PARENTING TOWARDS UNITY CONSCIOUSNESS

Earth Parenting is a philosophy formed from the understanding that before our culture discovered the Earth people, their parenting practices which shared common threads through out the world, created foundation for harmonious coexistence between themselves and their environment.  In seeking to find this information, which is beyond the written word, my husband and I lived without running water or electricity with our small children for six years. I based this philosophy on what I call 'Indigenous mind'; simple in structure, complex in design.  It is completely relevant to our current world of complexity as it activates the heart intelligence that resides within us all. This is the age of the great remembering; the return to our heart intelligence. Our collective agreement to reach Unity consciousness is upon us. More and more we collectively are turning back to the ancient people for their wisdom. There can be no coincidence here in the widespread seeking of this knowledge for these cultures lived in Unity consciousness already. What is occurring on the planet now is Planetary Unity consciousness. In a way, it is a mindset to achieve an open heart. The mind filters our awareness and colours our reality. This heart intelligence is blocked by all this perception because our collective world view has hundreds of years of belief systems tied up in what we experience. Modern science has even discovered that the thoughts of our grandparents live in us now. Quantum physics has concluded that in order to change the future, we need to alter the past.  So even our latest advances point towards the logical conclusion of instilling love into our children through acceptance of our parents and grandparents, even our ancestors. Part of accepting the past is becoming acquainted with it. Our culture's past history continues while we remain within the consciousness of a culture that has for so long been disconnected from its heart intelligence. When the simple fact is looked at that Earth people lived so successfully for many millinea while this culture interrupted the fabric of life in the blink of time's eye, then we can look to these ancient ways with a reverence that allows us to see reality differently.  In that shift we then find our own culture's beauty and wisdom. We will need both cultures' beauty and wisdom to navigate out of planetary chaos and towards Unity consciousness. There is no blame in the place of heart intelligence. There is no black and white, no good and bad; it simply is either connected to heart intelligence or disconnected to some extent.  We need only to expand our awareness and raise our vibrational frequency. That's all we need to do. Both intentions are a life times work. Both lead us ever closer to increased happiness and joy, health and peace.

NATURE MANIFESTS AT OUR HIGHEST EXPECTATION OF IT It is a free will universe so nature will give us our experiences based on our belief systems. Through many generations in our culture, we have been schooled in the understanding that nature is an unpredictable and wild place where we are potentially in danger. However that is not the reality of nature. Even though our modern documentaries focus of this exciting aspect of nature where it is survival of the fittest, the statistics of injury in nature do not support our collective fears. Instead Nature tolerates our unsubstantiated fears by giving us the highest manifestation of them. Those with snake fears may simply have one cross their path. Someone scared of the dark will hear a noise. Another person perhaps scarred of spiders might freak to the sensation of something crawling on them only to find it was an ant. And so in this free will universe we have the right to be frightened of nature but nature has its own relationship with us which is above and beyond what we have interpreted through our collective myopic vision. As we approach Unity consciousness, we are remembering that we are intrinsically linked with the natural environment around us. The older cultures of the world understand this deeply. The Earth is our mother and all its forms are sentient beings with their own spirit forms. When we, as individuals, raise our vibrational level through uncluttered thinking, being present and surrendering to our heart intelligence; we begin to reach Unity consciousness. Our ability to manifest our reality becomes increasingly obvious as we reach this state. We naturally vibrate at the same frequency as Nature. When we enter natural environments we potentially extend our experiential field. If we are able to surrender our fears the experience in nature will be nothing less than sublime. However for many of us the fears will be deep; having been inherited, they often lie dormant, hidden in obscure places in our psyches. All fears separate us from our potential experience with love. What we don't deal with we hand on to our children, like unpaid bills. So by design our children will on some level, bring these fears to the light. This generation we are given so much help with this ancestral processing. All we need to do is to be open to letting it be released by understanding that we hold onto it when we block Nature from our lifestyle. Step by step we are invited to reclaim this relationship with the wild. We are invited to gently push past our comfort zones.  We will find guides waiting to take us further. They could be our children, or our spouse. They could be just a natural sign at the place in nature we venture to.  When we observe the elements as we would if our life depended on them, we activate an ancient listening skill that lies dormant mostly in modern life.  By remembering that our shadow is death, we rekindle this communion. Then we can walk as spirit in a human body; alert and in love as Nature itself is. Held in the primordial dance of peaceful attention, vibrating with the eternal consciousness of love itself.

