Sometimes I think I am a good mother and sometimes I strongly doubt it. If I look closely I can see that so many of my ‘educational’ actions towards my kids are based on fear. I want them to be able to make it in this world. When John has forgotten his maths homework at school for the tenth time, or Hannah did not clean the trash bin properly after emptying it, like always I have severe doubts that they will succeed. They are too sloppy, not focused enough! How do I meet my fear?
In your question I can hear that you are willing to be honest. You are open to confront pain and you are seeking realness instead of a false happiness. This is the ground for true transformation not just self-improvement!
Much more of our behaviour is based on fear than we are conscious of. I am discovering that more and more by doing a process called Emotive Subself Healing (ESH™), a therapy I recently discovered. Its premise is that none of us were fully felt by our caregivers when we were children and hence we shrunk away from our authentic selves and developed strategic ways of behaviour in order to be loved as much as was possible. We literally created a new strategic self in order to survive. As adults we have become so accustomed to it we are to a great extent not even aware of it anymore. In order to be fully functional human beings, in order to become authentic again, I believe, we need to heal the emotional body on an emotional level and not simply transcend it into a larger, more comfortable spiritual space, or a psychological quick fix into new age numbness as many of us have been doing for years.
I recently spent an afternoon with a beautiful five-year-old girl named Tess who reminds me so much of myself when I was little. I wanted to tune into her world to remember better how mine was as a little girl.
Tess was ready, wet curly hair, wearing a white flowery dress, her little bag with money in it over her shoulders when I arrived. She knew that we were going to have lunch together even though it was way past lunch time and we had never talked about having lunch. I knew it too. Great, we were on the same psychic wavelength!
When I asked her, as we drove off, whether she ‘just knew’ things all the time, she nodded. I had decided to move with her in her world. At first I was a bit shocked how unromantic her world was. It was not a wonderful world of a little fairy child; it just simply was an afternoon, another rich moment. We went to the toy store. The moment we entered I could feel her excitement quicken. She held my hand and we moved through this exciting world made just for her and other kids.
Tess had 90 cents in her purse, which for her did not represent a specific value; it just meant she could buy a toy. ‘I like boy stuff and horses,’ she said.
I guided her to the few things she could actually buy with the money she had and she found a little zebra and was most delighted. We immersed further into the store. It was quite an experience for me. Normally I hate most toys in toy stores and therefore it is usually a painful place for me to be in. Being there with Tess’s wavelength, though, we were in an acutely exciting place. After a long time of exploring she found a little wooden barbeque stove for a dollhouse hidden under a few boxes.
‘I am getting this too,’ she said with great certainty and put the box under her arm. I told her that she did not have enough money to buy it. She looked at me and said with clarity, ‘But you do!’ I had decided not to get her a toy. I did not want to buy her love, even though if I was honest, I really would have liked to get her one.
I noticed that there was not a trace of neediness in her voice. She was just simply right. I did have enough money! It was right for her to have that little stove and the fact that I was paying for it was just a detail. She was clearly living in a world of abundance, not greed. It was so clean, there was not even a need for her to say ‘thank you’. Getting the little stove was just simply existence taking care of the obvious.
When we paid she was as overjoyed that she got change from the 90 cents as she was about getting the little zebra.
‘And you got change too!’ she said. The world was a fair place! I could see that so much of why my world had become more narrow than Tess’s over the years was because of a fear that somehow there was not enough of everything and that I had to be in control in order to not get hurt by life. I had sacrificed being an in-tune and aware being who knows what is right at every moment, for being in control.
After we had eaten our sushi I asked her what she thought happened to people after they died. ‘First they all go to hell,’ she answered, ‘and then they go to heaven and stay there for a while. And after that they come back to the world again and again as animals and as people.’
‘Who thought of making a hell?’ I asked her.
‘God!’ she replied.
‘But why would God create such a horrible place?’ I asked.
‘Hell is not only bad,’ she said firmly. ’It is just that everyone has to go through it. It is just like that!’
If this is not what happens after death, it certainly is a very precise metaphor for what happens in life: encountering a narrow pattern of behaviour and going through hell with it so to speak, moving through it and spending some time in heaven, only to come back to earth again and after a while meeting the next narrow space.
‘Mum has been expecting us back for a little while already,’ Tess said with a big smile. I looked at my watch and indeed it was already half an hour later than we had said we would be back by. It was so refreshing to see how Tess’s availability to life made her take care of everything naturally.
I was very lucky to have had such an in-tune little teacher, one who still has quite an intact access to who she is. Yet even in her I could see she had strategies, being cute instead of real. I simply refused to go there with her and she would snap right out of it.
Dear Maria, you are probably reminded of your five-year-old Maria in Tess too. It is really amazing how much we have shrunk away from our true potential and how much of that shrinking we have already passed on to our children.
