throughout my childhood, i was torn between the Rational way that my dad {and the rest of NL} operated, and the Emotional person that my mum was. despite my dad being a very sensitive, introverted, gentle person, he was doggedly sticking to the Rational, the Intellectual, the Proof, the Material, the Brain. if you can't touch it, or see it, it isn't there... my mum, on the other hand, was one ball of anger and passion, lived from the heart, believed in faith and giving her powers to a force higher than herself, one that wasn't visible or touchable. she believed in Jesus & Mary, my dad believed in Newton & Edison...
obviously, it's not that simple - my mum prided herself on Knowing Stuff, and Learning, and my dad, ultimately, got in touch with his feelings, started to trust the Universe, slightly... but on the whole, it was divided this way for most of the years i lived in their house. i lived in my head, mostly, cos it was safe there - nobody bullied me. i understood my head - most of the time - and figuring stuff out, analyzing, thinking, became a way of life. there was Right and there was Wrong, there was Black and there was White. my feelings were weird, unpredictable, overwhelming, and i did my very best to keep Feeling to a minimum. or at least, paying too much attention to them, cos Feeling goes on, regardless of whether or not you acknowledge it or not... oddly, i also enjoyed going to church. mostly for the rituals, and the notion of belonging somewhere, rather than Believing in God... i didn't like the thought of submission to another force/person {as God was seen}/force, and being deemed okay as long as you follow the rules, though.
i even tried to intellectualize childrearing... moohahaha!! being a mother freaked the hell out of me, and all the weird feelings that came along with it made me feel {...} incredible insecure, and reading about sensible ways to being a mum helped me to get a grip on my overwhelming feelings that this little person brought out in me... but somehow i started also reading books on how babies connect to mums on a very prime and spiritual level, and that sleeping with them helps this process of bonding, and some more things that started to slowly getting me to stop being over-rational.
living in England at the time helped this process as well. England has {for me} many more ways of connecting to the spiritual/natural side of life. not in a regular religious way, but with Paganism, Witchcraft, Druids, Celtic origins of the country that go back many centuries, it was {to me} a very rich source of possibilities, as well as {to me} UK having a less rational life-view {not to say Brits are irrational and unstable, but the over-rational way people are here in NL was not so prevalent when i lived in UK...}, so the notion of connecting to my intuition was something that slowly was gaining ground.
but it wasn't until we moved to NL and i found a Waldorf Steiner School for the kids to attend, that the spiritual development that i had been dipping my toes in, really took off. to me, Anthroposophy comes fairly close to the Paganism i had gotten to know in East Sussex over the years, although there are enormous differences, as well, but it gave me a feeling of familiarity {Germanic orderedness meets Celtic natural free-form... to put it incredibly simplistic...} i could live with very well, and while the kids learnt how to knit flute bags and count while jumping & clapping, i joined every possible group and course that the school had to offer. and i learnt to connect with my Feelings...
and while i learnt to understand my Feelings, i had less and less time for the Rational side of things. the more i was in touch with my feelings, and my intuition, the less i wanted to be stuck in my head. i wanted to move away from condemning, from having an opinion on everything, from seeing things from one side only... where i would've once thought that the spiritual teachers i mentioned in my previous post were mad, and anybody who believed that were idiots, i learnt that there is so much more than what we can see or touch or explain... the phenomenon that what i wished for, would happen {which i kind of noticed and used to my advantage without knowing what it was or how it worked} had a name: Law Of Attraction... i had been manifesting all the things i had wanted when i was a teenager, and that stopped once i became Rational, once i analyzed too much, once i convinced myself that i needed to have opinions, judgements, proving how wise and clever i was... and now it feels {...} like an uphill struggle to get back to a sense of naive Being, and just Be.
so when i read Harry Potter, i understand why so many people feel such a deep connection with the world they experience, why the Wizarding World is so much more appealing than the one we're supposed to live in. it is so very tempting sometimes, to flick the world a very loud 'Expelliarmus!"
