I think for many years I tried to take from the world.
After years of wrestling with persistent childhood pain stuck right in my chest, the methods I used to escape that pain, and the ceaseless efforts to recover from those methods, I arrived at a place where I was tired of myself.
It wasn’t pretty. I have experienced a few bouts of depression in my life, but this was existential. “What’s the point of it all?”, I asked myself as I moved through a sticky, darkness that consumed every action of my days.
Then came a moment during the blackest day when I hit my end. I don’t know who I was talking to. I like to call it “the energy behind all things”. That presence that exists in every plant, animal and person that moves seeds into flowers, one season into the next, and embryos into babies.
I had a thought that the same energy that helped me grow as a baby might still be with me. And I told it that I had two choices: I either needed to exist no longer, or have it take control of my life. “I can’t do this anymore. So you take over”, I said as I kneeled in the darkness.
It happened very gradually, with a lot of fumbling and backwards traveling along the way. Very slowly, my perspective started to shift. Having a full heart became the primary importance of my day. I started to notice the things that filled my heart. They weren’t huge monumental things, but little moments. Little moments that added to other little moments.
And the actual things that brought be joy surprised me. It was not the highs of a Friday night party, or the big vacations, or exciting plans written in my schedule that brought me joy. Instead it was a tiny moment of connection with my kid, a flash of understanding a student would experience in my workshop, an instant of flowing creativity as I wrote my book, or an email I would send to send a donation to an organization in need.
I started to notice that the true moments of joy, the moments that filled my heart so much my arms tingled, were moments that I was giving. Instead of taking from the world, it is giving that fills us up. I started to look around me at the masses of people, trying to find happiness in a book with 10 steps, a bottle, a better body, a new house, more vacations, and more friends, and saw that we all had been traveling in the wrong direction.
It is to the heart we must go. And our heart is happy when it is giving. Our heart is happy when we ask the world, not “What can I get?” but instead, “How can I be of service?”. This is my absolute favourite metaphor in my children’s book, The Girl and The Sun:
When we make a consistent effort to let the sun in our heart be our leader, then we feel free to paint the world with our own unique rainbow. We all have values, passions, talents, and colours inside of us, and we keep them hidden due to fear from our cloud. But when we delve deep into our heart, discover our colours, and have the courage to bring them forth into this world, then we paint it with those colours…and it is fucking brilliant.
The sun, cloud, and rainbow metaphors that make up the story in my children’s book The Girl and the Sun were molded piece by piece from my own pain and subsequent drive to overcome it. I use these metaphors every day to parent myself and my children. They are not my own ideas. They come from many teachers along the way: Anita Johnston, Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, Jeff Foster, Tara Brach, Marianne Williamson, and many counselors and colleagues who guided me along my journey. Through The Girl and The Sun I can now share them with the world. Please visit www.ashleyandthesun.com/free-handouts-parents-and-teachers for free handouts and www.ashleyandthesun.com for a thorough explanation of the sun, cloud and rainbow metaphors.