Save the Children

SAVE THE CHILDREN

A GodSpirit Story

Mother and I were dusting the dining room in my childhood home. As we worked, we were having a discussion about who we could love. I was eight years old, and I was trying to get my questions answered so I would know what the right way to think was and what the wrong way was. I asked mother point blank, “Can I love myself?” Without hesitation she replied, “No, we don't love ourselves. That would be conceited. We just love other people.” I will never forget the innocence of my question or the well-meaning of her answer. Years later, as I was recovering from clinical depression after the death of my eighteen-year-old son in a car accident, my counselor said, “Your mother set you up.”

When you are willing to love yourself, you can overcome just about anything in life. When you are unwilling to love yourself, or have been taught not to, life can overcome you very easily. Love is a shield, a mighty fortress, which we have to carry inside ourselves FOR OURSELVES foremost. Without Self-Love, life's problems, illness, and other people may overcome you. Self-Love makes the difference between standing fast against the winds or falling with the ravages of life.

Love for your Self is a choice. Most of us are not consciously taught as children to love ourselves as well as others. Loving your Self is the wisest choice you can make in life. It helps many other good things fall into place easily and naturally. Not loving your Self causes just the opposite, and then we wonder why life is so hard, and why there are so many problems to overcome.

Children are gullible, and if they love you and trust you as a parent or friend, they will do what you tell them without questioning the consequences of your counsel. They may believe that you have all the answers they seek. After all, as a parent you are their guide and teacher. But, maybe you really don't know the answer to their question. The child may ask you a question you have never really thought through or experienced for yourself, and the answer you give that child may affect their adult life, just as my mother's answer affected mine years later. I grew up withholding love from myself just as mother had taught me but tried hard to be loving to other people.

After I had been married many years, had a nice family, and had just started to drive home from work one day, a sudden precognition of an accident came into my mind. I immediately rejected the thought. The next day, the same thing occurred at the same time. I wondered if my inner voice was trying to warn me that I was going to be in an accident. I didn't like thinking about accidents so I consciously tried to put the thought out of my mind. Later that week, however, it manifested. My son Mike was killed in a car accident. He had been eighteen for six days and had looked forward to that birthday so much, as if great things would happen because he had finally turned eighteen.

Without love for myself to sustain me after his death, I became like the sand washing over the rock. I went to pieces believing that his death was my fault, that I had been a bad mother, and that there was something I could have done to prevent him from using the drugs that caused that fatal moment in the early morning hours. The power pole that he crashed into broke in half, falling across the truck. Later, after my husband and I talked to his doctor about his wounds, I sincerely hoped he had died instantly. When I saw what was left of the truck a few days after the accident, the only thing on the front seat was his hair brush. I picked it up and kept it for a long time. I felt devastated.

When a child is gone, there is so little of value that you can keep or hold onto. I sewed a pillow out of flannel material that I had left over from a shirt I had made for Mike. I sewed a pocket on the pillow and wrote, “May the Lord be with thee and me while we are absent one from the other,” on a little card and put it into the pocket. I slept with the pillow, cried with the pillow, cherished the pillow, and finally got rid of the pillow and the hair brush. Nothing could replace my son.

Where had we gone wrong? Was his death our fault? My fault? God's fault? Mike's fault? I had never taught my children to love themselves because I had been taught not to do that, and I had not yet discovered the vital importance of this spiritual requirement. Actually, I blamed the power pole that fell across the truck for Mike's death. Why did the power company put those blasted dangerous things so close to the roads? I wanted to form a Mothers-Against-Power-Poles coalition! The power company in our city (Auburn, Washington) promptly sent us a bill for about $175.00 for the destruction of their power pole. I wanted to send them a bill for a million zillion dollars for the destruction of my son. They could replace their pole, but my son was irreplaceable, and their bill was so untimely.

Life went on. I found no solace in anything I did. My family grieved deeply, and we all went on with life. Within the next two years, our business failed, and we moved from Washington State to the Bay Area where we both got full-time jobs. One day at work I began to hallucinate. I did not know what was happening to me. Then my doctor told me I had a tumor in my right ovary and that it might be cancer. He said I should have surgery immediately. But, instead of following his advice, we decided to move to Oregon because living in the Bay Area was so expensive. About a year later, because of my on-going pain, the doctor removed a large tumor that was thankfully benign.

My body recovered, but my mind didn't. I became more and more ill as time went on. I ran my piano studio at home with my B.A. Degree in piano performance, and my husband was offered a good job. We both drank a lot of port wine every day, and I took Xanax to relieve my mental torment. It got to the point I had no relief unless I had one or both of these “fixes.” Both of our fathers had been heavy drinkers. Our son had died from using drugs even though we were doing our best to be good parents in a sick world coping with everyday life. Many people could tell stories like this and much worse.

Just a few days before the end of November, I was standing in a grocery store line. My eyes fell on a Newsweek magazine cover (November 7, 1988) that said “Body & Soul, Scientists Discover The Links Between The Brain and Your Health.” I bought the magazine. In a small article within their main article, it mentioned a woman named Louise Hay, to whom I will be forever grateful. She had written a book called You Can Heal Your Life. The next day I went to the library and checked it out.

