New beginnings

The Universal journey of Easter

Lucy Maude Montgomery once wrote that “nothing ever seems impossible in the spring” and today’s reflections touch on this for all of us today no matter what challenges we may be facing.

Before we go deeper just a few reflections about Easter.

Our nephews are staying with us for a couple of nights this weekend so today with good friends we watched hundreds of excited kids hunting for eggs in the park. What IS it about the promise of hunting for Easter eggs that’s so much fun?

It seems that in the 1700’s the same amazing German immigrants that inspired us to decorate Christmas trees in our homes ALSO inspired our egg traditions. (In case you’re curious, the name egg in Old English is associated with a goddess of spring and fertility “ēastre” and the Germanic origin was “ostern” and mixed eventually the English word “east” became “Easter”.

I fondly recall working side by side with my mom to watch her boil the eggs, put them on ice, and then dye their bright colors. It was something I looked forward to every year because my parents worked hard on the farm and this was something fun. Even though we all know that Easter is not about chocolate bunnies and egg hunts, I would be lying if I told you that it was the magical part of the holiday for me growing up.

In contemplating a picture for this Easter Sunday message today I was drawn back to the roots of my Mom’s Ukrainian ancestry to a tradition called “pysanky”. A meditative tradition of melting wax onto eggs with a flame and repeatedly dipping them in colors that pre-dates Christianity. This picture is not meant to pressure you to up your egg game, but to highlight this ancient beautiful pagan spring ritual of renewal that has survived the genocidal efforts of Putin to not only dominate Ukraine’s people but to erase its culture.

Every time Ukrainians have had to flee from the Soviets or the Nazis they have immigrated to North America, thankfully with their “pysanky” egg decorating skills alive and well. They feel familiar to me. I grew up with some of these beautiful eggs on display in our home and maybe traditional art is embedded in our hearts and cultures because the most beautiful parts of our humanity somehow rise again and again in our most difficult challenges and are such an integral part of who we are.

These particular mystical, beautiful eggs were painstakingly colored as small symbols of hope and they were displayed at the Ukrainian Institute in New York. One of the reasons I wanted to share them with you today is because of what is planned for them next: They will be buried ceremoniously in the ground under the Ukrainian cities that were destroyed by bombs as symbols of fertility, hope, and rebirth.

Eggs are universal symbols of fertility, resurrection, and eternal life. I once heard someone say something simple but profound:

"If an egg is broken by an outside force, life ends. If broken by an inside force, life begins. Great things always begin from the inside.” ~ Jim Kwik

It’s easy for us to love spring with all of its warmth, sunshine, and the buds of new life after a long cold winter here in Canada, there are daffodil buds coming up out of the ground already in our front yard.

My husband and I had the chance to visit the Netherlands one April before covid and experienced the awe-inspiring sea of tulips at the Keukenhof Gardens. If you’ve never been, I hope you can see it for yourself one day, there are no words or even pictures that grasp the panoramic jaw-dropping layers of bright colors under the sunshine and are a powerful symbol of new life.

Many of us scratch our heads and wonder what bunnies, chicks, flowers, and eggs have to do with anything. In 15 minutes I’m definitely not going to explain the significance of this holiday, but to over 3 billion people that celebrate Easter and Passover, it’s a foundational part of their faith.

I love to zoom out and take a broader or metaphysical view of things from above the tree line to see that it’s not just a history for Jews or Christians to celebrate and contemplate, it’s a Universal story of the triumph of love and the healing potential that exists within all of us.

Easter represents a reason to hope when all hope seems lost, the potential for light that exists within even the deepest darkness, and the possibility for new beginnings that seems impossible when all has gone wrong.

When we’re frustrated and exhausted we’re just not open to infinite possibility – the willingness to consider that there might be another way, that a miracle might be possible – makes us available to miracles. We become pregnant with possibilities once having allowed the thought of the infinite possibility to penetrate our consciousness.

