“It is so dark here.” -It was my 16 year old son speaking to me…
We were standing in front of our modest 4-bedroom home in Manhattan Beach in sunny Southern California. Across the street the oleanders lining the old railway embankment were in full bloom, a brilliant hedge of bright pink and white extending all the way to downtown. The air was cool and mild, and a gentle breeze from the ocean, only six blocks away, brought the scent of salt air and roses. We were surrounded by blue sky… We were standing in paradise!
“Look around you,” I said, but he could not see the Beauty all around him. He was like a horse wearing blinders who could only see what was directly in front of his nose.
We “see” with more than our eyes. We see with our feelings. We see, hear, taste, touch and smell with so much more than our physical organs of perception.
Another time my son gave me an African thumb harp, which, when twanged, created not only a sound, but a powerful vibration. Similarly, it is as if we have a thumb harp in our Souls and when that harp is struck by our perceptions, the vibrations they create travel throughout our body and we respond with our feelings of love, joy, fear, anger, compassion, sadness, and sometimes resistance. If there is no vibration, no response, no feeling, there is no real perception. We “see” without Seeing.
What gets in the way of our feeling? I’m sure there are many answers to this question, but here is one: filters. What we perceive never has a chance to reach our soul harp because it has to pass through our filters. Filters have been compared to different colors of glasses, which, of course, change the whole mood of our perception. This is an excellent simile, but where do the glasses come from?
We all have traumas during our life and only rarely do we completely experience those traumas. We do not want to, so we make them into a pair of glasses and look at our lives through those glasses. That way, we do not see the traumas, but they still cloud our perception. Each additional trauma clouds the glasses more until we are looking at things through a murky, brown colored lens. And our precious sense perceptions fall short. They can’t make it all the way through to our harp. There is no feeling response.
We are losing out on the vibrations of life! This is called “Depression.”
That is why we need to open our inner windows and let the left-over emotions from the traumas we have experienced fly out, like bats. Bats love the dark so we have to let in the light. I have gotten rid of quite a few bats (there are always more to go), and I can attest that my harp is now playing much more beautiful music.
I would love to hear from you about your thoughts and experiences, so please feel free to e-mail me at selfhealing101@yahoo.com. If you would like to learn more about letting in the light, you may call me for a getting-to-know-each-other session at (510) 250-9109,
at no charge.