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Recently, I watched a video by a noted medical professional who talked about wanting to bear a child. Her husband’s grief ran as deeply as hers that their IVF (in vitro fertili- zation) efforts had, time and again, proven futile. The years had passed without success. While only 5% of US couples seek out this and other similar methods to get pregnant, there are now 200,000 babies in this country who have come into the world through these means.

Midway through the video, the doctor spoke with great force about the joy that being a parent would give to both her and her husband, and how not being able to conceive had caused them massive heartache.The power of her message conveyed more than words. It rang with the conviction with which she spoke: that parenting brings joy while bareness delivers only emptiness. Of this, she was completely convinced. This had been her belief, reinforced by her husband’s as well.

At last came the day of adoption. Finding the child of their dreams turned their lives around. From that point on, they lived enriched by the arrival of their little one with the daily joy they had both sought for many years.

Theirs was a sweet and touching story.

And yet watching the video, my yogic training came to the fore with the reminder that, according to the ancient Indian scriptures, circumstances are neutral. Why should the state of being childless cause so much pain to the human heart? Because those who long for children  choose to interpret it that way.

Flashback. Some years ago I decided to treat myself to a series of facials. The esthetician and I chatted away as layer upon layer of luscious creams and toners were applied to my face. Meanwhile she spoke of her 4 grown children. Motherhood, for her, had been anything but fulfilling. In fact, she admitted blatantly, she’d found it to be a drain as well as an irritation. Each of her children somehow irked her. They made a tough life even harder for her, raising them as a single mother.

How is it that having children can enhance one person’s life and yet prove to be nothing but a burden, for decades, to another’s?

Because it is the expectations, feelings, and interpretations that we bring to these neutral circumstances that color them as either positive or negative.

It is not the act of parenting itself that brings us joy. Or the act of anything . Parenting can only reflect the joy that pre-exists within us, the joy that we bring to it. To return to the physician mentioned in the beginning of this post, being a parent can indeed take one to deeply nourishing levels of pure love when we expand into that role, as she and her husband experienced.

In my book, From Bagels to Curry, where I was the child being parented by a dying father, I faced the biggest test of my life  in caring for him in the days leading up to his passing while learning to draw on reserves of courage I didn’t know existed within me. As Dad’s “expiry date” drew nearer, I wrote:

“Dissolved are the defining lines between parent and progeny. With the pure love of family as the conduit for divine love, it seems as though my father has become my child—though he’ll never hear this from his daughter’s lips!”

For those who want to raise children and yet are not able to know the joys of parenting, as well as for those who have borne the loss of a parent, it can indeed be comforting to realize that we needn’t have our own children in order to be parents,. Love in its truest form is without limitation. It can transcend even the finality of death.

In essence, we cannot deny the humanity of our pain. But we can transmute it.

Loss of a loved one is both a universal and an individual experience, one from which no one in this world is exempt.

The first blog commenter for my new author site, Anne (thanks, Anne!), wrote so beautifully about what it means to lose loved ones–about missing them, wanting to feel their hugs in return, and living with the ache of their absence from our lives.

These are the sentiments of just about everybody who has lost someone dear to them.

Truly there is much to miss when a loved one departs – the tender moments, the joys, the special ways of touching places of beauty that are not replaceable or repeatable. Yet within these special moments, we can find that the suffering from loss can take us to an even greater love –the love that people who have experienced death and then returned to life, as documented by a growing number of authorities on the subject. Their experiences explain a commonality that is now becoming understood as well as accepted.

Basically, there is a “presence,” as I described in From Bagels to Curry. My friend Krishnadas shares at a lunch in a Los Angeles restaurant about his own near-death meeting with a being of Light “on the other side.” There, he encountered a love a hundred times greater than the sensation of first falling in love:

“We place our order, chattering away. Krishnadas shares two milestones in his life—about his father dying when he was only fourteen, and later when a severe blow to his head precipitated a life-changing, near-death experience. We share the parallels of our lives, two soldiers ‘on the front lines’ barely able to crawl through our tests—that uncomfortable place where no rest in this world is possible.

The pain of losing loved ones is, obviously, the subject of this post – as Anne shared in her blog comment on November 17, 2017: “But the pain of loss is the proof of the love I have and continue to have. . .”

Yes, this is an understandable response to the passing of a loved one. But consider that in perfect peace, there is no restlessness; in perfect joy, no sorrow. Thus it follows that in perfect love, pain does not, and cannot, exist. In perfecting our loving of someone who has left us through physical death, we can reach a place of supreme happiness and peace in continuing to love and not feeling that “death ends all.” Why should it? In other words, is the pain a proof of a deep love or is it a gentle suggestion to love more wholly?

Many years ago, one of my friends lost his wife of 2 years to cancer. The marriage was a second one for them both. A wise counselor advised my friend to love  his wife even more after her passing.

Perfect love is without attachment, sorrow, or need. And it is rare. But what a noble goal to attain to! This is the love expressed in the Spirit-in-Nature flower, Grape Essence.

