Editor’s Note: Elisa is preparing for the second leg of her Thriving Planet World Tour, this time to Bali and other Asian locales. This column, a favorite of Planet Waves readers, originally appeared on February 3, 2013. — Susan
By Elisa Novick
This week, after three days spent in agony from tooth pain that went into my trigeminal nerve, a root canal and surgery on an infected ingrown toenail, I am marveling at just how much joy is bubbling through me. How strange!
Joy is the mark of a soul, slipping through the portals into this world of woes. I am ecstatic seeing how a client’s deepest grief, the suicide of a close family member, is her path to spiritual awakening. And another, being brought more deeply into incarnation in her body during a group meeting via Skype, is now shining like an angel.
As souls who have come forth into manifest reality, we get to experience ourselves in many contexts. We are organisms. We have bodies to learn how to get around in and maintain. We have psyches with pre-programmed and re-programmed patterns of reaction and response.
Aspects of self are called forth variously in relationship to family and others in our lives and all the groups we get identified with — school, religion, political orientation, race, gender, community, nation, planet and cosmos. We exist in timelines — our past, present, future lives, and the generational progression of all of the genetic cell lines that have contributed to us being who we are.
Every one of these relationships contains learning opportunities and every one of them has karma. There are many maps and diagrams (e.g., astrology) and philosophical systems we can use to put these relationships on display that can give valuable (and sometimes not so valuable) feedback. They enrich our understanding.
Yet always, who we truly are contains all of that and also transcends all of that, because what we do with that information, and all of our experiences, inside ourselves and in relationship, determines how we grow.