I am at The Outdoor Lifestyle Show until 6 July - nothing sweaty for me, I have my stall at the Wellness Centre.
Because this is a life-changing weekend for me, I decided to spoil you with a full-length story despite what research says.
Please let me know whether you prefer the posting in short instalments or in one go.
What is the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you? Try and beat this one.
I recently had to attend an evening meeting in Kent, south of London. I was due in London early the next morning. Rather than risk missing the last train home, I decided to stay over in a hotel.
London budget hotels are generally an embarrassment to the city, but I managed to get a decent room at a very good price in a place called Orpington, close to where my meeting was.
I went to bed at 11pm and did not fall asleep immediately, because there was a hall light right outside my hotel door that shone right in my face. I covered my head and eventually fell asleep.
However, I woke up several times because of the light. I know that the light was required for the inhabitants of the room above mine, because they had to use the stairs from the hallway that we shared.
At some point I woke up again and decided that since it is pitch dark outside, nobody would need the light to use the stairs. I got up and opened the bedroom door, and there was the light switch, two steps away. Bliss!
As I reached the light switch, the electronic lock of the bedroom door softly closed behind me. And there I was standing in the hallway, dressed in a pair of knickers. My phone, my watch and my clothes were all behind that locked door.
Of course I was wide awake immediately. I could see the humour in the situation, but I also felt quite exposed (excuse the pun).
I decided to go upstairs (not that I had many options) and see whether there were people in the room above mine. The bathroom of the upstairs room was separate, and I managed to find a face towel that covered the essentials – for once I was happy about being flat-chested.
I knocked on the door and eventually a very scared female voice answered. I explained that I had this mishap, and asked them for a towel to put around me. After long deliberations in the room with another female, the lady told me that they would throw a towel down for me if I went down the stairs.
I ran down the spiral stairs, and waited for the towel – and waited. Eventually I went up again, and as politely as I could I asked them again for a towel. She told me that they had thrown a towel down – not down the spiral stairs to the hallway, but through the window to the outside. I again asked them to just pass me a towel, and they said they would throw another one out. Again there was no towel in the hallway.
I asked the two ladies to please call the police, because I had no phone and the ladies did not manage to wake the hotel management on the emergency number. They were obviously very scared and told me to go away.
Since it was still pitch dark outside, I decided to venture into the corridor. I found one towel on the first floor and the other one on the ground floor. I only realised the next morning that there was CCTV covering the hotel grounds and buildings.
Now I was covered in two towels and feeling a bit braver.
I saw a light burning in another room and decided to try my luck. I had no idea what time it was, and no way to find out except by asking other people.
I found the room and there were two gentlemen in. I asked them to call the police because the hotel management was unreachable. The gentleman offered to try and get the door open, but realised quickly that an electronic lock cannot be opened by normal means.
The lovely man then offered me his single room, explaining that his friend had a double room next door that they would share for the remainder of the night. Since he was so sincere and offered me the key card to the room, I gratefully accepted.
A few minutes later the man knocked on the door to get his watch. Then he left. Another few minutes later he was back again, this time with a duvet under his arm, because his friend did not want to share the room. I told him that under no circumstances would I inconvenience him any further, and I would let him have his room back.
The man decided to negotiate with his friend again and left the room. Then another man joined the two with a loud Tarzan cry. This was just after the nearby church bell chimed four times. The three men had a very loud discussion about beds and sleeping, and I decided that the stairs outside the two scared ladies’ room look more attractive.
I sneaked back and made myself comfortable on the stairs. Some time later someone came into the hallway and knocked loudly on my bedroom door. It was obviously my new friend who discovered that I had left his room.
I quietly ran into the bathroom and locked myself inside until he had left.
Then I sat on the stairs again and decided to meditate. What else can a girl do at 4.30 in the morning when you are dressed in two towels and a pair of knickers?
When it was broad daylight, I decided to try my luck at reception. This meant leaving the building and running barefoot around the side of the building to the reception area, being fully aware of early morning traffic on the busy road that was about ten steps away on the other side of a wire fence. What did those drivers think?
Of course, having no watch meant I had to guess what the time was. Daybreak was at about 4:15, and it was impossible to guess what the time was from then on.
