I am not much of an artist in this life but I dabble with paint and markers on occasion.  A few months ago I felt inspired to draw this picture I’ll call becoming the child. I didn’t understand it at the time but it’s been sitting on my nightstand for a while.

I love kids and I have a lot of them. Well actually I have not given birth to any of them but I feel like I did, like they are a part of my permanent family.  One of the kids is a ten-year old girl who I’ve been mentoring for about a year.  After months of begging on her part I decided to take her to the water park. She’s only ten but I feel like I always have to barter with her on what we are going to do next. She really wanted Six Flags but I got a weak stomach and roller coasters are not my friend. So I got her to settle for the water park instead.

As soon as she got in my car she was on ten. She smiled, she screamed and talked really fast and I hadn’t even started up the car yet.  She was so excited that I got excited just by listening to her.  I suddenly remembered being ten.  It took me back to a place when I was her age and I was in the car on my way to Six Flags with my siblings and parents. I imagined how the night before she probably couldn’t sleep. And how she’d probably been up since dawn fully dressed just waiting for my car to pull up. And then I remembered the picture and decided I would really share in this day with her.  So I let go of my ‘hey I’m adult look at me, do as I say’ and I started to mirror her. We giggled, we talked about the rides we’d get on. We stopped at the gas station and bought cookies and chips to eat on the way (it’s only a 20 minute ride).  She made me stop so we could get matching gargles.  Of course they didn’t have any my little mermaids in my size but we sure did look for them. We rode rides, floated along the lazy river, we had a great time.  Every time I even thought about getting stern with her I’d visualize my little picture. This picture helped me to remember why  it was ok to become more like a child. In fact we all could learn how to be a little more loving, innocent, giving, creative, joyous, imaginative and carefree.  Being all those things allows you to slow down and to enjoy just being…no cares, no bills, no relationship, no pressure… just fun. Sometimes it’s hard to remember what it was like to be a kid but on that day I remembered. And I want to keep remembering…

You can’t really began to cultivate your relationships with other people until you cultivate the relationship with yourself.  Prior to that you are only giving a small piece of who you are to other people.  Today I am learning to self-love.  I always thought I loved myself but this is to a whole new extreme.  It feels different.  Today loving myself means acknowledgement, acceptance, appreciation and approval of my physical and spiritual. It is not necessary to look at myself in the mirror to point out that my stomach could be flatter, my ass could be bigger or my breast could use a lift.  It is no longer necessary to think my hair could be longer and fuller or that my skin could be clearer.  Today I saw the beauty of what’s already here and what’s always been with me.  And for once I just walked around my house in a meditative state naked and vulnerable. Yet I felt a wholeness.  A love that I hadn’t felt for myself in a while or maybe ever.  So today I send gratitude to the universe for allowing me to see myself as I am, perfected and here in this life with this vehicle and vessel as it was intended to be.

I got some abandonment issues I never knew exactly why. On the surface I seem fine. My parents have been married for almost 40 years.  No one of significance really left my life permanently or made me feel extremely rejected. All the things you would on surface think that would cause abandonment issues I could not identify with. What played on in my own life right before I divorced my ex was this strong feeling of abandonment. I went into the relationship with that issue and so to see it play out in real life was paralyzing. It was so strong that it felt real. It was betrayal and extreme panic mixed into one. The only way at the time I knew how to handle that feeling was to run as fast as I could in the opposite direction. It’s been a few years and I’ve long gotten passed why things didn’t work but that abandonment thing keeps bubbling to the surface.

I own a past life regression CD. I’ve used it over the last few months. It has been pretty insightful so I figured why not use it for this. At the beginning of the mediation I see myself in a hospital. Everything is white. A blond-haired nurse walks pass me with a chart in her hand. I see my spirit standing in the operating room. The year 1836 pops into my mind and the word German. I am not sure what the world German means at this time, is it the name of the hospital or is it my background. I’m not German in my present day life. On the table is my ex husband. He’s surrounded by doctors. They are operating on his heart. In the adjacent room I see myself in a physical body. I am in pain. I am unsure as to how this is going to turn out. I am crying. In the row behind me, my former mother in law is there too. She is his mother in both lives. I was also his wife in both lives. My awareness turns back to the operating room. I see his spirit get up from his body. He comes over to my spirit and we start to talk. We start to have conversations about the life we’ve had together. We are laughing and having a good time. No one else can see us. After some time the doctors give up, there is nothing else they can do to bring him back. My awareness turns back to the waiting room and what I feel from the physical version of me is pain. I feel abandoned. I feel like he left me here by myself, there is nothing to console me. We didn’t have any kids, he wasn’t suppose to leave me. In my mind it didn’t dawn on me that it was by design for him to go. He wouldn’t have left me by choice but our time on that plane at that time was complete. I continued that life feeling abandoned. I never remarried. Years later when his mom died, I began to relive the abandonment again.

Before you leave a regression you are asked to release it. Because of your awareness level, you can see the situation from a different set of eyes and understand that what you felt although real, the conclusion you might have come to at the time was not truth. In order to move forward in this life you can realign with the truth. So I began to pray and I used my conscious thoughts to make sense of the false imprint I’d been carrying for years and maybe even lifetimes. For the first time I honestly felt a weight lifted. I had at least one thing I could identify with as to why I had these feelings in my present life. I can’t guaranteed that my abandonment issues are gone but I definitely have gained another perspective on it.