Years ago, I was having a health issue and I decided to stop eating sugar, having read a lot about how sugar is very unhealthful coupled with my own intuition that it was harming me. It seemed to be helping me feel better. One evening sitting in the garden with neighbors, family, and friends, someone brought some kind of sweet treat. I declined passing it on. I felt a kind of disciplined resolve, a strength to make this commitment to cut sugar out of my diet. But it was a budding commitment; a tender small shoot coming up from the ground of my being. It was a commitment that if cared for, watered, tended, could grow into a strong branch of my interior tree.
As the sweet treat was passed around without much fanfare, I made my declaration out loud, “I’m cutting sugar out of my diet.” One woman commented. I don’t even remember who she was or how she came to be with us; I think she was a friend of the neighbor. In my story, she was like the uninvited evil faery who came to cast a harmful spell. I do remember the feeling that came toward me from her comment; like a rambunctious dog playfully running into the newly planted flower bed to chase flies, tearing up the tender new buds in the act. “How long can you keep that up,” she said with a grin and a wink. And in that moment, I felt an utter deflation of my resolve.
I’ve eaten sugar ever since and never again felt that inner resolve about it. I’m not blaming that woman. I just remember how those flowers never came back to the flower bed. And correspondingly, that health issue has never resolved itself.
I have a friend whose nickname for her daughter is Bug. I don’t know how she got that moniker. I imagine it came when she was a small child. However, this daughter, now in her forties is a strong, fit, and very capable woman. She is so much more than an insignificant bug. And yet her family, her mother, and she herself, seem to agree to this identification.
When I turned 40, I changed my name; I’ve written about that in my memoir. I’d been given the name Ethel, when in fact my true name was Hannah. I never felt myself to be Ethel. I felt the energetic quality of the sound of those letter tangling up my expression of myself — closed tight sounds, the th getting caught between my tongue and my teeth; the L staying stuck in the back of my mouth. Indeed, my entire life changed, began to unlock when I changed my name to the more open sounding Hannah.
When my niece was born, she was also named Hannah. She was the second born, a daughter after her brother. My sister nicknamed her the girl. That supposedly cute ID came with an entire history of boys holding a higher religious position within the orthodoxy to which my sister adheres. I have no doubt calling her daughter by that diminishment was totally unconscious, but that is my point. We all unconsciously agree to being and staying small and assisting one another to do the same, even with our own children. When Hannah got older, they began calling her Chanch, an even tighter sound than the Ethel I was called. Because that first ch is pronounced from the back of the throat with the Hebrew language sound (as if bringing up phlegm). The final ch, with the quality of sound as in cha cha, or crunch, feels to me like a prison camp. So, although my niece was outside most days playing basketball, studying piano, being a good student, being supported in many other loving ways by her family, the music of her name was a subtle defamation, a constant energetic reminder of limitation.
How do we break this agreement to smallness? First, we have to recognize it. And then just declare, I know who I Am in Truth, I know what I Am in Truth. Because who and what we truly are is no small bug, incapable of keeping our commitments to Self, wandering through a prison camp trying to make the best of it. We are Stellar beings with great power that comes from ALL that IS. And it is time we step up and KNOW that. Because our smallness circles round and round in an ever-tightening diminishment, like the Uroboros, a snake eating its own tail. Sooner or later that snake arrives at the head and gobbles itself up in its craving for something truly nourishing.
The world at large is now poised to eat its own head in its lust for power and war, a mistaken urge for satisfaction — a Demi-urge. A false power born of fear. The ultimate fear is that of annihilation, and fear of annihilation can only create just that. When one, two, or more individuals come to recognize this truth, they can puncture the entire illusion of smallness and humans can awaken to the glory of their true inheritance. I AM. . .
Add to that if you so desire: Worthy, Loved, Supported, Knowing, Capable, a spark of the Divine, a wave of water from the same water that is the great ocean of Being. I Am That.
*Painting of David and Goliath by Dan Craig
by Heart Light Digital