The “Facts of Life”: A Peface Before the Story Begins
Do you remember being told about “the facts of life” as a child? You know – the “birds and the bees” talk about how children come to be? My mother told me about this when I was little more than three years old, and she told me the human version not the “birds and bees” version. I proceeded to tell a neighbor friend of mine who had been told the “stork” version of this story. He told his mother the story I had been told, along with the fact that I had told him the “stork” story was wrong. She in turn called my mother, incensed that I had corrupted her son. This marked the first time I was exposed to the lesson that some people are afraid of the truth.
I mention this because by the time I was six I was suffering greatly because there was another “facts of life” story I had not been told, which I desperately needed to hear: the “facts of life” not about sexuality but about spiritual connection. I remember walking into the synagogue that my family belonged to, on my way to Hebrew School (kind of like the Jewish version of Catechism for Catholics). I peered into the beautiful darkly lit sanctuary on the way to my classroom. And from deep within me I had an experience of profound emptiness, along with the words, “God is not here!”
I found this utterly terrifying because, in my six year old feeling-mind, if God was not in this place that I had come with my parents to attend services since I could remember, maybe this meant that God did not exist at all! And if this were true than I was more starkly and irretrievably alone than I could bear, since I already felt alone in my family because of having become convinced that I needed to be my family’s hero since my parents seemed to me unable to be mine or my brother’s.
The experience I had peering into the synagogue was so disorienting and so terrifying that I never told a soul about it – not my parents, not my friends, not my Hebrew School teacher and not my Rabbi. I felt as though I had stumbled into a terrible secret that I was not supposed to know!
In hindsight, I came to deeply appreciate how desperately I had needed to be told some sort of “facts of life” story about my connection with spirit, with source. In fact, I needed this kind of the “facts of life” story much more than I had needed to hear the story about the sexual “facts of life.” In 2002, I was gifted a version of the “facts of life” story I had needed since I was six years old. It was told to me as though it were one of my parents talking to me as a child, though some of the words that were used I would not have understood back then. Nonetheless, the six year old that I carry within me still understood, and indeed clung to, every word.
I wish I had been told a story like this by my parents throughout my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. They loved me deeply but they did not understand the spiritual aspects of religion in a way that would have enabled them to tell me a story such as the one I am about to share with you. Had they understood these “facts of life,” they would gladly have passed them along to my brother and me. They did not, just as their parents before them did not.
It is with this version of “the facts of life” that I will begin introducing you to The Flow of Life. I entitled the letter below the “the facts of life” as a play on words based on what I have mentioned above. Please know, though, that I am nevertheless not presenting this as “the way it is,” but rather as one metaphor for dealing with life on life’s terms; a childhood metaphor that I continue to find nourishing, even as a man in his fifties. ,. and that many others with whom I have shared it have as well. I hope this version of “the facts of life” helps illuminate or reaffirm your connection with higher wisdom and your most sacred life purpose, as it has done for me.
I invite you to imagine having been told the following “facts of life” story beginning as a child. Imagine it being repeated over and over by a loving relative throughout all of your growing-up years, using many different kinds of wording depending on your age. Imagine how your life would be now had you heard this sort of “facts of life” story.
You probably didn’t hear a story like this as a child. So, after you have imagined how hearing this might have been for you as a child, allow yourself to next imagine how you might life your life from now on if you begin to embrace a story life this one from this day forward. If this version’s metaphysics or wording choices are not quite right for you, I invite you to write your own version of this kind of message that your deepest self most needed to hear about the “facts of life,” beginning as a child…
A Different Version of “The Facts of Life” for the Child in Us All
Welcome
Welcome to the world, my deeply precious child! What I am about to tell you I will repeat to you many times in many different ways as you grow and develop, because even though you will not understand some of what I tell you today, over time you will gradually come to understand all of this and much more. What I am about to tell you are the higher “facts of life” on earth that very few people tell their children. The more you live in harmony with these “facts,” the more happiness and love you will feel as your life unfolds.
Life Meaning & Purpose
You have a precious purpose in this life, oh precious child of mine. All of us do. You are here to do some wonderful and amazing things while you are here. Fulfilling your purpose is meant to be a joy not a burden, even though some moments of your life might not feel that way at the time. For most of us, discovering our purpose takes many years; others discover their purpose sooner. Each person discovers their purpose themselves. Finding and living our purpose takes a lifetime. But you can trust that, like all of us, you are here for deeply important reasons, both for your own development and for the many whose lives you already touch and will touch throughout your life. Life is perfectly set up to help you discover and fulfill your purpose. I will help you set off being as well-prepared for your journey as I know how.
It has taken me time to free myself from the idea that most people have, that children come into life innocent. I see how unhelpful this idea is. If you came in innocent then this would mean that anything difficult that happens to you in this life of yours would be a tragedy forced upon you by a cruel and unfair life, or allowed by source to happen to you. This belief would only teach you to become a victim of the world and to distrust your source. I love you too much to teach you such a false lesson!
