A guardian angel is a part of us. Its the part of us that returns us to being whole. It comes from us.

Life hives off the part of us that makes us whole. The part that makes us complete as we are, perfect without doing. Self-contained and content as we are. That happens in life.

We fragment. We need to become something, something that emphasizes a facet. Over-develop aspects that work and protect us. Put forward the parts that can handle (at least partially) the stresses of fitting into a social world, surviving outside.

Developing the do part.

The guardian angel is the part that remembers who we are. It is the part that embodies, holds, holds onto that essence. It is that part, the formation of something, uniquely personal that will continue to exist, exist and protect us, exist and remind us, exist and support us, even as we form into a do-er self.

The guardian angel is an aspect of our being. An aspect that connects and links us to our perfection, our creation, our divinity. It comes from the part of us, where this experience is not even abstract. Because where we come from, and when we arrive in this world whole, this is not abstract, it is the water we swim in.

My daughter Ada is in Kindergarten. This is a neat but hard transition. She is entering institutional life. The pressure of so many rules, regulations, must-do’s. Much about managing bodies, managing and creating institutions. The loss of so much self-explored and organic-group explored activity and learning.

She feels that pressure.

Also the self-consciousness, a deep change in perception. Learning that I need to survive in this. Its largely social. Its bigger than me. I need to learn how to do this and fit in. Not love and joy for joys sake. The environment is not necessarily supportive and there just for me. I need to shrink my living to see what is welcome, possible. What fits. It no longer starts inside, out. The outside is a function of my inside expression. The outside is something that exists, and I need to see who I can be in it. The abrupt shift, turning outside in, hiving off our authentic, simple self-expression. To create something formed outwardly.

And she feels that weight. She feels that pressure. She is fine in so many ways. She, and others, need to build protections and functional ways of being. Becoming a do-er, is crucial to survival, it is part of what we do on this earth as human beings, it is part of the developmental process, the experience of moving through the journey of life. But from a spiritual perspective, and by this I mean that part of ourselves connected to wholeness, the part where this is not even abstract, but our actual way of being, a felt sense, a perception and experience in the world, it is the part that some essence, gets, relatively quickly, forgotten. Harder to know.

Today Ada is getting a guardian angel. A friend gave us the idea. It is a way of offering something that addresses her anxiety. It is offering something that is real, at least I am discovering this, as I see how this concept is emerging so organically and naturally from within this developmental moment in her life.

And it fits with her knowing and connecting back to her wholeness. We are going to a small special bookshop, one with lots of sacred small objects. I am allowing her to pick her guardian angel. We’ve talked about the idea for about a week. Ada has been having anxiety at night anticipating the things that are unknown about the next days school day. It has been helpful to talk about it. It has been helpful to normalize it, talk with her about how others,myself included feel that way. It has been helpful for her to use her ‘breathing tool’, something they offer in school. And it has been helpful for her to do some drawings, and she has drawn some amazing images of her face, in ‘nervousness’, ’scared and not knowing what comes next’, and ‘afraid’. But these are all still managing the ‘feelings’. There is a whole person there. There is a spiritual being there. There is someone who does not have to ‘control the world’ to be safe. There is someone who can learn to let go, and trust, so she can just be in her life, and not be obsessing about the parts she can’t control.

And for us, for her, we are introducing the guardian angel. It is the part of her she is forgetting. It is the part of her, she loses touch with when she is anxious, or her world feels bigger than her. And it is a something, a real something, a pointer back to what is always there. And she will find it and pick it.

Ada is a very open girl. She sees and allows the connection between the practical doing realm, and the subjective, fluid being realm. And she, in her life, is testing her relationship and perception between these realms. She will do great in school. She can do, and she is bright. But can she ‘do’ without fragmenting so much, without losing contact so much. Can we as parents, often as women, as spiritual beings (not in some woo-woo sense, but in the sense of having worked hard to be rediscovering wholeness) add and allow this connection between worlds and parts of ourselves and theirs.

For me, this little guardian angel, and the practice and remembrance it represents seems beautiful.

We will see how it goes.

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I give thanks and acknowledgement to Wendy Hammond-Matthews who surfaced the idea of a guardian angel as a spiritual option for working with anxiety. I thank Ada for showing us this potential opening in this developmental turn in her life. I welcome the curiosity and input of others, as this is just an experiment and a creative offering and option in how we work with spirituality in our lives, in a real, and responsive, and deeply feminine practice. I thank my friends who let me send this very different kind of message and mini-essay, journal-type entry to them for experiencing. Much love, Rebecca

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Questions

It is not meant to be denominational or a specifically Christian entity. I do not intend or experience any binary with any other form of God, Goddess, Diety, or Protector. But it makes me curious, what is the aspect, the other names of something that is personal, holds and protects us, and returns us to the felt (already existing) remembrance of wholeness, as if they hold the wholeness, which we in that moment cannot fully see in ourselves?

1. What would be other names and entities that would expand the intention of this touchstone or protector that specifically has this dimension of wholeness? Not a specific power, an aspect or way of being that is needed in the moment, but our wholeness?

2. What is that in other faith traditions? What is that in other forms?

3. What does it make you see?