LOVING MYSELF AND THE WORLD BEYOND CONDITION The choices you make right now, based on how you choose to perceive this moment, are literally creating your future. This month’s Parvati Magazine explores the theme Equilibrium. My article “Finding Balance In Relationships” looks at how our core beliefs affect how we perceive and therefore choose to interact with the world. As often is the case when I share, I get immediate opportunity to put my teachings into practice. I feel this happens because the universe is the ultimate compassionate teacher. It lovingly makes sure that I am walking the talk and serving to my utmost by presenting me with many life lessons that support my growth. This week, I had an encounter with someone through which my feelings were hurt. As I processed my experience, I discovered that some of my core beliefs needed revision. So I went within and took stock of how I choose to perceive life, asking myself if I am living in unattached truthfulness or projecting and validating my assumptions onto the world. I also went back to review my blog posts that celebrate the power of the divine feminine, a five part series written in December 2013 through January 2014. If you have not yet read them, they are pretty juicy and…
Why Most Of Our Problems Would Disappear If We Honoured Our Inner Child After marriage, people often ask the bride and groom if they will be having children. In my case as a newlywed, it would be unlikely. Not because I don’t love children. On the contrary, I love them so much that I feel I am already guardian to many. Whether or not we have children, I believe we always have at least one child to take care of: our inner child. I am not a TV watcher. I don’t even own a TV, as I far prefer spending my time actively creating art or resting in the stillness of meditation to passively watching dramas unfold on a tinsel screen. Yet, being part of the entertainment industry, I check in periodically with current TV shows to keep me up to date with passing trends. Yesterday I stumbled upon segments on YouTube from The Voice Kids, a show that holds blind auditions for children, where the coaches can only hear the voice and not see the singer. If the voice is selected, then the singer is revealed and must choose which coach he wishes to work with as he moves forward in the competition. Though any notion of childhood exploitation rests uneasily with me, I found…
(Continued from The Sacred Garden) I have been feeling low energy the last couple of weeks. Perhaps it is just the end of winter and I am a bit like a tropical flower that is challenged by the colder seasons. It is more likely that I have been working too hard, a knee-jerk reaction to feeling that I need to catch up for time I spent bedridden this past year. So I started to push rather than flow. My pushing came strikingly to mind last week as I was doing my bi-weekly swim to help heal my spine. I started to feel really pumped and proud that I was swimming faster than everyone in the pool. I suddenly noticed that I could feel an acidic fluid rush through my cells with each stroke, as the reptilian part of my brain was getting fixated on how “special” I was because I was faster and therefore “better” than others. Being a meditator, I took note when the constrictive consciousness arose through me and started to feed my cells with toxic ego boosters. I then returned to what feels more natural and joyful to me: to use the swim as a meditation practice flow, rather than trying to push the river. (Of note, I swim much…
(Continued from “An Apple in an Orange Grove”) Recently I was out with a friend in a mall. She was asking me a similar question, feeling a bit stuck with her attachments to her family. I said to her, look around. Beside us is not a 24 year old guy and a 35 year old woman but a two year old boy and a three year old girl. This mall is full of two and three year olds. Many of the fundamental decisions we make every day likely come from our unconscious mind, that is, the unresolved inner child that continues to rule our life until we give it the love and attention it needs and turn towards the Divine, the source of unconditional love. Anyone who has tried setting long term goals knows this to be true. We need to have our unconscious mind in alignment with our conscious mind, or else we inevitably meet an inner saboteur and fail. That is because our unconscious mind is ultimately in charge. Our primary commitments live in the depth of our unconscious, so we had best befriend these in order to evolve. Most of us live with a buried inner child, held captive by the grip of our ego that is committed to getting limited…
(Continued from “Trading the Infinite for the Finite”) In our early years, as we focus on survival, we lose touch with the infinite. Our parents, and not the source of pure consciousness from which we came, become the centre of our universe. In this process of maturation and survival, we tend to take on habits that pull us from our original, natural and pure connection to source. We begin to believe that the imperfect beings that are our caregivers are the truest sources of our love. With this comes expectations and disappointments. We begin to barter, shift, twist and modify ourselves in order to try to find unconditional love from conditional beings. In the process, our relationship with the infinite and our true self weakens in order to make do with the finite. We once were connected to the source of pure consciousness, the place of unconditional love. Now we have traded that infinite connection for finite love. Though we are creatively surviving, which is a great thing, we lose a part of ourself in the process. In order to become whole, to return the one source of pure unconditional love, we need to regain our sublimated connection to the eternal. What initially was natural instinct is subdued with shoulds, wants and desires that…
Dear Parvati, Is it important to get in touch with your inner child in order to live, as you would say, a “rooted, vital and expansive” life? PART 1: TRADING THE INFINITE FOR THE FINITE Thank you for this question. My immediate answer is, yes. The following explains why. I believe that we are born like a hunk of flesh with pure consciousness. At birth and soon thereafter, most of us are still consciously connected to the infinite source of love and consciousness from which we came. Hence the raw purity we can easily see in a newborn. It is as though we can see the infinite in the depth of an infant’s eyes. If you look deeply into them, they seem almost formless, dark and vast, like deep space. As we mature, our personality forms, and so do our features, including eye colour and facial expressions. In this process, our egos take shape, through which our individuality is born. Our personalities are a reflection of two concurrent forces: our own previous karmic tendencies (the soul information with which we were born), and the way these tendencies bump up against our life experiences. Our mother is the first person with whom we come into contact. As such, our relationship with our…
(Continued from “What are the unconscious tendencies that affect your choices?“) The choices we have made over years have carved the lives we have today. Most of these choices were made unconsciously, until we wake up to the story of our lives. We all carry personal tendencies that shape the way we make our decisions. We can see these tendencies clearly in the way we reacted to our parents. Each one of us has unique interference patterns that thwart our joy. These interference patterns are like an inner saboteur that blocks our ability to live our greatest joy. We all carry a saboteur within us until we find the courage to befriend ourself and get to know our shadows. When we befriend ourselves, we begin to listen to the full story of our lives: our hopes and dreams, and the scary, painful bits. If we are to fulfill our dreams, we must acknowledge our shadow, which has a huge impact on the shape of our lives. When we befriend ourselves, we listen to the little girl or little boy within that holds secrets to our unfulfilled desires. When we befriend ourselves, we hear our deepest joys and activate the inner courage to realize our true heart’s desires. An exercise that I include every day in my…
PART 3: AUTHENTIC COMMUNICATION: FROM GOO TO GRAMMAR (Continued from Part 2: Sounding It Raw And Real) Much of our developmental information happens in our wee, early years. Before the age of one, we have set up bio-dynamic patterns in our body and psyche that set the stage for our adult life. Before we are able to articulate words, we are sputtering, goo-ing and making all sorts of sounds. During infancy, our bodies are fresh, unencumbered by cerebral tensions. Expression as a means of feeling connected to the raw life force flows through us as toddlers. As we grow, we learn to put things into sentences and form ideas. In that process, a filter is placed over our impulses as we learn to interact with others and socialize. We learn what we can do and what we must not do in order to get the support from our surrounding that we need to survive. Though we may grow up to be healthy, responsible citizens, we may have lost touch with our inner impulse, our soul voice, our connection to the primal force of “being” versus controlled thinking. We may hear the phrase “to give voice” and immediately think of speaking. But words are only one part of our daily sonic communications. Clicks, pops, pursed lips, parted…