In Awe of You.

Click on the image to watch the event video.

I had no idea my water had broken until I went in for my regular checkup and the doctor sent me straight to the hospital. Once there, I was given Pitocin, to induce labor, and the process started. At one point, I had made great progress, my son’s head had seen the artificial light of the hospital room, but then I grew weak and could no longer push. The epidural I was given numbed my body. Eventually, my baby was delivered by C-section. My birthing experience had turned out to be the total opposite of everything I had wanted: a natural birth, in a pool, with no pain killers.

Once the incision of my swollen belly had been sewn and my baby delivered, the nurse put him on my chest. I hugged him but couldn’t feel him. I couldn’t feel anything. I was numb from my head to my toes. I wanted to scream but was too frail to even do that. I just smiled, my heart overflowing with love and gratitude for the beautiful, healthy little being that now laid on my anesthetized chest.

It wasn’t long after that episode, that I began to realize that I wasn’t just ga-ga, head-over-heels full of oxytocin, marveling at my creation, but I was literally in awe of my son. I wasn’t just in love with this little human creature, but I revered him. It was as if I felt he knew more than me, that he was wiser somehow, that he was someone to look up to admire and listen to.  

I remember thinking “what kind of mother are you that you feel this way?”. I loved him to no end, but more than motherly love, I felt a sense of reverie.

Years have passed and I now understand what I must have sensed and felt then. You see, as children we come into this world vibrating at very high frequencies indicative of our true loving nature. We are pure energy and as such, should be the cause of awe and revery to anyone who is also in touch with their true nature, even in the slightest bit.  

But it doesn’t take long for most of us to get muddied and tarnished, as we deal with the world we’ve come into and how the adults who came before us see it. While well intentioned in most cases, they have forgotten where they came from themselves and therefore, cannot recognize the magnificence of children, who although not knowledgeable of THIS world, are fresh and new and smell of unconditional love and acceptance.

Children soak up every bit of every experience. They are a blank canvas on which every moment is etched and painted. Every day filling itself with more wonder and color. The reason they are to be revered and imitated is not so much for what they do, but for how they do it.

They observe intently, notice the details, marvel at the details, see, hear, smell, taste and touch the details. They are open, fearless and free. They know no boundaries.

We don’t have to “teach” children that they can grow up to be anything they want to be. They already know this. We don’t have to “teach” them to love and accept others. They do that by default. It’s their true nature.

We’re the ones that have lost touch with our true nature.

We’re the ones that keep doing what we’re doing even when what we’re doing is not pleasant or fulfilling. We’re the ones that keep focusing on something that didn’t go right and decide we’re never going to amount to much. We’re the ones that talk down to ourselves. We are the ones that keep us in our place. And we pass that on to these brand-new beings who are soaking in every moment of their tiny little lives.

But we can’t take all the blame. Most of us are just trying to figure things out ourselves. After all, we’re also the product of those who came before us and how they saw things and experienced life.

The truth is we all come into this world neurologically disadvantaged. In his book, Neurodharma, Dr. Rick Hanson explains that even before we see the harsh artificial light of a hospital room, the amygdala, the activator of our fight or flight response and are trigger for stress and fear, are fully formed in our tiny little ancient brains. This primes us for survival from the get-go, alerting us to any dangers that may be lurking nearby. It’s as if we’re a baby radar.

The hippocampus on the other hand, the part of the brain that provides episodic memories contextual memory (what actually happened and why) does not form until we’re about three. If you think about it, that’s a very long time that as children we spend experiencing fear and stress due to the activation of the amygdala without knowing exactly why. From a very early age, unexplained distress gets recorded in our psyche.

That is why so many of us walk around with deep emotional wounds, beliefs that define us, which could be extremely difficult to work through because there’s no what, why and when. There’s just a deeply rooted unidentified fear that was felt before we could identify it, much less express it. 

Right before my son turned four, I took a job in another city and left him with his father and my mom for three months while I settled down, found a home, school, etc. He had been in Montessori school since he was two and a half and I wanted him to continue on that path.

My strategy made sense to me at the time, but had I known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it.

My son recalls these months as having been abandoned by me, although we spoke on the phone every day and I explained the situation to me at length. I now understand that there was no way I could have explained it to him that he would have understood it. He just felt the fear of being left alone, perhaps of rejection or not being loved by me.

Ironically, his father suffered a similar experience when he was just a few years old. His mother went on a retreat for the weekend. He claims to this day that she left him and was gone for months.

According to Hanson, “The feelings, sensations and longings in your younger experience were internalized into implicit memory stores but disconnected from explicit recollections of the situations in which they occurred. Today this buried material lives on. And it can be reactivated by the type of cues that were also present way back then, such as feeling unheard, unseen, or uncared for.”

While mindfulness and meditation may help to soothe this long-term suffering, Hanson goes on, it is important to uncover and reveal this deeply rooted pain before you can truly heal. This may call for special kinds of psychotherapies and self-help practices, which he lists in his book and which I encourage you to seek.

For now, what we can all do to start the path back to our authentic selves is take up some of those behaviors we used to do as a child: 

·      Observe rather than do.

·      Look at every moment as your last one.

·      See, hear, smell, taste and touch it.

As you begin to do this, you’ll start to reconnect with that unconditional love that is at the core of who you are – what we’re all made of.

Once you reconnect, even if only for seconds at a time, you’ll start to trust yourself and take risks. You’ll start to shed your fears. You’ll start to feel good about who you are and the life you lead, as it is, while starting to change that which no longer serves you.

You’ll begin to open up to new experiences, people and things. You’ll start seeing opportunities arise where you couldn’t see them before. The more you do this, the more confident you’ll become and the more you’ll know no boundaries. The more you do this, the more you’ll remember where you came from and what you came here to do. And the more you’ll realize that YOU can do anything at any age and under any circumstances, as long as you’re in touch…with you.

While this may sound like pie in the sky, it’s not. The process back is a simple one, although it may not be easy. It requires intention. You have to want to do it and do it often. After a while, like any habit, it will have wedged a pathway in your brain, and it will become something you want to do because it feels amazing.

The process back to you is through mindfulness, a practice that involves intentionally paying attention to what’s happening in the moment without judging it or yourself. It can be done at any time of the day or night and can be quite liberating without even realizing it.

To try it out, next time you sit down to a meal, just eat. Do nothing else but eat. Stop, look at your food, take in the colors and textures, smell your food, maybe even listen to your food, take small bites and truly taste your food. That’s all.

Next time you’re walking to your car or around the block, just walk. Do nothing else but walk. Feel how your body orchestrates every movement. One foot in front, shift of the hip, foot kicks back, other foot comes forward. Count your steps. That’s all.

Next time someone is talking to you, just listen. Don’t think of a rebuttal or something you want to share or advice you want to give. Just listen. And see how that feels.

That’s mindfulness and it can be incorporated into any part of your day or anything you’re doing.

For the guided meditation that accompanies this program, click here.