I am sitting at a cafe having lunch, trying to recover from the most chaotic morning ever with my 1-year old son, who would not comply with anything on my agenda today. Whatever I tried to do, he was miserable with and showed this by screaming and protesting so loudly that it broke both my ears and my heart, over and over. I kept breaking to the point that neither tears nor emotions could be held back and eventually I found myself screaming in chorus with my son. As our screams blended more and more, the barriers between them suddenly faded away and I could no longer distinguish between who was the screamer and who was the “screamee”. You could say our screams were one. Our pain was one. Out of this feeling of mutual pain, as I continued to “torture” my son with things that had to be done, a deep feeling of worthlessness arose. And with that the thought “I’m a horrible person for torturing this innocent human being”. I dove into this feeling and I was transported then and there to a different time, a different me, and a very painful acknowledgment of having tortured other people...

It’s amazing what a baby can bring out of you, isn’t it?

So back to the cafe. As I’m sitting here trying to breathe through this experience, a company car passes outside my window. It’s an airport taxi with the words “Door to Gate”. Under the words, a rainbow, a personal symbol of my spiritual journey. The message is clear to me: another door to the next gate or gateway has been opened.

A few moments later, I look up and there’s a rainbow flag waving at me from a balcony across the street. To top it off, another vehicle drives by. This time with the word “LOTUS” in big letters.

For all of you, also going through rough shit at the moment, I’d like to share this metaphor of the lotus that I resonated with.

“Just as this sacred flower goes through so much before it blossoms, so does the human spirit before it can let go of the things that stand in the way of reaching enlightenment. Without going through the sometimes very difficult lessons of being human (the mud), a person would never be able to reach higher states of consciousness (the lotus).”

With all my heart,

Anastasia