth-tellers, liars, searching, addicted, compassionate, artistic, dark, afraid and certainly uncertain, these kids today look like all that we do and don’t want to see in ourselves.

The gift they bring us, however, is an understanding of our humanity and our divinity.

Several years ago, a movement to “put our children first” began to take hold in many Western cultures, so that by now many cover the extreme fringes of this movement by raising children who are entitled and afraid not to be. And right there on those fringes, some of our strongest thought movements have engendered that same kind of entitlement by telling us that if we can just reign in our thoughts, we can have anything we want—without ever trying to assess where that want is coming from.

Our children long for fame and wealth in a world where these things seem not only possible but probable. If they don’t attain to these things, they feel enormous shame and often become either angry or depressed. They begin to believe that they are but victims of random forces at work.

There is a quiet desperation in our schools that builds to bullying,

www.malala-yousafzai.com

suicide, and mass shootings. Yet our children also offer amazing insights into their power to generously give of time, energy, and heart to raise money for charitable organizations and bringing attention to matters that require our compassion. Malala Yousafzai is only one example of the many children heroes who show us all what’s possible when we live from our passion.

What’s the difference, then, between those children with a feeling of desperation and those with heroic hearts?

The difference is identity. The options for identification run through a child’s home in the form of each parent’s unresolved unconscious “stuff” projected onto the child, who will then introject that material and identify with it. The child is most likely to respond to that introjection with an identity—a way of seeing and being—that not only allows them to believe they can survive their family, but also allows them to believe they are that identity.

John Bradshaw thought of identification as a part of a family trance. He saw the family trance as orchestrated and reinforced by the parents in the system, in which each member who bonds with another is cast under its hypnotic spell and absorbs the emotional content and patterning ascribed to them by the parental leadership. A child becomes locked into this state, which may have severe consequences, until they can psychologically break from the family.

John Firman and Ann Gila, authors of The Primal Wound: A Transpersonal View of Trauma, Addiction and Growth, tell us that our most important wound was the wound of separation that occurs as we identify with something other than Self so that the survival instinct, rather than the Self, becomes the organizing center of our lives:

This powerful bond to the survival unifying center—both internal and external—significantly limits self-empathy; that is, it significantly limits our ability to be open to the wide range of our authentic experience. The unfoldment of authentic personality is derailed, and we instead struggle to survive in an oppressive environment. Whenever we are bonded to such a constricting unifying center and identified with the constricted role dictated by that center, a very curious thing happens: we enter a trance.

The options for such entranced identifications run the gamut from victim to perpetrator, scapegoat to rescuer, clown to superperson. The choice of identity depends on both the innate strength of the child and the messages they are absorbing from the primary caregivers.

For example, a child with a natural gift for empathy might quite easily slip into the scapegoat role in the family, taking on full responsibility for the emotions of everyone else in an otherwise emotionless family, developing a life in which they affirm their worth by holding themselves accountable for the happiness and suffering of others, motivated almost entirely by guilt.

Of course, the more an identity is affirmed, the more likely it is to continue to manifest. For example, if a child is taught, verbally and nonverbally, that they are bad, they will need to do more and more “bad” in order to prove they exist—for without our identity, our entire existence is called into question.

If all of that is true, the question then becomes: What can we do to ensure our children don’t adopt this identity and are allowed instead to be true to themselves? From a spiritual perspective, what can we do to encourage our children to stay fully connected to their own being, rather than giving up their identification with their authentic self in favor of some identity that seems to alienate them from it?

Parents must be willing to find—and begin to live from—their own authenticity. When a child senses authenticity around them, they will more naturally and fluidly respond authentically.

Of course, finding and living from authenticity is nothing like “doing what you want,” which is the “going” spiritual and emotional theme for many.

Finding and living from our authentic self is, at least for adults who have

previously lived from an identity, a journey inward in which a great deal of differentiation must occur before integration sets in.

This means that the adult must be willing to own what arises into conscious awareness, embrace it, dialogue with it, then surrender it in favor of their true being. This is a journey that has many zigs and zags.

If a child with a parent on such a journey can intuitively feel that the parent is fully responsible for their own “stuff,” the child won’t need to take this stuff on in order to protect themselves from it. All the child needs is for the parent to communicate, both verbally and nonverbally, that the child is free to grow up to be who they uniquely are, instead of who the parents’ stuff needs them to be.

We can’t communicate this if we don’t understand the authentic self that’s the roots of the tree we are. Roots where all of the energy of living originates.

Roots that, though it rains and snows and the wind blows the tree around, hidden safely underground are doing just fine. Roots that make it very, very difficult to kill the tree. Roots from whence all nurturance comes.

Without such understanding, which can only come with the experience of one’s own authenticity, we may say the words “be yourself” to our children, but we will take those words back with our actions. Unless we can come to our children with the peace that comes from knowing we stand in alignment with our roots, we won’t communicate to them that they have the freedom to be themselves. Our nonverbal communication always

reveals what we are really thinking to our nonverbal children.

In line with this, as parents we need to understand that our children are constantly reading all the subtle nuances of body language, voice tone, eye contact or lack of it, and just the intuitive imprint of being in the now with another human. And mostly, they are identifying with it, because they haven’t yet fully come to understand that they are separate from their parents.

This means that by the time they are becoming verbal, they have most probably already developed a huge part of the identity they will wear as survival. Therefore, starting early modeling authenticity is going to be our most effective parenting tool. That doesn’t, of course, mean that the child’s identity is thereafter cast in stone, but it does mean that we might have to work a little harder after that time to facilitate their willingness to go within for guiding wisdom.

Which brings us to fact that children should be encouraged in every way possible to go within for information. When they are troubled, hurt, angry, or disappointed, we can encourage them to express, rather than suppress in the name of making our lives a little easier.

We don’t want to have to deal with the whiney, crying child, but if we can help them learn that their feelings are information and guidance, they will always have themselves as their primary resource.

For instance, anger can tell them they need a boundary, or that they need to empathize with the boundaries of others. Whining can remind us to ask them what they need, or to think creatively about what we already know they need but are trying to ignore in the name of schedule or stuff to do. The monster under the bed could just be a metaphor for the bully in the playground or the alcoholic raging dad they are afraid to really see.

When they bring us a picture they have drawn, they should be challenged with something like, “Oh, wow, I saw you over there really

putting your heart into making this—tell me all about it.”

They should not be told, “Oh, how pretty!” Or worse, “Oh, I see a house and a tree and a car and a person.” In both of the latter cases, the child is having their work defined, instead of being mirrored for their passionate effort and challenged to define it themselves.