I was successful with my second venture to reception, where an astonished cook opened the door for me and gave me a second key card to get back into my room. This was around 6:15.
I found it interesting that I did not at any time feel threatened. I could understand the fear of the two ladies, but at the same time I could not understand it. I had realised long ago that fear is something you build up in your own mind, and therefore you are the only one that can break it down again. I left them clean towels and a business card the next morning, and I hope that they will eventually read this blog and start breaking down their fears.
I also realised that when you are dressed only in towels, you have a kind of bargaining power that does not really serve an emergency. With two of the three gentlemen there was clearly alcohol involved, but even with that I did not feel threatened. All the time I was fully aware of my angels – they had a good laugh with me but I also knew that they would protect me at all times, and that was so comforting.
And next time I stay in a hotel, I will wear pyjamas – even if that means having a little extra luggage!
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If you feel like whining and complaining but choose to rather jump up and down, do a few war cries and take a few deep breaths, you will immediately pop out of the whining mood, because you will simply have too much energy to hang your shoulders and your face. You may get a few funny looks in the office, but at least you will feel much better for the rest of the day – and get a laugh out of other whining people which will make them feel better. Try it – it works.
Of course laughing also raises your vibrations. It does not matter whether it is a giggle by yourself or a deep laugh that comes from your stomach. You do not need to hear a good joke to laugh. All you need to do is laugh, and notice how your feelings change. There are companies that have tried this – a laughing session to start the day off – and it improved their productivity. They did not allow any jokes – at some point you could either run out of jokes or offend someone, and people’s sense of humour differ anyway. Just laughing works all the time if you want to raise the energy in a room, and it is contagious.
There is also the darkness that we experience after a particular incident, like a divorce or an accident. Some people experience it and then decide to move on. This takes time, but we all have our incidents and it is possible to accept them as part of our life path and then move on. Other people define themselves in terms of that incident for the rest of their lives, and often join organisations that make them feel like traitors if they choose to move on. I am referring to organisations that help people “recover” from alcoholism or rape or losing a child and so on. I am sure they initially do good work, but their survival depends on having dedicated members – people who choose to relive their experiences for a long time rather than integrate the experiences and get on with their lives.
If you are stuck in such an experience and want to define your life in a different way, I can recommend Dr John Demartini’s Breakthrough Experience or any good NLP practitioner.
NLP is the acronym for neuro-linguistic programming. NLP explores the relationships between how we think (neuro), how we communicate (linguistic) and our patterns of behaviour and emotion (programmes). An NLP practitioner will help you identify how your thoughts create your reality, and then change those thoughts so that you can also change your behaviour patterns and the emotions that they are based on.
But if you are simply having a bad hair day, trust me, nothing beats retail therapy. Just do not buy any clothes when you are in such a mood, because when you feel better and you see what you have spent your money on, you will get yourself into a mother of a depression.
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When we wake up in the morning, we all look like a version of the devil in the children’s bible, with hair standing in all directions. We then choose how to approach the day, and if we make the wrong choice, we blame our hair. Is that fair on our hair? And some young people (and people who still believe they are young) spend a fortune on hair gel and cultivating that porcupine look that the rest of us try to tame before we leave the house.
We all feel less than great at times. Of course there is the bad hair day, which friends can commiserate with, because like you they know this is nothing serious. It really is a cry for a friend to go with you to buy another pair of shoes or a pint of beer, whichever way you are inclined. You recognise these people because one talks all the time and the other one only says “I know . . . Isn’t it just . . . I know . . . Of course not . . . “ and so on. We all need that from time to time. I know someone who only calls me about twice a year. When she calls, I know it is so that I can tell her she is a great person. When she is in that mood, somehow she believes me, but not her husband or children who constantly makes demands on her.
Then there are the days when we simply choose to feel like whining about things, especially the weather and the government. Why on earth does everyone the world over have such an obsession with the weather? Anyway, when we choose to have a miserable day, the worst we can encounter is someone who is radiant with happiness, because it somehow tells us we made the wrong choice, and that is not nice to know and makes our day worse.