It’s like we forget and we reach a point of repeating a pattern and somewhere along the line, we have given up hope. We’re told something can’t happen. We’re told there is no cure. That there this is how it is. You’ll always be depressed. You are terminal. That war is inevitable. It’s too late for the environment. That the relationship is over. That the mountain cannot be moved.

So what does this have to do with Easter? We all know how it ends so why revisit this story each year?

Because the Easter story does not change, but WE do.

We can approach the story with a greater understanding by bringing our own healing and depth to it. Delving into the mysteries of a religious hero’s or heroine’s journey can unlock secrets otherwise unavailable to our conscious egoic mind.

Human suffering is inevitable in a world that is permeated with illusion and fear, yet through the power of forgiveness we can and do transform it. With every prayer, every moment of faith, every act of mercy, every instant of contrition, and every effort at forgiveness, in time we move beyond our suffering and find inner peace.

If I’m being honest, for most of my life I just didn’t believe that.

It didn’t feel real to me and I was sure I was right in my thinking. I was certain that life was over after death. I didn’t even allow it in because well, I found the whole idea of resurrection seemed impossible to imagine, and yet the more I heard stories of miracles, faith, and spontaneous healing the more I wondered if I was in denial. I still wanted proof.

I can remember walking into Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré a church in Quebec as a little girl lined with crutches, wheelchairs, and canes innocently wondering how or if is this possible. Seeing them felt like evidence of faith at its best:  life-giving instead of life-taking.  A visible display evidencing that many found new health and new life through their faith at that place at that time.  I still wasn’t sure at that time but it had an impact on me and years later drew me down to South America to experience another healing center where people came from around the world to have their own healings. It more or less sealed the deal for me.

There was more to the story of who and what we were and how things worked that was not easily explained.

We’re all dealt our own cards in life. We have our own curriculum, our own crucifixions, our own battles and trials, and tribulations. But each of us has within us the potential for enlightenment and resurrection. To heal our minds and our bodies if we allow it.

Light, according to A Course in Miracles, means “understanding.” It’s a shift from body identification to spirit identification. Of course, we have a body and we experience time and space in this third dimension, but there is a more ultimate energetic essence to us that Jesus was trying to demonstrate. He was not afraid to die because he knew better.

He realized something that we didn’t and still don’t.

The resurrected mind is the mind that understands. It understands that only love is real, and nothing else exists. It understands that illusions like old thought patterns die off and dissolve in the presence of love. It understands that we, and everything about our lives, can change in an instant.

Jesus was a fully self-actualized human being that offered us a way to SHIFT our level of CONSCIOUSNESS. We’ve been offered it many times before in History.

Moses offered a shift in consciousness.

The Buddha offered a shift in consciousness.

Plato offered a shift in consciousness.

St. Paul offered a shift in consciousness.

Rumi offered a shift in consciousness.

Mohammed offered a shift in consciousness.

Meister Eckhart offered a shift in consciousness.

Thich Nat Hahn offered a shift in consciousness.

Mooji, Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Gangaji, Ram Dass, Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, Allan Watts, and David Hawkins offered us a shift in consciousness among thousands more unheard-of enlightened people that have walked the earth and are today.

We have read their books, watched their youtube videos, and heard their teachings. It’s all at our fingertips now. Beyond that, pretty much every major world religion that I know of acknowledges that our physical birth is not the beginning and our physical death is not the end, so why are we so afraid to learn more about this possibility for ourselves?

Why are we still struggling to allow our minds to entertain that we may be wrong?

I think many of us are turned off by institutionalized religions and all of the wars, corruption, pain, and suffering they have inflicted. I get it. It wasn’t until the concept of religionless Christianity that I even allowed myself to reread the bible as an adult and stop judging it and open my own mind.

I was probably in my 40s before I realized how many different Christian interpretations were out in the world but there also seems to be a great divide between those established in a more exoteric form of Christianity based on a more literal biblical interpretation that Jesus died for our sins and he is the one and only Son of God. It’s the foundation of much of Christianity. It’s based on the material plane, the outer world, and the events, and God gave his only son to pay for our sins as a kind of retribution for giving us eternal life.