The “facts of life,” my child, are that how your life will go has little to do with what happens to you and lots to do with how well you digest those experiences. How well you do this mostly depends on how connected you remain with source. I am committed to helping you deepen your connection with source so you can develop a particular way of understanding your life experiences, and to helping you develop the skills you’ll need to digest those experiences. Living in harmony with The Flow of Life will help your imagination and curiosity and playfulness and love and joy and light-heartedness grow throughout your life, rather than fade away, as happens with far too many adults as they grow older.
Ingredients You Came In With & Those Life Provides
You have come into life with almost everything you need in order to discover and fulfill your precious purpose here. Like all of us, you are, and will always be, connected with a wisdom that is truer than what we believe we know when we view ourselves as separate selves. How strong your connection with source is will determine how accurately and how often you will access this wisdom. Like all of us, your body will tell you what is true and not true for you, whenever you listen to it carefully enough. And, like all of us, a wonderful set of energies flows through you that you will use to discover and fulfill your purpose. All of these energies, along with your higher wisdom and inner awareness, are available to you naturally as a child. Like most of us, you likely will forget how to find or use some of what you came in with as grow up. But, my precious child, always remember that there are ways to learn how to do this again. Because, my beloved child, you are never alone. You always have inner access to a love so complete and unchangeable, and a wisdom so pure, that you will never be without what you truly need, even if it seems that way at times.
There are two things you did not come into life with that you will also need in order to find and fulfill your precious life purpose.
One is life experiences. Some of these will feel joyful and some will feel painful. Some will feel wonderful and some will feel scary. All your life experiences can help you find and fulfill your purpose. Think of yourself as a student. Consider life experiences as your classroom. Treat higher wisdom as your teacher guiding you how to harvest deep spiritual learnings from your experiences. And see me as an elder student who has agreed to be your teaching assistant.
The other thing you did not come into life with is specific worldly skills you will need to digest your life experiences so that they serve the reason you are here. You see, life experiences are simply that: experiences. They are always meant to help you. Life experiences are a type of food; in some ways more important even than the food you eat with your mouth. Always remember that food is only as good for you as your digestion allows it to be.
Properly digested life experiences deepen your connection with source and your higher purpose. Improperly digested life experiences separate you further from feeling connected with source and your higher purpose. The experiences you don’t digest properly will seem to have hurt you, or they will seem to be in charge of your beliefs, emotions, choices and actions, or will seem to teach you that you can only depend on yourself, or that you must control others and circumstances…until you finish digesting them. You can trust that you have properly digested a life experience is when you feel more connected to source than before, you feel more loving and safe and joy-filled, when you have embraced in your heart the gifts of light you harvested from that experience, regardless of whether the experience itself seemed wonderful or awful. When you feel these ways, and when you are neither harmed nor saved by a life experience, this is called forgiveness.
My Role & My Limits
My role in your life, as higher wisdom’s teaching assistant, is to, without shielding you from your experiences, do my best to initially provide you with as much safety as I can, and to help you digest your experiences and learn the skills you will need to become able to do this without me. I will, most of all, do this by not disconnecting from you, but instead keeping you company as you digest the experiences you have in this life. Whenever I provide you with deep clean connection, this will help you will deepen your trust that you are always connected with source.
I love you so deeply, my child. Yet I can only love you as well as I love myself. I don’t love myself perfectly; few adults do. And so I will not love you perfectly either. Even though my most sacred jobs are to help you strengthen your connection with source and teach you how to properly digest your life experiences, I, like my parents before me, and like almost all parents, don’t fully know how to do this for myself. So I will not do this perfectly with you either. This means that you, like all of us, will carry a growing number of undigested life experiences until a later time when you will learn how to digest them more fully than I know how to teach you.
My limitations will not stop you from wanting more connection and guidance from me than I offer you. For a time, you will be certain that you can get more connection from me than you receive. You will try to figure out what you need to do in order to get this from me. You will try to discover what to cover up or change in yourself in the hope that this will get you the love you need from me. You will try to figure out how to make life easier for me in the hope that doing this will make it possible for me to give you more of the love you need…or so that I will at the very least accept you or find you valuable. And, if need be, you will figure out how to contain or manipulate or control me, in order to keep yourself as safe as possible from what you get from me in place of the connection you need.
The Survival Plan
As a child you do not yet experience that your connection with source provides you with all the connection you need that you cannot get from people. Children look to adults for the connection they need. Most adults are limited in the amount and quality of connection they can provide. This includes me. So, your attempts to get all the connection you seek from me will not work as well as you hope. Nothing you try will get you all the connection from people that you seek. This will not be your fault, my dear one. But the fact that this won’t be your fault will not take away the pain you will feel because of my limitations and your limited ability to take me beyond them. So, you will also need to develop ways to numb your pain over not getting the amount and kind of connection from me and others that you need.