Of course we can consciously choose to change our mood. It does take some effort, like finding your way back to the right road when you get lost in a city you do not know. You can continue to just drive until you leave the city, and then try again to get to your destination, or you can focus on driving to the end of the one-way street, and then use your inner compass to go into the right direction and be on your way again. To be continued.
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We seem to have stronger links to some people than to others, as if the paper was folded double so that the figures would be joined from the knees downwards but also touch closely on all the other parts. The people that we have stronger links to are those that we associate with on a daily basis. They would for example be lovers, close family, friends and even animals.
I have read about an experiment that was done with a woman and her dog. The woman would leave home to go somewhere specifically for the experiment, in other words not part of her daily routine. She would travel in a random direction, and at some point decide to stop and turn back home. She would note the time when she decided to turn back home.
At the same time there was a person at her home that would observe the behaviour of the dog. Invariably, the dog would get up and wag its tail in anticipation of the return of the woman, a few minutes BEFORE the woman consciously decided to stop and turn back. How did the dog know the woman was on her way back? The dog had no hesitation tuning into the quantum vacuum to ensure that he would retain contact with his owner, because the dog has not learnt yet to fear the unknown. We tune in the same way, but we do it unconsciously, and that is how we become aware of the well-being and distress of those that we feel closest to us.
I grew up in an area where there would regularly be light earth tremors – near the gold fields in South Africa. We could also see in the behaviour of the animals when an earthquake could be expected, and even how severe it would be. If the animals – both chickens and dogs - became restless, there would be a light tremor. If they started behaving completely out of character, that would be the time to go outside and expect a more severe tremor.
The same happened during the tsunami a few years ago. There were a number of elephants with their mahouts or drivers in one area. These elephants were tame and used to having people on their backs. On the specific day, the elephants ran to higher ground and nearly threw the people off their backs. They then ran down again and grabbed unsuspecting people with their trunks and dumped them on higher ground.
The mahouts had no control over the animals, and only realised what had happened when the devastating wall of water came.
Imagine waves of energy around us and emanating from us. Those waves of energy probably have the same strength for each one of us, but we are only tuned into those that we consciously want to pick up, like a radio that is tuned into a specific station. The other stations are there, but if we tune into all the stations, it would be too much for our minds (and our ears) to cope with.
So we simply tune into those people that we care most about, and then we are surprised when we know about their well-being before they know themselves – because we do not understand what we know intuitively. We live on the surface of a sea of information, and we are only aware of a tiny bit of that information.
So when you have a very strong and often apparently completely irrational feeling about something, accept that it is real, and act on it. It will make a huge difference to your life and someone else’s life.
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Have you ever had the experience where you think of someone and then the phone rings and it is that person calling you? Or where you talk about someone and that person walks into the room unexpectedly?
And then there are the many instances where people disappear and their loved ones know in their heart of hearts whether they are alive or dead, but have no way of explaining that knowledge. An example is the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal a year ago. I personally am convinced that she is still alive – that is what my gut feel tells me. Many other parents and loved ones are not so fortunate – and they know it, and are just waiting for confirmation. I really feel so sorry for them, but then we all choose our experiences because we need to learn from them.
I have learnt over the years to dread dreaming about people close to me like my son or my partner. I know from experience that those dreams invariably are warnings of trouble ahead. For many years I was only aware of these dreams that came true a few days later, and I did not realize that they were early warnings. Once I have had the dream, all I can do is wait for the trouble to materialize and then deal with it. If I had known this years ago when I first became aware of those particular dreams, I would have made different life choices. My life has turned out to be perfect for its purpose anyway, because those experiences and the warning dreams have been a very important part of my spiritual path and my growing awareness.
How does this work? Here is my unscientific version.
Take a sheet of newspaper. Fold it in half, and then in half again, so that you have four layers of newspaper. Now take a pair of scissors and cut the outline of a person out of the newspaper, but cut it out from the knees upwards. You should end up with four people touching hands, and joined from their knees downwards.
