A Better Question than Love

Reflections For Those In Abusive Relationships

Image Courtesy The News Chronicle

Quite recently I watched what may well be deemed a controversial video within the Awakening and New Age communities. My beautiful soul sister Hope Jemimah shared it on her Facebook page and it caused some great controversy. The video of contention was Matt Kahn's Soul Contracts, Twin Flames and Soul Mates Redifined. Allow me to preface this blog post by saying up front that I have no desire to attempt to define or redefine these terms - this is not what this blog is about.

Now, I truly did not watch the entire video - I find myself doing that a lot of late: buying a book and not finishing it, starting an interesting article and then just skimming it...it's almost as though I go in - take just what I need and then leave. It's just the way Spirit is working with me these days. 

Anyway back to the Matt Kahn video - the one thing that he said that jumped out and grabbed my attention and had it fully for the last few days since watching his video is (and I'm paraphrasing a bit):

"If you stay with someone long enough you will fall in love with them even if you hate them - because your core nature is love."

Now don't we see evidence of this all the time - whether it be the Stockholm syndrome that kidnap victims face or the woman who cries mournfully at the graveside of her abusive husband? Surely the psychologists and psycho-analysts would probably offer a more technical and logical explanation, but I personally believe that our true nature is love and that the Divine is choosing to have a multitude of physical experiences through and in us. 

However the moment that you resonate with this truth that we are all love at our core, the reality of life challenges you to see people - not based on this absolute truth but on their relative truth. 

So the absolute truth is that co-worker who gives you a hard time is an expression of God and that you should love her....but the relative truth- the truth you experience -  is that she is a backstabbing fiend who attempts to undermine you at every opportunity she gets. 

Imagine this scenario now: You are working on an ultra-important project but your co-worker envies the fact that you were chosen for this project. She has even presented herself as a better candidate for the project to your boss! 

You just sent your final report to the printer but when you go to collect it - it's not there. When you look down the corridor you see your good 'friend' or rather fiend walking away with a stack of papers in her hand. You approach her but she denies having your report but your 'spidey' sense aka intuition is shouting to you that your report is in her hands. 

You can't just say "Peace my sister" and walk away. Consider this - God is using this opportunity to challenge you to honour your intuition and speak up for yourself. You have been a doormat for far too long and have stamped down your intuition for far much longer. Yes you can re-print your report but do you really want it in her hands when you know she wants your project?

Image courtesy:
http://kamisulat.blogspot.com
Title: Workplace Backstabbing

Now I'm not advocating that you accuse her forthwith but maybe you can say 

"Oh really, can we just go through the papers you have in your hand because I know that I just sent my report to print and I believe it got mixed up with your print job." 

As your report miraculously jumps out of the stack in her hands, she apologizes and calls it a genuine mistake...let's not judge - maybe the mistake was indeed sincere....in any case, this is the place where you can show love! 
What is vitally important to the universe though, is that you stood up and honoured your intuition!

Now what does this have to do with the Matt Kahn video or abusive relationships. Well believe it or not - you playing the doormat to your co-worker's overt and covert tactics is an abusive relationship and according to Matt, that co-worker is a twin flame sent to meet you on your path and help you to accelerate your soul's evolution!

Now you see why the video is so contentious - because so many of us are just so attached to the idea of a 'one and only love for me'  twin flame romance song! I'm deliberately not getting into that conversation.

However, Matt did make me think about a relationship I walked away from and one of the hardest things for me has been trying to resolve whether I loved enough...or whether there was enough love and then all of a sudden I realised that the question of love is totally irrelevant. 

When at the core of our beings, we are all love for we all possess the Divine spark buried deep within us, we realise that we are all capable of loving. The problem is that we are inconsistent or incomplete in the loving as we suffer from unconsciousness - lacking the full awareness of who we really are!

The grieving wife at the husband's graveside telling everybody how she much she loved the dearly departed is not crying - in that moment - for all the times he hit and abused her but rather for all the good that she beheld in him. She is also grieving for what could have been and all the 'if only's' her marriage faced. If only he did not drink so much...If only they had more money.....

Did he abuse her and make her life miserable? Yes
Did she love him? - Most certainly - she stayed and hoped and prayed for the best.
Did he love her? I would like to suggest that yes he did! In his sober moments when he held her and sobbed and promised to never abuse her again - his agony was birthed from a place of momentary remorse and dare I even say - love as well!

Now we can argue that this is not a good representation of love and that abusive love is not true love and I would agree with you! 

However I will add that the higher perspective, that you are in position to have, is because you know better! The woman who stays - does not know better. This love - that buys her flowers one week and bandages the next - is the only love she knows, which is why you cannot use love to get her to leave!

Should she have stayed with him to live a life of pain and misery? You may say that we cannot go back in the past especially as our imaginary guy is already dead! 
However allow me to superimpose another image into our story - that of their daughter - a child who grew up watching this abuse and has now hand picked a guy who is 'just like daddy'. 
This daughter, based on her home environment, associates love with abuse and has consequently chosen a lover who abuses her.