Children want and need to be seen for who they are. Part of this is seeing what they do, then letting them know they’ve been seen. Allowing them to define their work isn’t just practice in listening deeply to our children; it allows the child to decide for themselves what it is they are doing.

When children are upset, they should be encouraged to name their feelings. So when they say, “I hate Johnny!,” if they are told, “You don’t hate, Johnny, you’re just mad,” they learns to unname their feelings and give them another, nicer name. But if they hear something like, “You’ve got some really strong feelings. What happened?,” then they are free to explore without restraint what they are feeling and to tell the story that explains this feeling. Actually, they are much more likely to continue to “hate” Johnny if we tell them they don’t.

Finally, children can be shown how to meditate. But don’t do this by telling them to sit still and stop thinking—like we adults tell ourselves we must do in order to successfully meditate. Rather, we can do this in some fun ways, using imagination and play.

For instance, we might say, “The sun is shining in your belly. Can you find it?” When they lean over and try to look at their tummy, we can say, “No, you

can’t see it from outside; you have to look inside yourself. Close your eyes and see if you can see the sun shining inside you.”

Or we might say, “Listen, can you hear the bird way up there in the tree?

What is the bird saying to your heart?” Or, “Listen to how quiet it is. Can you find that quiet inside you? Close your eyes and see if you can find the silence.”

When children see their parents meditating, and the parents share ageappropriate experiences they have while meditating, such children are more likely to try it themselves.

But we must be careful not to project onto them our expectations that they perform meditation for our own need to raise “good” children.

If we are to teach our children the letting go that occurs in meditation, we must show them we can let go of our need for them to be something that will please us, fix us, or otherwise exist for our unresolved issues.

Teaching our children is important. But we can teach what a child has the capacity to learn and nothing more. Beyond that, it’s wasted effort.

All teaching that opens the door to learning is done with both a challenge and nurturance. Children should be challenged to operate with empathy for both themselves and others. They need to be taught how to be safe and selfnurturing. And they need to be shown how to do the same for others.

They don’t need to be taught to “put others first” as some kind of pathway to right living. First, this thinking only breeds resentment. Second, there is no first, second, or third. We cannot absent ourselves to be there for others; we can only pretend to do so. Authenticity, soulfulness, and living from our divine nature aren’t made up of pretense.

So if Mary hits other children at the park, she shouldn’t be hit to teach her not to hit. Rather, she can be shown that hitting isn’t an appropriate response.

She can immediately be brought home—calmly, not angrily—and given an assignment to draw a picture that tells a story of hitting. Then she can be challenged to tell what was going on in that story she drew. She then gets to tell her story with play.

Then, the parent can draw another picture that offers a different story— another possible way to deal with the situation than hitting. She can be told

that when she hits, she won’t be able to play with others. But if she can learn not to hit, but to use that other recommended solution, then she can play with other children.

While this takes more time and energy than just yelling or hitting our children, it constitutes an authentic learning experience for the child—and nobody said that parenting wouldn’t challenge us to do this same intervention for ourselves.

Children are attached to their essence when they come here. The only thing that detaches them from this is an identification with something other than their essence. As parents, we can offer our children a chance to stay identified with their essential being if we honor who they are instead of trying to get them to be something—anything at all.

Our children aren’t here to meet our needs. They are here to fulfill their own need to express their authentic being. Our delight is in the fact that we get to be a part of that fulfillment, watching the flower unfold and bloom.

Works Cited:

Bradshaw, John. Bradshaw on the Family: A New Way of Creating Solid Self Esteem. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications. 1988, 1996. Print.

Firman, John, and Gila, Ann. The Primal Wound: A Transpersonal View of Trauma, Addiction and Growth. Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press. 1997. Print.

About Andrea Matthews...

Andrea Mathews is a psychotherapist with a thriving private practice, offering Transpersonal and Cognitive Therapy to her clients for the past seventeen of her overall thirty years’ experience as a therapist, manager, and supervisor of therapists, in the substance abuse and mental health fields. She is the author of three books, RESTORING MY SOUL: A WORKBOOK FOR FINDING AND LIVING THE AUTHENTIC SELF (2007), and THE LAW OF ATTRACTION: THE SOUL’S ANSWER TO WHY IT ISN’T WORKING AND HOW IT CAN (2011), AND INHABITING HEAVEN NOW: THE

(2013), as well as several articles in national and international magazines, and several poems in literary presses. For the past five years she has been the host of the AUTHENTIC LIVING SHOW on VoiceAmerica.com, with over 150,000 listeners, having interviewed some of the world’s most profound and prolific spiritual teachers, authors, and entertainers. An inspirational speaker to both corporations and large and small groups, Andrea’s theme is always authenticity. For fun, Andrea is also an artist and a musician. Learn more about her and her work on the following websites: ANSWER TO EVERY MORAL DILEMMA EVER POSED

www.andreamathewslpc.com www.innerwings.com

What Living a Lie Teaches Us about Truth: Reflections from the Movie Kumaré

Photo:

http://kumaremovie.com/sri-kumare.php

by Catherine Bell and Paul Zelizer Are spiritual leaders real, or full of it?

That’s the central question in Kumaré, a feature documentary film about a fake guru who begins to help people find the guru within—and, along the way, finds the guru within himself.

The film is about Vikram Gandhi, from the U.S., masquerading as a wise guru from the East named Kumaré, who starts a real following of people in the

West. It opened in theaters June 2012 and is now available on iTunes, Amazon Instant video, and through most cable providers.

The short version of the story is that by living a lie, Kumaré finds that the greatest truth more deeply reveals itself. This is a film that’s able to hold a great paradox in life: that often truth is paradoxical.

A little more of the backstory can be found here. You can also watch the trailer. Kumaré is a must see for any truth seeker, yoga instructor, spiritual leader, monk, rabbi, priest, minister, leader, or teacher.

There are many spiritual lessons from Kumaré. Here are seven of them: 1. Question Your Obsession with Experts “Make your life a myth” - Kumaré In our modern world, there are experts on just about everything—from financial law to dog training, relationship advice to car repair.

Kumaré told everyone he was fake, yet no one even questioned him. They revered the expert that they assumed him to be based on appearances. Many people say we need to get out of our heads, when perhaps consideration needs to be given to actually being in our head center and using it.

The people who began following Kumaré had a tremendous need for someone to validate them. It demonstrated how huge movements get going based on…what? An expert, a guru, a real leader?

