Category: inner peace

Spiritual Chaos

When I began this blog, about 9 months ago, my focus was to share ways of finding some inner peace and calm amidst the chaos of family life with young kids and husband and animals etc. My first posts outlined a little of my own inner journey. Then I got distracted by other things that life presented me with, things I felt I wanted to share with my new virtual world. And so I have posted about family, pets (Dylan seems to feature a lot), GAA (my dad would be so pleased) and holidays (with gratitude). Occasionally I wander back to tending to my spirit by writing about something a little deeper. So I suppose what I am trying to say is that I have not really stuck to my own brief – I have meandered around my life over the last months. But that is OK – because that is how life is, particularly if you have children.

I am now learning that my spiritual life and my search for inner peace and meaning must exist right in the very centre of all the other more mundane day to day bits of living. It does not really work if my inner life is known only to me and is something that I only ‘indulge’ in when alone and in secret. So I tell my kids (and to their embarrassment, their friends) and my own friends to talk to the angels, to hand over worries to God, to meditate, to ask for help and to always focus on the positive and the good in life. I have an angel in every single room of the house – not always obvious – but they are there. I have a smaller population of prayerful buddhas (as oppose to the fat laughing one) which serve to remind us of the need for reverence and stillness in our lives. And these reminders are very important to me because I have found that once a problem hits, I revert back to my old ways of dealing with it – worrying, desperately trying to reassert control and anger. My spiritual prompts remind me that all is well, that I am not alone and that help is available if I remember to ask for it.

What about you? Is your spiritual life important to you? Is it something you hide away or not something that you feel drawn to in any way?

So – my previous post describes how I uncovered a huge affinity to my Wiccan sisters. So the next step was to open an account with Amazon.com and begin to buy everything I could find on ‘The Craft’. Much of what I read spoke deeply to my soul. I loved the lack of rules, the lack of hierarchy. I loved the feminine essence of this religion. I still have huge respect for the craft and still feel a lot of that connection. But somehow going sky clad and making potions and spells didn’t quite sit with me. And so having educated myself fairly well on the old ways, I took back to the road again. The road to find myself and to inner peace… and as walked, I could hear some giggling in the heavens. God really thinks it’s funny when I get lost and confused!

Then daughter number three arrived… 6 weeks early and with little warning. She was a very lardy 8lbs 12ozs which I assumed was great for her. But, apparently not. She was a very sick little baby for the first two weeks of her life. The experience shook me to my core. The thought that I might lose my little baby shone a very bright spotlight on my life. As I made deals with God (she had stopped laughing by the way), I promised to give up work in order to be at home with my little ones, regardless of what sacrifices I might have to make along the way. I held in my heart and in my head the vision of me and him along with our other daughters in our lounge at home with our new baby in her moses basket in the corner. I held tight to this vision and willed it into being. And two weeks after her traumatic arrival I took her home. And as we all sat in the lounge that evening I thanked God for the normality and simplicity of it all! I think God was smiling, a big beamy smile!

And so the journey that began in earnest with the arrival of daughter number two on Halloween in 1998, took a massive leap forward in late 2000 as youngest daughter settled into life at home. I finally fulfilled the promise I made to God in the hospital and retired from the world of paid work in late 2001 and took up my position as stay at home mum and home maker and general dogsbody without pay or status! Initially me and him planned that this would be just for a year. I was sure that by then, I would be champing at the bit to get back into the world of paid work.

Boy – was I ever wrong?