I was pondering about why children and teenagers love to just ‘hang out’, ‘chill out’ and just generally get together with no particular purpose per se. It occurred to me that these were just modern day expressions of what is actually quite natural for us all…
- To just simply ‘BE’
- No agenda
- No ‘to-do’ lists
- Simply BEING and connecting with others
Children often amaze and inspire me because when they are just being themselves they connect to people with such openness, ease, presence and playfulness. The innocence in their eyes and their body just melts any hardness that comes their way.
Children are so inspiring and we have much to learn from them, for when they are just left to simply be themselves, the sparkle in their eyes is bright, the expression is full and they know in their hearts what true love is and what it is not.
So what happens to us when we get older? Where does that sparkle go? Do we forget how to just ‘hang out’ and ‘be’ with each other? We all were once a child with that sweet innocence and honest connection with ourselves.
As adults, how often do we truly connect to this? Yes, we catch up with friends and spend time with family, but are we truly allowing ourselves to ‘BE’ and connect with each other – heart to heart? Are our accumulated protections, hurts and mistrusts stopping us from truly meeting and connecting with each other? Have achievements, goals, and recognition become more important than true connection – leading us to always be ‘doing’ something?
These are the questions I have been pondering on lately as I appreciate and observe the sweet innocence of a child – an innocence that is naturally within us all, should we choose to re-connect to it.
The innocence and openness I re-connected to within myself recently felt so heavenly and natural; in the past this had felt very raw and ‘naked’ to me, which is why I would rarely allow myself to go there as an adult. But there was nothing ‘weak’ about being in my innocence, quite the opposite. The more I allowed myself to stay open to this, the more I could feel the power of my expression that came from this connection of deep presence and stillness.
I then took myself for a walk with my openness and innocence. My chest and heart felt so different – I felt so open to people and the world and my chest and heart felt like it was 1 metre in front of me. This was definitely new to me!
I realised that what I was experiencing was what it would feel like to let people in, to let the world in, to not put up a guard to protect, to allow myself to be fully seen in my sweet natural innocence.
Gosh the world felt so different!
All I had to do was surrender and ‘JUST BE ME’.
In our innocence we are so open and precious and truly divine.
Forever inspired by Serge Benhayon who inspires me to JUST BE ME.
By Marika Cominos, Melbourne
Further Reading:
Serge Benhayon: The Natural Philosopher
Inspired by Universal Medicine… Just Being Me
The Natural Love Of A Child
845 Comments
My feeling is the more you commit to making your life and work about connecting to people the more you are gifted with to Just Be.
I know for myself there is often a doing that needs to happen. I’ve told myself it’s all about purpose. But lately I’ve been reflecting on the purpose of just hanging out. Being together, connecting and that being the purpose. I think I’ve let myself be tricked into thinking that purpose was all to do with achieving something.
It’s a good marker to use by observing how children and teens can naturally allow themselves to just be, and how they value the simplicity of connecting to others. This really highlights the way we push and rush our bodies through life and remain in cycles of endless doing instead of experiencing the joy of being with ourselves and others.
This openness is indeed the way to go Marika. It can feel very naked at first, but feels so much different than the closed off “just busy with me’ attitude I lived with for such a long time. What a change!
“So what happens to us when we get older? Where does that sparkle go?” Our inner sparkle of childhood is forever there within us patiently waiting for us to feel the light.
It’s great to question the systems of life and the state of the world and our physical bodies. There is so much illness and disease now and there is clearly something very wrong with our systems of life if this is the product of our way of living. Perhaps it is all in the fact that the systems seem to make life all about doing and not nearly if at all about be-ing!
Returning to a feeling of innocence in our body is a transformational experience that, when experienced, becomes a foundation for interaction and communication
A simple recipe of Just being me – so why do I make it so complicated by adding extra ingredients?
‘Do we forget how to just ‘hang out’ and ‘be’ with each other? Thank you Marika, re reading your blog made me realise once more how easy it is to make life into a serious matter and on the other hand how simple it is to reconnect to what we felt when we were young and is still living within, our natural sweetness and innocence, the sparkle we all have.
Children are great at just hanging out and being themselves – with no agendas or to do lists shadowing them they are light hearted, open and thus a joy to be around.
Absolutely Susie, I agree with you but why can’t we say the same about adults? Is it because most of us have forgotten how to be ourselves, light, playful, open and joyful?
My husband and I got to hang with one of our sons last night and go shopping. It wasn’t what we were doing or buying that was precious, it was being together and listening to each other. For me especially, instead of going with a goal and allowing that to drive ahead of us, I just went with the flow and it was amazing and so different. We were more understanding of each other, it was actually more enjoyable then how I usually feel about shopping. It showed me that when we put ourselves first then everything else is out there, it is second and then we can just be ourselves and not get wrapped up in doing.
I often see children in the supermarket where I work and I get so shocked with the ease they are at, they laugh, sing, run, dance, jump, scream, shout, tell jokes, do cartwheels, play with their friends and so many other things, they just do what they feel like doing, nothing less nothing more. its amazing to watch because I know that I used to be like that as well.
