Saint and Sinner

Saturday Cuppa: Take your pick from the Juice Bar!

Passionfruit and orange juice
Carrot, ginger and celery
Pineapple
Apple and mint
Carrot and Apple

All freshly made. I’m juice fasting this week…I decided to take advantage of the mild British winter/Paul being home to make the meals ~ and start the new year off with a four day cleanse. Happy New Year!

We spend January 1st walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential. ~ Ellen Goodman



This week my emotions have been touched by two lives who’ve walked the world stage in vastly different ways.

Last week in my blog I mentioned my lifelong desire to be a Fairy Godmother sprinkling angel dust over lives and how the ways in which I’d like to do so involve quite large amounts of money!!

Imagine my joy a few days later when reading what my heroine Oprah Winfrey is up to... I’ve admired her for more than half my lifetime. Not actually having seen her show now for about twenty years, my respect is about what she does off camera. She is a very giving, generous soul who blesses other people’s lives, staff, friends and strangers ~ and often anonymously. The cynical could say that she can afford to be generous. Yes, that’s true. But look around you at others who have millions and billions to their name. How many of them actually use their wealth to truly make a difference?

Tell me which talk show hosts in the UK are doing grand works of philanthropy? I’m not even talking about writing a blank cheque for charity. I mean actually getting hands dirty. Making decisions. I read the other day that British actress Emma Thompson had ‘quietly’ adopted a 16 year old Rwandan refugee a few years ago. Some people just get on and ‘do’ acts of kindness.

Oprah’s childhood was one of classic poverty. She has now set up a school in Africa for 11 and 12 year old girls whose families are living lives of poverty, yet despite such beginnings, the girls show the potential for achievement. When describing what she looked for in these girls, she talked about seeing a light within them which showed they’d always see hope, no matter what.

Oprah picked every item for the school including tiles and towels. She said that beauty was very important for helping people feel better about themselves. Her school will also pay for the girls’ university education.

Oprah was raped by an uncle as a teenager. She became pregnant. The baby died.

Last week she was asked about not having children of her own. She described the girls in her school as being the children she never had and now she understands why she didn’t have children of her own. I was moved to tears when I read how much she loved each and everyone of them (150 girls which she hand picked out of 5000 applications) and couldn’t imagine it was possible to love them any more had they been her own.

Oprah, you go girl!

Saddam Hussein was hanged this week. I felt so sick at the thought. Not for one nano-second do I condone the barbaric acts which he instigated whilst he walked upon our Earth.

The media replayed dramatic scenes of the violence and deaths he was responsible for, and yet nowhere did ANYONE bring up the information that might just help to heal humanity.

I don’t believe in original sin, but original blessing. We’re all soul-conceived by a Higher Force and therefore can not be anything but pure. So what led Saddam Hussein to becoming someone with an overwhelming desire to control and take life?

When he was four months old in utero, his father died. Saddam’s mother was struck with grief. Experiencing our mother’s trauma during gestation can affect us on all sorts of levels. For example, it can cause the milk teeth to come out black. One can only wonder at what on earth is happening for the foetus for something as damaging as this to happen to the teeth. So what about the things we don’t see? The things which occur beyond the physical body, in the mind and heart?

At the same time as his dad died, Saddam’s 12 year old brother was seriously ill in hospital and preparing for brain surgery. He died.

Is there anything in life that can come close to the pain of losing your child? I’ve not been there, but I don’t pretend for a second that anything could compete with such grief. Not one loss, but two for Saddam’s mother AND for Saddam. When we are in the womb we pick up EVERYTHING our mother is experiencing. There is no hiding, no escaping, no denying. Her feelings, her thoughts, her passions, her despair, her frustration, her hates, her grief...it is all ours.

Saddam’s mother was in emotional torment and threw herself under a bus to kill both herself and her baby. Clearly they both survived. She then tried to abort Saddam.

A Jewish family took them in and convinced her not to kill him. When Saddam was born, his mother gave him away to another family who raised him for the first three years of life. His mother remarried and Saddam then had a ‘home’ to come back to, except that his step-father was a bully who abused him throughout childhood.

As we grow up in life, we make choices. He could have made different choices. My point is though, who are any of us to judge him given his violent and unwanted arrival into life? How differently would we have reacted to ‘life’ given the same circumstances?

I’ve called this blog saint and sinner. Sin is an old archery term which means ‘to miss the mark’. That is, to miss the bull’s eye. Each and every one of us is capable of being a saint and a sinner. It’s easy to miss the mark…but it’s not impossible to keep our eyes focused on it and try our best to reach our goal of remembering Who We Really Are.

Some time, if you meditate, ask to be shown the vibrational field in which your parents conceived you…and move forward into your gestation and birth. Were you welcomed in love or indifference? Planned or tolerated?

One of the reasons I started The Mother magazine was because of my passion for conscious conception ~ to bring every baby into this world with nothing but unconditional love and welcome! To conceive, gestate and birth peacefully, non-violently and with love would truly change humanity. Nothing less will. Hanging people like Saddam Hussein doesn’t rid our world of poison. The elixir of life which will sustain, nourish and nurture every human being into their full potential is love. Nature or nurture? Regardless of the nature we come in with, nurture is fundamental. Never underestimate the impact of your parenting, and remember, it begins before conception.

happy new year everyone! ~ Veronika