When an “answer” or a path is presented with conviction, there’s a good chance there’s someone who’s going to believe it. People buy into a worldview that reassures them, comforts them, and rarely question it. If it falls apart, they resort to blaming.

Kumaré shows us that humans can be profoundly gullible when we have lost connection with our center and don’t have a well-developed sense of self. As the film progressed, some of his followers did begin to have some degree of awareness that what they were looking for was in themselves, but only to a limited degree. They were still very dependent on external practices and the “expert”.

In the end, the majority of his followers mentioned the “unveiling” was the ultimate teaching. In contrast, a small number never contacted him again, seemingly as a result of feelings of betrayal and mistrust.

When people get hooked by a cult, a guru, a religion, a politician, a leader, a doctor or a healer, it’s easy to turn to blaming. In fact, it’s the most common response.

Kumaré invites us to explore our own neediness and projections when it comes to spiritual leaders and experts. As we become aware of this, we can begin to use situations to grow ourselves up, instead of fault-finding.

Any time we cling to an expert, it creates a maintenance problem for ourselves because we are constantly relying on the external authority.

2. Where is Your Sense of Center?

“Sometimes we need to form a circle in order to find our center” - Kumaré Kumaré demonstrated that people never really move on to a state of centeredness until they truly address the emotional issues. And these are particularly strong when an attraction to any kind of guru, whether Kumaré or the Pope, is involved.

For instance, we notice that many recovering Catholics and fundamentalists turn to New Age practices or other alternatives. They reject one set of beliefs, then buy into a similar set of beliefs with a more positive twist that make them feel better, but it’s the same old stuff in different dress.

There are also atheists like this, just as fundamentalist in their conclusions as was Jerry Falwell. Richard Dawkins would be an example. Such individuals have never worked through the reasons they rejected what they once believed in, or what others believe.

Stay in your center and observe the calmness. To be a leader often involves making tough calls where you can stay in integrity with who you are. There may be no perfect answer, but there can be good answers. And don’t worry, you will make mistakes as doctors do, leaders do, gurus do. That’s simply part of being human, and the important thing is what you learn from it.

3. Sex and Guruship “Until we stop building alters to what oppresses us, we will never alter anything” - Kumaré The film also lightly touches on the question of sex and guruship. Who wouldn’t want to sleep with a mystical person? Someone with a much more direct connection with the divine?

This raises many power issues—from the issues in the church, to supposed gurus taking advantage of women and children. In the movie, it was remarkable how quickly people opened up to Kumaré about the most intimate details of their lives, from their cocaine addiction to the lack of intimacy in their marriage. It’s easy to see how lines could be crossed.

4. North America's Fascination with East Versus West “The mother is the first guru” - Kumaré Another issue the movie explores is the West’s fascination with spiritual leaders from other cultures, particularly India. While there is a deep wisdom

tradition in India, in that country it’s woven into a cultural context. And people living in that context often understand that spiritual leaders and paths, even the best of them, have limitations.

Stripped of this context, North Americans can more easily miss the limitations. They more often see the great wisdom and insights. They try to spiritually bypass the whole picture of India—the impoverishment, suffering, and violence—to maintain some fantasy of perfection.

But this idealized fascination many in the West have with India reflects the sense that something is lacking in ourselves. It sets us up with a false sense that we will find what we are looking for “elsewhere”. Of course, we never do, which is why people become lifelong “seekers”. The poet Rumi has a term for this: “spiritual window shoppers”.

5. Question Everything “People say: I want a guru. I say: come, come. Then I say: No, I am not!”

- Kumaré, just before being car buffed Kumaré told everyone he was a false guru and nobody questioned this. He created things like his “blue light” meditation. How many times have we sat in a

yoga class and done something similar? We know we have. And because people began practicing it, it became real. The movie shows how we can create things from less deliberate or impure intentions, yet they feel like they are actually real.

To us, this underscores the importance of deep inquiry. For example, the movie mentions the law of attraction, and how people were told not to worry about the science behind it. Without any science or deep inquiry, many people still cling to approaches like these in an attempt to escape the pain of uncertainty and increase their illusion of more control.

Kumaré is a lesson in truly questioning everything. Everything. No stone left unturned. We need to use all our senses and head, heart, and gut centers to inquire into what’s true for us.

6. Hold the Paradox “We create the illusions that comfort us and the illusions that frighten us” - Kumaré In the lying, there was deep teaching, and deep teaching embedded within the lie. Paradox.

The experience the people in the movie went through, including Kumaré himself, became their teacher to varying degrees. Yes, they were lied to— Kumaré isn’t a real guru. He’s a film maker from New Jersey.

Yet this lie, and their choice to believe it, in the long run taught them much about truth. It also served Kumaré well. Each shifted toward her or his own center of gravity, however tentatively.

When you look towards a spiritual leader, what are you trying to fill in yourself?

To be a seeker, you must not seek. In order to learn, you sometimes need to be able to accept a lie, and know it’s a lie, while at the same time seeing the lie itself as the learning—and in this case it led to a truth.

7. Community and Belonging “If you can imagine a person who is more true to yourself than your current self, then just do what they would do. Then you will never say I am not doing what I want to do” - Kumaré

We live in a culture that has a tendency to separate. For example, in some religions the spiritual leader never socializes with the “flock”. A similar phenomenon exists with many psychologists, social workers, doctors, and even educators.

When wisdom leaders are too separate, when they stop being members of genuine and embodied communities, when the roles become more important than the people in them, leaders become quite isolated. They are asked to be something that’s more than human. The potential for confusion and suffering is great.

Contrast this with the Buddha, who lived in the forests with the people he was learning among. Or with Jesus, who trod the hills of Galilee and Judea with an entourage among whom he lived in the fullest way. The greatest business leaders also practice management by walking around with the deepest humility.

Humans have a need to belong.

What tribes do you walk among?

Photos courtesy of Vikram (Kumaré)

Applying the Wisdom of Kumaré We aren’t against teachers. Both of us are grateful for the long lineage of wisdom teachers we have learned from.

However, we do want to invite you into a more deliberate inquiry about what your relationship with spiritual leaders looks like. Specifically, we invite you to consider—with your heart, head, and gut centers—the following questions: 1.

What has your relationship to spiritual leaders been like in the past?

What kinds of expectations have you had of important spiritual teachers?

2.

3.

What responsibilities do you think spiritual seekers have?

4.

Who have been your gurus? What have those relationships been like?

What parts of yourself have you been trying to make sense of on your spiritual journey?

5.