It is beautiful to watch Viktoria, for most young children the fun and joy is seen in the smallest thing. Like simply walking down the street can become a game, skipping or jumping over the cracks so naturally.
It is true, we have forgotten who we are and as such our natural way of being. Yet our essence, our inner-sparkle remains unchanged, it is only our relationship, to our essence that changes. In rediscovering our connection with ourselves, our essence, our body and being, we discover just how natural and liberating it is to be ourselves and share our real selves with the world.
Yes, that’s a great reminder and through our daily activities/ choices we can either connect or disconnect further.
I love on walks to just stop and hang out, there is an intimacy that we allow in these pauses that is very precious.
I remember before TV came to our community we did a lot of ‘hanging out’…and we were a lot fitter as well !
A child can light up a whole room with that open and innocent connection they have to their innermost. So can adults when they reconnect to that same quality and essence.
I got to ‘hang out’ with one of my granddaughters the other day. We had been shifting dead branches in one of our paddocks when my body said stop and rest and I listened, unlike in the past when I would have kept going until the job was finished no matter how I felt. So I sat down and she joined me and we hung out, talking about nature and life interspersed with moments of silence. It felt so wonderful to just stop and be and to not feel guilty about it; it was a moment in time that I truly valued.
Beautiful, it’s so needed sometimes. Today I felt that I just needed to rest, however I did not, that lead to eating food which is making me sick right now, and being unable to focus at work.
The world has become so much about doing and not that it is bad to do things but it is very important to know ourselves first from our being-ness and from there do things. Otherwise we don’t know who we are and get lost in the doing and exhausting ourselves beyond our limit.
“Children are so inspiring and we have much to learn from them, for when they are just left to simply be themselves, the sparkle in their eyes is bright, the expression is full and they know in their hearts what true love is and what it is not.” I so agree Marika, especially after looking after my young grandchildren for a few days while their parents had a break. We had such fun, simply hanging out.
We work so hard to look like someone else, or look like a picture in a magazine, or to behave in a way we think we are supposed to, or to meet the standards set by our parents. Just being ourselves seems reserved for a lucky few, but it is on offer for everyone.
When we feel the quality of our true self worth and love we can just be with it and express from there with others and experience the joy of just being, but we live with such a fast paced lifestyle that people don’t know how to be with another except in the doing of some activity.
The world of “doing” is a very exhausting world to live in, where we are always on the go, always rushing, always trying to be better than another – just writing that feels exhausting. I prefer a world of “being”, where we are simply being ourselves, where it’s okay to stop and to feel the joy of “hanging out” , no agendas, no expectations and definitely no exhaustion.
There is something seriously missing in this world and I reckon this blog has hit that nail on its head. We may have aeroplanes, be able to text our friends at school and across the world in seconds, and have the flashed technology our ancestors could only have wished for, but we still endlessly seek something that even our tech has not provided. There is a quality about these beautiful play-full moments of just be-ing and not having to do anything that brings a whole deeper dimension to life and who we truly are that the busy-ness of our world has very clearly been ignoring.
It’s such a valid point that children and teens are all about the being, and as adults we lose this and become all about the “doing”. How much we miss out on by not simply being ourselves.
Beautiful blog Marika! It makes a huge difference to how we live and feel when are able to stay open to the world.
The only thing I would share by way of adding to this blog, is that whilst it is important to recognize the divine quality in children – the innocence, love and open-ness – nor should we allow that to become an ideal that blinds us to the fact that children equally can be manipulative, or cruel, or disconnected, and so as adults we have a responsibility to raise our children, nor just let them “be” in that regard. Similarly, yes, whilst it is true that society is driven to the point we have forgotten just “to be”, that is not to say that there is always connection in just being or hanging out. To put it so simplistically without further explanation is dangerous in a way for it suggests on one level that being in the activity of “doing” is somehow wrong, and that by default and in order to connect to our Soul we therefore need to be doing nothing. As this article points out, we definitely as a society have too much motion, and too much drive. However, the answer is not necessarily in just learning to be. It is about learning to understand the quality of our beingness, and that is something actually different. To be still, or connected to our essence is not actually related to the amount of activity at all, but rather a description of the quality of our activity ( and note just being, or hanging out is still an activity, just one with less physical movement) . And so, one can hang out, and even just be with one’s self and still be disconnected, just as one can being working hard and committed to a busy day and still be connected to their divine essence, and actually therefore be in the emanation of the quality known as stillness.
What you have to say Adam is very interesting because I know a small child and from the get go of meeting this child when they were a baby there was a wariness in them, they seem to look out at the world with suspicion. And as this little child gets older I have been able to observe how very intelligent they are and how they use this to be manipulative how they strive to control the situation all the time. It has been quite an eye opener for me and I feel that this is where we get to understand the possibility of reincarnation because how can a little child know so much about control and manipulation? What if this was how they were in their previous life and they have just came back into this life with the same personality traits?
