Something to Consider

A few weeks ago, I was watching Franki play with little dollie and Jaguar and as these two were talking to each other, I heard little dollie say to Jaguar, “my finger hurts”.  I found it interesting because a few weeks before, I’d hurt my finger.  Children mimick what they see and hear and feel around them and they become versions of all of these until they make new decisions about who they want to be and how they want to feel and respond.  So as I think about this, I assume that dollie has told Jaguar that her finger hurts because Franki saw my injured finger, and when she had asked about it, I had told I’d hurt my finger.  I’ve also heard her say that her own knee hurts.  I wear a knee brace sometimes when I workout, and she has asked, “your knee hurts”?  And so, this observation has been “planted” into my awareness and I’m curious about it.  A few days later as Franki and I were taking a walk, it occurred to me that if you were to ask me if I had physical “ailments”, I would say, “my back, my knees and my stomach”.  Not that I would talk about them, and certainly not that they’re a big deal, but if I were asked, that’s likely what I would say.  Then I realized that these things that I would say were my “issues”, are the same ones I heard my parents either talk about, or I observed my parents having.  My father fell and broke his back and had a “bad back”, and he had a knee operation and would voice his discomfort about both his knees and his back.  I have many memories of my mother having stomach discomfort and “problems” any time I saw her.  She also had a “bad back” and experienced frequent back pain.  I’ve come to understand and believe that physical conditions are more about what you believe and expect than they are about heredity and that of course, whatever decisions or conclusions my parents have made only need be mine by choice and not by association.  Somehow, it never occurred to me until recently that these physical “ailments” that I’ve owned as mine may not really be “mine” in the sense that I just picked them up from my parents, observed and heard, and therefore established an unconscious belief and expectation, and through the path of least resistance allowed them to be present in my body just as they had/have been with my parents.  The idea may seem simplistic but I really believe that first, these “problems” only began because I witnessed them, and second, they’ve continued because of my attention to them.  I don’t know if I’m conveying how truly freeing this idea is…that these physical ailments aren’t necessarily “mine”, but instead, I experienced them only because I saw them and came to expect them whether I knew it or not.  And so now, this opens a whole new world to me…a whole new perspective from which to view these physical manifestations.  I never before made the association that my physical complaints were the identical ones I witnessed in my parents.  So once again, my desire is stronger than ever to be mindful of what I’m conveying to Franki and I’m even more aware of the ways in which my focus, and my beingness, is observed and translated by this little girl in my life.  Not only what I say and do, but who I be as observed and who I be as an energy being is interpreted by her.  I understand that Franki will mimick and may become similar to how I am and she may adopt some of my beliefs, but I never applied that concept to her interpreting and possibly mimicking and “owning” the same physical “complaints” (for lack of a better word) as I have, or as Jack has.  It was such a simple moment…Franki playing with little dollie and Jaguar, that spurred such an epiphany.  Having the realization about my bodily manifestations mirroring my parents’ has already transformed my attitude and expectation toward these physical manifestations and now I see that I can let them go…I don’t need to hold on to something that was mine only by association.  Really, really, good. 

How I respond to life becomes Franki’s example and can influence how she responds to life and what she comes to expect unless and until she decides differently.  But many of those things go unnoticed and unexamined as we move through time.  We often go through life without questioning our beliefs or expectations and simply see them as truth, or “as the way it is”.  I’m happy that as a result of observing our daughter, I had an opportunity to re-examine something and make a new decision about it.