How willing are you to question spiritual teachings, even when they come from a legitimate lineage?

6.

How do you want to lead, and where do you want to belong? From the front, the back, the middle, or somewhere in between, depending on circumstances?

7.

We invite you to consider this, from Kumaré: You are a great being, much more wise and empowered than you were taught growing up. It’s our greatest prayer that we all continue to deepen the connection with this inner wisdom.

“There is a guru inside you” - Kumaré

Namaste Publishing’s editorial director spoke with New Yorker Lynnda Pollio about her new novel Trusting the Currents. If you’ve ever wanted to write a book, this is an interview that will speak to your heart. This is what Lynnda had to say about the decade it took her to produce her book.

There are many life lessons here for anyone who is on a spiritual journey.

It has been a long and winding road. For much of the time I felt like I was down a rabbit hole by myself, and I had no idea what was normal or not normal as it took my life in a completely different direction.

I kept trying to make it go away, and it would just sit there for a while. Then I would start hearing it again. It was like a burr beneath the ground that just started growing again.

When my mother fell and I was in New Jersey taking care of her 24/7, I picked the book up again basically because I couldn’t stand watching TV anymore. When I did so, I felt a whole new energy come into the book, so I did another edit.

At this point I felt I needed an editor. A serendipitous connection came about, and she was perfect because she completely fell in love with my main character, Addie Mae. Because she understood her, she helped me get out of my own way.

Some moments change everything you become. My life as a busy New Yorker abruptly changed when I unexpectedly heard the mystical, elderly voice of Addie Mae Aubrey, a Southern, African American woman. Her first words, “It’s not what happened to me that matters,” began a spirited remembering of her teenage years in the late 1930s rural south and the hard learned wisdom Addie Mae asked me to share. As women from different times and different places, together we embarked on an uncommon journey that changed everything we would both become.

Narrated by Addie Mae Aubrey, Trusting the Currents is a spiritual story of self-discovery—of faith, courage, forgiveness, and the uneasy search for one’s place in life.

Beginning at age eleven with the arrival of beautiful, mysterious cousin Jenny and her shadowy stepfather, Uncle Joe, Trusting the Currents explores Addie Mae’s reluctant awakening. As Jenny, the story’s mystical center introduces Addie Mae to the spiritual world and begins her relationship with nature, a caring teacher, Miss Blanchard, guides Addie Mae with the power of reading. Romantic love enters her life for the first time The culmination of this with Rawley, and we experience how Addie Mae’s emerging sense of self compels her to a life-altering process was that the decision.

book no longer felt like what I had entitled it, Soul Seeds, anymore. For the next couple of weeks, I kept changing the title, but nothing ever felt right. Then, three weeks later, Trusting the Currents simply came to me. When I reread the book, I realized that trusting the currents is all through the book!

Throughout the story her mother remains an unwavering source of love, even when fear and evil shake their lives. Unfathomable loss and rising trust in the “Invisibles” not only transforms Addie Mae’s budding life, but leads to my own spiritual awakening.

Addie Mae reveals how life blossoms when we have the courage to not only accept but also learn from our mistakes and sorrows. Her story may belong to one woman, but the lessons it teaches belong to everyone willing to open their hearts and listen to the truth within their souls.

Trusting the Currents represents a new literary genre of conscious storytelling, bringing high spiritual It’s easy to tell other frequencies into the reader’s experience. I believe there people how to do things, is a huge, growing, and underserved global movement especially if you see them hungry to feel this kind of heart-based, transformative clearly and you know communication and guidance.

they are the truth. But if you don’t have the experience yourself, you don’t fully understand how difficult it is.

The book brought me into the heart of those difficult moments that I hadn’t really faced. In other words, I really did have to trust the currents in the decisions I made! Even now, deciding to self-publish, with all the different issues that pop up, I keep hearing “trust the currents.” As I pass through various experiences, I find myself remembering a line in the book that’s directly related to the experience I’m having, which helps me get through that moment.

There’s a part in the book in which I talk about faith, which is like being stuck between two places. You are stuck between where you’ve been and where you are going. This is where faith comes in.

As I learned to practice faith, which means trusting the currents when we can’t see where we are going, I essentially lost the person I used to be.

It’s been an amazing spiritual experience, part of which has been going

through a dark night of the soul. It’s the feeling of now knowing where you are, what you are doing, or if the path you are on is right. I didn’t know whether my writing was any good at all. At times I wondered if I was wandering in some crazy direction that I shouldn’t be going in. It was always faith that brought me back.

People read the book and tell me that, a few days later, something happens in their own experience that causes them to remember a particular passage from the book, which brings them a sense of calmness, security, peace. The word people use a lot is that the story is very “comforting.” There is a certain comfort in trusting the currents.

In my own case, I had to give up all of my financial stability to get this book done. I left my job to start my own business, and that very same day my mother became ill, which meant I didn’t earn for the next couple of years.

All of which of course caused me to question whether this book was good, or not good, for me.

But it always felt important, something I had to do, and that it was ultimately going to lead me to what I was here to accomplish on the planet— and hopefully help other people who were going through the same experience.

In the end, it’s a book about transformation.

You are at a place in your life, and either external circumstances start changing this, or something inside of you starts changing, and in the beginning you really don’t know what to do.

During this process of transformation, you will “The voices in Trusting the stumble, make mistakes, and things will happen Currents refuse to be muted that are difficult to go through. But if you just as they bring us face to face keep moving with the currents, you get to across the divides of race, understand yourself better. class, religion. This is a In Addie Mae’s case, she finds it through reading and through her increased ability to connect to spirit through nature. When she has to finally make some decisions, she’s comfortable with leaping into the unknown. I think that everyone who has to undergo a transformation—and so many people I know are —reaches that moment when they have to leap into the unknown.

powerful story that is an offering, a revival, benediction, altar, and a powerful calling for the return of all longobscured matriarchs. All praises for Trusting the Currents. Enlight-ening, and highly evolved.”

—Jaki Shelton Green, Poet, NC Piedmont Laureate

From the time I was little, I’ve never quite fit into the normal way people tend to live their lives. I always felt I was here to do something, though I had no idea what that was. For a time I stumbled around from career to career, luckily successfully.

But I always felt a spiritual connection to other worlds, and I felt I was to bring some sense of that to other people.

When my father became ill, I spent a year taking care of him. He had been estranged from the family because he was an alcoholic, and it was important to me to be part of his death. He had had a couple of heart attacks, and we were told he was going to die fairly quickly. I had been practicing energy work, so I did some energy work with him, and he recovered. This enabled him to spend another year with us. During that year, we healed the family dynamic.