Surrender to Love

MOTHERING IS HOLDING AND LETTING GO. Just as breathing requires two opposing acts, inhaling and exhaling, we need to exercise letting go while simultaneously holding our children. The pure form of mothering in the collective memory, the Indigenous people of the world still exhibit this to varying degrees.   This type of mothering is as easy as breathing and requires no real thought. The act comes from the wider intelligence of the heart space and therefore has no encumbrance. However modern mothers have no immediate village to let our children go to.  We come ourselves with a mixed bag of repressed pains and fears. Like an archeological dig they pop up as our children reach the age the trigger was set, sometimes many generations ago. It is little wonder that the closest we come to letting our children go is to creche or school.  Letting them go is deeper than that just as love is deeper than physically taking care of our child. It is at the level of the heart space that we hold and let go. It could be that like birth, we don't get to hold our baby until we have truly surrendered. The act of birthing is ultimately, the act of surrendering. In modern mothers our analytical mind is over active and often at birth this presents a massive problem that prevents true surrender and blocks natural birthing, as statistics show. So if we accept that we are a culture of women who have largely forgotten how to surrender, we can turn our attention to finding ways to allow that to heal. Moment by moment it's the simple things like singing and gardening, walking in nature, that give us back to the space of surrender. We need to let go of so many layers of thought that quietly drive us to ever shifting fashions. Breath in the love for your child, breath out that same love. You will see that it is not your love you give to your child but God's love, the universal love that you can source though letting go is so much bigger.

Silence speaks loud and clear

      The other day I had the privilege of walking into a beautiful forest with ten children under the cover of silence.  Their challenge was to walk to the rocky outcrops where we would have lunch, without talking.  I had suggested to them that we wouldn't talk if we were watching a movie, so we could try going in with the same attention.  The veil of silence allowed us to experience the natural setting at a higher frequency; immersing us all deeply and quickly.  As we walked the sounds of the forest turned to music, as if our silence was communicating a willingness to hear.  Like a radio station tuned in with the slightest turn of the dial, birds song filled the air and we could even hear the trees cracking and rubbing together.  When we arrived at the rocks a bliss had descended over us and we were all smiling deeply.  We were experiencing a spiritual high.
       When we returned to the school we were introduced to an Aboriginal song that an Elder had given us saying she wanted it to be sung along with our national anthem.  It is a beautiful song that literally translated means, "Welcome friends, welcome good friends".  I stood looking at these cultures polarized by this difference in digesting information; our culture needs so much more explanation, measurement and analysis.  It is head-based and we are required to endlessly collate, relate and translate the world back to each other.  The indigenous culture sees this polarity more clearly than we do, they even laugh about it being the 'white-fella way'.  The indigenous cultures are much more deeply connected to their heart spaces; their song needed only to say "welcome friends", the rest is left to love which cannot be measured and needs no translation.
       For all our intellectualism, we are blocked by a simple bias that tells us deeply that we are the culture that is smart and they are the culture that remained primitive.  Our thoughts are necessary and our need to communicate is essential.  We now have technology overlaying the industrial revolution and we are further imprisoning ourselves by our collective obsession with it.  This age of technology comes with great opportunity to communicate but it also brings us the shadow of our culture which has been ravaged of its heart center and with every generation has further activated the mind; perhaps eroding and blocking the truly extraordinary experience of being alive.  We might take time to listen to the beat of out hearts and remember we are here to connect with the Earth and each other.  Technology needs to be actively put in the back seat.
       We spoke more deeply when we used less words.
      