That is a representation of us, the people on earth and in the universe. We are all unique and individual, but at the same time we are all one and linked together. If you want to, you can give names to the people you cut out. How about calling them Me, Sister Teresa, Osama bin Laden and Sarah Jessica Parker? Why not? Why would you want to be one with Sarah Jessica Parker but not with Osama bin Laden? We do not have much choice in this – we are all one. If you had cut out six figures, you could have named the last two Jesus and Adolf Hitler. Or you could have named them after you most and least favourite teachers at school. Either way, this gives you an idea of how we are all linked together in this Universe. To be continued.
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There is the modern practice of dating many people and having no-strings-attached sex with various partners. As a friend of mine once put it, there is nothing wrong with good, happy, healthy sex, no matter who your partner is. That would not work for me, but who are we to judge one another? I once read somewhere a very cynical definition of love: when two people wake up together in the same bed in the morning and neither wants to leave, they have found love. Such occasions probably call for a minor celebration, but I wonder.
On the other hand, we have all seen couples that are radiant together. They clearly belong together and they want the world to know this. Now that is a celebration. I mean every time they are in the presence of others and their happiness spill over to other people, there is a celebration of love. Whether they ever get married or not becomes irrelevant.
I once had a colleague who had that kind of love with her husband. They both had successful careers and they had two lovely children. Because of discriminatory tax legislation, they had to pay a huge penalty for being married and successful. They got divorced and did not tell anybody. She confided in me a few years after the divorce and I wondered how she could be so matter-of-fact about this. This was when my own acrimonious divorce was still fresh in my mind.
Then she invited me to their house and I met her husband – and all became clear to me. They had been together for nearly thirty years, and they were still in love and acting like newly-weds. There were moments when nobody else existed for them in the room. I realised that what they had was a meeting of souls, and that the angels celebrate with them every time they are together. That is when I put in my order for a similar relationship, and the angels listened.
The union of two souls is a celebration. Does it matter whether the union is between a man and a woman, or between two people of the same sex in a relationship? Not for me.
And this union does not only happen between couples. I have seen the same thing with a teenage girl holding her mother’s hand in the company of other adults. The girl was a stunningly beautiful, well adjusted young lady who was quite comfortable with expressing her obvious love for her mother in this way.
I have seen two sisters with very different characters embrace each other for no specific reason. And that was not a once-off occasion. Those sisters are both married women today and will still walk through the proverbial fire for each other.
I have a friend that has shared my path with me for over fifteen years now. We live on different sides of the world, grew up in vastly different cultures, and she smokes like a chimney, but I was with her when she waded through hell and she has been there for me during my worst and best times, often without question, sometimes with strong criticism, but always with love. The bond between us transcends all differences and our differences enrich our friendship.
And I am fortunate enough to be able to often associate with kindred spirits that radiate this kind of love. Namaste to all my free flying friends out there!
No document or ceremony can capture this kind of love, and when it happens to you, you will know, because the room will be full of angels. When you find such love, hold on to it.
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We like ceremonies and celebrations. We scoff at ceremonies like coronations, inaugurations, society weddings and other public celebrations, but only after we had watched them, so that we can ridicule the detail. We silently place ourselves in the place of the main characters in the celebration, and wish for our own turn.
I remember when Prince Charles and Princess Diana got married. At the time I was working as a civil servant in South Africa. For one day, we were allowed to break all the rules. I had a portable television set in my office, and we gathered around it all day so that we would not miss even a tiny detail of the broadcast. This was years after South Africa became a republic, and we had no official ties with the royal family. It did not matter. We were caught up in the magic.
I recently heard about a man who spent that entire day in bed with his girlfriend, now his wife of many years. They obviously had their own magic going on that day.
In England the expression “getting a hat” means that a couple has decided to get married and it is time to prepare for a celebration, part of which is to buy a hat to wear to the ceremony.
Nowadays a wedding is preceded by months of planning and huge expenses. Everything has to be just right, and there are even mock weddings before the day so that every participant can remember their steps for the big moment.
Sadly, the cost of a traditional wedding and the emphasis on the legal aspects of the wedding put people off the idea of marriage. Add to that the high divorce rate and the negative emotions that go with divorce, and marriage becomes a lot less attractive.
