What’s Your Offering?
I often meditate with an old photo of myself at just three days old. I try to read into my ever so new eyes, curious what the message that little child is trying to send my grown-up self. Looking at the photo, I always wonder why did I come here? What is my unique gift to this moment in time in this incarnation? What have I come here to contribute? What is my offering to life?
I wonder if most everything born knows it offering? Looking at trees and birds, flowers and stars. They know their offering. They are part of the breathing of life, a delicate, intricate dance of absolute wisdom.
Knowing and honoring your offering imbues life with a sense of meaning, a sense of direction.
In indigenous cultures, part of the work of the Elders is to help each child recognize his/her unique offering. Observing a baby with patience. With stillness. What is the baby naturally drawn to? What is it innately interested in? What calms it? What makes it laugh with joy? What causes it pain and sorrow? What gifts come easily to it?
Our current western culture doesn’t recognize this enough. We too often fill our babies with stimuli and rules and fears and expectations. We don’t look through the eyes of divine love that says we are each here to make a gift of our unique offering.
The closer we are able to live to our own offering, the stronger and more resilient we are despite external pressure. The more passionately and joyfully we can live, the deeper our satisfaction is in the ways we feel in our daily lives and the greater difference we can make in our world.
What if you could find and follow your offering at any age? What if you could find a community of people who watch and listen and help you give birth to your deepest offering? What if you didn’t need some catastrophic event like an illness or loss or a loved one or a spouse leaving you to finally remember who you are and why you are here?
Walking the path with an open heart is simply an exploration of the nature of our offering, a recognition of previously unseen threads which are not random or peripheral, but are the path itself. It’s a remembering to do what we are deeply drawn to in the quietest moments of listening to our hearts.
-Jennifer
