Your Bowl of Light: Ancestral Hawaiian Wisdom

While at a Lomi retreat this week, I was again reminded of this simple yet profound and beautiful story.  It helps me when I am down, and maybe there is a time when it can help you too.  So I share it here.....

The Bowl of Light
Since ancient times the Hawaiians believe and pass on this simple idea:  Each child is born with a bowl of light.  This bowl represents your true identity,  a vessel of shining light. If you are taught to love and respect the light, then you will grow in strength and health and you can do anything – swim with the sharks, fly with the birds, know and understand all things.

If, however, you judge your experiences of life as bad, become fearful, worried, ashamed, stressed, or resentful, each of these things represents a stone that is dropped into your bowl.  Each time a stone is dropped into your bowl, it blocks some of the light.   The stone and the light cannot hold the same space. 

If you continue to drop stones into your bowl, it will eventually be full of stones, the light will go dark, and the bowl will become heavy, and burdensome.   But the good news is that the light never goes out, it is just sometimes obscured by the stones.

If you become tired of your bowl being heavy and dark, and you also feeling like a stone,  you can simply turn over the bowl and the stones fall out, and you your light will shine again!  What a simple yet profound idea - that it is simply up to you at anytime to let go, dump the stones that weigh down and darken your bowl and start again with a perfect bowl of light.  What a liberating and powerful idea.

In this Hawaiian story, the bowl of light represents our true essence: pure light, pure love. When we are conscious and respectful of this light, we are living in our highest state of freedom, our sovereignty.

The stones in the bowl represent the pain and suffering that we cause ourselves by resisting life instead of trusting it, and by not accepting others or ourselves as we are.

If we fill our bowl of light with stones, we lose connection with our essence and feel separate from the source of love and light.  The reality is that all of our experiences, both painful and pleasurable, will always be part of  who we are. It’s not possible to deny or eliminate them. What we can do is free ourselves of the stones at anytime and return the light to our bowl so that the memories of our wounds no longer affect us negatively.

You can apply the message from the Bowl of Light story to your own life - and if you like, even get a bowl, and some stones to remind you.. Try an experiment:  Try to think about your own bowl right now.  Is it full? half full?  empty?  Try then to think about turning your bowl, emptying the stones right now, and start and try today to live in the moment, and become conscious of your thoughts, feelings, and communication with your friends, family, coworkers, customers, and so forth. Try to keep your bowl empty of stones.

I love this simple story, with its powerful profound message.  May your bowl of light shine always.   Remember, its up to you..

Aloha

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