The chapter about this flower essence concludes with these words: “Grape thereby helps us remove the veil of emotional poverty that steals over us at times and to heal that dryness of the heart that arises from the many sorrows that life lays at our feet. This essence helps to uncover our heart’s natural ability to love and in so doing, to forget ourselves in the process to the point where the lover, the beloved and the act of loving become as one. Love, ‘the rewarder,’ is its own reward.”

Maybe we are not yet able to love on that level of purity. But it’s certainly worth aspiring to!

“I have found the paradox,” said Mother Theresa, “that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.”

 

I’d like to start with a digression from the subject of this blog, if you don’t mind – or at least sort of.
With our newest site live for nearly 2 months, www.liladeviauthor.com, I’d been in a conundrum about how to connect this site to our decades-old flower essence site of 250 pages and counting, www.spirit-in-nature.com. The 2 subjects seemed to not overlap much. I was concerned about how to juxtapose them both for our viewers who are comprised mainly of book readers and flower essence fans.

As it turns out, it’s more of a non-issue than I thought.

This blog is a perfect example. The sites actually mesh very well – for the obvious reason that 3 of the 4 books featured on the author site address flower essences and, conversely, that Spirit-in-Nature Essences embody universal qualities that are familiar to us all and that we live and breathe every day.

Some of you have heard the story that, when I teach the flower essences, I ask students to “put on their flower essence glasses.” This is a way, both metaphysical and humorous, of looking at the world through the sattwic (elevating) qualities of the flower essences – calmness, kindness, and flexibility, for example. (See article I and article II.)

Flows of energy exist everywhere – in people, animals, events, and even in the changing of the seasons. You can wear your glasses morning till night to tune into them. (I wear mine all the time.)

Now, glasses on, and back to our topic!

One of my clients recently shared with me that her best friend’s 40-year-old son had been diagnosed with an inoperable and incurable cancer – the illness that is a pivotal theme of my most recent book, From Bagels to Curry.

Sharon wrote:

“I would love to make up a remedy bottle for my friend, her son and his wife. I have some ideas of things I might include but wondered if you had thoughts? I myself have been taking Pear Essence for the shock of the news and have found it helpful. I do want to help and I know the flowers can be a real support to my friend and her family.”

I replied:

For your dear friend, I’m so sorry to hear this. It must be a tremendous shock to the family as well as to you. Glad to hear that you’re on Pear Essence, a very smart choice!!

As you know, I suggest based on research to give single/sequential flower essences rather than combinations but it’s up to you how you wish to proceed. For the son, he too can use Pear Essence for at least 3 weeks and then he can see where he wants to go with it.

Just as the pear tree itself grows in many temperate regions of the world, it accepts harsh growing conditions while still producing a fruit that is rich in antioxidents, especially Vitamin C and copper. An excellent source of dietary fiber, pears also support a healthy heart. The delicate white 5-petaled pear flower brings peace to the heart of its viewer.

Pear is for inner peace and also for stability. But most importantly, it’s for resistance, indicated by the extremely understandable shock of the news. I know this may even sound coarse, and that you know it’s not at all meant that way, but most (if not all) of our human suffering comes from resisting what life brings to us. Facing one’s own, or our beloved close ones, mortality is probably one of the greatest tests that life gives us. Pear Essence helps us, subtly and vibrationally, to process the many implications that accompany this news.

It reminds us that within our nature lies acceptance of whatever challenges  life sets before us. If it’s not too brazen to bring in a note of humor here, there’s a classic line from an old film where one of the Native Americans about to go into battle, proclaims: “It’s a good day to die.”

Again, I’m so sorry. This flower essence can help us with the attitudes we confront when facing our own mortality, or as one sage said, “the stunning mystery of death,” such as:

“He’s too young.”

“Why me?”

“What did I do to deserve this?”

“”m not ready to leave.”

“It’s not time.”

Death places issues in front of us that we cannot delay or deny. It puts us right up against the most difficult test of our lives. As my own father with pancreatic cancer said 9 years ago, “Dying is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

Your friend and her husband can take Coconut Essence for 2 weeks to help transmute their grief (and believe me, I know this is tough and can take time), and then Grape Essence to love their dear son even more in this stage of his life. The love never ends. This is  the message of Grape Flower Essence.

I wish everyone great healing, support, and condolences through this most difficult time.

 

It’s a magnificent autumn day. A crispness in the air announces that summer has passed and our days are numbered until a winter chill will usher us to retreat into warmer layers of coats, hats, and scarves.

 As I write this post, about 800 miles away in Arizona, a funeral for my cousin is in progress. Our immediate family is stunned. Shocked. Reeling.

Only 2 weeks ago, the oncologist told her that she was no longer in remission and that medical means could prolong her life only briefly with the same measures that had earlier removed all quality from it.

My cousin declined. Ripples of incredulity reverberated through our immediate family members. “This isn’t real,” they commented. “It can’t be real.”

