braintissue

I am in the middle of a long, drawn out spiritual lesson, and though I might complain a lot through it all, the truth is that at the end of it I will be stronger, wiser and one step closer to being my Authentic Self than I was before my world seemed to crumble around me.

My lessons started back in 2007. I started drawing deeper into spirituality when I came home from what was a lousy vacation in Hawaii in June of 2007. My learning began soon after the plane landed. I did not think that things could go as remarkably bad as they did, but they did and though it was hard and I cried a lot, lost a lot, hurt a lot, I learned a lot, too. I learned that what we see in front of our eyes is not the outcome of one singularly painful event but the culmination of many painful events. I learned that there is truth to our knowing who our real friends are when hard times come to us, because there are people who helped us even though they couldn’t, helped when they needed help, helped, period, and there is a longer list of people who did nothing other than dispense advice which was not asked for and neither needed.

We are made stronger by the experiences we have, wiser by the losses, more able to stand up for the pain we go through, but we make it through it all and we look back, shaking our heads in disbelief that after all we went through we made it. And we are glad we made it, because normally there are things that happen during the times of learning, of loss, of clearing out that we do not expect to happen. Most of the time these are those moments we wait for, those moments of clarity and moments when we can turn to someone who made excuses for their actions by copping out with the old “you know how I am” excuse, and the truth is that no, we do not and we never do. We find out who is more important when it comes down to it all, and normally, it is not us.

An Eye for an Eye takes on new meaning

Think about that show where the guy tries to snatch the pebble from his teacher’s hand, or when the student teaches his teacher, or better, when a child gets to turn and tell the parent that they have hurt us and that they have been hurting us for years. When we have these unique opportunities, we must make the split decision of if whether or not we care to be angry and we care to be so in-your-face about things, or if we want just to impart wisdom onto them and tell them that they really need to stop and think about what it was that they said or did what they did and think about what their reasons are for the exclusive nature of the reason. Why is it that they seem to get a free pass to screw up but you and I do not?

We are never willing to see the sins we see in others in ourselves even though we know they are there.

My entire life I was told that I was not good enough, not smart enough, not this or that enough, for whatever reason people had. These same ways of being are still very much in effect in my life today, but the difference is that recently I realized that there is nothing that anyone can say or do to hurt me because I am the one who calls the shots, not them. This same thing goes for all of us. Unless and until we allow ourselves to be hurt by what others say or do to us, we are the ones in control of it all. We are the deciders of our fate and we are the ones whose future rests on our shoulders.

For the bulk of each of our lives we can each think back to a time in our lives when we hurt so badly because someone else had an opinion of us. At that time we are not prepared to be serene about things - we want to be angry, and in some cases it is appropriate to be angry. Yet time usually makes it so that we can think about the thing that made us so mad to begin with and when we find out what it was, it was never what was said but was left over pain from another memory. We bring to others the pain that was someone else’s and we blame them for our pain when the truth is that we can let go of it just as easily as we were willing to hang on to it.

What we are in pain from is rarely the issue at hand but is something that melds itself to this new hurt that takes us to that old hurt to revisit it again.

Recently my sister and I had a falling out. If I thought about it long enough I might be able to come up with the real issues but at this point in time I am just leaving it to the fact that there are a lot of comings and goings in the lives of a lot of people whom I love and care about, yes, even Napua’s. We, all of us, never have problems with other people until we are forced to have to defend that part of us that took so long to heal and that someone else ripped the scab off of. I have done it. You have done. We all have done it and we will all probably do it again and again, because this is human nature to do so.

When we are in the midst of turmoil with others, and when we are forced to look at ourselves in the show of their anger or their hurt, therein lies the opportunity of a lifetime if not to heal the hurt before it takes place in the other person’s life, but to understand your own. I absolutely know now what my problem has been all this time, and it totally had nothing to do with anything more than people judging me. I will not go into specifics, and I will not further the hurt. I will say that my entire life long the reason that I may have sounded like I suffered from a learning disability is not because I have one but because I kept on and keep on getting cut-off mid sentence, told without being told that what I have to say is not as important as what the other person has to say, and basically told to shut up because my opinion is not important right now, not when someone else is speaking. This is the thing that colored my life for so long that when I thought about the things that led up to everything else that has happened since the big blow out, I will tell you all now that I hurt badly when I was faced with the truth - but finally, I was freed, because what I had known all along was made evident in the happenings of the last few weeks.