My mother and he reconnected. So when he died, it was a healing experience.

It was right after this that a sort of voice in my head one morning told me to go to Sedona, Arizona. I packed my bags and spent five months there. This is where the book began coming to me. For a time I went back and forth between New York and Sedona.

Then one day I heard Addie Mae’s voice and started writing what she was telling me. In due course she brought me back to Sedona. As soon as she came into my life, I had a strong sense that this is what I was here to do. I didn’t realize it would take so long. It took a good ten years for it to emerge.

However, it felt like the thing that I was here for. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know.

When I came back from Sedona with the first draft, I had no idea whether I had written this just for me or whether it was meant for other people also. I knew it was extremely powerful for me. Not just the words and the messages, but the energy of the book. I was totally accepting of the fact that I might have written it just for me. But it felt really good to get it down on paper.

My relationship with Addie Mae was so profound, and I had never had that kind of relationship before. I trusted her, and she trusted me, and we had an amazing connection. She opened doors for me, which made the process of writing the book a little smoother. Writing the first draft, I felt taken care of. Once the first draft was done, she left, and I was pretty much on my own from thereon.

“Trusting the Currents is an oracle that speaks of the indissoluble bond between man and nature. A story told with such soul that Ms. Pollio’s characters and landscape know to speak only truth; I urge you to listen!

—Michelina Docimo, author of Echoes: Listening to the Voices in Spirited Trees

I gave up many times, telling myself, “This is crazy. I need to get back to my life. I need to make a living and let this thing go.” Several months would go by, then it would just start calling to me again. It was almost like a haunting. But it never quite happened, and it never quite felt right to me even. Something in me knew it wasn’t ready.

But when you are writing something, you just want to finish it so you can move on to something else.

I think that many of us don’t listen to that part of us that says, “This isn’t ready yet.” I barreled ahead, and things didn’t work out the way I felt they would. It was a lesson I had to repeat several times. Finally, this last time, I got it.

Right from the beginning, I felt the book had its own pulse, its own timing.

All I could do was hold a space for it to find its people—those who would support it, those who would read it. When I tried to do more than hold the space, the flow would just stop. I had to allow the book to become what it wanted to become, at the time it wanted to become what it is intended to be for the people it’s there for.

When I started sending the manuscript out to people I knew, I understood that it wasn’t for them. I knew it was for people I had never met. It’s almost as if I had to hold the space not only for the book to ripen, but for the people it was intended for to be ready for it. The world has changed over the last decade, and I think Addie Mae can perhaps be heard now in a way she couldn’t have been a few years ago.

I look at this book as having three different levels, the first of which is the actual story. It’s about an elderly southern black woman who starts recounting her teenage years and the love, magic, and tragedy that defined those years— and that transformed her. It’s a powerful story read just at that level.

Sprinkled throughout the story are various messages and inspiring insights that Addie Mae experiences, which she then teaches us. The wisdom she garnered through the process of making her mistakes, experiencing her sorrows, and facing her challenges, she now shares with us so that we can inculcate them into our own lives. She even talks about how she hopes that someday, over some hill, she’ll be able to help others who have the same issues she was struggling with. So a big part of the book is for people to read it and find some of the solutions to their own struggles.

A third level of the book is what I refer to as a sort of “frequency” level. As I was writing this, there were times when I had to work on one passage, often just once sentence, for hours. The reason I had to work on it so long was that it had to have a certain cadence and rhythm when it was read aloud. There’s a tone to the book, and to certain passages in particular, and I felt that there was almost a “transmission” that was part of this. I’m not quite sure what that was, but it was really important. As people read the book now, they often refer to some of these passages, as if there’s a certain “elevation” in those statements. This is why, at some point, I want to also make it into an audiobook. I think there’s another level of the book that only comes through in sound.

The prologue and epilogue are my story of the writing of the book, whereas the rest of the chapters are Addie Mae’s narrative. As you read my story, then go into her story, you get the sense of these two women sharing an experience, so that as I created her, she created me. There’s a sense of “we were in this together from

the beginning.”

One of the themes of the book is what women can accomplish when possessed of the same compassionate spirit. It doesn’t matter what class you are, or what race you are, but it’s about your heart. The heart is what connects us.

This book has been all about me being in the dark, and bringing me into knowing something. Even on the practical side, I knew nothing about publishing when I started, whereas I know a lot about publishing now.

Hopefully I will be able to help other spiritual writers who want to get their voice out. For instance, I couldn’t find a genre that my work fit into in the publishing world. You can consider it literary fiction; you can consider it selfhelp; you can consider it women’s fiction. It didn’t fit into one thing. Finally, I decided it’s storytelling.

Writing this book was not a magical mystery tour. I really struggled with the book, and it brought me into deep darkness. It’s as if I had to understand what people are going through in their own lives. You can write about light, and love, and laws of attraction. But you have to really understand where people are coming from, and how confused they are, not knowing where to turn. I feel I’m more spiritually mature, more compassionate, than I was before I went through this experience of writing the book.

I didn’t have a particular desire to write. For instance, I didn’t make a conscious decision to write a book. This book picked me. I was just sitting one day and heard Addie Mae’s voice. I actually tried to ignore her, but she just kept coming back. So I eventually started writing what was coming to me. For about a year, I didn’t even know I was writing a book. I remember the moment when I said, “Oh, I think I may be writing a book.”

At one point Jenny said to Addie Mae, “Sometimes the only hope that exists is the one we create ourselves.” The book was something I had to create for myself. I feel people have to learn how to do more things themselves. I hope that in some way this book can help others with this process. It’s definitely a book for someone who is going through a struggle with who they are, and how they become who their authentic self instead of what other people want them to be.

Available From: iTunes Amazon (including Kindle) Barnes & Noble (including Nook)

Reading

Trusting the Currents in the Light of Dr Shefali Tsabary’s New Book

Out of Control

by David Robert Ord

In the spring of 2013, in my capacity as editorial director for Namaste Publishing I was privileged to work with Dr. Shefali Tsabary on her book, released January 14 this year, Out of Control. It’s all about why disciplining children doesn’t work, and what to do instead.

It so happened that Lynnda Pollio released her self-published novel Trusting the Currents toward the end of 2013, and since I had given her some feedback a number of years ago, she sent me a copy and asked me to let her know what I thought of it.

