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Creating Bridges: Spirituality & Philosophy: The Awakening Generation
In the Beginning
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by Ann Marie Judge |
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When a child is born with the new energies, we are so full of love and clarity; there is no need to pursue awakening, as many individuals in older generations are doing. In that, we know nothing else but to be totally open to the world from the start, to everything that people will tell us, to everything we will see. If we are lucky, we grow up in a family that realizes and respects our sensitivity and open, untarnished love.
We also often experience life in a very raw way, without much “stuff”—ideologies, definitions, fears, or inhibitions—in the way. Our greatest joy is to experience the full power of love in any form it is available to us. Everyone knows children like this; children who run up to complete strangers in the mall and hug them, who are not afraid to open a dialogue with the woman ahead of them in the checkout line.
Just being around these children is a breath of fresh air, a little bit of heaven on earth.
An Unkind World
Unfortunately, that joy in the rawness of love and life gets buried when we grow old enough to witness the other side of that coin: the raw nature of pain.
The world as we've known it has never been kind to anyone that's chosen to awaken. When we open your eyes to all that truly is, not only does love become the powerful force that I wrote about in my February column, but pain becomes equally visible.
Adults that are given the choice to awaken are often aware of this fact. Even if they are not, when they awaken and begin to experience these extremes, they are able to think it through and can hopefully develop the strength to maintain their awakened self.
For a young child, they were born with the light. They did not choose it, and when the pain of the world starts to show itself, the awakened child does not have the cognitive powers of an adult to work through it.
I remember one day while I was in high school last year. I went to my first class; my teacher ended up having us read an article on Columbine for one reason or another. Then, I went to my next class and we read a story about a boy who attempted suicide. Later that day, we watched Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.
I could usually handle just one of those, but when all of them happened in the same day, it was too much. I had an independent study in pastel portraiture for my last hour of the day. Off to the side of the art room, there is a little room for storage. I went into it and cried until I was too exhausted to cry anymore.
Something like that often has little effect on children these days. But I was that little girl who got lucky enough to have a family to nurture my openness, and I choose to keep everything raw—I love the joyful side of being awake too much to be able to shut it down. What happened to me that day was the dark side of the rawness of life.
For the children that do not have a supportive family, they experience the same light and darkness. But when there is no one to nurture the light and heal the dark, they can do nothing but shut off both extremes.
Imagine you are a little boy and witnessing a fight between classmates at a young age. Most children might laugh or encourage the fighting, because they are also afraid. But you experience the anger and pain of the people fighting to such a great degree that you want to break down right where you are and open all the floodgates holding back your tears and your pain. You want to express your pain so badly, but you know that you can't. You would become the center of the children's attention and might be labeled a “crybaby.” Most importantly, you deeply wish that you didn't care what the other children would think of you, even as you feel the need for the love and approval you already have from your friends. You can't risk losing what support you have, however inadequate it might be.
If that happens even a few times to an awakened young one, it causes a hardness and coldness that most people take years to cultivate. For most people, it would take a great deal of pain and hurt to cause them to become so jaded. But for an awakened child who experiences every emotion and every joy, every pain and every frustration of not only themselves, but of the people around them, it is all too easy for the world to break their loving spirit. Just to survive, it has to be hidden away.
A Simple Trick
Even if my message is one of love and strength for these children, it will be hard for them to hear. Once an awakened one shuts down his light, he must convince himself it does not even exist, or else risk opening himself again to all that pain he shut out in the first place. To ask that he just release it all and come back into the light is risking spiritual death.
It would be like taking off all your armor and riding to the front line of a raging battle.
Yet, if an awakened one who has shut down his energy choses to read this and has the courage to even open up a tiny bit, to peek out from his hiding place and see the world in the clarity he is capable of, he might see amazing things. And inevitably, he will also still see that painful side.
The trick in this case is to embrace, rather than deny, every aspect of life as a part of a learning process. When I am feeling depressed for one reason or another, my mother often advises me to be totally present with the feeling, to let myself experience it fully. Just as there are two sides to life, the more fully a person can experience his or her pain, the more vivid and powerful the joyful experiences will be.
The Task of the Caretakers
As I stated, the ones that have already hidden their light cannot simply be asked to open themselves again. Many will not even see that they have a light anymore.
It is up to the families and friends who know a child or young person to be an awakened one to nurture them. Don't expect any kind of epiphany on their part; I used to see it in my friends and try to “beat it into them,” trying to show them who they really are by throwing everything at them and expecting them to be able to just let go of all their years of utter pain and frustration. Obviously, this approach does more harm than good.
What can be done is that teachers, parents, older siblings, extended family, counselors, care-takers, and healers can take care to respect, recognize, and acknowledge the sensitivity in these children. A space must also be created in which a child or young person can realize his own light, and can discover how it works for him in his own way.
