Water Reflects

I began, like so many of us, in a household where

it was somehow my job to be the lightening rod for the family's tensions

of unexpressed emotions.

~ The Book of Awakening:

Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

by Mark Nepo

I have come to believe that one of the causes of mental illness is having universal experience and thinking it is somehow worse for you or unique for you. Perhaps we are looking more at spiritual disease than mental illness, but without a doubt, it is a source of deep distress.

Mark Nepo is describing the reality of being born into a human family. Infants are lightening rods for the emotional experiences around them. This was not just a report of his personal life, it is a fact of each of ours.

 

Previously (including in my book Falling Together in Love: Stories From My Heart for and about YOU), I have written about the emotional climate I was born into around my mother's having discovered she was pregnant for me at the same time she was told she had gotten syphilis from my father. It is quite easy to imagine the emotions I was a lightening rod for in those first weeks and months in the womb....

Brent Haskell, in Journey Beyond Words, says it like this "The past is the creator of judgment. Without a past, and without your judgment, all people are equal." This is probably true about our experiences, too. Without a past and without our judgment, we are free to just experience life.

I have been working on an up-coming tip for well-being around the importance of the practice of meditation. The benefits are being proven by science more and more every day. For the tip, I have developed a core line, "You must be present to win." We must develop the ability to be present to our own emotions, including those we took on from our family of origin, to win at the game of life. What you win is inner peace and stability and the joy of living. 

As Emily Dickinson put it:
To be alive is power, 
Existing in itself, 
Without a further function, 

Omnipotence enough. 

 Like clouds moving in water, problems make me forget I am clear... The Book of Awakening, May 5

Water reflects everything it encounters. 

This is so commonplace that we think water is blue, when, in fact, it has no color. 

Amazingly, while soft and flowing, water—as ocean or lake or even as the smallest puddle of rain—takes on the image of the entire world without ever losing its essential clearness. 

~ Mark Nepo