The gagirl website contains a lot of amusing and eye-opening information about the various traditions that go with the modern Christian wedding ceremony. Virtually nothing of the ceremony has anything to do with being Christian – or belonging to any other faith group.
Considering that marriage is not even mentioned in the Bible, it is interesting how much emphasis the churches and even some governments place on the institution of the Christian marriage as a means of controlling relationships.
Among all the fuss, we miss the point. Does it really matter what style the wedding dress is or which side the groom stands on? What difference will the honeymoon destination make to the ceremony, except to cause stress when the couple are probably already not quite keeping up with expectations?
What is far more important is the celebration of joy and happiness when two people find each other and decide to be a couple. And that does not need to be celebrated with pomp and ceremony.
Conclusion to follow - not because I got lazy, but because research indicated that readers prefer shorter updates. This is my way of showing Love and Light to you.
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I always find it fascinating that in one aspect, all adults act like obstinate children without being aware of it. We judge each other.
The only sermon I remember from my church-going days was about the Ten Commandments. The preacher had a revolutionary approach to them, in that he said that you do not HAVE to obey them. He said the real meaning was that you could ignore them, but then you would have to take full responsibility for your actions. That made sense to me.
I realized in later years that the first commandment in the Bible is actually “Thou shalt not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:9). I thought that means we must not for a moment think that we have the capacity to decide whether something or someone is good or evil.
Why is it that we are not allowed to eat this symbolical fruits? Is the world not a better place when we all agree on what is right and what is wrong? Surely we all have a moral compass that we apply every day, and that is some form of judgment?
I do not like being told what to do or not to so, so I became curious about this, and did some research about this magical tree.
Like most symbols in the Bible, it appears that this image of a tree with the forbidden fruit existed even before biblical times.
In Greek mythology the Garden of the Hesperides is the grove that belonged to the goddess Hera. When Hera accepted Zeus as her husband, the goddess Gaia gave Hera some branches with golden apples on. Hera planted the golden apples and the result was a grove of apple trees that gave immortality to those who ate the apples. The Hesperides were given the task of tending to the grove, but they occasionally plucked some of the apples for themselves. Hera did not trust them and added a guard to the garden. It was a never-sleeping, hundred-headed dragon named Ladon.
The same tree with forbidden fruit features in early Mesopotamian myths, going back as far as the year 669 BC. There is a myth about the Sumerian goddess Inanna who ate the fruits of a tree to acquire knowledge. She was joined by her brother Utu, the sun-god, and the Sumerian god Enki, the god of wisdom and knowledge.
There is a similar tree in Buddhism. The founder of Buddhism, later known as Gautama Buddha, sat under the Bodhi tree when he achieved enlightenment. This tree was a fig tree with heart shaped leaves.
In Hinduism the Tree of Jiva and Atman appears in the Vedic scriptures as a metaphysical metaphor concerning the soul.
The old Norse sagas also contain a famous tree, the World Tree, which is an ash tree. This tree is located at the center of the Universe and joins the nine worlds of the Norse cosmology.
Why are these symbolical trees so significant? And why is it so important not to eat their fruits, especially if eating the fruits of the tree will give us immortality and knowledge that will make life so much easier?
I think that eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is like breaking any one of the Ten Commandments – of course you can do it, but there are consequences that you must then live with.
Eating this fruit of knowledge and wisdom is exciting and inspiring, and it opens up a whole new life for us. However, there is no turning back, and that is why the fruit of this tree comes with a health warning. Once you understand that this existence is only a small part of the eternity called life, you tend to see life here in a different light.
We can still be irresponsible with our emotions, but we carry all of that with us for a very long time, and we become aware that these emotions are ours, not anyone else’s. We can do whatever we want, but where we hurt other people, we carry that action and that knowledge in our cells for ever. And we cannot blame other people or circumstances for what we think, say and do, because we become aware that we are responsible for ourselves.
Eating of the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is then not about judging others. It is about growing up and accepting our own judgment of ourselves. That is the result of eating those fruits – we gain immortality in our own manner, and spiritually we are never the same again.
When we read that we must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it is like saying to a child that it is not a good idea to drive a Ferrari racing car. Of course the child can drive the car, but what would be the consequences? Can the child deal with the consequences? But when the child is older, then it is so much easier to deal with the consequences, and then the adult can have fun driving the car.