I find it fascinating because that religious story is more about what we think happened to the historical man from reading the gospels and accounts we were given rather than about his teachings that can free all of us. That he was an example of what is potential in us. Jesus himself was not an Orthodox Jew, he was more of a Mystic. Meaning he was not exoteric with his own faith but rather focused more on the inner or mystical or esoteric meaning and application of the messages in the Bible like aligning and listening to God and bringing his love out into the streets and real world. He was less about quoting scripture, moral judgment, rules, institutions, churches, sacrifices, punishments, and pulpits.

Just the opposite. He challenged and deconstructed ideologies everywhere he went. He never nailed down satisfying answers for anyone’s ego he told parables and stories open to interpretations, answered questions with questions, and spent his life trying to help others see something that they were missing and was eventually killed for it. He was challenging the status quo and deconstructing a religion of oppression but he was ALL about God.

So why didn’t the early mainstream Christians pick up on this? I’m not sure, to be honest, but there is a beautiful mystical sector to most major world religions including Christianity that eventually drew me in.

The Mystical path is the path of the heart.

In Islam it’s Suffism.

In Hinduism it’s Vedanta.

In Judaism, it’s the Kaballah.

In Buddhism, it’s Vajrayana.

In Native American mysticism it’s the Ghost Dance.

In Eastern Orthodoxy it’s Hesychasm.

In Christianity, it’s the Gnostic Gospels, ancient Celtic Teachings, and more modern highly intelligent channeled texts that use Christian terms but transcend religion like “A Course In Miracles” that are trying to help us get back on track and to free ourselves. They don’t claim to be the only way, but rather an expression of “one truth spoken in many different ways”.

Reading the bible bit by bit I came to learn that Jesus was not a fan of hierarchies and the mainstream institutions of power and oppression. He was more about having a felt experience of God’s love and forgiveness and extending that to others. Very few of us understand to this day from an ego and fear-based mind his famous statement on the cross “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do”.

I’ve always prayed to better understand what he meant. What EXACTLY don’t we know? What can’t we see from our current level of consciousness that needs forgiveness?

And that is what I have spent the better of the last decade learning mostly in private. After my own awakening experience, everything shifted for me. My life experience changed dramatically and it’s all I’ve been able to think about. I was lifted out of my sorrows and depression and addiction without me doing anything other than praying and asking for help so I needed to find a way to share this with others.

In my prayers, I asked to be shown how to see things differently.

To make this relatable and practical, let’s set the scene and imagine something that’s challenging you today…

Maybe a long-term relationship is coming to an end, a parent or partner is ill, you’ve lost a job, or you feel deeply depressed and you don’t see the end of your pain. We’re being asked at this time of year to look at ALL the challenges as the symbolic crucifixions in our own lives.

Can you even imagine there is the potential for a great change? Of feeling better? Of being happy. Of moving beyond your grief? Even if the circumstances in your life don’t change can you potentially make peace with them?

Being willing or open to allow ourselves to see this seems to be the key to the beginning of the end of our suffering.

In fact, the story of the crucifixion begins with an ending.

The point is not that we can do anything TO the darkness to make things feel better. Jesus didn’t resist what was happening to him. He kept getting up after being beaten down and he accepted his fate. He didn’t question or fight or analyze the darkness or weasel his way out. He saw beyond it. He surrendered. He focused on the light. On God.

This is not just a religious story or a theory, it’s a law of consciousness.

The only thing to be saved from is ourselves and our insane fearful thinking that has dominated our planet for thousands of years that have projected the outcomes we are experiencing today.

We are encouraged to look at the crucifixion but not dwell on it. Easter is a sign of peace, not pain.

No matter the circumstances of your life or what is done to your body you can overcome them because essential you cannot BE touched or harmed.

