Your Sacred Self
Living Your Real Life
don't have children
Birth of the true self -- the Christ in you
Can parents awaken?
Don’t have children
Until you are enlightened – don’t have children. You will hurt them. And you will add more wounded people to an already overpopulated and troubled planet.
The unenlightened, which defines most people, have children to avoid the most painful and important birth of all -- the birth of the child within who carries the seed of truth and the Sacred Self.
We avoid giving birth to ourselves because it is too painful. To give birth to our true and sacred self, we must be honest about our parents and their failings. This healing task is too wrenching for most.
As we remain oblivious to the pain of our history, we protect our parents instead of indicting them for their crimes against us. We deny the harm they did us, hoping to gain their love at last. Sadly, we project our pain, our thwarted aspirations onto our children hoping they will fulfill our dreams. And when they don't, we inflict our wounds. The darker side of parental projections is the rage we inflict on our children when they fail to fulfill our unmet needs from our own childhood. When our child has needs and dreams of his own, we are enraged. How dare this child have needs that I should meet when my needs were not recognized or fulfilled when I was a child? This unconscious anger erupts in various forms of child abuse and neglect, physical and emotional. We inflict our rage and revenge on this helpless child living at our whim and mercy -- what remains unresolved and unconscious, we are doomed to inflict on others and the most vulnerable target is our children.
The result of having children we are unprepared to love fully is another generation of disturbed, angry and wounded adults elbowing together on a planet overpopulated not with enlightened and sacred souls, but with an unconsciously breeding species, selfishly exploiting resources and each other to buffer the denied pain buried inside. These unloved children, now adults, put a great strain on the world's emotional and physical resources and threaten our survival as a species.
If you want to have children, be honest about your motives. Are you truly ready? Or are you avoiding giving birth to yourself. Will your child contribute to a more conscious world or will he or she be another wounded, unconscious burden to an already overstressed planet.
I'm not against having children -- but I am against having children and then abusing them because we are not healed enough not to hurt them. Think on this before you procreate.
Affirm: I must be healed before I have children. I do not have an inalienable right to have children that I will hurt.
Birth of the true self -- the Christ -- in you
Though it’s cultural blasphemy to assert, here’s the truth: Having children is the surest way to avoid giving birth to the transcendent child within, the true self, the Christ within us all.
As we watch young parents with their newborns hanging in packs off their fronts, the image is telling -- the denied and emotionally traumatized inner-child of these moms and dads, who they would not venture to meet within themselves, is now externalized. A surrogate child carries the neglected hopes and dreams of the wounded child that remains abandoned within these parents. Tragically this child will also receive the abuse and rage that remains split-off and denied from these unresolved parents.
If we wish to remain unconscious of the hurts we carry from childhood, we will always find others to carry our psychic baggage. And if we have children, they are the most likely and innocent candidates. Our helpless children, living under our authority and tyranny, will do our bidding to preserve our love, even carry our psychic baggage, our unresolved issues from the past. We readily, if unconsciously, thrust our baggage onto them. Secretly we hope this vital new life will rescue our own deadened life-force with its new-born vitality. However, as we project our unfulfilled dreams on our children and our unresolved rage, this burden deadens the child's innate passion, just as we were deadened by our parents. The child for self-preservation will hide what's best in him for a safer time in the future. For some, this safer time that requires separation from the parents and their traumatic influence, never comes. Parents who remain unresolved not matter how good their intentions will always unconsciously transmit the unhealed wounds to their children.
One wonderful opportunity for gay people is that we don’t have children. And there are others too who refrain from this culturally prescribed and addictive practice. Without children, we do not have access to this easiest, most common, and socially acceptable way to avoid knowing the true self. Without a child, we can not project the damage we endured, and deny, or our dreams that remain unfulfilled, unto a newborn.
Without children, we can address the child within, and hold and heal this wounded little-one into his or her fullest potential. As we do this painful work of healing the wounds inflicted by our primary caregivers, our parents, instead of passing them on to the next generation, our own inner-child can come to life authentically. And the spark of the divine that rests in the heart and soul of this child can burn brightly.
As we remove the encrusted layers of trauma that bury the inner child in despair, the babe born into the world is the the true self, the child of wonder -- the Christ child that resides in the core of all. As we do our psychic healing, the miraculous wonderful inner child is born at last.
The Christ child is the best in all of us -- and the best in all of us, once born, will redeem the world.
Affirm: By not having children, I give birth to the Christ child, the true, inner child I carry within me.
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Can parents awaken?
All people -- no matter their life situation, their age, their history -- can awaken if they heal the child within.
However, there is a particular difficulty for people with children to come to enlightenment. There is a powerful pull to project oneself into one's child. This is a narcissistic dilemma for most parents -- to be clear enough to see the child not as one's possession, but as a unique person with his or her own life to live. And to see one's self as a separate entity -- with an inner child who needs tending.
Most parents are narcissistically wounded. They were not seen fully by their own parents for their unique gifts, or valued for their genuine feelings. Until these narcissistic wounds are healed, it is too strong a pull not to misuse our children. Children of unresolved parents are too readily seen as outlets for unfulfilled needs and dreams -- and an outlet for denied rage.
When we're the parent, the child looks to us in a way that our own parents never did. At last, we are seen and needed, when in the past we were ignored, our feelings dismissed, and our unique gifts and person diminished. Now -- with a child -- we have a captive audience who lights up in our presence. For most of us, it is too tempting not to give into this seemingly innocent opportunity and misuse the child to meet of our own unfulfilled needs of the past. The child becomes the recipient of our need for rescue and our need for revenge.
Yet a parent can still come to self-awareness -- but only if he or she addresses the child within and not project past deficits onto the child before him or her. If a parent can step aside from his or her own son or daughter and truly embrace the child within, then this parent can grow. The parent must acknowledge and feel the split-off feelings of the past and grieve these wounds.
Only by healing the inner child can a parent not inflict these wounds on the child before them. It is possible -- but difficult -- but necessary not to be an abusive parent.
Affirm: If I chose to be a parent, I must be more prepared than is usually thought. To not abuse the rights of my child, I must heal my own wounds, fulfill my own dreams and resolve my rage and not project these issues unto my son or daughter.
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