Elementals, Nature, and the Value of Play

Elementals are the Beings that play the role of participating in the actual manifestation of material reality under the direction, guidance and inspiration of Higher Beings. They sacrifice themselves to this challenging role for the sake of the human being that we may have a stage upon which to grow and evolve. Their nature is such that they imitate the qualities, thinking and especially feelings of the humans that are in their environment. For this reason, we can affect the environments we live in and that we create, including our homes, yards, towns, states, countries, and world. The following are positive actions that we can take to create a positive and healthy environment and sacred space.

1. Be cheerfully industrious.
2. Become balanced with an evenness between cheer and seriousness. Practice deliberate cheerfulness.
3. Observe the seasons with reverence and veneration. Create Festivals that reflect these qualities and spiritual devotion.
4. Cultivate love, awe, wonder, gratitude and idealism.
5. Form the habit of blessing your home, your yard, your life, people, etc. with the qualities and virtues you value, such as love, peace, generosity, kindness, and truth. This can be done with blessings, ceremonies, prayers, etc.
6. When serving and preparing food charge it with the qualities of the Light of Higher Beings. Ask that it bring perfect health and vitality to your family. Request and command that there be plentiful food for your self, your family, loved ones, your country, and the world. Carry the inner attitude that every meal is a banquet of thanksgiving. Express gratitude to God and The Higher Beings, the Elementals for all that you receive.
7. Bless and give thanks to and for your clothing. Charge it with love, Cleanliness, strength and beauty for all your family.
8. Bless and be thankful for your home as a Temple of Light and Happiness, of Peace, great silence, security, sanctuary and as an altar of gratitude.
9. Bless and picture those entering your home to be filled with Light, Love and Peace.
10. Charge and picture your beds as places of forgiveness, of rest, healing, of restoration and rejuvenation where there is perfect peace and a connection to the Higher Self, the I Am That I Am.
11. Charge and picture every chair and seat with the energy of harmonization, purity, health Illumination, love and goodness.
12. Visualize your home to be a Holy Cup filled with the liquid Light of protection, perfect beauty, and purity.
13. Express love and gratitude to the Elementals for their loving sacrifice and ask that they be freed from the negativity that humans express in thought, feeling and action.

In my life experience I have found that raising children is one of the most inspiring opportunities you may have for spiritual initiations.  Every child is a recent arrival with the latest news from the spiritual world and that gift lies within the being of this tiny individual who is a seed baby ready to grow and blossom.  Rudolf Steiner has shared that the angels were intimately involved with child rearing in earlier stages of   human consciousness . The necessary evolutionary development of our intellect has left us without the intuitions which the angelic world conveyed to us in times past to assist in parenting.  He also offers a pathway to develop these intuitions and reestablish a relationship to the angelic world to assist us in guiding the children.

This intuitive process begins to develop when we consider with an open mind that every child has come from the spiritual world and alternates between life on earth and life across the threshold. They are children of the creator,  gifted to us to love and cherish, to guide and learn with as they mature. A family is chosen by the soul and higher being, the I AM THAT I AM, with particular ancestral traits and possibilities for a constitutional body.  This provides  a vehicle offering the best options for developing and living a life which allows the destiny to unfold. Based on past life experiences  and the insights of  the higher being, these characteristics serve the evolutionary needs of the child’s soul and spirit.  The feelings and attitudes which the mother has about this unfolding miracle play a central role in the development of the child in the womb.   Awe and wonder, joy and serenity affect  the body chemistry of the Mother so that she can create a welcoming environment for the feelings and organs of the infant to develop in a healthy and life embracing way.

A dialogue can also begin with the child’s angel with a request to guide and assist one in creating an environment in the home which will support health and well being for your child, in a way co-parenting with the wisdom and insight higher beings can offer.