Let's say you are a friend of this daughter and you try to explain to her that she is repeating a cycle of abuse and that she should walk away from her guy. She looks at you and says "But I love him....and he loves me."

Can you truly deny their love? Can you call her stupid and thereby subject her to verbal and emotional abuse? Especially when you know how her father treated her mother and that she loved both her father and mother?

Do you now see why Matt Kahn's statement was such an epiphany?

If we could all understand that we love - whether in part or in full - because that is what we truly are, then a better question to ask  is not - Is there love? But

Can there be growth?

Real Questions on Growth:

• Can you truly grow into the full capacity of your God given potential with someone who disrespects you and does not value you? 
• Do you even have any idea of how much potential you have? 
• Can your abusive partner grow into all that God has designed for him or her if you stay and facilitate their need to hurt other people by presenting yourself as a willing and submissive target? 
• Can you truthfully grow together and have a loving and healthy relationship where boundaries are set and respected? 
• Based on your real experience (as opposed to your fantasized desires) - are you being honest with yourself?
• Can your partner support and encourage you to pursue your passions - even if those passions are less about making money and more about fulfilling your soul's purpose?
• Does your partner nurture and support your vision for yourself or your business?
• Is your partner comfortable with you flourishing even as they don't?

Special Note for Victims of Physical Abuse:
If you experience physical abuse, you cannot effect change and help your partner grow if you stay! Your life is in danger and your life is precious. Please contact the relevant authorities.
It is okay to love your abusive spouse or partner - it is not okay to live with them. 
You guys need separation and external help via counselling etc. if you have to make it work.


To the victims of verbal and emotional abuse - your situation is actually pretty dire because of how sinister and undercover emotional abuse can be. If you truly believe that the two of you can grow together and you are both willing to conscientiously seek therapy and get the help needed...then you guys have a chance of making it.

Image courtesy Examiner

You cannot make it if:

• Only one of you sees a problem
• Only one of you is committed to seeking help
• Only one of you is committed to changing
• Your partner is treating your therapy as a charade
• Your partner is narcissistic and does not see his/her narcissism

Let's face it - the only way you could be content in an abusive relationship is if you lower your expectations and kill all the dreams you had for yourself - especially the dream of how you wanted to be loved and treated.

And everyone has dreams on love. You just may have forgotten yours if you think you don't have them. Revisit your inner child...

You may think that you are simply not growing and that you are comfortable with being stagnated and you may even tell yourself that it's a sacrifice you are making...maybe for your children perhaps. 

Here's the problem with that:

Nothing remains the same - not even stagnation.  Eventually, slowly but surely and possibly imperceptibly at first, stagnation gives way to death.

First you kill your long-term dreams, then you kill your day to day expectations, eventually you kill your opinions and by the time you have killed your hope, you have long lost the battle for you. 

If you have to take away only two things from this blog post, take this:

A constantly diminished you cannot truly serve another person - not even your abuser.

The more you grow, the more your understanding of love grows and this places you in a position to love better and be a better YOU!

So you may love and you are free to love, but can you grow? - that is the better question!


In love, light and blessings

EE

Leaving you with this heart stirring song from Chrisette Michele which may help some of you...:)

"Yes I love you but I really got to lose you

Freedom is where I want to be

Yes I'll probably always love you

But I'm moving

I got to do this for me!" 

 ~ Blame It On Me by Chrisette Michele

EE ARTICLES: The Role of Technology in Your Child's Development

Our last blog post and first offering for the EE Article Series explored what many believe is an impending consciousness revolution and I believe that it will actually be activated or driven by technology. The responses to "Conscious Revolution - The Youth Response to Technology" were enormous and sparked many discussions. One off-spin discussion is 'What role (if any) should technology play in our children's lives?' 

To venture to speak of the merits of technology is to allow oneself to sit on a pendulum that can swing between two very extreme trends of thought. And these thoughts are all so much more passionately expressed and felt when one thinks of what is best for one's child.

Parents Who Hate Technology

On one extreme end of the spectrum, are those for whom technology is the tool of the devil or the Illuminati. The thought of introducing technology to their precious child is beyond unthinkable. For these souls, the ideal spiritual approach to life is one where we abandon our concrete jungles and live in the real jungle. Swimming with the dolphins, eating wild berries and sleeping under the stars are for them the hallmarks of true spiritual living. 

These are the ones who who, quite notably, call for us to unplug from the matrix and get out into nature.

To the extremists - electronics and media houses are the tools of the alien reptilian race, which are used to program and monitor us. These folks won’t even own a tablet, far less introduce them to the pure, innocent minds of their star-seed children. 

(For what it is worth, there is something in the very core of my being which finds this lifestyle appealing although quite honestly, I have never truly experienced living in the wild).

