The first spiritual principle Mother Mary taught me was gratitude. I only had glimpses of it if someone did something for me unexpectedly or something turned out to be more than I was expecting. What blocked me from feeling gratitude in my life was my sense of entitlement. Mine was about the size of Texas. I was so mired in self pity over the raw deal I got in childhood, that I believed the world owed me and owed me big. I faithfully filled out my Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes entry forms (no purchase necessary)every year. I felt real disappointment and anger because I never won. I waited in vain for Ed McMahn to show up at my door with the balloons and my giant check. I thought about him more than any other man, ever. Like so many others I felt I deserved a cash settlement and then my true life would begin.

From the beginning of my spiritual awakening gratitude came easily. It was the only thing that did. I believe my check did finally arrive, in the form of Mothers grace. It is the only explanation I can see. Every other spiritual concept grew slowly in me. I did a lot of acting as if with everything except gratitude. All I had to do was think about it or pray about it and it would be there. It was that more than anything else that opened the door in my life to a connection with Mother. I could feel rage,self pity or sorrow for some things while I was grateful for others. It was my first real experience of balance. For me there is a wonder and beauty to feeling gratitude that at times can be painful it runs so deep. I weep as I write this for the fullness of my life, all of it.

This is why Thanksgiving became my favorite holiday. I replaced the feast of food with a feast of hiking and communion with nature. Mother has revealed to me over time the importance of gratitude. It is at the heart of the half full, half empty glass thing. It sustains me in ways I don’t fully understand. When I feel cut off from Mother through my own crazy thoughts, I can touch gratitude and know She is there.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Shakespeare said “How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?”

I have always thought of myself as a fairly patient person, until that is I had a child. My son has a will of iron and the patience of a loud, whining Buddha. He will go to any lengths to impose his will. The boy can wear me down like no one else. What Mother showed me early on is that much of my patience I thought I possessed was a lie. I acted patient much of the time so others would reward me with their love and attention. It offered me the opportunity to feel superior and soooooo…healthy! Ha Ha, look how great I am, my patience shouted! Then came baby.

My first glimpse of my impatience began soon after my spiritual awakening. Like minded people were quick to point out how hard I was on myself. When I first heard this, I was genuinely puzzled. I didn’t see it, not even a little. But Mother made sure I heard it over and over again, sometimes from people I barely knew. Because the first few years were about self honesty, this fit right in. Over time, I began to see how punishing I was to myself. A lot of what it came down to was impatience with myself. I was and can still be, so intolerant of every ones process, my own especially.

With other adults it was easier to hide this impatience. I could speak to them for hours on how they should live their lives in order to be better, their pain was somehow wrong, because mine was. After about a sentence and a half, my four year olds eyes glaze over and I loose him. Despite my best efforts to do so, I can’t spend hours explaining why he can’t have or do what he might want to do in the moment. When he gets upset and pushes hard to get it, I give in or get angry about 20% of the time. And about 10% of the time I am acting as if I had patience. It works for my son, but I am still left churning inside.

Every time I have one of those reactions it is my impatience. My son is just being four. But he is me in those moments. And I speak aloud with the voice that was always there waiting to criticize and show intolerance for his/my process. My son and I are just trying to understand who we are in relation to ourselves and the world in any given moment. Making it more complicated or less significant is the greatest punishment.

Mother has taught me how to make amends for my choices that punish. I could never apologize for the things I needed to amend and was forever apologizing for things I had no control over. Mother taught me to flip that. Now I can make amends to my son and myself. I can forgive him and myself and let it go. I always thought being spiritual meant not making mistakes, but what I realize now is that Mother has shown me how to surrender when I do.

I know I am a great mom and my son is having the childhood I dreamed of, but I am making some big changes. In the last few months I am not giving in at all and the difference in my son is amazing. He is much happier because the boundaries keep getting clearer for him, which gives him the security he needs. Now that I have made that change it feels easier to allow him his reaction and work that out for himself without my impatience to speed it up or eliminate it all together. I don’t know how to create patience, but I can change a structure, make a different choice and the result is more patience.