As I read Trusting the Currents, it struck me how many insights the teenage girl Addie Mae Aubrey stumbled upon that parallel some of the amazing teaching Dr Shefali shares with us in her new book. So rather than simply review Trusting the Currents, I want to reflect on some of the parallels.

Addie Mae writes, “It was late

August. The three of us traveled ten miles to the county fair. I’d never seen so many folks, white and black mixing together, nobody hooting over each others’ color. For the first time I realized that life-long beliefs, born purely from being a child of Oakville, were not all true. I was not who others decided me to be. I could change my identity by simply altering my location.”

One of the things countless parents attempt to do when raising children is to train them to be in many respects carbon copies of themselves. Oh, they wouldn’t say that, of course. They’d say they want their children to be whoever they decide to be. But the reality is that in most of our homes there are expectations, spoken and unspoken, that our children are subtly pressured to meet.

One of the consequences of getting children to conform to the expectations of others is that they lose touch with their own center of gravity. This creates a hollow feeling inside. Where their true being ought to be experienced as peace, joy, and a love of life, instead there’s a void. Something is missing.

Our kids try to fill this sense that there’s an emptiness in their lives in different ways. Some turn to drugs or alcohol. Jenny turned to boys, becoming pregnant. What she was really searching for wasn’t a boy, but a transfusion of

selfhood. She wanted to borrow a sense of self from the boys to fill the place inside her that felt empty because her real self had become buried. As Addie Mae explains, “Jenny never cared for any of those other boys. She only slept with them to ease her soul pain.” How many of our young people is this true of? How many of us is it true of as adults?

Part of the battle that ensues between parent and child is because peer pressure is in many cases a more dominant force than our parenting, especially if our children begin to feel alienated from us. I learned the power of peer pressure when my son, now 29, was about three years old. He opened the refrigerator one day and said, “I want a tomato, daddy.” Except that he pronounced the word in the American style, as if it were a capital A. Being from Yorkshire I responded, “That’s a tomahto, Julian.”

“No, daddy,” he explained, “it’s a tomAto.” I knew there and then that the battle was lost. Flying in the face of all my good intentions, daycare had Americanized the English accent he had picked up from growing up around me.

There’s an essence at the heart of each of us, as Constance Kellough writes about in her editorial this month. This essence is our very “being.” But the shape our self-expression takes in life is greatly influenced by our environment. Some environments, especially family and our peers, help us express ourselves in ways that are true to our essential nature. Other situations crush our essence, burying it deep beneath family and social expectations that are far from true for us.

When a child feels pressed to conform, it’s natural that the child’s essential being is going to balk. Because of the way we’ve practically all been raised, it doesn’t occur to us that a child’s backchat is often simply an attempt—albeit distorted in many cases—to speak up for their essence, the more so as they feel themselves losing touch with their true being.

This was certainly the case with Addie Mae. She tells us, ”I know it was hard on Mama raising two wild things. Jenny may have been foolish with her body, but my bullhead and the mouth that served it gave Mama just as much trouble.

Back then girls weren’t expected to give double talk, especially to their daddies. Uncle Joe, I kept reminding Mama, was no daddy of mine and I would be taking no mouthing from a good-for-nothing drunk.”

Children have an inborn feel for behavior that’s unjust, addictive, and abusive. Society used to bury such feelings as if what the child reported “didn’t happen.” Or they blamed the child, as many a victim of rape has been blamed.

I recall an incident over 30 years ago when a friend of mine, in her early twenties, went with her parents to visit her grandfather. During the visit, he

got her alone for a few moments and began kissing her in a highly inappropriate way. It wasn’t the first time. Not knowing what to do, the family just swept such incidents under the rug.

Today, we know how harmful such things are, and more and more who commit such inappropriate acts are being called to account. Yet there are still societies in which those with the courage to speak up, as demonstrated by Addie Mae with Uncle Joe, are chastised.

In her article in this issue of Namaste Insights, Andrea Matthews talks about three ways in which children tend to react to pressures that are contrary to their true being. One of these ways is to become compliant. In many ways, Jenny, Addie Mae’s cousin, was compliant.

Speaking of Jenny, Addie Mae says, “Mama held her up as a good girl, one who listened to her elders and followed the rules. She was very punctual.

Mama pointed out this fact each and every time I was just the littlest bit late.

Jenny kept her room tidy and completed her chores even before being asked.

She never questioned the right or wrong of things. She never wondered why something was the way it was, or even if it was the way it should be. She lived easily within the corral of life, unlike me who was always kicking and stomping and trying to jump over it.”

Dr Shefali shows in Out of Control that it’s important to teach our children to express what they are feeling in constructive, respectful ways that enhance their relationships with others. Yet in many homes even today, children aren’t listened to respectfully, their feelings honored. They aren’t regarded as fully human like ourselves, but are treated more like parents’ possessions.

There’s an illustration of this in Trusting the Currents, and I want to quote it in full because it’s an example of how much of what adults label “disrespect” is actually only the child’s desire to be treated as a real person. Addie May relates: “You are soooooooooooo skinny, girl,” the lady in the dress shop said out loud as I tried on a short red jumper.

Everybody looked at me, all these fat ladies rattling their pug heads in agreement like I’d rather be looking like them.

“I’m just skinny next to how fat you are!” I barked back.

Well, you should’ve seen the look on that lady’s face. My Lord, I thought she was going to bowl over and die. Mama smacked me on the rump, warning me to act respectful.

“How about her respectin’ me?” I demanded, chest out and shoulders back, a young, bruised cockbird ready to fight.

Addie Mae could certainly learn to put things a little more respectfully. Yet she hit the nail on the head: the women in the store weren’t seeing her as a real person. So it’s good that her mother explained to her, “Addie Mae, honey, you do have a big mouth for your pint size; an’ you need to think more before openin’ it. But you right, age an’ authority ain’t no excuse for rudeness.”

If many parents were to learn this one insight, their relationship with their children would be transformed. Age and authority don’t give us the right to say, as our only reason for why our children should or shouldn’t do something, “Because I said so!” That’s just plain bullying on the part of the parent.

For a child to stand up for themselves around an adult has long been seen as rebellion—a root of evil that must be crushed, or the child will grow up into an adult who goes down the wrong road.

The truth is just the opposite. It’s crushing a child’s sense of spirit that causes children to go astray.

An important aspect of parenting is for the parent to affirm what the child is feeling, rather than negating it. So on the way home on the bus, Addie Mae tells us that Mama whispered in her ear, “An’ don’t you ever believe you not perfect baby ’cause God made you ’xactly like you supposed to be. In all your life, I want you to remember than an’ know it to be true.”