Developing ways to numb your pain will complete your Survival Plan. You will have your Happy Ending Fantasy, which will be quite real to you, in which you are certain you can get from those around you all the connection you need. You will decide on the Rules you need to follow in order to make your Happy Ending Fantasy come true. And you will select and use anesthesias to numb the disconnection pain you feel and cover up the painful and angry feelings you have toward yourself and others when your attempts to get more connection fail.
Because of this you will eventually develop a split deep within your being. On the one hand, your digested life experiences will help you develop the understandings and skills you need to live in harmony with your true nature, connect with source, and discover and fulfill your precious purpose for being here. On the other hand, your undigested life experiences will give you the impression that you are separated from source, and this will cause you to develop the understandings and skills that make up your Survival Plan. Your Survival Plan will provide you with ways to “cope” with life here on earth while your experiences remain undigested. These ways of coping will become automatic and unconscious, leading you to believe that your Survival Plan is as much “who you are” as who you actually are. You will become very attached to your Survival Plan! You will be tempted to forget that coping is not thriving, or that even if coping is not thriving, that this is as good as life can be.
Wakeup Calls & Choices
Even though there will be times when you feel this way, I pray you will do your best to remember, my dear precious beloved child, that life will never fail you! Life does not limit you to mere coping! You will eventually begin to have life experiences with which your Survival Plan is unable to help you cope. These unpleasant-feeling blessings, these life upheavals, will offer you sacred opportunities to outgrow your Survival Plan and move more fully into who you truly are. These Wake-Up Calls will not feel easy to go through because, in order to respond properly to them, you will need to do two things that will feel quite unpleasant, at least in the beginning.
The first of these two things is that you will need to become willing to surrender some of your beliefs about who you are, who others are, how the world works and how wisdom makes itself generally known in this world, and within you in specific. In other words, you will need to be willing to become disoriented for a time. Deeper humility will be one of the gifts that will come to you from this surrender.
The second thing you will need to do is to digest the undigested life experiences you carry that caused you to develop and become attached to your Survival Plan to begin with. In order to do this you will need to stop using your anesthesias and replace them with the habits and skills needed for proper life experience digestion and fuller alignment with source. You might not know what all of these are, but if you are committed to doing this, teachers will appear.
If you do not respond to your Wake-Up Calls by doing these two things, you will instead enter into a cycle in which your attachment to your Survival Plan will grow stronger. The stronger this attachment grows, the more into darkness you will go, the more unhappy you will be, and the more out of harmony with yourself, others and higher wisdom you will become, regardless of how much outward success you might obtain. If you take this darker path you will gradually become embittered and old, a hollow shell of who you truly are. You will more and more live your life like the living dead that populate earth in such large numbers. So, when you are at the choice point that Wake-Up Calls offer us all, please do not make the choice to enter a Deterioration Cycle. And on those occasions when you do, please remember, my dear one, that it is never too late to change your mind. Never!
If, on the other hand, you do these two things in response to a Wake-Up Call, you will enter into a cycle in which you can transform some of your undigested life experiences into the gifts they were meant to be. As a result you will further develop the understandings and skills you need in order to more joyfully discover and fulfill your life purpose with more light-heartedness and lovingness than ever before. You will move into fuller integrity with your purpose than ever, as well as into more complete and uninterrupted alignment with source than ever before. My child, this is what life experiences are actually for in the first place!
You will be blessed with many Wake-Up Calls over the course of your life. This means that you will be gifted with the opportunity for many Transformation Cycles during your years here on earth. Do not resist them, my child, but rather lean into them instead. The gifts you will harvest, both for yourself and others, will prove priceless, I promise you.
You see, the deep sacred learnings you are here to learn, and the ways you are here to make a difference in the world, cannot be separated from one another. These can be yours only to the extent that you properly digest the life experiences with which you are gifted. The extent to which you make a positive difference in the world depends on the extent to which you harvest learnings that expand your connection, lovingness, joy and light-heartedness. And all this in turn depends on the extent to which you properly digest your life experiences, my beloved child. This includes the life experiences you have with me as your imperfect parent figure, when I do not offer you the connection you need for digesting your other life experiences!
Harmonizing With the Flow of Life
We are all in this together. You and I and all of humanity. These are the “facts of life;” this is how the “Flow of Life” unfolds on earth. Resist this and you will suffer. Accept this and great fulfillment will be yours, which is my wish for you. Please do not use my limitations to cripple yourself. Grow beyond my limitations just as I have done my best to grow beyond those of my parents.
I love you so much my precious child. Go forth into this life, remembering what I have told you, and fulfill your sacred purpose with love and grace and lightness-of-being, knowing that I will remind you about all I have just said often and in different ways at different times…
Complete details about how to take charge of your development are in
The New IQ and The New IQ Integrity Makeover Workbook by Dr. David Gruder,
both of which will be released this coming January, 2008!
Want to know more? Click on the book cover draft further up the left frame.
Want a free sneek peek? Click on the "Free eCourses" button further up the left frame.
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