The relationship with the child has already begun as well.  Steiner shares in one of the volumes of “ Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies” that we have been together in the spiritual world before our birth and in  past lives, not necessarily as parent and child.  Thus a possibility exists that parents and children may evolve together.  With these thoughts in mind the child who is held in joy and wonder,  before and after birth, has a very different feeling than one who is surrounded with worry, fear or doubt about any aspect of childbirth and child rearing. This is an important aspect, for the child is affected a great deal by the feeling world of adults.  Of course, thoughts and actions have an impact, but it is the feelings the child perceives most strongly.

From birth, when the child’s perceptions are first experiencing physical earthly existence, the child is mainly connected to the parents and foremost the mother.  Steiner spoke of the dominant capacity of imitation in the young child and this is what is most prominent in the relationship. In the spiritual world the child experiences a deep feeling of devotion and brings this into the physical world in the expression of imitation. This is not the basic concept of imitation that I raise a hand, the child raises a hand. Rather, the young child’s imitation is one that is visceral and  all encompassing as the child  experiences not so much what you say or what you do, but instead who you are, your “Being”, which expresses itself in what you think, say, do and particularly what you feel.

The predominate mode of imitation in the child makes the parents the prominent role models for the child at the deepest and formational levels of the body and psyche as well as a guide for how to be in a physical body and function in the material world.  When the relationship develops with this understanding of the child’s experience one strives to be a role model worthy of imitation. This developmental and age appropriate understanding supports  the child’s sense of self in growing with a deeply felt experience of being understood and honored .Note that the emphasis is on striving, for we all learn a great deal from making errors and the child benefits from this as a model for being human.

In the future I hope to further explore imitation and the role of guidance as well as other aspects of parenting as I continue to develop the work with prenatal parents.

I am very happy to have people forward these blog articles on to other parents and request that you acknowledge where they originated and/or link to my website.☺

In Stargarden, my Waldorf Early Childhood Parenting Program, the morning  begins with the group of adults and children singing together:

 “Give Thanks to the Mother Earth, Give Thanks to the Father Sun, Give Thanks to the beautiful garden, Where the Mother and the Father are One,

 Give Thanks, give thanks, give thanks that we are One, Give thanks, give thanks, To the Mother and the Father Sun”

The greeting is accompanied by gestures of gratitude to our Mother, the Earth, and Father, the Sun, reconnecting with a feeling of humility to the Nature Spirits, the Elementals, and the Higher Beings who have sacrificed themselves to manifest material reality for the sake of our Spiritual Development here.

In creating a garden, even small flowerpots on the window sill, one nurtures in children a deep appreciation of these invisible brothers and sisters. The feeling of gratitude and appreciation for the plants, which are manifestations of the elemental beings, nurtures these Beings in a way that frees them from material bondage. The relationship that we cultivate with the Divine Mother Earth through tending and caring for our garden keeps alive the child’s inherent experience of their spiritual home and creates an aura of blessed sanctuary so that the beneficial elementals, and we with them, find peace. Through the seasons, careful attentiveness to the needs of the elementals in the garden helps to imbue the children and adults with health-giving vitality so that they have an experience of the sensible and supersensible in nature and the physical world and can find the peace and harmony accessible to all.

One aspect of tending the garden involves use of biodynamic sprays with which we aid the cultivation of sanctuary for humans, for plants, for animals, and the supersensible realms. Each sanctuary becomes an island of light with its boundaries extending to the farthest reaches of the cosmos and to the deepest realms, where Higher Beings who guide the earth reside. The home becomes the chapel for the Holy Family to worship in the daily rhythms of waking and sleeping, eating and cleaning, working and playing. Our work becomes our prayer, and our prayer becomes our work, as we celebrate the spark of divinity, the gift of co-creator, within each individual. It is a very full, rich and beautiful tapestry of life that we weave together.

It was Rudolf Steiner’s vision that these islands of light be cultivated far and wide. Here in the Rocky Mountain region and throughout Waldorf communities and other communities which appreciate the Mother Earth and Father Sun, we can shine brightly by creating such sanctuary.

I am very happy to have people forward these blog articles on to other parents and request that you acknowledge where they originated and/or link to my website.☺