Recently I heard a story from a client that had me experiencing deep feelings of grief. Having trained myself to hold feelings and hold space for my clients, it’s usually easy; but I have to admit, this one hit really hard.
Growing up with a neglectful, absent or abusive mother is one of the hardest things in the world. A mother’s love is the closest to unconditional love most of us experience. Unfortunately, many of us do not get this opportunity. But it does not mean that you can never experience it. Here is a beautiful celestial mantra that will fill the gap of a mother’s unconditional love in your heart. I know a lot of people do not believe in the power of mantras; but trust me – just give it a go. Listen to this beautiful mantra by Nirinjan Kaur once a day for 40 days, and feel the love of the celestial mother descend upon you. This mantra will heal the mother wound that most of us carry within our hearts. Translation is below :
Oh my child, this is thy mother’s prayer. This is thy mother’s prayer. Remembering the Lord, all sins are erased and past and future generations are saved. May you always say His name, He who has no end. Oh my child, this is your mother’s prayer that you don’t forget the Lord even for an instant. Worshipping forever the Lord of the Universe. May the true Guru be kind to you, may you keep company with the Saints. May your clothing be the protection of God, may your food be the singing of God’s praise. May you drink the divine nectar. May you live long, may the meditative remembrance of the Lord give you infinite delight. May joy and pleasure be yours. May your hopes be fulfilled, and may you never be troubled by worries. Let your mind be a bumble bee, and let the Lord’s feet be the lotus flower. Says Servant Nanak, attach your mind to them, and blossom forth like the songbird, upon finding the raindrop.
Here is my interpretation of Hafiz’s ‘My eyes so soft’ poem:
Don’t
Surrender
Your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more
Deep.
Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice so
Tender,
My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.
In this poem, Hafiz is trying to tell humans the importance of loneliness. Loneliness is a feeling a human experiences when he/she is away from their soul, their spirituality. They try to fill this void by other people or things or activities or food/drinks, but ultimately everything is temporary and this loneliness returns. Hafiz says, remain lonely for a while, remain in the pain of being lonely. What gives you pain – teaches you, it ferments you – transforms you and shows you a better way to live life. Hafiz says, this loneliness is actually extremely useful for a person as it makes the person ultimately realize that he/she will feel a sense of belonging only and only when they get in touch with their spiritual nature. This will remove every part of their loneliness.
This chill
I feel it in my bones
Like a shiver
All through my body.
This winter comes
As a reminder
All that was once pretty
Will soon lay barren,
Cold and dead.
This cycle of life
Shall soon end
And winter makes
Me feel it in my bones.
Gratitude is an alchemic emotion. When a person is experiencing gratitude i.e., feeling thankful for something; it is impossible for the person to be angry or bitter at the same time. Usually, a human’s emotional body is quite complex and many emotions can exist side-by-side. But, when a human charges their emotional body with gratitude – no negative emotions can exist along with gratitude for the time being. Fear can soon come in after a human is done feeling gratitude, but not along side it. To make sure that ‘fear’ doesn’t come after gratitude, the other emotion needed is ‘faith’ – but that’s a whole different story.
Healing with gratitude is a very ‘feminine energy’ way of healing. It does not specifically look at a wound or hurt, try to analyse it and then try to find ways of healing the issue – this process is very ‘masculine energy’ based – logical, analytical. Healing with gratitude, does not go into the depth of a particular issue, it is more holistic. It is healing by surrender and alchemy – very magical, just like the feminine energies. For a person like me, and I think most of us nowadays – who are used to being more in their masculine energy of being logical, analytical and deep diving into issues – it requires some patience and practice to cultivate the act of being grateful. Because masculine energy is always out to fix problems and issues, it becomes a natural habit for people in this energy to always strive to improve – which in turn means looking at short-comings and trying to overcome them.
This itself is against the emotion of gratitude in which there is an inherent element of being content in the current condition. The true emotion actually even goes beyond being content – it goes to the extent of bowing your head to the event/person/entity which is causing this feeling of being thankful. The very moment a person experiences this, the ego dissolves for how many ever moments gratitude is experienced and with this ego dissolution – all the ego-based emotions (coming from the Manipur chakra i.e., Solar plexus chakra) disappear. In Buddhism this can be described as when the cause is removed, it’s effect gets removed too. That is why, the emotions of fear, hatred, jealousy, envy, anger, bitterness, etc. which are ego-based cannot exist along with gratitude. Gratitude alchemizes these lower vibration emotions and converts them to love. Love toward the event/person/entity that we feel grateful for. This love also is an ego-free love, a devotional love.
How then can one cultivate gratitude? Here are some ways :
Make a list of things you are grateful for. Keep it with you in your phone. Read it multiple times in a day.
Doing something that ignites your passion. This will make you a magnet for gratitude.
Helping those less fortunate than you are.
Being open about asking for help and making it a point to thank whoever helped you.
Make a list of the tough situations in your life and list all the people who helped you out from it. If something else helped you come out of it – music, books, spirituality, exercise, art, adventure – you can make a list of these. Thank each of them again, if you haven’t already.
Go out in nature and admire whichever aspect of nature you like.
Look at a thing of beauty – this maybe a person, a mountain, a tree, anything – and try to get lost in it’s details. The moment you are completely lost in its beauty is the the moment gratitude will automatically flood your heart.
Say ‘thank you’ whenever you get the chance to.
Once you start magnetizing your being with gratitude, you will start attracting more things to be grateful for. Little by little, your life will start moving from a materialistic realm to a more spiritual realm – where magical synchronicities will fill your life – giving you more and more events/persons/entities to be thankful for.
Here are some songs which I think are the same frequency as gratitude. They talk of different religions, but I find their vibrations to be very similar (P.S.: Not my intention to endorse any of these religions)
Read between the lines 