Creating Space For Wholeness

13 Sessions To Reflect On The Journey Home To Who We Are Meant To Be

Facilitated By Karen Hilfman Author of The Mended Mirror

 

Session #11 of 13

 

A Time Of Reflection

 

• As you read the quote and story below and consider a step in The Connection Strategy, notice what you notice as you read. Does a word, phrase or concept tug at your attention?
• Does a quote or insight emerge for you in this time of reflecting as together we listen for and commit to choosing pathways that lead to life and love and light rather than death and hatred, that lead us home to who we are meant to be?
• What insights rise up from your experience as we hold space to focus on and empower a vision of wholeness and well-being? What are the lessons we need to be learning? What are the shifts we are embracing or need to embrace?
• What wisdom and creativity is emerging for you? What stories and situations fill you with hope? Are there quotes or stories or experiences that you would add to deepen these reflections?

 

Connection Strategy For Self And Community: From Disconnected To Connected

13 Steps to Connect to the Power of Transformation, Meaning, Purpose and the Authenticity Within Each of Us to Enhance Our Life Together in Community

 

Step # 11    Engage in significant conversations that include laughter, tears and lots of wonderings. Disconnect from shallow, veneer-thin dialogue filled with catty comments and opinions that are declared as “the” answer.

 

Quote

 

How to Be Spiritually Healthy

In Order To Reflect Love and Wholeness

 

1) Celebrate the awareness that we are born in blessing, and ensure that the foundational stories we lift up carry the message of love.

2) Recognize the gift of the blessed unrest that is happening in the world through grassroots movements as a sign of the new way that is emerging.

3) Be aware that we are capable of conscious evolution, and so we are key players in deciding the direction in this time of great turning and change.

4) Incorporate the gift of integral spirituality that gathers together the wisdom of the ages by combining the insights of the sciences with best practices for the spiritual journey.

5) Connect to the perspective that God or the Divine is both within and beyond all of life, which encourages us to see goodness and choose the way of love.

6) Know that compassion is at the root of all world religions, confirming that it is an innate human capacity.

7) Be open to the emergence of creativity, wisdom and new ways of seeing life that are part of the significant evolution we are currently experiencing.

8) Accept that we are deeply and profoundly connected.

9) Integrate the awareness that it is our task to move more fully toward living from the Divine love within us.

10) Awaken to the Christ Consciousness within, to the universal consciousness of love.

11) Recognize that love is a choice and that when we are in fear we are disconnected from love.

12) Connect to opportunities for collaboration to create a world focused on everyone’s well-being.

13) Create safe space to practice healthy community where we can risk being vulnerable, brave and creative so that we allow the world to be filled with possibilities and wisdom.

The shifts in my thinking, combined with the impact of deepening spiritual practices, help me to articulate my perspective about finding and living wholeness even in brokenness. It also helps me be clearer about how to be in relationship with Mom in a way that is caring of her, my family and my own state of being.

 

Page 258 The Mended Mirror by Karen Hilfman Millson

 

Story

 

In 1999 when Mom and I are on the final leg of our journey through Israel and Palestine, I ask her if she remembers something happening in my life when I was six months old that would cause me distress. We are in Tel Aviv standing on the balcony of our hotel room.  It is the night of April 27, the sixteenth anniversary of Dad’s death.

Mom tells me that it is when I am six months old that she almost died because of complications from the pregnancy that followed my birth. I know the story; I just didn’t know it happened when I was six months old.

Mom tells me the full story as we stand on the balcony.

She is rushed to the hospital. Anytime she shares this story she tells us is that the baby was moving up into her organs, a description that seems odd but that’s how she describes it. During the night she remembers an out-of-body experience of looking down at herself from the corner of the hospital room. Then she turns because she feels drawn beyond the room. Part way to someplace else, my face flashes before her. She remembers the ache of her milk-swollen breasts and turns back.

She looks at me that night out on the balcony and says, “You brought me back that night. I was in the hospital for seven days. I don’t even know who took care of you and your sister and brother while I was gone.”

I ask her if she was able to breastfeed me when she got home. She responds quietly, “No.”

So my inner child carries the wound of this experience.

When Mom comes home from the hospital, she has two lively kids, a two-year-old and a four-year-old along with me at six months old. She is also healing from the impact of a pregnancy gone wrong, as well as any medicine they had her on during the seven days in the hospital.

If I imagine myself in that situation, with no grandparents to help, I am sure I would be in survival mode, making sure the kids are fed and safe, then withdrawing into myself to contain some energy for my own healing.

I speculate out loud to Mom that my guess is that she uses much of her energy to engage the two- and four-year-olds when she comes home, hoping that the six-month-old will stay put. When I describe the scene in my imagination to Mom, she agrees it is pretty accurate.

Mom and I stand on the balcony side by side pondering our shared experience. We are gazing out at the Mediterranean Sea. Something catches my eye. A white dove is flying down toward us. It hovers over us for a moment, and then flies away.

The imagery in the story of Jesus’s baptism—the description of a dove like the Spirit descending upon him—is not lost on me. It is in that moment of the appearance of the dove that the scripture story says Jesus hears God claiming him as a beloved child of God.

The assurance that we are all beloved is a key understanding that sustains me in the tough moments of life.

A deep peace comes over me. The moment feels like a gift after all the angst of struggles Mom and I have shared together. I wonder if perhaps the depth of our connection begins on that night long ago when Mom almost dies. It seems to make some sense as to why our lives continuously intertwine.

 

Page 68 The Mended Mirror by Karen Hilfman Millson

 

Sharing Your Reflections

 

To add your thoughts to this conversation post them on the Course page under each session of Creating Space for Wholeness on www.AuthenticConnectionCulture.com or www.TheMendedMirror.com or on Facebook.  Or simply be intentional about holding prayerful space knowing we connect heart to heart across the miles and time, and that together we are empowering and strengthening the things to which we give our attention.