Here are some of my favourite poems by Gerry Hillier which I collected over the past 5 years after attending the annual yoga retreat in Australia. Enjoy. Gerry will be visiting Singapore in mid May, if you are keen to attend her workshops, check out www.theowlcompany.com.
I am
said the leaf
in stillness and then
We are aware that a family unit provides the early conditioning of a person’s personality. How we behave and what we become later in life is deeply connected to our family life. Psychologist like Erik Erikson talks about the psychosocial development in 8 stages through which a healthily developing human should pass from infancy to late adulthood. Each stage builds a successful completion of earlier stages.
In the Vedic tradition, the first 14 years of a child’s life is crucial in his or her development. Till the age of seven, a child is like a sponge. Anything that the child is exposed to, the child absorbs. His/her mind and body grows at an amazing rate. In this phase, the child is in the visualization phase. Whatever the child sees is imprinted and embedded into his or her unconscious. The embedded memories start replaying as the child grows into an adult. These embedded memories drive many of the adult decisions. Between the age of eight and 14, the growing child is in the verbalization mode. The child starts learning languages and verbal imprints, not merely visual images, start getting embedded. Using words like happiness, suffering, etc., instantly evoke appropriate pictures and therefore emotions. During this entire period, the child is controlled by its parents or parent substitutes like grandparents or nannies. Most of what is embedded in their unconscious comes from the elders close to them. Hence the parents from which a soul takes birth from play a major role in a child’s upbringing. Fundamentally, as parents we have a huge responsibility in creating a loving and stable family for our children so that it brings less suffering and depression to them.
Bruce Lipton, who is an internationally recognized leader in bridging science and spirituality, talked about quantum entanglement. Entanglement happens when 2 persons fall in tune with a same thought. Physicist Amit Goswami published an article in a physics journal showing that entanglement affects people. The premise of the finding was – when two people become entangled, one person will conform to the energy of the other person. When one of them is a healer whose cells are vibrating at a higher level, the client’s cells become entangled, and their energy is lifted.
Here’s my story of my entanglement with Gerry Hillier.
The year was 2004 when I first met Gerry at a Yoga Teachers Training in Byron Bay, Australia. This was also the period when I was still searching to find myself, and I had just become a new mother. We were room-mates during the 14-day training. After spending almost 2 weeks with her, I was not only enchanted by her wonderful stories about her life and the children she worked with but also inspired by what she was doing i.e. teaching drama and creative expression to kids and youth in her home town in Queensland on top of being a yoga teacher, an author/a writer and an entrepreneur. She is one being that I was more fascinated with than the renowned teacher who was training us.