Jesus and all of these enlightened leaders and teachers are pointing to something our egos will not allow us to see or believe for ourselves. That our physical bodies are merely the vessels that are holding our divine essence or consciousness.

I was trying to think of a helpful metaphor, this one isn’t perfect but if we were trees and the tree trunk was our essential self or true eternal self, and the leaf represented our form or us in this lifetime. We’ve come to think or believe that we’re only leaving and that’s it. When fall comes around and we blow away, we don’t realize that the bigger part of us is alive and well beyond this season of life. It’s no wonder we are afraid to die. Some of us that have had NDEs or profound awakening experiences have had a taste of what we truly are but it’s not something we can intellectually grasp so why don’t we stop trying so hard?

Someone I respect and admire once said to me: “Do not allow your ego or your intellect to get in the way of allowing yourself the chance to have a spiritual experience in this lifetime”. Mysticism can only be experienced, never understood by the mind so give up looking for proof. Jesus begged us to stop asking for proof but we missed that too.

Believe it, THEN you’ll see or experience it. Jesus told us to pray by ourselves anyway, not from pulpits. This is between you and the source of your being so sit in your own spiritual closet at home behind closed curtains, that is fine.

From our separate, egoic fearful selves we just don’t believe that we can handle all of life, we even argue about our limitations in our own minds. As Freud brilliantly pointed out our egos use our own intelligence against us in service to our neurosis. The pain of childbirth, the pain of loss, the sadness, and the grief. We are made to experience life in all of its complexity.

We can handle the pain and the truth.

Even in childbirth, we ask for epidurals (again no judgment) not because we need them but because we want them. We don’t think or believe that we’re equipped to handle it. Why suffer? Let’s make things easier may just be a part of the problems we’re facing even environmentally. We are made to be able to endure pain and it’s a natural even healthy part of life because it makes us stronger. I’ve lived the last decade in chronic pain so I am no stranger to any of this. I’m not saying don’t ever use painkillers to help you if you need them. It’s simply to point past all of your interfering thoughts to your true nature.

We are capacious with the great capacity to hold ALL of our life experiences with grace, hope, and love and atone and forgive and surrender it to a higher power of our understanding and THAT is what heals.

We’re here to transcend the illusion of our fearful and unforgiving thinking.

And although it’s a natural process, death seems to be our number one fear worldwide even though we’re told not to worry.

“Be not afraid” is even repeated 365 times in the bible.

According to A Course In Miracles, “You can have a miracle OR a grievance, but you can’t have both”. Of course, you can keep your narrative, your complaints about others, and your need to be right but you will stay stuck there. You can’t have a foot in both worlds effectively. Trust me, I’ve tried that.

It’s one or the other…fear or love.

We get to choose. Over and over again. Response-ability. We have the ability to shift our thinking and we can choose to respond differently.

Over and over in our daily lives.

Jesus did this. He achieved this level of self-awareness in himself and he was trying to help us. We misunderstood. He told us not to call him Lord and worship him but we did and we still do. He actualized the state that is potential in us and that is why it’s hard not to worship him. I do. It’s no wonder he’s called the Alpha and the Omega because he inhabited the space that is ultimate but is available to all of us in every moment.

Easter is a demonstration of how we can pause and shift our thinking. To allow our own minds and hearts to be healed.

To resurrect beyond the dark circumstances and narratives or the details of our lives and remember the bigger picture of our identity. We’re not just a leaf, we’re also the tree trunk and roots and a part of the eternal forest, and our existence continues past this one-leaf cycle.

If we are just identified as a separate leaf, it does seem inevitable that we’ll have an existential crisis, feel anxiety and fear the end of our lives and the loss of everything from our loved ones to our beauty.

This took me 50 years to accept this as a possibility for myself and no convincing from others would have done it for me, so I get it if you’re not buying this. Maybe this year we can just open up to possibility and give ourselves all the time we need to sort this out for ourselves. Nothing will get through our defenses otherwise. You don’t need to tell anyone, let’s be just willing to allow our own personal perceptions to shift to a new reality.

