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I have a daughter named Jenner Rose, who has been a source of amazing growth and inspiration to me. Many of you know that I love to tell “Jenner Rose stories” as a way of sharing some of the gifts I receive from her. Here’s one.
One day, when she was about 4, Jenner Rose asked me, “Mama, are we going to go to heaven when we die?”
“Some people believe that,” I replied.
“Mama, what is heaven?”
“Well, honey, I think we live in heaven. We live in a beautiful place and we have a beautiful home. We have lots of friends and family that we love and who love us. We have everything we need, and there’s so much love all around us. To me, that’s heaven.”
She thought and thought about what I said, for quite a while.
Then she asked, “Mama, are we dead?”
This little conversation made me pause and think about what it means to be alive and vital. Many people walk around thinking they’re in some sort of hell, and someone else in the same situation might think of it as heaven. What’s the difference?
I think it has to do with one of the most fundamental things we talk about in HAI workshops: being at choice. We say that we are at choice every moment of every hour of every day. There are moments of obvious choice, such as who to choose for a partner in an exercise. And there are many opportunities throughout the workshops to see the power of our perceptions and how our perceptions affect our experience. We talk often about observing our thoughts.
And there are choices about how to live our lives outside of workshops. This is a very powerful place to experience being at choice. Over the course of the years of my involvement with HAI, I’ve experimented with my choices a lot – choices about lovers, listening, asking for what I want, and so on. And during that time, I notice that I have consistently chosen to live my life in love.
What does that mean? To me, it has to do with recognizing that experiencing love is what I’m here for. Not only romantic love, although that’s part of it. In each encounter I have, I always look for the spark of love. And you know what? I always find it. Sometimes it’s just a tiny spark, and sometimes it’s a bonfire, but there is always love. For me, it’s a question of opening to experience it in whatever form it may come. It often doesn’t look like I think it should look.
A few years ago, my former husband told me that he could no longer pay the amount of child support we had agreed upon. All sorts of feelings and judgments came up for me, and I was not a happy camper. As we talked and worked through the issues and came to a new agreement, I realized that at a very deep and subtle level, I was attempting to exert some control on him, through money. It was only in this process that I could see it and make some different choices about it. And now, we both feel much freer about the whole situation, and are able to talk much more easily about money. And, of course, our daughter also benefits because this tension no longer exists. Even though it was a difficult and, at times, painful process, it has turned out to be a great gift to all of us.
Part of how I open to experience love is to cultivate an attitude of gratitude. Rather than look at what’s missing in my life, I feel grateful for all that I have. And the more I look for things to be grateful for, the more there are. And so, the more I look for love, the more there is. Love and gratitude complement each other, and feed each other.
And the love comes in many forms, some of which don’t look like love at the first moment. Instead of saying to myself,” That’s not love because it doesn’t look like love to me,” if I can simply accept that I can’t see the love in the moment, and I can expand my ideas about what love is, soon enough, it feels like love, or I can see the gift or feel the gratitude.
I’m not talking about being Pollyanna here, but about the power of our thoughts to shape our reality. What we focus on is what grows. Did you ever notice how if all you can think about is something that’s bothering you, pretty soon it monopolizes your thoughts? The same works in a positive way. I choose to believe that heaven is right here, right now. And guess what? Heaven, I’m in heaven…
Sometimes when I check on Jenner Rose at night before I go to bed, I just stand or kneel at her bedside and look at the miracle of this child. She looks like an angel as she sleeps; her face is so peaceful and sweet. Her breathing is even and slow and I wonder if she’s dreaming or if she’s out traveling around the universe with the other angels and spirits. I wonder if she remembers what god looks like. When I ask her she says no, and she also says she doesn’t remember before she was born. She still lives in a dreamy world and when she daydreams, my fantasy is that she’s very close to god and the angels. She lives in heaven, too.
I invite you to join me and choose to live in heaven on earth, right here, right now. Try it on and see what happens!
Barbara Musser