Questions for this Parent: This parent needs to consider the following questions - Am I inadvertently teaching my children to be fearful of the unknown? Am I sufficiently open minded and balanced in my thinking? Can I acknowledge that even science can be spiritual? Am I ensuring that my child is well equipped for living in this technological era?

Image courtesy: http://estruda.deviantart.com/art/Living-with-nature-193978709

Image Courtesy Amazon.com - The Watch Over Me Dream Station

Parents Who Love Technology 

On the other extreme end are those who view technology as the pinnacle and ultimate achievement of mankind. Research and studies that electronics invariably emit frequencies which may be harmful and serve in some way to affect the natural frequencies of the brain, mean nothing to them. 

How could it? They live in a fully automated smart house, sleep with their phones and tablets charging within easy reach from their pillows (not a good idea), and cannot imagine making it through the day without checking in to their Outlook calendar, Facebook news feed, Google circles. Twitter updates and other daily notifications. 

Will they introduce technology to their child? Why the baby room is already outfitted with the latest smart gadgets! Who needs mobiles, which are so last decade by the way, when there are sophisticated smart-sensor technology baby monitors? With built in sensors to detect baby’s movements and sleep patterns, one monitor on the market can adjust its display of lights and sounds to create different moods and environment to either soothe baby to sleep or greet them on waking in the morning. 

  

These parents will, quite naturally, gift their one year old baby with a tablet loaded with age appropriate apps and content and they will tell you that it’s to ‘help stimulate baby’s brain’’.

Questions for this Parent:

Am I using technology as a pacifier to avoid the act of parenting my child? Does my child sense that I genuinely want and enjoy spending time with them? Do I responsibly monitor my child's usage of technological devices? Am I sufficiently aware of the real dangers that exist not only with the internet but with the use of electronic devices?

Where should we stand?

Well let's eliminate the passions and just try to objectively consider the well researched and documented pros and cons:

The Pros:

Despite all the naysayers, there is growing support for the actual benefits of technology in childhood development.

●      Increased visual-spatial ability - A person’s visual-spatial ability which speaks to their capacity to understand and remember the spatial relations among objects is said to be quite indicative of a person’s adeptness to success in mathematics and science. Several notable bodies including the John Hopkins University recognise this and even recommends the playing of video and computer games to improve this skill within oneself.

●      Better Hand-Eye Coordination - The University of Toronto has researched increased sensorimotor skills among video gamers. Sensorimotor control speaks to coordinated vision and hand movement.

●      Improved Cognitive Development - There are certain regions of the brain that are engaged in the use of computerized devices which can be said to lead to improved cognitive development.

●      Improved Verbal Skills - It is not uncommon for children using these devices to quickly learn the nursery rhymes which can played on repeat to enhance rapid learning. As new words are learnt in the nursery rhymes, they can then start linking these words together in daily conversation.

The Cons:

To develop a more balanced perspective let us consider the research done in this authoritative report from Public Health England which highlights the major detriments to extensive ‘screen time’, a term which encapsulates television viewing time, time spent surfing the internet or playing video games etc.

The main cons are:

●      attention deficit problems - switching from the fast stimulation of technology to the slower pace of natural life means that children get bored more easily with the regular pace of life

●      Hyperactivity - strongly linked with the problem of attention deficiency. If the child’s natural environment is too slow and boring, children may become hyperactive to assist with giving themselves the heightened stimulation they have come to accept as normal from their computerized environments.

●      Socialization problems - most of the technology gadgets and activities can be engaged alone which means that children who spend excessive time playing alone on these gadgets won’t be able to develop crucial social skills which comes from interactions with other people and children

●      Lower levels of wellbeing - emotional distress, anxiety and depression are never too far off for kids who possess poor social skills from spending too much time alone.

●      Several physical health problems - such as eye strain and underdeveloped muscles from long periods of inactivity.

(NOTE: This article does not quite scratch the surface of other ills such as online predators, hackers who hack into your home camera system etc. but suffice it to be said that there are real dangers inherent with technology use which one must become aware of. This article is simply focused on how technology may affect your child's development.)

Conclusion ~ Technology and Your Child: To Be or Not to Be?

In the same way the pendulum eventually comes to rest in a neutral position after a period of time, so too our passionate thoughts and beliefs eventually find a more neutral and balanced view. And so my position is:

“I’m not afraid to expose my child to technology. Technology is a tool which I will manage the usage of, for both myself and my child”.

After starting with a complex mathematical function for our pendulum swing, we end up with a very simple equation:

Love = Time

The most crucial thing you can do to aid your child's development is spend time with them. This is how children interpret love.

So gadget loving mommy or tree hugging daddy (and yes I purposefully switched these from the expected stereotypes) - whatever you do, make sure to spend adequate time with your child. Your love, which comes across in the time you dedicate to them, is the best development tool ever.

Love, Light and Blessings

Elizabeth Energy