I was made to see the hurt I caused and in that hurt I was able to better see my own. It made a lot of sense and gave me some measure of closure. I finally found out that I am the Black Sheep for a reason, and it was not even the reason that I believed all these years but something else more genuine and true.

We truly are never given more than we can handle, and if we think we cannot handle it it is because we are being taught something very important

I am not one of those mothers who uses swift and Biblical punishment with my children. I was made to look foolish as a child because my caretaker - normally my aunt - seemed to like punishing us kids physically. Maybe it made her scarier than she already was, or maybe, like I believe it to be true, she is what I have always known and recently accepted as being truth - she is a bully, and the worst kind. Hawaiian mothers are made to believe, for the most part, that if the kid doesn’t listen, physical punishment is the only way to go. I am probably wrong in this judgment of things but as far as my life and my memories go, this was the way that things were handled when we spoke out of turn, out of line, or simply just did not listen. We were handled in a Biblical sense.

Kids do not forget the shame in having their spirits crushed, and it is my own experience that when you physically harm a child, you are breaking their spirit. Children are not horses - they are little human beings here on the same mission as most “civilized” adults are. Why, then, do so many people believe that in order to control an unruly child, they must be smacked around in order to gain control? If this were true, then my children would be out of control. We are non-spanking parents - -there are ways to make a kid understand the rules, ways to make a kid realize the errors of his behavior and none of it involves physically hurting them or emotionally scarring them.

(It’s called tearing everything out of their closet after they have cleaned their room, and keeping the cords to their PS2, their computer and their cellphone until they have done what they have been asked without questioning why they have to do it until AFTER it is done…no physical harm, no foul)

I was treated to being often times ruled with the proverbial iron fist, and I was treated to weekly spankings from those whose care I was in because it was my aunt and in many Hawaiian families, that is just the way it is. Whose rule this is, I will never know, but it is one that I have not adhered to because I recall the shame, the anger, the rage that I felt after it happened. What I do not recall was being told why I was punished and what action it was that I did that would cause them to be that way to me or anyone else for that matter.

This past Saturday I was able to redeem my broken self by questioning the reason why it was that anyone would want to do such a thing to my oldest son who is 15. The answer I got was that because I know how the person who did this, is. This was not a good enough reason for me, and I told them so, and it was one of those rare moments when all those lessons that you were being taught all these years, and all those times when you just hung your head in shame and cried your eyes out not because you hurt physically, but because your very heart was breaking.

Live and let live should apply to us all but does not

Too often in life we are told what we should believe and what we know to be true does not match what other people assume it turns out that we are the ones lying because it is not comfortable for them. I say - enough is ENOUGH already. We can and should be angry.

No one has the right to judge anyone else, no one, and in families from one end of the Universe to the other, there are issues within that family which make it seem that since it is that the way people handle things is to pass a judgment on them is normal, everyone should just accept it that way and go on with life just hurting. The problem with this is that we want to judge, like to judge, but we do not want to be judged, questioned, told that there is a better way. It is in these small kernels of truth that we find the diamonds in the coal, the sparkling specks of gold through the murkiness of the stream, the ancient coins at the bottom of the deep darkness of the sea.

We are more inclined to judge than we are to accept and observe. This is the lesson that I learned, and that is that we are only here for a short time, and in that time we are lucky enough to have company on that journey, and on that journey if we are lucky enough to have company we go along that road and have the realizations that where we have been we have learned and taught, and it should be not only the goal of the soul to have learned, but also the goal of the soul to impart wisdom as well.

Namaste…I LOVE YOU ALL !!!

MAPU

Roxanne Cottell is a freelance writer who calls Helendale, CA home. She is married with three children. For copies of this writing or for other information please send her an email at revrkcottell@yahoo.com