Mother is my rock. It is through Her I learn to be as patient as a stone. I guess I am becoming rich!

I’m overwhelmed, I’m three, I’m on the verge of a temper tantrum, all because I looked too far ahead. I’ve only been blogging for a few weeks and the insecure voice inside suggested, quite casually, that unless more people start reading it, I’ll have to resign myself to being a total looser. The way this works is; I’m writing my blog, not feeling deficient at all, and the seemingly bright idea pops into my head to explore ways to get more people interested in my blog. Since I am in the midst of marketing my website and this blog is apart of that overall plan, it seemed like a legitimate idea. Danger Will Robinson, Danger!

What I have discovered about myself through painstaking experience is that I need time to settle into something new before I try to expand it. A few weeks of blogging in real time equals about five minutes in Danielle time. While my growth often feels erratic to me, when I look back I can see it has been slow and steady. What I discovered in my search to optimize my blog were sites with scores of suggestions and about a hundred links to yet more sites with even more suggestions. Yikes!

I ended my work day yesterday pissed off and tired. I went into the kitchen to help my husband make dinner and told him what I had done and how I was feeling. Best friend that he is, he talked me off the ledge. And here is the miraculous part, I listened and heard him. I could feel his words in my heart and Mothers hand on my back soothing me. I really felt I was a beginner and it would take time to expand my blog and it was OK!

Being a beginner was never OK before. I always felt I should be an expert at everything I tried. I berated myself mercilessly for always falling short. To this day I struggle with consistency. I set up an unobtainable expectation early on in life, the old refrain, “I should have known”. I am surrendering this as best I can. It is Mothers kindness and grace that gives me the ability to experience something different. Not so long ago an experience like that would have kept me in overwhelm and catapulted me into self-pity for weeks, now it lasts a few hours. This is how I mark my growth, by the everyday choices. I used to crave the big changes, but I soon learned that’s a set up for disappointment. Today I woke up feeling excited to blog again, trusting my process with it enough to let it go.

My back has been hurting lately. As a former massage therapist, I started looking for ways to support my back and help it heal. As I sat down to eat dinner last night, I became acutely aware that I was sitting on the very edge of my seat with no back support. I thought, why am I sitting this way, and a moment later was answered by my son who asked me to get him some more milk. For the last four years I’ve been jumping up to get him more drink, food, utensils, and of course mop up the endless spills. In the beginning that’s all normal, his shear size prohibits his ability to reach and lift most of these objects. What struck me was the fact that I have forgotten how to relax in between. I find I sit at my desk and work this way as well. It is as if my hyper vigilant child has finally found an acceptable outlet. It makes me feel ready for anything, except serenity.

My back has always been a barometer for measuring the relax factor in my life. lately it has been getting steadily worse. I am feeling today that my willingness to literally almost jump to fulfill my son’s meal time requests are about not wanting him to have to wait for anything. I have very black and white thinking. For a long time I turned the traumatic and difficult events from my childhood into one long event. I made my whole childhood bad, with a few good times sprinkled in. There exists inside of me the desire to make my son’s life all good, it’s making us both miserable. I am creating an artificial world for him, one that exists to meet his every need immediately. The perfection in our dynamic is his absolute insistence on me hopping to it. He loves to tell me to hurry, that he wants it now! Or he will ask for it over and over again, even while I am moving to get it.

My son and my back are really telling me to stop, slow down and relax. The world will not stop spinning if my son waits a minute more for another glass of milk, even if his cries say otherwise. Relaxing into myself is what Mother is always whispering inside of me.
“It’s alright Beloved, everything is alright.”
I need to believe this for my sanity. It is coming true in my life, more each day. But there are still enough moments when I don’t beleive, to serve as a reminder to sit back and allow the chair to bear my weight, hold me upright and support my body. Even the simplest action can reconnect me. It always amazes me the forms in which Mother reveals Herself to me. And She’s ergonomic!

I supported and voted for Barack Obama because over the last few years the fight has gone out of me. When the primaries began and so many politicians began pounding the podium and shaking their fists with promises to fight for me, I found myself faintly ill. Obama was the only one who spoke of healing through unity and change. Hmmm, sounded an awful lot like Mother.