The resurrection itself as the story is told was not immediate.

There are 3 symbolic days between the crucifixion and the resurrection. Christ “rose from the dead” after 3 days. Marianne Williamson has a friend that calls this “tomb time” when you are living in the uncertainty of the outcome. It may take 10 years. Or 40 between the end and the new beginning.

Life and death are a mystery to all of us here on Earth. Speculation at best, but I find the quality of intelligence and the concepts that seem to be coming through to us now as the veils are thinning fascinating. Once we can get over ourselves and how the messages come and instead of reacting fearfully hear what they have to say we may find ourselves free. It’s uncanny to me how aligned they are with what Jesus was demonstrating to us. It’s also what every enlightened sage and human has walked the earth and has left us with. The whole bible is filled with people hearing voices so why wouldn’t that be any different today?

When we pray and surrender our way of seeing or thinking that has kept us stuck and ask to be shown a better way, we become meek and humble, and in our humility, the heavy boulders that are keeping us in the dark are mysteriously removed and we rise. We stop seeing through a glass darkly. Solutions will come to us naturally in the form of people, resources, and books.

We recognize in a moment that we are free and we always were, but for the illusions of perception that ruled us up to this point. We see through it all.

The altar is in our own minds. Our THOUGHTS are energetically RAISED to a higher vibration where a lie and fear cannot even be held. It cannot exist.

We are energetically resurrected. All things are new to us from this vantage point.

We RISE.

“You will know the truth,” Jesus said to those who trusted him, “and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32). By his clear-eyed honesty, Jesus revealed holy, ironic wholeness. Denying pain intensifies it, but facing hard facts of life and death leads us deeper into a reality where God and the eternal can be found.  

We’re all dealt different cards but no matter what the circumstances, there is always hope. One of my favorite books is “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. He survived the Holocaust and witnessed the death of his parents, his brother, and his wife at Auschwitz. His insights are all aligned with what Jesus demonstrated:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.” What is this? “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

Jesus is showing us that there is always hope and life where hope and faith exist to allow yourself to see beyond your current circumstances.

Easter isn’t just about Jesus 2000 years ago, it’s about all of us today.

It’s interesting how so many of us experience loss and suffering or witness injustice in the world and we shake our fists and say why is God doing this to me?? Why me?

God is not allowing children to starve in the world, there is an abundance of food on this earth…we are. It’s our maligned thinking, our fear, and our low levels of consciousness that need to be surrendered.

The mystical meaning of the Esoteric Journey as a Universal Journey is as applicable today as it was 2000 years ago.

Jesus was in a state of mind that is potential in us.

So let’s recap:

First, there is an END. Something we face that we can’t control and we ask to be shown a better way. Like Nelson Mandella facing imprisonment for a crime, he didn’t commit. We forgive our captors. We ask to be shown a better way of seeing our suffering. He even befriended the guards.

Regardless of the details of what has transpired. We are 100% willing to be shown how to see things differently.

Second, we wait. With hope. Even for 27 years like Nelson Mandella if need be and in the meantime, we live as best we can. We serve others and eventually, the blocks that are keeping us in the darkness will be lifted.

Third is our resurrection. The last step and the crowning accomplishment of a forgiving mind. It nullifies the effects of the darkness and all the dead places inside of us.

These are not just abstract ideas if we allow ourselves to allow this to enter our own minds as a possibility they are like fertilized eggs waiting for the right time to hatch from the inside out.

Happy Easter, everyone!! May the colorful tulips, eggs, and especially love renew your life today and peace prevail in all of our minds and on earth.

With love,

Nona

ps. There are so many inspiring songs of redemption like “We shall overcome”, but this song by Bob Marley has some of my favorite lyrics:

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds

If you aren’t familiar here it is performed by contestant Michell Brunings amateur artist on the Voice in Holland. In blind auditions and I just love his tone and the message of the song…