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We have said that unfolding into awakening is a journey, a path with seven stages. Each stage is critical and each stage will be met before the next is initiated for the stages themselves - by their nature - which is your nature, are in a sense, frames of experience which contain and hold you in safety, in safekeeping, in gentle loving containers as a crib contains an infant, as a car seat contains a toddler.
In 2016, after the completion of Book One of The Flow Materials, I wrote in my journal about an aspect of my own consciousness I’d never known was there. I’ve edited the heck out of that journal entry, to make it readable for you. Here’s the gist -
All of this work I’ve been doing inside the angels’ field of love and blessing is shaking me. I am a sack of loose parts, shaking free the mind from the ego. Shaking me free of the fear-based construct that polices the boundaries of the world, and of the self. The strange viral notion that we must keep ourselves under control.
As this is happening, I am discovering, inside of me, an aspect of my own consciousness I never knew was there. A vigilant boy on the cusp of adulthood who seems to live in a kind of control room inside my head. A protective, responsible ‘boy’ who is so earnest, so very good about keeping the world (and me) under control. When I saw him, he saw me and he sagged against the doorway of the control room with relief. He’s a prisoner, I realized. He should be playing, exploring, discovering the world. Instead, he’s holed up in that control tower, tasked to keep me safe and keep the world under control. He’s exhausted, I realized - it’s time he was set free.
I think that he appeared because I’m more okay now - more present, less reactive, more open and curious. I’m less concerned about what everyone else is thinking and doing. I’m especially less concerned with what you think of me. And so, perhaps, he got to feeling more okay, too. More willing to take a minute or even, come out to play.
Of course, whenever the world shakes, he rushes right back to the control tower. This tells me he was probably born out of trauma and is, therefore, triggered by events in my life and in the world that rhyme with whatever it was that made him appear and take over. What I mean is, he came to help me feel safe. He came to take care of me. What I mean is, I love him.
When I am triggered, he is triggered, and everything seems urgent. I have to hurry up and get the message out. Have to finish every single project I’ve left, threads hanging, on the shelf. What is this urgency? That the work will be available even when I’m not? That I will leave something of meaning behind, something that will … help? I sense that he believes I am here to save the world. I sense he thinks it’s his job to make sure that I do. What I mean is, tasked with the challenge of making a fairy sprite finish her homework, he must be exhausted. He is - and I am tired from the wrestling match, too.
Working with the guides, I am beginning to understand that we are all here to save the world. But not the whole world, just the interior world behind our eyes. This realization arrives (again and again) with deep sighs of relief. My whole body gets it - and lets it all go. It arrives, also, with the realization that with everyone working on the save the world project, I need only focus on my corner of the map. I can trust you - and everyone else to show up for your part.
At the time of this journal entry, a terrorist attack at the PULSE nightclub in Orlando, Florida has killed 49 and injured 50 more. I send prayers. I sit with the pain of this. I hold the whole world inside of my aching heart.
Then, my cat purrs and I look up at the world outside my window, vibrating with new life. Trees and plants, leafing out - endlessly performing their miracle of photosynthesis. A miracle which is also a balancing - a balancing which is also a gift, without which we could not even breathe. Our constructed, man-made world overlays this other one - this muddy, growing, green reality, following its nature.
I start to purr.
And here is a white butterfly, fluttering toward me. Here is a message of constancy, a grace note in these solemn times. Birds flap and tweet all around me. The rooster at the farm across the road calls and calls. The air is abuzz with song - crickets and mourning doves, woodpeckers and wrens. Here are the robin and bluejay who daily visits me since my father died. And here, on this day, I feel the guides, pressing at my attention. I close my eyes and listen, leaning into the vibration of the flow.
Continuing from our last post, I ask them: “What do you mean when you say we must “become real?” What is the nature of the real? And what is my nature, my calling, my way?
To find your own nature, look to the life you have made. Look to the world you have built. You will find yourself there, in the reflection of the world around you.
Amy is noticing that since completion of Book One, we are much more available to her. She experiences this as we are in her head and her thoughts. Yet we have always been there - always been here, in her and with her. There is a strange loneliness in this realization for...