When I first awoke to Spirit in my life, I came out fighting. I loved the wow factor, hated the facing self factor. The only way I knew how to do anything was fight. I fought my fears, my doubts, my joys and my sorrows, in other words, I usually thought I should be feeling, thinking and doing something other than I was doing. My joy was undeserved, my fear made me powerless, my doubts made me a looser and my sorrow made me unbearable to be around. All my fighting made me want to fight harder. I couldn’t understand why all that fighting led to more fighting. When was I going to win the war? I yammered about peace with the best of them, but secretly felt it was boring and got you nothing but a robe and a pair of sandals, and not even cute ones at that.

It seemed to me that the people out there fighting were getting things done, making a difference, being noble. Gandhi just caught a lucky break. If I stopped fighting and being so hard on myself, who would I be? I was afraid for a long time to find out. facing the need to heal within myself made sense to my mind and sent the rest of me into terror. When I listen to politicians speak of fighting for me, I feel such kinship and connection to the way I used to treat myself. Now I see that their fight will be hard and uphill, and while they may gain some ground, at what cost will it come? How much blood and treasure will they give away to win? My internal struggles cost me myself.

Today I need unity, balance and compassionate healing in every aspect of my life, from my political candidates to my toothpaste and everything in between. Things that appear to be healing at first, turn out to not be later, and that’s ok, I won’t know it all, ever. Fighting doesn’t hold the same fascination it once did. That lets me know I got here through peace, and still managed to have some cute sandals.

Lately, Mother has been focusing Her Wednesday night meditations on the third chakra, or soul center. According to Her, the solar plexus is the attachment point of the soul to the physical body. In the meditations, She is guiding us to find the fragments of our soul, that reside outside of our bodies, I visualize a waiting room, and welcome them back into the body to rejoin the soul.

Mother teaches that the spirit or my eternal self is quite vast, but the soul is the part of my spirit that resides in my physical body. I confess I have not spent much time focusing on my soul, spirit yes, soul no. Yet I have been feeling a yen to reclaim myself. I am not as afraid as I once was to welcome back the parts of me I separated out to survive. Soul retrieval is not a new technique, it’s just one I have little experience with. I know I have become more whole in every way over the years, but this type of reclamation is speaking to me from a deep place.

I visualize the waiting room because of my tendency to wait for life. I believe it may be possible that these fragments, as long as they remain such, will contribute to the feeling of waiting. What am I waiting for? I don’t know. It feels to me as if these fragments carry some of my life force or chi. When I am willing to welcome them home, no matter what they bring with them, I’ll have so much more of me, to do what needs doing to serve Mother and myself.

There is no knowing what details of my past these fragments hold. What I hope is to welcome them not with a wince but a smile. I never want to cringe from myself again. I’ve become too precious to myself. Mother has shown me that. So I will do my best to be patient and not push. I only hope the waiting room has great magazines, it might be a long wait.

What am I waiting for? A few weeks ago I wrote about living in the energy of waiting. I used to wait for a man to tell me what to do, or someone else in authority, but now it seems I am waiting for myself. Maybe I always was and the other things were just my rationalization. I think I’ve been waiting for the perfect formula to present itself, and then I’ll…? I want the perfect food, relationship, parenting, social, career, formula to all come together in just the right way, so I never have to deviate. No more struggle or doubt, ever again.

So far the waiting is not working out so well. No matter how often I hear Mother tell me and others that life is always changing and evolving so we can make our choices based on who we are now, not who we were, part of me doesn’t believe Her. If I could figure out the best right way for me, I could check out and not have to bother with change because I would be set.

For today, it seems as though Mother is right yet again. Part of me is grateful. The relief of not having to figure it all out is big. Another part is pissed off. I want to work it all out now, so I can, what, live pain free, have a life of ease and pure comfort? I always seem to get hung up on that part, damn it.

Today I can feel Mothers’ hand supporting this transition from struggle to acceptance. It isn’t all my fault, yet I cannot abdicate all responsibility. As usual, it is somewhere in between. I feel patient with myself today. Stay tuned.