What We Remember and the Tree of Life

What We Remember and the Tree of Life

As a mother and part-time photographer, I spend a lot and I mean A LOT of time behind my camera lens.  This  is not even mentioning the countless hours in front of the screen to edit and optimise the images I took. There is a standard joke about Asian travellers that goes on holiday and watch the holiday afterwards  – claiming that the whole experienced missed and then watched digitally.

This made me think about my kids and their direct experience of me as a mother. Will they remember me – a loving, laughing, joyful mother?

Or will the remember: “Benjamin, look here! Mikyla SMILE” or “Mikyla come stand over here”! Truth be told, it doesn’t matter what I say anymore, they don’t even bother to look up a the lens.  I can totally understand that!  I can have the best intention in the world and I can work hard to give them the gift of thousands of edited photos one day, but what will they remember?[/vc_column_text]

The Question is: Will they look at the photos and go: “Oh wow – look how happy we looked!” or, “Oh look, see there you still had the green shirt that you never took off”! Or would they remember me, not emotionally ever available because I always had “another batch to edit”?

They may look at the photos and wonder why they look so great, when all that they remember from that part, was the rejection they felt when they asked me to help them open a packet.   And I just grumbled: “Ask your Dad, I’m busy taking photos”. I hope that is not the case. I hope they see the loving care, the tenderness and the dedication I showed in faithfully capturing all their special moments!

This brought me back to the Kabbalistic principle of perspective and truth. For me, my truth would be that I worked hard to capture their special moments. I hope that they will appreciate all my efforts as a Mom to affirm their worth and importance to me in my life.  However, from their perspective, their truth may be that they only remember their Dad having fun with them or helping them or laughing with them!  If the pattern is ingrained enough, they may grow up with relationship issues because they got hurt by my “rejection”.  Yes rejection by me not looking them in the eye and having a conversation with them because it was too important for me to run and get my camera!

As a group of people, we can all be present in the same moment, but we can have a different filter or perception of what that moment looked and felt like.

What I realised in my years of practice is that for most people, once they dig around in the memories long enough, they find that what happened to them might not be as frightful in the present, as how they remembered it to be when they were younger. At the time when it happened , it was quite a big deal. Often when we are little kids and not emotionally able to handle trauma, pain or rejection, we see the situation ‘bigger” than what  it is, simply because we don’t have the emotional resources to process the facts around the situation.  Through those experiences (good or bad), we learned and we became stronger. And often times, the “now’ version of us are able to better protect us from hurt and pain – because of what we learned in the process. This is where it SHOULD become easier to trust ourselves and others but we often don’t.

I hope that one day, my kids will look at these pictures and see the beauty, appreciate the moments and feel the joy captured. But if they do feel that I created a different picture from what they experienced as truth, I hope that they will find their way to the universal Kabbalah teachings. That they will find a way to discover and uncover their own truth and find their own answers to the important questions of:

• Who am I?
• What am I?
• Where did I come from?
• Where am I going?
• What is my purpose?

And I hope that their answers will lead them to a place of peace, love, forgiveness, joy, abundance and strength. I hope that these will take them away from a victim state and it will help them create the life they wish to have on this earth.

Next month in September, I will be joining my third Kabbalah Tree – meaning that I have enrolled to complete my third year long Kabbalah programme. I can not wait to see how the tree (the process) will take me deeper and how it will work to help me discover even deeper more exciting parts of me.

May my children always seek their truth, but may they also realise that everyone sees the situation or the event from their perspective. May we always find a way to question what we have accepted as blatant truth. May we always be able to discern between that which is real and what in life, was just deceiving thoughts that held us captive by unforgiveness.