Nature is our Spirit just as Spirit is our nature

          In nature our children experience the oneness that is their nature.  Given space and time, their ego selves shrink leaving anb expanded form; they have access to their divinity when they are immersed deeply in nature.  It is the same for us as adults, potentially though as we have layers of belief patterns to get through before that experience can be ours.  Exploration in nature with our children connects us with our deeper story.  It reveals our fears, our hopes and dreams for that is where they were formed. 
          Though the indigenous parents emulated and lived this love of nature  for their children on deeper levels than we can hope to achieve in our culture ravaged of it's nature, any small step towards their ways with their children will leave us with more wealth as parents than we could ever dream.  We would do well to remember that all accounts written about the children of the new world were how amazingly joyful, happy and energetic they were. 
          I often tell my children how to delightful and easy to play with the children of my childhood in Fiji, Arabia, Africa and Pakistan were.  The Fijian children were perhaps fifteen to twenty generations removed from those first people described by the early explorers but the easy childhoods had continued up until my childhood in the early seventies.   After we left Fiji, industries targeted the place for cheap labour and production created jobs and pulled communities and families apart.  When we returned after five years, we the found a modern Fiji without their huts and their traditions; the average mother working in factories; modern day slavery in my mind.  Never the less the children still possessed that joyful nature; seemingly as yet protected by generations of intact community spirit in their genetic banks.
          Now is the time to rekindle community and a lot of people are out there doing it.  It is also time to get our kids back into nature.  To do that deeply we have to look first for our nature within nature.   By facing our beliefs as just that, multi-generational fears of an alien race in an alien land. (Our ancestors were an alien race to the original inhabitants.)  Then by gently pushing ourselves just past our comfort zones, chipping away at the crusty and brittle ideas of those "alien" ancestors of ours, we can visit nature and trust our children in it.
          This is the greatest respect we can pay our ancestors because when we look through the lens of the genre they lived in first, we can more deeply understand their personal story in its true spirit.  So too when we see ourselves in this current times we would prefer to see ourselves outside of the collective consumer ego that has possessed the world. 
          When we decide to take this journey back to nature with our children we are rewarded by our trust with wonderful experiences, never to be forgotten memories. Nature rewards and expands our trust.  We have taken a leap back into our indigenous mind; the collective understanding that our essential nature is nature itself, one in the same.  Then a new journey awaits us with our children.           
            Go first to the place you have the most fear about...it might be the cold and the idea that inclement weather makes you sick.  Explore it and take a walk in the rain or swim in the chilly ocean.  If it is the dark then go for a moonlit walk, you will be amazed at how much your children will love you for doing it!   If it is fear about dirt and being dirty start with some clay or make mud cakes.
           Make sure that what you pick you are happy enough to do   because your children will magnify your fears or apprehensions.   Enjoy it for yourself, your children and your ancestors and for nature herself.  Go in as deep as you feel comfortable and then go in some more.  There, in the moments of trust, have we xpanded just a bit further into our true nature.
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Gathering momentum

Wait a moment Mum.
            In my family there has been an ongoing climate of tension between myself and my husband that is reflected in our children.  My work as mother has been a continual regrouping as we live in this pea soup of old patterns passed down through the generations.  My choice has been to stay united with my man, to work on myself, gathering momentum to break free of these patterns with the aid of prayer.

             Our children are our indicators of the 'weather patterns' of our energy bodies.  Under seven year olds are directly connected to the mother's field, while pre-teenaged children absorb and recreate it themselves.  Once they are teenagers they will work to refine it within they definitions of their morality and their own inherited karmic patterns.  At this stage the parents and significant adults will and can intentionally refine a child's emerging individual patterns.  With love, no patterns are locked in.  Our children are still growing in every way so really the only work to be done is the continuing effort by the parent to grow themselves and transform their own behavioural patterns.
       
              This work of the mother is the power of forbearance, something our generation has lost and is searching for again.  Women gave this power away with the feminist movement, which brought equality but turned its back on the ability to rise above the difficulties of a situation by holding peace for the bigger picture.  Too often I have reduced my spirit by engaging in the difficulties of the moment.  By recalibrating my view to this wider perspective, I find that answers are replacing my need to 'fix' things and the healing is transforming my family like magic.  I am aware of the patterns but more able to stand apart from them.  The momentum for change has its own order and like a snowball rolling down hill, it is easy, mostly. 