These moments of shock that distance us from our “normal” sense of reality are important beyond our recognition. For it is within these moments that we glimpse a higher truth—that life seems like a dream because, to reference the Indian scriptures, it is a dream.

But instead of clinging to those sacred moments of seeing what’s real and what isn’t, we try to scramble back under the comfortable quilt of the illusion that this world is real instead of those flashes true insight. Based on habit, recognition, and those thought patterns we find comforting, we are hypnotized by our daily affirmation that this world IS reality.

Have we got it all backwards?

Doesn’t death itself tell us that our lives are impermanent? To quote my doctor brother (whom you’ll get to know in From Bagels to Curry), “No one gets out of here alive.” To live for fulfillment in this world that we will someday have to leave is like building castles in the sand, as impermanent as their foundation that will be washed away by the tide or blown down by the wind, as though they had never existed—as though they were nothing but passing dreams.

In this spiritual memoir, I chronicle facing these same issues 9 years ago with my father’s passing. About the day of his funeral, I wrote:

The glorious afternoon is made bright by a light deeper than the sun. Loved ones hover silently in the afternoon heat. The grass at my father’s gravesite is exquisitely green, covering the hillside in a radiant sea of life force. Has grass ever been so brilliantly colored? The funeral seems dreamlike from beginning to end, fashioned like the song from a Jewish play, “laden with happiness and tears.”

Who in this world has not suffered loss of some kind?

If we take that loss in the right way and let it take us to a truer understanding of what is real and what isn’t, and what really matters and what doesn’t – that is how tragedy can take us to truth.

 

I’d long dreamed of writing a series of children’s picture books where each flower essence becomes a child. Not texts but fairy tales. Not facts but fantasy. Stories where the magic of Nature would come alive in children’s minds and hearts to transport them into fanciful fiction with inspiring role models based on the qualities of these 20 flower essences.

I aspired to express their magic in a different way, a new way—to write books for children as well as adults – or, as our credit line says, “The Spirit-in-Nature Essences Storybook Collection for Little Blossoms of All Ages.”

Samantha Strawberry was the first book to be written. Bradley Banana, personifying humility rooted in calmness, was the first of the 20 books to be published, in the summer of 2010. Bradley is now also in Italian and Japanese.

Ten years ago, a July afternoon of errands in the quaint former gold-mining town of Nevada City—population 3,000-ish—left me sun-scorched and eager to escape the dry heat of the Sierra Nevada Foothills. I managed to survive by squeaking into the Del Oro Theatre showing of the latest Harry Potter film. Surrounded by chatty, screaming children with the scent of real-butter popcorn rising like smoke rings above the cushy chairs, I settled into my seat. Ah, great air conditioning. Too bad I forgot my down coat.

Onscreen the young Mr. Potter in one scene played the classroom teacher’s apprentice in the art of magic. He waved his wand and magic happened. He concentrated with great force and more impossible things came about.

That’s when it happened. That was the moment I decided it was time to write these books. If Harry Potter could perform magic, so could I – through these books.

A few weeks later, I joined a group of friends for a camping excursion to Lake Tahoe. The largest freshwater lake in North America, it once homed the Washoe Native Americans. Their tribal leader had said Tahoe was the center of their being: “I always heard from my elders that if you have problems, you need to go to the lake and wash your face, and let everything go.” The lake’s beauty, history, and chilling waters further inspired me.

In the magic of Nature at the Martis Creek Campground, I sketched out the character of Samantha Strawberry. Dignity was the quality uppermost in her nature.

I scribbled with a sharpened pencil on lined paper, remembering back to being hospitalized at a very young age with double pneumonia. Breathing had become an impossibility. Aside from being tortured by hypodermic needles, foul-tasting antibiotics, and pills too big to swallow, I missed my family terribly. I was a prisoner in my hospital bed. There was one way to survive – I would disappear into the fairy tale comic books my parents brought me each day. Through them, I could escape all torment and vividly live in the adventures of the characters who traipsed from one storyboard to another. The pomp, the drama, the simplicity: their lives became as real as my own.

The memory of that complete absorption remained with me. Could Bradley, Samantha, and their 18 siblings do the same for other young readers? It seems so, according to the children and their parents who read The Spirit-in-Nature Essences Storybook Collection.

Who is Bradley Banana? He had always been a quiet boy – a good listener, able to relate to the realities of others. He, like the essence that provides his surname, always remained calm, even at the grim prospect of walking a pirate’s plank. By his humble example, the proud Captain Clumpalong was to learn about humility. Talking about oneself all the time as a braggart, he found, does not bring happiness!

Here, in this hardcover book, is a message that children can easily absorb—not in the form of a lesson but through the example of their friend Bradley. Too much focus on oneself and too much self-protection are not the path to true humility. Those behaviors keep us forever walking the plank of egoic self-involvement. Self-forgetfulness, on the other hand, bestows upon us a liberating sense of calmness.

So that’s my story. And Bradley’s.

Listen to Lila Devi talk about Banana Essence in this online video

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