I had previously studied spiritual healing extensively in Los Angeles, but, while the course did teach that our thinking causes, it never came right out and said, “LOVE YOURSELF.” Louise Hay said it loud and clear. I began to say, “I LOVE MYSELF, I LOVE MYSELF,” over and over all day long. I had never consciously put love into my mental space before. I really wanted to get well. I discovered that there is a big difference between thinking LOVE and thinking LOVE FOR YOURSELF. Thinking LOVE stopped the course of my illness, but thinking love for myself as SELF-LOVE turned my illness around, and I began to get well. Eight months after I began saying I LOVE MYSELF all day every day, I was well. And by “well” I don't mean I was just back to where I was before I became ill. I knew I was in a new, higher place, and it felt good. I had found the rock to stand on when the gale blows its hardest. I had overcome my childhood misteaching by a well-meaning, loving mother, whom no one had ever taught to love herself. As she now dies from Alzheimer's, I have told her to love herself, and I hope she has heard me. The Self within us is an entity that must be loved for us to survive.

Nothing in this world stays the same. Families change, husbands and wives change, jobs change, homes change, and friends change. Love, however, does not change—not if it's spiritual love for the Self. Love for your Self will sustain you against the ravages of time, against the winds and the waves, against the perils of the street, against the hatred and abuse of those who do not love themselves and try to abuse you.

It is not too late to SAVE THE CHILDREN. Teach your children to love themselves. It is a vitally important step in their education. If you want to give them self-preservation, teach them Self-Love. It is not conceited as my mother taught me. It is the greatest gift and the wisest thing you could ever teach your child, and the most loving thing you could do for them. This is not superficial love. It is deep spiritual love for the Self as a perfect God conception, which you are. It is loving your Self in the most truthful, pure, deepest manner possible. It is not here-today/gone-tomorrow love. It is constant, ever-present, cemented-into-your-mental-space love. It is the greatest gift you can give to yourself, to your children, to your family, and to your friends.

Love for the Self is the “Pearl of Great Price,” the treasure often sought after but seldom found. It is the answer for humanity, sick as we are, with our glasses of wine, our drugs, our “fixes,” whatever your fix may be. Whether YOU stay where you are or whether you begin to change is YOUR choice. Whether others in your family stay where they are or whether they begin to change with you is their choice. If you choose to teach your children to love themselves, you can make the most remarkable, positive difference in their lives as they grow to be responsible adults. Remember, there will be many years in their lives when they will live without your guidance. Wouldn't you like to be remembered by your children as the one who taught them to love themselves? It will bring blessings into their lives and save them from many perils.

One word of caution! Loving your Self will lift you above and out of the scenario you are now in. If you are happy with the partner you are now with, happy with your present financial situation, and happy with your life overall, then do not increase your love for yourself, because if you do, I guarantee your life will change. Loving your Self raises the level of your spiritual vibrations. If you choose to love yourself, you can lift yourself to a higher level of life where there is more money available to you, more possibilities for meeting high-minded people, and more opportunities for you to develop your Self to your highest potential and to fulfill your heart's desires—even your greatest aspirations in life. Your present partner in life and your children may not elevate themselves as fast as you do, if they even choose to do it at all, and in time you will find you are at different spiritual levels of understanding, even at odds, with people you love deeply, which is exactly what happened to me.

As I became well, I lost almost everyone I loved—my husband, two of my other three children, my grandchildren, and my mother who no longer knew me because of dementia and Alzheimer's. I could no longer fit into their scenario. A friend said to me, “You got well and left your family behind.” In spite of my undying love for them all, I have asked my Self if I would be willing to hate myself again even a little bit so I could have them back. The answer is NO! I am now at a spiritual level where I can help other people heal because I have overcome so much, even death that I was fast approaching during my illness. I could never wish to go back to that low state of mind. Through Shamanic Illumination, which releases negative emotions from the luminous body, I have been able to dispel the grief, loss, pain and despair I felt over losing my husband and all of my precious children, with the exception of my youngest son, whom I taught to love himself as a child. We have a comfortable relationship. My undying hope is that the rest of my family will begin to love themselves, and we will meet again some day in love.

Our spiritual growth rate is individual based on our own choice to love ourselves intensely all the time, or haphazardly when we happen to think about it, or not at all. If you are willing to love your Self, there is also the question of how high you are willing to let your Self go with this love. Do you stop with human love, divine love, magnificent all-encompassing love, or ultimate compassion? How high, how deep, and how far will you let your Love for your Self rise? Everything is levels. If you could use a thermometer on yourself to measure your intensity and elevation of Self Love right now, how would you register—high, low, or not at all? Just a thought to ponder.

Just loving your children is never enough to save them from the perils of life.

It's not too late to SAVE THE CHILDREN. Children are very teachable. They will listen to you, and they will follow your good example. Have the courage to be the first in your family to LOVE YOUR SELF. You can help make a difference in the world of today. Your children who love themselves can help make a difference in the world of tomorrow. Teach your children to love themselves. SAVE THE CHILDREN.