Today, January 12, is my son's 39th birthday. I woke at 3 am and sunk my attention into my heart where I focused on him and on my boundless, ineffable love for him. This love for my child is like no other. Holding him in my heart, which i do often, seems to deepen and magnify the love. Or perhaps it just shows me how big it really is. It reminds me of being pregnant with him when I was but a child of 22, carrying him within me for nine months, most of that time alone, as my husband was on a war ship in Viet Nam. I was living alone in Honolulu among other young Navy wives, many of whom were also pregnant.
Holding our love and particular intentions for another in our hearts is one way to use Samyama for simply being with another, for loving them, or offering them healing and prayers. Samyama, is, to me, a prayer, a ceaseless prayer. Focusing on loving evokes devotion. This heart energy is magic, as it alchemizes and purifies whatever/whomever it touches into its highest vibration. These vibes are non-local, so they affect these others we tune into, wherever they are. I sometimes tune into the soul of each of my children, as well as others, and focus my loving attention on that soul within my heart. This can be a very sublime practice. I deeply experience how united i am with each soul i focus upon.
I spent the better part of last week writing and finding photos for my son's birthday letter. In this letter, I focused on his conception and his birth, simply giving him the 'dreamscape' of what was there in the field when he was conceived and born. I included photos of his newly-married dad and me, of our first apartment and view of Waikiki, and, of course, the first photos of him as an adorable, chubby-cheeked, newborn infant. He weighed 8.5 pounds! Putting this letter together gave me a week of deepening love for my son, as well as devotion. I was in a constant experience of Samyama as I wrote the 'dreamscape' and placed the photos.
His dreamscape included the natrual, wild beauty of Hawaii and the Pacific Ocean, the awesome surrounding volcanic mountains, the ubiquitous frangrance of flowers, the constant awareness of the Viet Nam war, the presence of the goddess Pele, and, of course, my condition as a very wounded 22-year-old giving birth alone while his father was at sea. His dad came home safely a week later. My son was born after 23 hours of labor in an army hospital filled with wounded servicemen, shock, trauma, death, and grief. All of this was in the vibrational field affecting us, certainly unbeknownst to me at that time. I brought my baby home to the love of good friends and the fragrant beauty of our little nest with a view of Diamond Head and Waikiki beach.
So much surrounds each of our births, and we rarely think about it. When we do, we see that the vibratory field was woven with all kinds of intense emotions, family and collective events, the emotions and circumstances of our parents, not to mention the chemicals and toxins we ingest through our mothers and the birth itself. Sometimes just knowing what was in the field of our parents and family when we were conceived and born, can help us to understand what was woven into our tiny bodies and into our consciousness that may impact our whole life and we later experience without understanding its source. We are not separate from anyone or anything around us--ever. Even the moment of conception is conditioned by what is in the field as well as in our parents.
I started a novena for my son on January 10th. Today is the third day. This novena is comprised of nine days of Samyama, prayer, tuning in, listening, all focused on him, his life, his health and healing, the healing of ancestral wounds, and anything else that emerges in these nine days. I don't have a plan with this novena for a particular practice, i am just listening and feeling and showing up for whatever appears.
The novena serves as a container and a lens to focus attention on something and work with a particular intention. In this case, my intention is in service to my son and his life. Novenas are very powerful, and can be carried out with a variety of practices and prayers. We can offer them for others or for our own intentions, such as healing, fulfilling work, clarity about some issue, relationships. Anything is possible. The novena also provides a lens to see everything in the nine days as a 'response' to our intention, that helps clarify, heal, reveal obstacles, deepen our understanding of what we are truly asking for, and distill it. Things do happen! I never know where a novena will take me...often to the unimaginable.
At a certain point in my children's lives, I realized, painfully, that I am helpless in certain ways to prevent them from being hurt. I am unable to keep them safe in this world. I cannot 'do' much to help them in the outer world, but I can love them, do Samyama, pray for them, and carry them in my heart always.
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