... she hesitates. Here at the edge of this question that is forming inside of her, she finds a gap in understanding. A crossing she is unable to make. She has trouble understanding how we can be with her and, at the same time, IN her, how she can be an expression of the same wholeness that we are. And with our acknowledgement of this ‘gap’ in understanding, sadness and fear comes.
She asks, If I accept that you are in me and that I am in you, the natural logic of this leads me to wonder: Am I the only one here? Am I talking to myself? And to this we say, yes, Amy, you are talking with yourself and so are we. We are talking to our self even as we speak with you. For you and we are one wholeness plus one wholeness and we are inside of a wider deeper wholeness where all are included.
She asks: so, am I the creator and also the creation, expressing itself as Amy? And if so, who are you? And if so, who are these other people: my friends, my husband, my parents, my children? And who is my cat, prowling the room and calling me to sit, to settle? If all that I see is ... me... am I alone?
Amy feels afraid. She is experiencing the vastness of creation and the loneliness of awareness that all creators ask at the moment of realization: Am I alone?
And to Amy we respond, Yes, but no, dear one. From ‘little you’ you cannot possibly see and understand what you are. And we assure you, you are not alone.
We re-turn you to the discussion of power and control, power and containment and the veils of knowing. The veils placed by your creator/by creationto protect the small and frightened self from overwhelming vision and misunderstanding.
We have said that unfolding into awakening is a journey, walked along a path with seven stages. Each stage is critical and each stage will be met before the next is initiated for the stages themselves - by their nature - which is your nature, are in a sense, frames of experience which contain and hold you in safety, in safekeeping, in gentle loving containers as a crib contains an infant, as a car seat contains a toddler.
For you dear one, are but a toddler in comparison to the understanding that will come. And yet, you are a toddler with flashes of the rebellious, I-can-do-it-myself willfulness of the teenager, and of the young adult, filled with purpose.
Your eyes flash with outrage as you encounter the world of struggle your predecessor has made. You are toddler/teenager/young adult protesting and calling for change, even as you are graduating into middle adulthood, settling down and setting to what is before you, setting to work, all of these selves - which you are all at once - and more!
You are wisdom emerging to the middle adult as if curtain after curtain were being lifted and much is being revealed. Each curtain appears and what is behind it is chosen and entered into.
Each curtain is an invitation, never a requirement, yet if you would ascend - if you would evolve, the curtain must be seen and acknowledged, It must be freely chosen and the room of revelation behind it entered into. Each of these curtains guards a boundary of knowing: to see a curtain and enter the room it protects you from, you must prepare.
For each curtain is a limit which, when you are prepared, also opens onto a new freedom. Each room an ever-widening liberation, and a dissolving of another veil which holds you in containment but also in protection. For with ever increasing responsibility for your own power, you are more vulnerable to the effects of your actions.
And we pause to demonstrate to Amy in words and images our meaning. So that we might continue and she might continue with ease for these are new concepts and she is entering new rooms of understanding today.
By example, we offer the newborn child. Can you remember? Can you even imagine a world through the eyes of a brand new being? A world without names, without rules, without infrastructure? Can you imagine the world as the newborn experiences it: waves of light, color, sound - pure sensation. Hot cold touch shiver. A world of sensation in which which surrounds her, inside of which she swims. A world that is moving, bubbling, banging and singing. For what else must language sound like to newborn ears but song!
I hear songs in many voices. Songs being sung close by and far off. Songs.
And now add in other songs, actual songs - music on the radio and television, telephones ringing, and now, dear one, add in the songs of the rest of the world, for newborn ears hear it all, unfiltered by names that would distinguish one sound from another. The song of the wind, the trees, the bird, the song of the cat purring beside mother, the song of your own body, its hunger its movements. The song of your own heart beating. The song of light filtered through the tree outside your wind, dancing on the wall, the song of the plane passing over and the rainbows shimmering after the rain, the clouds across the blue blue sky. The song of blue. The song of curiosity. The song of life itself. All of this singing. What must it be but all one song?