For millennia, it’s been the mindset of some civilizations to see humans as fundamentally evil, which has led to parents beating children and in other ways inflicting terrible abuse on them—in some societies, even killing their own children because they didn’t conform. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have all been guilty of this in their past, and in some cases even in the present.

In Christendom, children were believed to come into the world in a state of “original sin.” This teaching has fostered a damnable belief that children should be subjected to horrendous corporal punishment to keep them on the “straight and narrow.”

The notion of “original sin” has been completely misunderstood. There’s nothing evil about our children when they are born. What’s evil is a culture that believes they are evil and treats them as if they were. That’s our original sin: telling our children they are less than fantastic, so that they no longer truly trust in themselves, as I explain in my book Your Forgotten Self.

The “sin” of treating our children as less than the magnificent beings they are is “original” in that it existed in society and family and educational institutions before the child was ever born. It gets transmitted through culture, not through procreation as religion has generally so wrongly taught. Those who have for centuries treated children as if they were inherently evil have much to answer for.

Over the Christmas period, I watched a movie called The Magdalene Sisters.

It’s a true story, and it’s stunning. I recommend you watch it to see just what the idea that children are sinful did to some 30,000 Irish girls, until the institutions were finally closed in 1996. One reviewer said of this film, “I would give this film 20 out of 10!” Former Magdalen Asylum inmate Mary-Jo McDonagh told director and writer Peter Mullan that the reality of the Magdalene Asylums was much worse than depicted in the film. And all in the name of God! Of course, there have been massive denials, as there have been of priests abusing children.

Addie Mae saw the evil of the idea that people are fundamentally evil. She tells us, “I loved the sound of the organ and those voices rising as we approached the church. The anticipation of God always pleased me greatly. But when I entered those big wooden doors, heard the minister preach about sin and obeying and staying in one’s place in life, I kind of lost interest.”

Whereas much of religion crushes who we really are as divine offspring, true spirituality draws out our potential, causing us to believe in our wonderful selves.

As Addie Mae shares with us, “Mama always taught that God lived in the goodness of who I

could be, in the love of family and friends, in the tolerance of those I didn’t understand, and in the courage to do what was right. So, while the minister railed on about hell’s fury and all, I watched the morning sunlight bring the jeweled images to life, imagining the holiest of saints taking me away on a beautiful white horse, flying high above the world for all to see my glory. I couldn’t believe I was meant for small things, and no God of mine was going to try and keep me there.”

Addie Mae had a powerful counterforce to the twisted doctrines of religion that told her there was something wrong with her.

That counterforce was nature. As just one of many examples of how much the natural world showed her both the nature of the divine and also her own true nature, she tells us, “There’s something bewitching about the early morning sun watching over God’s natural makings. The air sparkles like every molecule of life there is alive and awake with a tale to tell.

Nothing is hidden. Each morning all over the world, in the quiet spaces of nature, everything we need to understand about life is revealed. I’m sure of it.”

Can you imagine that? If we were only in tune with nature, including our own nature, everything we need to know would be clear to us. What a marvelous insight. To which she adds, “Of course, most of us haven’t learned how to listen yet.”

As Dr Shefali shares in Out of Control, a vital aspect of effective parenting is to help our children become truly connected to their world—to become fully

present in each and every moment of their existence, so they can hear what the divine in everything is saying to them.

While most haven’t learned to listen, Addie Mae tells us, “Jenny had, and every morning she was bathed in the precious bounty of that knowing. She told me to sit still and silent, listening only to my breathing, to the faint sound of my breath coming and going. It seemed foolish but I agreed because I wanted to share Jenny’s love of that place. To my surprise, a full hour passed before we moved, yet I had no feeling of that much time leaving. Then I heard.

The birds. Tiny insects buzzing. The wind. The stirring of concealed animals as they revealed themselves. Suddenly life surrounded me.”

Isn’t this what we really all want for our children—that life should embrace them, and that they should embrace life? That they should become fully alive?

Addie Mae added, “Jenny knew I felt the difference and smiled, comforted that I understood. She finally had another soul to share her secret world. We didn’t say anything more because two people who know the same thing don’t need words. We simply sat together in exalted silence, enchanted by nature’s holy presence. It seemed to be watching us, same as we were watching it.”

Dr Shefali has several key insights to share about teaching our children how to connect to their own being, our true being as their parents, and the world around them. If our children learn to experience authentic connection, they will be okay on their life’s journey. It’s the most important gift any parent can bequeath to their offspring.

The form of expression our essence takes is something we renegotiate throughout life according to our changing circumstances. The challenges of early childhood are fundamentally different from those of the teen years, with our growing awareness of our sexuality. The challenges change again with a family of our own and a career; and yet again as we face old age.

Each of these stages of life has its way of helping us discover more about our essential being—and very often through first experiencing what it is to not be ourselves, but

to form ourselves in the eyes of others, then realize in mid life what a mistake this is.

So it is that Addie Mae meets Rawley. Jenny has told her some of the things she can expect around boys. Addie Mae tells us, “There was none of the strange goings-on Jenny told me about. I was beginning to think Jenny had been fooling, trying to scare me. Or worse, should I even think it, that Rawley found me unattractive. I’d wake up with that fresh fear in the middle of the night and pray to God that Rawley didn’t find me pig-ugly.”

A transfusion of selfhood is something we so long for as we increasingly lose touch with our own dear center, which is of course what leads to so much distress in our teen years when someone rebuffs us or our peers poke fun at us. With the transfusion withdrawn, it hurts, since we don’t know our own self.

In severe cases, such as when a teen is rejected by someone they are borrowing an identity from, it can lead to the all-too-common tragedy these days of teen suicide. Not just being jilted, but even comments or photos posted on sites such as Facebook can be devastating to a teen.

This experience repeats with so many of us following a divorce, when someone has been “I never really thought of our “world” and no longer is. We feel lost, the way I looked before rudderless, without a sense of meaning.

at all. I was just me,

Yet it’s in precisely such times of crisis Addie Mae, the way God that, if we begin to sit with ourselves in the made me.” way Jenny sat alone in nature, we reconnect with our own center, our own true being. This is where all meaning must ultimately be derived from. No one can substitute for our own precious divine essence.

I address how suddenly losing our identity lifeline, devastating as it is, can be the making of us in my Namaste Publishing book Your Forgotten Self and in my audiobook Lessons in Loving—A Journey into the Heart. I show how life engineers these experiences precisely to awaken us to who we really are, and how we can put them to use to our advantage.

