By Dr. Marta Adelsman
Life Coach in Communication and Consciousness
(November 20, 2019)
Many years ago, I held my 3-week old son, Ethan, on my lap, with my hands under his head. As I gazed into his eyes, the depth of silence and radiance I saw there took my breath away.
As Ethan gazed back at me, I experienced being seen by Truth itself — by an imperturbable, never-changing Love. It felt like divine Presence, which grasped my heart, my brain, and my whole body.
In the light of this Presence that washed over me, I became very still. The stillness silenced my mind and ushered me into its peace. It enveloped me completely, all soft and brilliant and fierce.
I had glimpsed the Perfection of Being from which Ethan had arrived, and in that moment, I knew my Self.
Prior to this, through my upbringing in Christianity, I had embraced the notion of original sin. I grew up with the teaching that we needed to be rescued from eternal damnation so we could spend eternity in heaven.
Instead of original sin or damnation, in Ethan’s eyes I saw original Oneness. Seeing the Infinite gazing back at me marked the beginning of a several-years-long journey in which my religiosity disintegrated. Like the phoenix rising from the ashes, the stillness of Being burned up my old beliefs and transformed me. My religious belief system morphed into a unifying Stillness that underlies all belief.
Nevertheless, I never turned my back on my early Christian education and experience; I never threw out the baby, just got rid of a lot of bathwater!
I now see how we come to this earth-plane in the Oneness of God/Spirit. In early childhood, we undergo a necessary sense of separation in order to take on the ego that enables us to live here in our humanness. (I say “sense” of separation because we never really lose Oneness. We just come to believe we do.)
As a result of the perceived separation from our Divine connection, we can feel traumatized. Therefore, as the Enneagram (a personality description tool) teaches, we try to duplicate that original sense of Oneness by creating substitutes. These take the form of seeking relationships, knowledge, achievement, security, fun, perfection, etc. As we allow the ego to replace Oneness with its substitutions, without knowing it we strengthen the ego.
Gazing into Ethan’s eyes that day marked a milestone in soul-opening that made it possible for me to zoom out beyond my cropped, contracted spiritual views to see the bigger picture. It enabled me to bare my heart to the fullness of that Love which breathes and moves me.
In the light of Love, ego weakens each time we shine the light of our Awareness onto it.
As I learned to shine that light, I connected to ultimate Stillness. As a result, my parenting shifted. With practice, it became easier to access the Presence that made it possible to raise my three sons in a way that served them and sometimes seemed magical. (Here’s an example)
If/when children and grandchildren grace our lives, we can gaze into their eyes, knowing the Perfection from which they come.
Dr. Marta Adelsman is a Life Coach in Communication and Spiritual Consciousness. She works with people who want to know themselves and their purpose on the planet. If you are such a person, Dr. Marta will walk alongside you to support you to make spiritual principles practical and alive in your communication with others, with yourself, and in your life situations.
The tools Dr. Marta teaches help you to translate head knowledge of spirituality into compassionate, non-judgmental, life-affirming habits.
Visit her website, DrMartasMusings.com for more information.
