Over this past year I have grown closer to myself. I understand my wants and needs, silly foibles and endearing comforts. I am present.
Today is my birthday. I celebrate it with you quietly, my choice, and I celebrate it with me. I remember breathwork therapy I experienced with a healer, eyes closed, as she guided me through a rebirthing experience. I imagined my entrance into this world. So many shadows moving around, my eyes fluttered with the movement. When we were finished, I asked her if she was waving her hands around in front of my face? She was present and invoking my birth through guided breathwork into a world where I was wanted.
I came away from the experience with the belief the movement was some kind of energy dancing around me. I had no other explanation. I imagined excitement in my parents faces as they welcomed me. I felt wanted.
This healing offered me an opportunity to redefine a core belief. My reparenting began as I was welcomed into this world. No matter what truths were happening as a child, I redefined a core belief through a visceral experience.
Affirmation work is more effective when done with emotion. Feel the words. If I don’t feel the meaning of my mantra, change it until it rings true within. Sometimes my affirmations come to me after I reach a point of no return, and emotionally spent with frustration and desperateness. I used to believe crying was a weakness, but learned to believe crying is a doorway to harvesting realizations otherwise hidden behind my wall.
So happy birthday to me! I receive with joy! I feel my presence. I love and accept myself. I honor Oneness.
Often the instruments of change are not kind or just and the hardest openness of all might be to embrace the change while not wasting your heart fighting the instrument.
The storm is not as important as the path it opens. The mistreatment in one life never as crucial as the clearing it makes in your heart.
This is very difficult to accept. The hammer or cruel one is always short-lived compared to the jewel in the center of the stone.
Participants’ Reflections:
So cool! I was so peaceful a bee sat on my leg for several minutes!
I want to say how happy to the depth of my being that you were born. Happy birthday.
I want to say that I’m glad that I met you in this experience of life. I wouldn’t have wanted to go through life without meeting you. Thank you all. Thank you for the day you were born.
I want to ditto everything that everyone is saying. I was thinking this morning how much my life has changed in the last year and it’s starting to come together in my dream work, in my art work, all the pieces are starting to interlock. That wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for this past year, with all of you, being in lockdown. I owe you all a great depth of gratitude. Thank you. So happy you are here in this lifetime, this time.
Don’t forget the gratitude for yourself because you are willing to walk through the doorways as we all are. We may be kicking and screaming at times, we’re still moving forward. Thank you.
I want you to think that the flowers, the trees blooming, the leaves bursting out, and dogs wagging their tails and smiling—it’s all of them rejoicing that you were born and all that you strive for. And if it rains or thunders later, think of that rain and noise as another celebration and exploding of gratefulness that you are here, from everyone you’ve touched.
What a beautiful, guided visioning that came out of your heart.
I wanted to share something I found yesterday. It ties in to rebirth. It’s a poem by Gabor Maté from “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction”
“The greatest damage done by neglect,
trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict
but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it.
All too often these ill-conditioned implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives.
We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we’ve created.
Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past...
Mindful awareness can bring into consciousness those hidden, past-based perspectives so that they no longer frame our worldview.
’Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present…
Until you reach that point, you are unconscious.’ …
In present awareness we are liberated from the past.”
Thank you. Happy birthday. During the reading, you were talking about affirmations. Until this moment, I had forgotten about an affirmation I had made for myself in a workshop. It was an exercise about developing a new groove in my brain. When I’m going down that rabbit hole, to have an affirmation that takes me out and forms a new groove. My affirmation was “I am safe and all is well.” I had kept it for about a year and it had gone out of my mind. Until this moment, I had forgotten it. So thank you for reminding me of it.
I love this affirmation. My affirmation is “I am safe and I am happy.” It’s printed on index cards all over my house. We all develop new grooves. I like thinking about it in that way.
Thank you so much for being born. Thank you all for participating in this. It’s a joy to see how we are all learning here together and growing together, gaining in wisdom and serenity and authenticity. It’s beautiful. Thank you everyone for what you share. It’s such an incredible thing we are creating here.
I hope you all have a delightful day. I hope you all notice the blooming trees with the incredible colors on them, little bunches of leaves that are coming out, even the melting snow, it’s all part of our existence, it’s all part of being alive, and it’s all part of relishing in the energy that gives us a reason to keep going. This community is so incredibly rewarding.