Parenting... Success... Healing The Past... Love
Eat Shit My Son…Eat Joseph’s Shit.
One of the most powerful healing methodologies popularised by Reiki is ‘Healing The Past’. Taking the sum of this life’s experiences and sending a powerful stream of energy through it. Reexamining one’s life in toto was not ‘invented’ by Reiki. All spiritual traditions have a version of it. Some are vicious in self-examination. Some gentle. Anyhow it is a powerful healing practise and sometimes agonising, no matter how gently one handles it. It can be so painful that many have run away from us when we do this. It can be so powerful that it can trigger miracles, create a complete life turnaround. So important is it that Devadhara Healing and Cosmic Heart Spiritual Pathway has formulated 6 different healing modalities that help one infuse life with healing and joy.
In healing your lives you have shared with us some of the most ugly aspects of life. Brutal child abuse, violence of grave intensity, terrifying poverty, predatory siblings, strange parenthood … yes we see parenthood of all colours, joys and awfulness…
During one such session a seeker revealed that his mother was so focussed on success, or rather rage at failure, that even though her son invariably did well, coming in the top 3. He was often pipped to the post by one Master Joseph.
He would sometimes return home with his marks paper, and class ranking back home and would tremble when he had to present it to his mom. If he by some terrible misfortune had come second in class, the dreaded No 2. He would be given the firing of his life by his mom. Who would scream out “Eat Joseph’s Shit My Son… Eat Joseph’s Shit”. Said in good, regional language you could smell the shit, feel its textures far better than through English’s ‘blandity’. Of course if he didn’t get the message right he would be taken to the loo, and his No 2 achievement would be rubbed home.
So what did this do to him? An expansive and creative mind was taught to overwork. To seek the slightest mistake. To pick out the smallest flaw. To see himself as worm. To carry a deep rage at women, hidden deep. To doubt. To seek to hone oneself to ferocious edge.
In aura terms what was the effect on him? His aura had deep bands across his chest and stomach, alternates of restraint and expansion. His mind which otherwise would have been exploratory, became a dense thicket of looped energy. It looks like the steely sinews of a toned body.
Now we can stop with this. Stop with an examination of the wounds life inflicted on him. But to do so is condescending. For it acts as if the wondrous liberal childhood, many of us enjoyed, is the only one conceivable, or the only one that perfects us for life. It looks at him as a wounded cripple. He may have scars. But he is not a cripple. For as he comes to terms with his hurts and hates, he has two registers. He is driven to explore the most fanciful, and extravagant ideas. And he is pushed, bloody hell pushed to self direct force with obsessive intensity making him unfirable. Given soft, warm, fuzzy encouragement he would have been warm, intelligent… But the man pushed to eat Joseph’s shit will work harder, conserve more intensely, and so he will in corporate race do better. He will be nore consistent. Also he works harder at relationships. At one level he is almost Spartan in his approach.
A grim-toned movie, the 300, celebrates the victory of the 300 spartans against the conquering hordes of the Persians. It obviously seeks to tap into the undertone of Terrorist Middle East versus the outnumbered West. The mighty Persians were foiled by a narrow pass and 300 doughty Spartans that refused to break, down to the last man.
But the Spartan Warriors would have been a mere rabble without The Spartan Way of Life. Which incidentally included abandoning ‘substandard children’ to the wild, to be eaten alive by wolves and insects. It included casting aside the useless old on hilltops where the elements would pick their bones. But by that measure the liberal way is not more merciful.
The other day we went to a set of homes of the lower middle class. The homes were single roomed homes. It had a communal loo. As we used it, you realised it was relatively clean, but shit still swam in the water, the muck of many feet stained the floor, you had to stand in line for this rare privilege. And you think of the mother as she stood once in such a home and clawed her way above this life. Getting a good job and husband, putting 3 kids through school, college, marriage. And she sees her son wasting the opportunities she would have longed to have had. The grim realisation that unless we climb the ladder we can fall, deep down to a slum. Was that what triggered her terrifying "Eat Shit my Son rants?"
NeoCapitalist driven liberalism abandons the old to old age homes. It follows parents with a deadening, terrifying big mama watching how every safety pin is pinned. It rips away, kidnaps children, from 'substandard' parents and thrusts them into the ugly maw of child services. It blesses the 1%. It coddles the 30%. It casts the 70% into a life that is sub-human. Cruel Father and Smothering Mother are both horrific.
Many things shape us. Great Joy. And Great Ugliness.
But niceness like too much water can rot our roots. And harshess can cause us to dry up and die. Now the man who ate Joseph’s shit has worked harder at the spiritual exercises we gave him. And so out of ugliness comes deep joy. He is kinder with those fallen. Has created a small foundation to help others. He cares for battered women. Loves with ferocious greed. He is on the path to ‘Mukti’. Which means after 37 lifetimes, one in which he was flayed alive and fed to vultures, he is close to gathering the full harvest of life and walking back to God, bag groaning.
Many things shape us. Great Joy. And Great Ugliness.
The simple truth is that at Creator’s Child, we know that Love is at the Heart of Life. That Love is the one thing that gets us to flourish. Love is the very nature of existence. So why you may ask does Love come here? To learn in a place that can be shitty as hell, to choose Love.
One day The Smothering Mother who screamed at her son will live with him, will be taken care by him. He can feed her Joseph’s Shit. Or the Manna that Dances Down from Heaven.
-- Tarun & Celia Cherian
Commentary: Now Parenting is hard. The hardest job in the world. And we give our children what is in our blood. What forms us. What we were fed with. But this means we give what we were given in childhood, but it also means we can give what we knew in other lives, and what the soul knows. We do not have to repeat history.
- Now childhood is beautiful. But growing up is hard.
- We are not the sum of the shit that happens to us.
- Eating Crow and Eating Shit has its benefits: If you read Buffy's Doggy Revelations you will read how animals drink other's pee to absorb their pheremones, their courage. In specialised modern healing procedures, a partner's shit is fed to another to restock on fecal bacteria.
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