Keeping Our Childhood Essence

I have been on a spiritual path for over 6 years now. That path has included everything from singing kirtan, doing yoga, meditating, raising my kundalini, laying on a bed of crystals with crystals all over me, theta healing, singing bowl healing, sound healing, energy work galore, reading spiritual texts, Aryuvedic healing, acupuncture, reiki, life coaching, chanting mantras, doing A Course in Miracles, workshops galore, I could keep going, but you get the idea. I believe each and every one of these things has helped me become who I am today and has shaped and “healed” me in some way. Yet, what I believe they were really doing is essentially reminding me of who I really am.
When I think back to my childhood I had a lot of this already figured out, it just got muffled and turned off. The cloud of my ego and subconscious mind and all the perceptions of who I thought I was began to cloud my True vision. I thought I was someone who had to worry what other people thought of her. I tried really hard to be perfect and tried to do things that I knew made other people happy. I got caught up in the fear that money would run out, that I didn’t look the way I wanted to, that the economy was bad, that I had to work several jobs to survive, that I needed more clothes, more shoes, a different car, etc. etc. All of this was keeping me really busy not having to deal with finding out who I really was, what my truth was and what made me happy. Does that sound familiar?
But as a child I had some things figured out. First off, I remember from as early as I can that I had a place I would go to called Erin’s World. This place was inside my head and I could go there at any time. It was a place where everyone was really nice, no one yelled, there was lots of love to go around and it was just a really happy and abundant place. Not much else to it. As an adult I teach people how to use their imagination to manifest and believe they can live the life they dream of living. As a child this is what I was doing, using my vast imagination (our most powerful tool as human beings) and creating a happy and abundant world for myself. Some where along the way, I was told to stop imagining and get into the real world. I forgot about this valuable tool and I had to re-learn it. But as a kid I had that one down.
I am currently reading A Course in Miracles and the chapter I just read was all about how our ego was formed in what is called the Separation, where we separated ourselves from God. To heal the separation we have to release our self-perceptions and therefore our egos and begin to remember our love for God again. As a child I would go to church on Saturdays with my Grandma and on occasion with my mom. We were Catholic and so we would always be in these beautiful Catholic churches that always fascinated me. My grandma always let me bring toys to church and I would just play the whole time with my Barbies and My Little Ponies. I guess I was a bit spoiled, you could say. My mom was not as fond of this, but I would bring something to write on once in a while. I remember around the age of 5 bringing a little journal with me to church. It was white with red hearts all over it. I still have it to this day. I opened it up a few years ago and I had only written one line in it in my messy kid writing. It simply said, “I love you God.”
I remember this now after having read the passage in A Course in Miracles about our love for God and how we have to return to that. We have lost our connection to God and created a separation and that is the basis of our suffering. At 5 life was so simple and I had it figured out, just love.
As children we are so close to Source, we haven’t gone through the period of forgetting yet. Is it possible to skip the period of forgetting? That is what I am hoping for by starting my Pure Light Foundation to help children keep their natural talents and gifts and to teach kids how to use their imaginations to create the life they want. The Pure Light Foundation will allow children who can not afford the program to get it for free and will allow for this program to go across the country and world. This is my dream.
I have already started working on this with a small group of children in LA and the results are astounding. Kids just get this because it is what they do naturally anyway. It is just teaching them to continue to do it and to give them a routine to make it part of their lifestyle like brushing their teeth. We don’t stop brushing our teeth when we get older, it should be the same with using our imagination, it just becomes habit. I am currently working on the curriculum that I want to incorporate and then I will begin taking it to kids yoga studios and after school programs and teach workshops.
So think back to a time when you were a child. What were your hopes and dreams? What did you create with your imagination? What did you have figured out? Go back to that childhood innocence and remember that. That is your essence.