              When there are no 'what ifs', there is only the known and when I am open to that it becomes more obvious what to pray for.  The momentum of spiritual growth is natural when I expose myself;  when I become translucent, vulnerable as a flawed human being, I open myself up for healing.  It is a natural process.  I stand exposed with my short comings and then see how they have manifested in my children.  I feel these feelings, realise them and then they are released, freeing up love to do its work of magic.  This will gather momentum and transform us as a family.  I need only to stand aside and surrender to the power of forbearance. 





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Safety is a state of mind

          If eliminating all risk is the way to keep our children safe then absolute safety would be assured by putting them in a comfortable box.  Of course, this is not sustainable!  By realigning our intent to a wider frame of immersing our children in nature as an essential ingredient for their optimal development, we then lift our children free from those boxes.
            When we trust nature; we trust ourselves and our children.  The experience becomes lighter and more joyful.  Play is freed from legislation and the constant monitoring that our safety parenting requires.  When we follow the lead of our young children and then push ourselves just past our comfort zones, we find the path of trust shining before us like a well lit series of beacons, beckoning us on, ever further to exploring  outside those boxes.
          In the raising of my children, I have followed this process and have received many flowers from it.  Each step of the way is clear when I follow their lead.  If I think too far ahead, it can become very frightening.   Once while spotting my toddler balancing on a wall, I had a sudden realisation that this could lead to him climbing a high bridge as an older boy; instantly fear threatened to overcome me and I wanted to get him down and put him in that box.  By following my children's lead, one step at a time; I will breathe through these random fears as they come up. When I stay in the moment, these irrational fears disappear, in this case, the present reminded me that he was still small and the universe was supporting us in his venture across the wall.  Bridges in the future would be made safer by this very act of trusting and empowering his body and spirit now, as he had shown was his desire.
            Fear is all in our head and so is the need for safety.  Paying attention in the moment provides all the safety we ever need.  Our babies come to us with trust as a natural and fully functioning aspect of their love for us.  When we give it back to them, we complete the circuit between ourselves and the higher power.  Now we are activating ancestors,  angels, fairies, and all unseen elements that connect us ever more deeply with ourselves.
               We are limited also by our collective understanding of safety and children.  In some cultures, babies grow up  in trees, on boats and are absolutely safe in their environments.  Scientific studies too have proved that babies have inbuilt faculties for keeping them safe which are activated by experiential learning. By design our babies learn about the world through their early explorations.
            I have always used sound to convey levels of danger and extra caution required by my babies.  Modern parenting tells young children that a pot belly stove, for example, is always dangerous because it might be hot.  My children grew learning that the environment around them was ever changing; sometimes the pot belly stove was hot, other times they could open the door and play with the ash, other times the ash was too hot: it changes.  The only thing that never changed was electricity which I always indicated to my babies was dangerous.  Any power point, socket or gas appliance knob  that they showed interest in was met with strong danger noises from me.  As they got older I told them an invisible snake lives in there.  
          On one hand my babies had a natural respect for their environment and would daily meet things in it with new found curiousity.  On the other hand, I organised my home and life so that they were never out of my sight.    In keeping with indigenous parenting, the village arrangement gave toddlers freedom to explore their surroundings with the constant observation of their family members.   Here is the real key to safety; mother/ baby bonds provide intuitive connection that extends throughout the wider family group.  Earth parenting fosters this consciously, understanding that we as individuals flourish when we are deeply connected with our family group.  When we lived close to nature, we also lived closer to eachother. This can be recreated in our modern living simply by understanding how important it is.
          I have borrowed another indigenous understanding which underpins my every moment and that is that my shadow is death and my children's shadows are their death too.  This knowing leaves me attentive at all times, grateful  and ready to bless or pray in a moment because I know how precious life is. And life is to be lived!  So cast away safety as a barrier to your children's lives and release them with the understanding that you can't escape your shadow, only let it keep you in the present moment.   Disrespect comes from not allowing experiences to happen, foster connection and love's light will cast small shadows for your children as they enjoy their amazing lives.
         
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