As an adult it seems we have gone through the ‘school of hard knocks’ and almost completely changed how we were to fit into the world around us. It’s like we have taken all the things that have happened or didn’t work for us and made sure we didn’t repeat them so the outcome would be different. Some may call them embarrassing, hurtful or frightening experiences but whatever they were we have used them as a point to make a change so they weren’t repeated. We think that by changing ourselves and what we did prior this would stop them ever happening again or protect us from ever feeling that way again. What if though these experiences weren’t what they seemed? In other words what if things came at you when you were younger, not for you to change as a result but for you to be aware of how they felt in order to see them more clearly. So you don’t shy away, avoid or change but you watch, embrace and become aware of what you are seeing. The world isn’t meant to change you so you map out from yourself a way to be so that things don’t repeat. Things repeat for a reason and our avoidance of them or pretending they don’t exist doesn’t mean they don’t repeat, it just means we have found a way to cope or pretend that they aren’t there. The next time something ‘bad’ or similar happens just stop and bring an awareness to how you feel. Don’t make a change as a result of what happened but more simply bring awareness to how you are feeling and take that into your next step. No thoughts carried forward either just the presence of your breathing and what is happening in front of you in the next moment. What if all we needed came from simply how you breath and the full presence of your next step? If seems too simple, but yet this is truly how it works. We aren’t meant to carry experiences around on our shoulders or in our bodies to map out a path to avoid them ever happening again, things will just play out a different way. Presence and breathing, simply all that we need.
Innocence as a quality has been badly maligned. Allowing a connection to our pure innocence is nothing less than Divine.
The joy in my heart from reading this and the knowing inside of our pure divnity this allows in the moment is beautiful to reclaim within as adults and is always there. “Children are so inspiring and we have much to learn from them, for when they are just left to simply be themselves, the sparkle in their eyes is bright, the expression is full and they know in their hearts what true love is and what it is not.”
‘Children are so inspiring and we have much to learn from them, for when they are just left to simply be themselves, the sparkle in their eyes is bright, the expression is full and they know in their hearts what true love is and what it is not.’ And we can be like children again and feel the joy in our hearts, open and tender beings we are.
The belief that we are only worth hanging out with if we have done something or are doing something completely kills that joy of simply being ourselves and feeling that we are worth hanging out with just as we are. Until I had someone come into my life who wants to hang out regardless if we do anything or not I never saw how tight this hold this belief of what I do = my worth as a person to be has been. The beautiful thing is that I am the one holding and nothing is holding over me and as such I can choose differently.
We can’t THINK openness, we have to FEEL and BE openness. I love the physical and tangible example you gave Marika of the feeling and expansiveness in your chest and how that allows the movement of being open with people to so naturally occur. This doesn’t come from the mind, the mind does not love, it is all coming and being communicated from the body – so how we live and treat the body has a huge impact on how we relate to people from the body.
Beautiful Marika, how simple joy can be when we surrender and just be.
There is such deliciousness to this “to allow myself to be fully seen in my sweet natural innocence.” A moment of wondering, can I really do this, I wonder what it will feel like now? And also a responding from my body appreciating I also know this already as I have lived it before – maybe not for a while but my body can still feel what it’s like just by reading the sentence.
I love when we allow ourselves to be and don’t go into moving and operating in ‘roles’. The other day I didn’t go into a teacher mode way of relating to someone who was having a challenging moment but instead just related and connected to them. I could have started to tell them what the school rules were and needed to be but knew something different was needed, in this I was able to gain a much greater understanding of what was going on for a student and we didn’t go into a battle of power- it was more working together.
Kristy this is beautiful – and life changing experience when we are connected to and not dealt with from a register of wright and wrong.
“Children are so inspiring and we have much to learn from them,” i so agree Marika. Witnessing six year olds being who they naturally still are (content in their own skin) in the classroom is a joy, as ‘the system’ has not yet got to them on the whole. Being true to who we are is vital – otherwise who are we? Learning to accept, appreciate and love myself has been something I am grateful to Universal Medicine for, for reminding me of the importance of this.
Once you choose to leave or disconnected from the lightness that you were as a child life begins to impact on you. You begin to mould yourself to fit into how the world is and not hold yourself and allow the world to come to you. This we can say is where the world batters you into the person you are but equally you have chosen to lessen who truly you are to fit into what you see. Children don’t plan ahead and yet always have a plan, be open, be love and welcome anything that is front of them. As adults we change how we are in the world and then are unhappy with how things are around us. We have more responsibility then currently meets our eye and if we look back to look forward you will find all we need do is be truly present in the moment.
Gorgeous blog Marika, I agree the world does feel completely different when we surrender, be open and simply be ourselves. How we feel about ourselves is an indication of how we choose to see the world. When we are more loving, we are also more likely to be open to receiving more love, and be able to see and appreciate how loving we all actually are.
This blog exposes the naturalness and spontaneity we lose as adults. As children we thought less and simply moved from the heart and connected with friends and others. Now it feels as if we’ve created complex processes to meet with another. Very rare to simply drop by and be with another, all is planned in advance. The only home I drop by in and hang out is my friend who lives next door.
ha ha perfect timing reading this right now as over the last week this is what I have been feeling more and more to just be and not do! There is no quality in doing but plenty in being and gosh it is so much easier! As you have said ‘All I had to do was surrender and ‘JUST BE ME’. Beautifull.