Now that makes sense to me – and I understand why the tree bears “forbidden” fruit.
Early on my spiritual path, I was in a room where, during a reading, a spiritual teacher gave a very harsh warning to a man about playing with his own mental health because the man was adamant to become a medium even though he was clearly emotionally not stable. That stuck with me.
Does that mean that exploring our own spirituality is dangerous and we should not do it? On the contrary. We become our true selves when we explore who we really are, and we find joy and understanding. The warning is that we need to understand that we are dealing with something that is far greater than our human minds can conceive. We must not be greedy or try to run before we can walk. And we must understand that once we have taken on that responsibility, there is no turning back. We can no longer blame others for what happens to us, and we will never see the world in the same light again. But we will also experience indescribable joy and peace.
For some people things like clairvoyance and telepathy and energy work are second nature. For other people anything spiritual is like an awakening from a deep sleep. Nobody wants to awake from a deep sleep by means of an explosion. We want to slowly become conscious, then stretch out and leisurely open our eyes. And some people want to sleep on. We need to be patient with ourselves and one another.
I sometimes encounter fear and prejudice when I do readings for people – because I do not use tarot cards and I do not rely on the interpretation of any other cards. At least tarot cards and other cards have some entertainment value, but many people find the idea of just closing your eyes and “tuning in” scary. I have also encountered fear and prejudice that is so paralyzing that people avoid me and never explore the reasons for this behavior. How do I react? By loving them. It is not for me to “convert” people or to assume that everyone should share my beliefs – which are right for me now, but may change as I become more aware and awake.
This may be presumptuous, but I think I have had a tiny bite of the forbidden fruit, and I know there is no turning back. Of course you can take a bite yourself and experience the joy and peace and abundance, but are you ready for it? You will know in your heart of hearts and walk your own path.
I will be working at a psychic fayre at Worthing Pavillion Theatre, Marine Parade Worthing BN11 3PX, on 14 and 15 June 2008.
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I am always fascinated by the rules around succession to a throne and how monarchs exclude their children that were born of some women, but include the children that were born to them of other women. I get upset when children are described as “illegitimate” – as if God made a mistake with that child. And not too long ago – in the youth of our grandparents – children that were born to unmarried parents were as a rule given away for adoption. Some of those children never even found out that they were adopted, or finding this out was a very painful experience to them, because it reflected the “shame” of their births.
In some cultures children that are born “out of wedlock” carry that stigma with them for the rest of their lives, simply because their parents were not married when they were born. In other cultures people fall in love, live together and have children, and later on they get married. Are those children illegitimate?
All children come into this world because they have planned to do so, like us. They choose their parents and they choose their paths in this dimension. I believe that they also choose the experience of “being illegitimate”, probably because they have to deal with feelings of inadequacy and rejection.
Why are the children “illegitimate”? Because their parents were not married when they were born.
Marriage should be a celebration of two souls joining together in love, and finding fulfillment in that love. For most people marriage is also about raising children in a loving environment.
Does that mean that marriage has to be a ceremony with a legal contract? No. A wedding is any celebration of two souls joining in love. The legal contract was added because of the rules of society. Without a legal contract a mother cannot claim what is due to her children when people decide to end a relationship. Without a legal contract a father does not have the right of access to his children. What a strange world we created for ourselves! Of course the church likes the idea of a legal contract between people, and so this legality was integrated into the traditions and ceremonies of the church.
I understand that the church can play a role in helping couples to understand the contract between themselves – that is the love contract. But I am afraid I find it difficult to understand how people who chose to be celibate could think that they are in a position to explain and regulate the relationship between couples, when they personally rejected that type of relationship in the first place. My own experience of being counseled by a man of the cloth about marriage was an attempt to give me a huge injection of fear and the threat of rejection from society, when I was emotionally in tatters. Fortunately I was immune to this treatment. I am also sure there are also people that gain much benefit in such situations, even though it did not work for me.