If a child you care for comes home from school one day and tells you about the fight he witnessed at school, encourage him to explain how he felt. The feelings of these children, above all else, must be validated. Not placed on a back shelf, but brought out into the light so they can be dealt with in a very open and forthright fashion.
We absolutely must have a place where we feel safe enough to express ourselves without fear of ridicule or losing the connections with others we need in order to keep our light burning.
“Light Maintenance”
However a child chooses to express her light and love, whether it be through artwork or science, dance or poetry, mathematics or ice skating, she must be allowed to pursue it. When we awakened ones are not allowed to pursue our passions, it closes our unique way of experiencing the raw wonder of life. Even if we have a safe forum for expression and discussion, if we cannot have the time to pursue our passions, all of our endeavors in life suffer.
I find personally that it is more important for me to have time to be alone to write and pursue my artwork than it is to challenge myself academically. This is not at all to say I am a bad student. It is simply that the kind of academic excellence that is encouraged in which young people are told that they must constantly challenge themselves to take harder classes and to get better and better grades is not right for the awakened ones.
This encouragement may work for children that need motivation to do more than watch TV, but many children today already possess more than enough self-motivation. In that, this encouragement is only confusing to us. We are told that we must do certain things in order to succeed, and that if we don't, we are a “failure”. And yet, we know internally that following our hearts and doing whatever it is that makes us feel connected and in tune with ourselves is the most important thing we can do; it's the only way for us to ever truly succeed.
Now, being forced to do things we do not enjoy is one thing; boundaries such as doing homework before play or feeding the dog are obviously not up for dispute.
But the way children are asked to do increasingly more every day means we have no time to return to our passion.
Educators, parents, the government and other social entities think they are doing us a favor in pushing us to excellence. And they are absolutely right in thinking that children today are brilliant. We are capable of amazing intelligence and achievement.
But their fear that we will not live up to our full capacity is manifesting itself with terrible, terrible consequences. With heaps upon heaps of standardized tests, homework, school activities, sports, and lessons we're told we need to be taking in order to succeed, our light flickers and often sputters out.
Unleashing the River
When something attempts to channel the creative energy we possess—while it may work initially—a situation often arises in which disaster is imminent.
There is a mid-sized channel that runs through a small town in Ireland; it originally had a natural, erratic path that wove through the countryside. But when a wealthy family settled there, they decided to divert its course so that it flowed neatly down their front lawn and through the town.
For the most part, it worked. To this day, the channel has a straight path, surrounded by lovely hedges and flowerbeds. But every so often, when the rains are especially long and hard, it begins to flood and tries to return to its natural path. On one occasion in the 1800s, it flooded so high that it actually managed to return completely to its original path.
Unfortunately, this meant that it now flowed directly through the post office in the center of town.
There is a picture framed on the wall of the post office of a postman who, unaware of the flooding, went into the building to do his daily mail sorting. While he was putting the mail into its respective slots, he was bowled over with water that came flying out of the slots that he was putting mail in.
If the situation does not change, and awakened children's creative forces continue to be diverted into neat paths, all of society will be like the postman that stood unknowingly in the path of a river that he wasn't even aware existed.
The hope we have, the hope for the children, is in making the world aware of this river. Whether it comes to the point of flooding, or if it is more kindly acknowledged and allowed to pursue its own course, there is no way to stop it.
And honestly, who would want to stop this amazing thing? The kind of wildlife, trees, flowers, insects, and all the life a wild river supports far surpasses the beauty of a concrete channel. Nature will always prove the greater force; why continue to fight it? |
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Ann Marie Judge
Crystal Child, Student of Life, Spirituality, & Writer
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Ann Marie graduated from high school in 2005 and is currently an eighteen year old freshman at Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin. She is majoring in English and religious studies.
Not yet old enough for acronyms at the end of her name, she considers herself a student of life, and has been deeply involved in the spiritual community since her first awakening at the age of twelve. Since then, she has had much education in the metaphysical and spiritual arts by a wide variety of teachers and healers. She was very quickly recognized as a Crystal and Indigo child, as well as a clairvoyant and intuitive.
Because she was able to began living for the spiritual at a young age, her dream is to reach out through her writing to other young people that are experiencing similar awakenings while still being within the educational system and a society that often does not recognize or nurture young, spiritually-gifted ones. Her vision is to form a community of spiritually-minded young people so that the younger generations will be prepared to be guides and teachers as the spiritual consciousness of the world continues to rise.
Though much of her life is still largely potential, she feels this time in her life is the first step in fulfilling her dream of becoming a published writer so as to serve the children and young people of the world that feel the spiritual stirring within. As well, she hopes to educate parents on how to nurture and understand what is going on in their children's minds from a young person's perspective.
Visit her website at
www.RandomActsof
Literacy.com
to read her works, view
her art, and gain insight into the spiritual experiences of an Awakened young person."
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