I believe we choose the family we are born into. We choose our families for both their spiritual knowledge and their spiritual weaknesses. While we grow up, family weaknesses often rub off on us and become our own weaknesses. Or maybe the truth is that we already have these weaknesses and need to have them re-ignited in us by the family we choose. No matter the case, confronting a family weakness gives us a chance to throw off the weakness from the inside out. We have to engage with a weakness and own it, before we can let it go. This is one way to do that.
Our family’s divine knowledge is often submerged by family illusions, weaknesses, and personality murk. Usually we have to work hard to retrieve this wisdom. Because of our efforts, the harvest will be something that really belongs to us. And regardless of the family murk, it will be a valuable harvest. Why? Because no matter what family we choose, it will be a family whose core identity is divine, holding eternal wisdom that is divine as well. Why? Because when the illusions are gone, everything is divine.
Those who choose to come into an adoptive family or find themselves raised by more than one family of origin will experience multiple strands of family strengths and weaknesses. One gift of this is that they will never completely believe that only one family lineage holds a monopoly on truth. They will quite literally embody a deeper truth that there are many ways to find our common divinity. They will experience first hand that there are many ways to lose track of divinity too. Consequently, they will often have more family garbage to toss. This can be an arduous process.
The Angels tell me that at the moment of birth, each of us holds an awareness of why we chose the circumstances of birth that we did. While I have been a rather disorganized mother in terms of taking photographs of my children’s milestones, I do have one photo of my eldest son, Ben, when he is a few minutes old. In this photo, he looks into my eyes with such a penetrating, clear look. It is easy to see that he has brought some of his before birth consciousness into this moment. My understanding is that this awareness necessarily fades within a few hours. Each of us must regain this sense of clarity about our choices and mission in life through our own effort and search process.
During this brief period after birth, we also have a clear view of the spiritual strengths and weaknesses of our chosen family, the tool bag for spiritual learning that our family will be offering us as we grow up. We remember, if only for a few hours, the full inventory of the useful as well as useless tools for living of our family of origin. We grasp the reasons we chose our family. This is yet another piece of awareness that fades away only to be regained through life experiences and our analysis of these experiences.
In the guidebook, I write about the process of sifting a family’s divine wisdom from its spiritual illusions and weaknesses in the descriptions of Black Currant and Bloodroot Flower Essences. This is because Black Currant Flower Essence supports cleaning up the counter productive habits and illusions of our families of origin and Bloodroot helps us to see the divine wisdom our families hold in the family tool bags. What an awesome truth that even the most garbage encrusted family holds divine wisdom at its core. And more wonderful still, this wisdom is the only thing that is real about a family.
I have always been drawn to make Flower Essences that I personally need. Black Currant and Bloodroot are no exceptions. With the addition of Borage Flower Essence to help me have the courage to do the work, Black Currant, Bloodroot, and the aforementioned Borage have been what all of us at the farm call the Family River Trio. This threesome has helped me recognize and remove family’s spiritual garbage floating in the river of my family’s bloodline. The trio has helped me uncover my family’s divine wisdom hidden beneath the garbage. It has helped me have the courage, strength, and good cheer to keep going when the garbage got me down.
Sometimes it feels like tossing family garbage overboard has been a primary focus of my adult life. I also have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what divine wisdom could possibly have compelled me to I choose the family of origin that I did. Let’s just say that there is so much detritus in my family river that it resembles Love Canal before the EPA arrived. I joke that I hope my soul gets the memo from my personality and agrees to choose another group of people for my family in my next life. But truth be told, I have come to a moment in my clean up process where I am at peace with my choice. This family, with its weaknesses and its divine wisdom, was one of many ingredients that got me to where I am in my life. And I am grateful to be where I am.
My family of origin obscured its divine wisdom in lots of ways. There were soul numbing addictive behaviors, values that acclaimed worldly accomplishment over self knowledge, ideas of intellectual excellence disconnected from emotions or the physical body, damaging notions that certain people’s ideas of perfection were superior to love, and a general approach to life at odds with divine purpose or any acknowledgment of divinity.
As is true with any family river garbage, none of these diversions work because none of them are based on anything real. Anyone who pokes through the guck and clears the water in their part of their family river is going to find treasure. I certainly did.
The strength of my family of origin river is a deeply obscured but wonderful Love for God. Maybe this is the wisdom of every family river. Let me know what you have found. I would be very interested.
When I finally connected with my family’s divine wisdom, it was a knock your socks off moment for me. It made me know my clean up operation was worth the effort. It also made me understand with more compassion why people might be afraid to encounter the divine wisdom of the family lineage. The wisdom requires a lot of letting go. I imagine this is true of any encounter with a family’s divine wisdom. Beliefs about what matters in life, choices of career paths, values systems, and the whole foundation of a life may suddenly be experienced as similar to the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Maybe it is a good thing that a family river clean up takes time, even with the best Flower Essence support. Throwing out garbage piece by piece while savoring each moment of expanding spiritual freedom helps get you ready for the experience that washes over you when you get to your family river’s divine self knowledge. BLISS! WOW! We are LOVE! We are LOVED! There is nothing but GOD! Why would I ever want to do anything else but LOVE THE GOD IN EVERYTHING???
It’s not an awareness I could hold onto completely, but it continues to inform my life. It leaves me with the work of trying to live a life in integrity with what I experienced, because what I experienced feels much more real than anything else. Love IS the only thing that matters! Only God is real! Everything else will pass away, so any effort to add to my pile of illusions with more illusions is about as sensible as putting icicles in a pre heated oven.
And how to avoid falling back into the obscuring habits of my family river, but hold true to this truth once I experienced it? I am working on that. I try to keep my tool bag as cleaned out as possible. I try to resist the siren song of old family beliefs that I really need this gizmo or that accolade or to be right, whatever right is. I try to remember to give everything to God instead of thinking I am supposed to do this alone. That’s one of the biggest, most recalcitrant pieces of my family garbage, this idea that I am adding to some mighty pile of worthwhile stuff all by MYself with only the tools of MY amazing intellect, MY willpower, and MY skills of discernment. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
It’s not me. The mighty pile is not real. There is only LOVE.
This cleaning the river is an ongoing process! But, oh, to taste that pure wisdom again! Hand me that pitchfork! God and I have work to do!