A marriage contract, like any other contract, can reach a logical end. When that happens, there is a divorce. When people get divorced, they reach the end of their love contract. That is in most instances also the end of the legal contract between them. In cultures where there is a stigma attached to divorce, there is a strong fear base. Those cultures can be quite cruel and will often see people living in misery because they can no longer be their true selves in a relationship that has changed, but people would rather have that than have those people question the institution of marriage as a binding contract even if it destroys both parties.
In this context of messed up adults who create fear and who blindly follow the rules that are imposed on them, children happen to come into this world to parents who are not caught up in the bureaucracy of marriage. The children are then expected to take on the same heritage of fear and rejection when you do not toe the cultural and religious line. Those children then take up an entire lifetime to fight that heritage. And the more they fight their heritage, the more that heritage rules their lives, because fighting something means you put more and more energy into exactly what you do not want, and you make it real.
I am not saying that it is all right to have many babies from one or more relationships. We all need to control ourselves and our destinies. If our destiny is to be a parent to many children, then so be it, as long as we take responsibility for each one of those children and raise them in love.
Can we really look at a new-born baby, an innocent child, and reject that baby outright because the parents were not married? Hardly. Then how do we justify doing it when that same child is older and can understand the rejection, but cannot understand the reason for it?
We justify it by having our own warped understanding of love. We do not open ourselves up to the beauty of unconditional love.
Every single child that comes to this planet is a legitimate child, because it is part of God’s plan. And when that child grows up, it becomes an adult that is legitimate. Whenever we question the legitimacy of any person on the basis of our own biases, we need to look inside, identify the fear that we project and eliminate that fear. When we accept everyone on this planet as God’s creature, we will have more love for ourselves and the world will be a better place.
Read an extract from The Bastard to see how our biases and judgements can damage other people.
I will be working at a psychic fayre at Worthing Pavillion Theatre, Marine Parade Worthing BN11 3PX, on 14 and 15 June 2008.
I will also be leading a workshop titled Conquering the Spiritual Mid-Life Crisis in Scottburgh, South Africa, on 25 May 2008, and in Johannesburg, South Africa, on 30 May 2008. Please contact me for details if you are interested.
If you would like to leave a comment on the website, click on Comments at the bottom of any entry. Alternatively, if you receive this by email, click here. Then click on Comments at the bottom of the entry. A block will open where you can leave a much appreciated comment.
He looked at the bees again and decided to leave them and go and ask his mother what the word meant. He found her in the kitchen, ironing. He liked the way the sun shone on her hair, and stood quietly watching her.
Then she noticed him. She put the iron down and smiled, bent down and hugged him.
“And how was your day? Did you learn anything exciting?” she asked.
“I don’t know, Mummy. What is a bastard?”
For a moment she stood stock still. Then she slowly opened the fridge door, turned around and said “Let me pour you some juice, you must be hot from the long walk.”
He took the glass from her and drank the juice. He looked at her and asked again “What is a bastard?”
He was so innocent. She did not know how to answer the question. “It is a really nasty word, and I do not want you to use it. People say that when they do not like others.”
“But Betsy told me today I am a bastard, and I do not know why. Why would she say that to me?”
“My darling, people say nasty things to others when they do not understand. You are a sweet boy, and you must not take notice of this girl. She does not sound like a nice girl at all.”
“Yes mommy.”
“Now go and take off your school clothes, and then you can come and help me unpack this parcel I’ve received.”
He went off to his room, and the mother stood there, staring at nothing. So the time has come. Time to explain. Time to start building defenses.
Read the whole story in A Tapestry of Life, a collection of short stories about moments that changed people’s lives. The book can also be obtained from Trafford Publishing.
I will be working at a psychic fayre at Worthing Pavillion Theatre, Marine Parade Worthing BN11 3PX, on 14 and 15 June 2008.
I will also be leading a workshop titled Conquering the Spiritual Mid-Life Crisis in Scottburgh, South Africa, on 25 May 2008, and in Johannesburg, South Africa, on 30 May 2008. Please contact me for details if you are interested.
If you would like to leave a comment on the website, click on Comments at the bottom of any entry. Alternatively, if you receive this by email, click here. Then click on Comments at the bottom of the entry. A block will open where you can leave a much appreciated comment.
