Rejoicing in Who You Are

This year has been a heart wrenching, heart melting, mind-expanding sort of year. Above all I’ve become more and more aware of our capability as humans and equally aware of how little of it we understand and use it.

The year has ended with my mum’s passing, and some beautiful experiences that surround that. After her death (a welcome release after the months she’d spent debilitated, her body ravaged by cancer) I took some time to sense into her energy.

I had a wonderful vision of a hand reaching down from the heavens to pick her up, with first one and then the other hand; the way one would with a small child about to be whirled around.
 
No longer weighted down, light as a feather and as free as the wind, she took to racing across the land, running fast and free with thunderous exhilaration. Then she was a single drop of dew on a rose, then the thorn, then the flower itself, an insect, a blade of grass, the wind that whistled through and the life-giving rain that descended from the sky.
 
All at once she took flight; she was everything and she everywhere. Like a kid in a candy store experiencing the jubilation of life. The feeling that accompanied all of this was exultation and absolute grace. Then a word arose, rejoicing.
 
As wonderful as it was to feel, it led me to appreciate the gap between that and how it would have felt to be shackled to a body so sick. While hers was an extreme and devastating burden, I know how far from the feeling of rejoicing I often feel on an ordinary day to day basis, and how others around me often seem weighted down too.
 
With mum’s passing we have made the trip back to the UK, and have been catapulted from the warm summer and longer days of the southern hemisphere to the cold and dark days of the northern hemisphere.
 
From beach walks to bright lights, late shopping and an abundance of consumables, it’s quite a shift. There seems a lot to distract me here, and it feels pretty overwhelming. In that sense I feel a deep gratitude for the somewhat more low key life I lead back home, more nature and less consumerism.
 
Yet there are the connections with friends and family to warm the heart and reflect back life in new and interesting ways. Being here with my family has made mum’s passing both more poignant and, at the same time, easier.
 
When I experienced the freedom and jubilation in mum’s rejoicing of all that is, I decided that I want to be connected with that feeling more often. Everything in the vision was connected to the natural world around us, a world we often under appreciate, and so I think the key is to appreciate and revel in the simpler things within and around us.
 
Many of our day to day worries don’t really mean much at all when push comes to shove. Most of us know things always work out in the end, yet we constantly worry about how we are going to get there, wherever ‘there’ is at that moment in time.
 
It really isn’t worth it, the worry.

Instead, reflect on the miracles we make happen. As much as I think we completely and almost universally underestimate our capabilities, there is one very obvious one we do recognise. The example I have in mind is the power of creation – the miracle of making and birthing new life. When you start to think about the complexities of that, just allow yourself the luxury of imagining what that might mean your true capabilities are.
 
We take for granted this amazing power of creation, yet for the most part seem to miss that it would point to the possibility that we can indeed create anything the mind can conceive and the heart believe.  I managed to create two beautiful lives, literally created two beings, yet for the longest time couldn’t fathom that the job I felt trapped in was a prison of my own making rather than an economic ‘necessity’.
 
Suffice to say life has moved on enormously since then, and the journey is well documented, but still, am I truly rejoicing in who I am and what life has to offer? Far from it.
 
Instead we become entangled in others’ opinions, and limit our lives and possibilities with beliefs that were passed along without too much thought, only fears.
 
So my new year’s resolution this year is to uncover more of our human potential, master it, and rejoice in it. To be more of who I am, more of who I was created to be, and to revel in all that means. Rejoicing in who you are means beginning to understand who you are and loving every aspect of that and of life around you.
 
As we head into the New Year, I hope more of us will seek to understand what we are capable of, and start to drop our attachment to those ‘others’ opinions and to rejoice in who you are.
 
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