Everything sings, all creation vibrating the one song together. Yet in order to live, the one song must divide itself into parts. In order to divide what is one into many, veils are added between this and that. Veils are added - and quickly - in early childhood.
First, there is naming. That face is mommy/ That voice is brother. Those hands, that smell, that way of walking, that is daddy and this one is sister. Name after name as the sounds and sensations are named and the flow of the one song is divided into things.
Naming is the first veil, dividing the one into many.
The second veil is the veil of qualities, which adds to each name a judgment/discernment: this feels good and this feels bad.
As the veils are added, the flow becomes more solid and your perception less fluid - more ‘organized’ - as the unfiltered flow of sounds and faces and sensations is divided into pieces.
And why is this one bad when this one beside it, made of the same song, is named good? Ah, this is the challenge. For through our eyes there is no separation into good and bad, no split between darkness and light, for all that has been and will be, and all that is now - all of this is blessed, all included. As you look upon the world, naming and dividing, you were taught to divide, also, your own nature. I am good in this way and in this other way, I am bad. And here was and is the origin of struggle - and all suffering.
Much of the learning to divide, to separate, happened naturally. You learned: If I eat too much of this, I get a tummy ache. If something smells bad, I must not eat it. Yet when learning is driven through reward and punishment - subtle punishment like disapproval or witnessing the suffering of a person the baby loves and harsher punishments like neglect, physical pain, shouting, the child learned: When I am ‘good’ I get sweets or sweet attention. When I an ‘bad’ I get bitterness, pain in my body, stern angry words, withdrawal of something I wanted.
Even now, as an adult, you continue in this way, rewarding the ‘good’ and condemning the ‘bad’ in self and in others. For once learned, the stage is set and you forget, once choice at a time, who you really are and why you came.
There are many books and many theories on the raising of children. For our part, the best way to raise children is to co-parent them with the flow of their own divine nature and your own. To realize that it is not you who is ‘raising’ them at all - just as you were not ‘raised’ by your own parents. It was your parents job to feed and nurture you, to keep you safe and warm as you, by your own nature did the rest.
Just as it is the nature of a tree to rise and grow, so it is the nature of a human child. Yet the human child has a human nature - and here, the tree and the human diverge. For the human child is growing a mind - and it is the nature of mind to ask questions. So the human child asks for the name of a thing; so, the human child will inquire as to its qualities; and, so, the human chilld will wander through the world in their own way, on their own path, which will differ from your own.
To parent a child well, bless the child with holding, with listening, with reflection of kindness, for when a child is met with kindness and holding she will know that she is kind and is held inside of a kind world. Inside of parameters of that world, the child’s nature will emerge.
To be with a child, be all for the child, just as we are all for you.Be all for your child, full approval, full engagement, while you are also all for yourself. Demonstrate joy by your attendance to your own callings - your hunger, your interests, your expression of feeling, your naming of the world as good - a way of being all for one’s self.
For a child learns from how you are, including how you are to yourself. A child always knows who you are. If you are kind to others, your child will learn this behavior from you but if you are kind to another in ways which are unkind to yourself - working too hard for too little reward, allowing yourself to be mistreated, sacrificing yourself out of fear - your child will learn that behavior from you and will treat herself/himself in similar ways.
Ultimately, though, your child is a human being, just like you, with his/her own nature to guide her. Like you, each child has her own guardian angels - one to hold the intention of her pattern and one to guide her mind and heart. Your child is protected by forces other than you - including her own nature, her own guardians and the veils of name and discernment - the structures of language and story world inside of which she dwells.Trust these angels and share your concerns about your child with them. For they are here to help you and support your child in her/his own natural unfolding.
And always, as you meet and establish relationship with your own inner children - the boy in the control tower, the gitl hiding in the corner of your heart - know that we are here with you, and eager and ready to help. For it is our nature to respond and to support. We are here with you, as we have always been and ever will be. For even as you explore the mystery of how we might be beside you and inside you, and you beside and inside of us, you are disntinctly you and we are distinctly who we are, and you are never alone.
~ Received this day of June 21, 2016
Love to you - and to all the children this beautiful spring day. xxoo Amy
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You are always awakening, always on the path
Beautiful invitations to remember.