Notice that it had never been an issue for Addie Mae how she looked to others until now. The thing it all turns on is that one word “think.” Eckhart Tolle has written extensively on how thought does us in. If you haven’t read The Power of Now, Stillness Speaks, and A New Earth, I consider them a must read for the person who wants to move beyond worrying what others think about them, finding their identity solely in their own center.

Addie Mae continues, “I never really thought of the way I looked before at all. I was just me, Addie Mae, the way God made me, just like Mama always

promised. It wasn’t until Rawley that I figured maybe God didn’t do such a good job after all.”

Do you see how the self-doubt begins to enter with thought? As soon as we begin thinking about ourselves, we start to doubt instead of simply being. As Addie Mae confesses, “I no longer believed Mama’s loving image of me.”

The school years, especially the teen years, are a time when our children need tremendous help from us as parents, so that they negotiate this period of “thinking about” themselves in a healthy manner. Dr Shefali has much to offer in Out of Control to help parents be of assistance to their children as they journey through these years.

There is a powerful chapter on the effect a teacher can have on a child. Miss Blanchard explains to Addie Mae, “It’s hard on a mind hearin’ things it’s not ready for yet. Old beliefs protect themselves with fierce conviction to keep fresh notions out. Experience and learning are the only tools we have to build a bridge so new ideas can enter and tired, worn judgments be surrendered. Life depends on us seein’ beyond what we know to be absolutely true. Everything important that happens in our world comes from somebody brave seeing past old believing.”

The teacher cites the case of Copernicus who “told an angry world that the sun did not resolve around the earth.” Consequently, “People were angry with him because they were scared. They didn’t want to know somethin’ new because maybe it might change who they were, too.” She adds that after people realized the earth truly does circle the sun, and not the other way around, “Now it seems foolish to think in the old ways, doesn’t it?”

A lot of people who claim to be “believers” really don’t have faith.

They have a set of ideas that form a security blanket, but that are

about as unenlightened as the pre-Copernican view of the universe. They cling to ideas that have no basis in fact purely out of a mental need for “certainty.”

As parents, one of our tasks is to help our children to allow their experiences and insights to transform them, so that they begin to unleash their potential. Miss Blanchard wants Addie Mae to “think beyond what you already know. By simply considerin’ the unknown, you might eventually seek to experience it as well.”

Dr Kurt Johnson and I wrote a book together entitled The Coming Interspiritual Age. Miss Blanchard points to the heart of the message of this book when she tells Addie Mae that most folks “believe the narrow, sometimes dim view from one window is all there is in the world. Some even demand that theirs is the only view there should be. They fear what they don’t know about life and want no one else knowin’ anything more either.” (Kurt and I pick this theme up in the next issue of this ezine, “When the World Becomes One.”) In response to this insight, Addie Mae tells us, “I felt a faint breeze blowing from a distant place I couldn’t yet see.”

I think that’s what many of us are feeling now, as we are being asked to move beyond the beliefs we learned in childhood, away from our certainties, into an age when our “I felt a faint breeze vision is vastly expanded and our acceptance of blowing from a things that would have been unthinkable becomes distant place I perfectly normal. Instead of dividing up according couldn’t yet see.” to our dogmas, we come together lovingly based on a profound sense of the oneness of everyone and everything.

We’ve come to about page 116 of Trusting the Currents, and that’s a long way from the epilogue that concludes on page 281. But perhaps it’s enough to wet your appetite—not only for this wonderful story, with so many insights, but also for the books I’ve mentioned along the way that can throw further light on the journey of self-discovery life invites us to take.

And for those who would like to discuss the book in more depth, I’ll be blogging on it in my author blog on the Namaste Publishing website, Consciousness Rising. You can find the link to it on the homepage.

www.namastepublishing.com

“There is a dominant story about an elsewhere God; there is an even better story about an everywhere God. There is a dominant story about Jesus as connector to an elsewhere deity; there is an even better story about Jesus as the revealer of God-with-us in our living and loving. There is a dominant story about sacraments which emphasizes dependence on men with special powers; there is an even better story about sacraments ritualizing who we are. There is a dominant story about prayer reaching out to a listening God; there www.morwood.org is an even better story about prayer raising the mind and heart in awareness of a Divine Presence always with us. There is a dominant story about the institutional Church as the unique pathway to God; there is a far more truthful story about the Church being called to do what Jesus did—to reveal the sacred presence with all people in their everyday lives.”

“Our primary task is to be attuned to the Divine Presence already here in children and to help them grow in awareness of this Presence.”

“Children up to the age of seven live very much in the now. The world is mystery and they have a wonderful sense of connection to the world around them.”

“We want to honor belief that the Spirit of God is vibrantly alive and coming to wonderful human expression in this child’s life.”

“Affirmation of God’s presence everywhere, in all things, in all people, is the key to the counter-

balance we seek to traditional prayer that addresses an elsewhere God.” “For the first time in human history we have a common story to tell about who and what we are. This is a story with the capacity to bond us all together. If God is the all-pervasive Mystery holding everything in existence, then for the first time in human history we have a common religious story: everyone and everything is bonded within this Mystery. The scientific story tells us that we give the universe a way of coming to awareness. Our religious story tells us that we—all of us in our own unique ways—give God a way of coming to expression in our awareness and our ability to love.”

“All talk about God should be totally free from fear.”

“God’s loving presence has never been absent from any human being.”

“If questions such as, ‘Does God know how things will unfold?’ or ‘Does God know everything?’ arise, they would be best handled by asserting that God does not think or know the way we do. It is like asking whether the sun thinks about shining or the wind thinks about what direction to take. God is, and everything happens in God.” “God, the Divine Presence, the Spirit of Life and Love—whatever names we use for this Mystery permeating and holding all things in existence—comes to visibility in the human reality we are. Prayer for all of us, adults and children, is the means we have to deepen awareness of this wonderful privilege. It is the means to deepen awareness that every human person shares the same privilege, regardless of race and religion.”

“Prayer is not about words addressed to an elsewhere God. Prayer is about reflection on life and the interconnectedness of everyone and all things within God’s Presence.”

“Our gratitude is not addressed to a listening deity. It has more to do with standing and facing life in a spirit of appreciation and gratitude, and allowing this spirit of appreciation to shape who we are and what we do.”

Please join our Namaste Global Spiritual Community again in April for new insights into

celebrating living consciously

Namaste Publishing, Inc. PO Box 62084 Vancouver, British Columbia Canada V6J 4A3 www.namastepublishing.com