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The Pearl and the Hut, Volume II explores understandings and higher perceptions around the psychological developments and heart challenges of adult child of divorce. The soul-spiritual insights in Rudolf Steiner's human consciousness philosophy, Anthroposophy, renew a person's humanness in the face of massive and necessary world changes.
From the soul-psyche orientations of the twenty-one-year-old and the Sentient Soul period of life, to the fifty-six-year-old living into the Spirit Self nature, adult children of divorce see ways to navigate complex development stages without bypassing important relationships, feelings, thoughts and deeds. |
Biographies, verses, stories and a selection of life-enhancing practices encourge a person's heart-warm inner nature and will-strength to manage on-going conflicts, overcome neglect, and create the humane soul family that "Pearls" need. A simple Platonic Solids thinking practice highlights a powerful self-awareness device for "Pearls" to keep their life-forces whole, pull themselves inwardly together in times of emotional and mental overwhelm, and stay grounded during shifting and confusing events. Striving past survival personality, they can cultivate the truly human rights of loving self-acceptance and compassionate togetherness with others.
Praise for The Pearl and the Hut, Volume II
"Belkalopolos presents a spiritual and psychological guide for adult children of divorce...The Pearl’s spiritual development is the name of the game; the reader is encouraged to not let the dark forces of the world “dissuade us from actually exploring and experiencing our full soul capacities...Dense with terminology and ideas, much of value is offered here in the form of heartfelt guidance." -Kirkus Reviews
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How I Work and Why I Created this Book Set
Back when the western world was beginning to really reverberate from the divorce waves of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and little was yet known about the longterm effects on the children caught between parent conflicts, I was a young adult child of divorce struggling with no voice and no comforting adult to see me for myself, hear my pain, or ask what ailed me most in it all. Then my mother died and the family estrangements, including in the extended family, increased. My brother was as challenged by the family coldness, silence, and disregard as I and he had a severe anxiety attack that hospitalized him for a time. I felt never more alone as then.
Many, many nights, for about seven years after that, I held my right hand up to the heavens and prayed to my mother and cried for someone in the spiritual world to find someone here to help me through all of this. I never forgot those seven sad and alone years, calling for someone to hold a hand out to mine.
Twenty-one years later, after my life had changed entirely, and while in deep mutual love with my common-law husband, living in a place that calmed my nerves and inspired my sense of spirit and soul, I felt a deep, compassionate sense to help others through heartbreaking and divisive times. Many committed people had fostered my heart growth, courage, and general sense of renewed life. I had never felt so peaceful. Yet, neither my husband nor I ever felt that the grace that we'd found in love was just for us or something we'd feel in the same way all of the time. We knew that love had to become as selfless as possible, and that would be both challenging and humbling. Yet, we were sure we were up to it.
I was once taught that the greater you go in love, the more you'll be tested on it to know that it truly lives in you through any challenge. And, sure enough, the hardest test of it came when my husband died unexpectedly, and at a still early age, and I was once again quite alone with my greatest losses, some unfulfilled tasks, and a sense of crushed dreams. The call to help others, and perhaps in doing so also help myself to grow and stay honest, truly sounded toward me like a trumpet and I knew I had to write this book set.
Rudolf Steiner has said that books mostly contain dead thoughts. They are good to record memories and even to record good practices and creative inspirations but they must be continually put to new life with others to have real meaning in the world. That was exactly what I hoped for with these books, as hard as such a task truly is. I, like anyone setting off on unbroken ground with a new initiative, still sometimes feel like only a beginner, and even at times inadequate, despite the many years of practice, experience, and preparation. Yet, the real soul life is about showing up anyway with what you have and being willing to make the most of what comes about for the good of all. Anthroposophical wisdom understands that we, as human beings, are always in a state of "becoming" and not in one of perfection or completion.
These books are my way to hold my hand out to those adult children of divorce that might be locked into themselves in some way alone and needing someone to know them inside a bit better than others have, and to possibly see them for who they really are. The books are also for caregiving professionals and others to be able to do the same in a new and more whole way. I promised to extend whatever I could to "Pearls" and to the caregivers so that both the youngers and the elders might receive the attending and stability that I came to learn about more for myself, and that I'd had more in my early childhood prior to the distortions of the family divorce. I felt called to bring soul-pyche development understandings that have been missed by many psychotherapeutic professionals in the last decades.
The process of editing a set of books such as these means continually updating ideas and research, and also living into the next steps of the ideas to keep the work alive, while also dealing with everyday personal issues and pragmatic life tasks. The initial impetus for this book was deep love. Renewing that daily is a profound human task. I think that most people, deep inside, are more dedicated to such a task of the heart than they have full awareness about. That's because the inner child in human beings longs for it. However, the impetus for human love gets regularly distorted in our times by the cold, hard challenges of life and the non-enlivening "things" among us all.
When a book comes out finally to others, that is simply the threshold to a new life with others based not only on what the writer has brought, but on what others bring to the book's insights and other offerings. There actually is no book without the others to read it and stimulate their own thinking, feeling, and willing. When we read someone else's thoughts or about their discoveries, we wrestle with feelings, grow from the insights, develop something new in ourselves often, update our own perceptions of the theme, debate, decently oppose, affirm, and otherwise enliven and enlighten the topic for the sake of the evolution of the human heart and consciousness. No one book is meant to be the be-all tome that tells us everything that is needed to be known about a subject.
In the case of The Pearl and the Hut books, the themes are heartfelt, painful, tender, envigorating, and stimulating to the soul. They make meaning and bring a new layer of societal understandings to a massive phenomenon. Much of what I bring to the books I have attributed to the master teacher, Rudolf Steiner, though I have found my own insights as a result of my work with his indications and years of varied meditative practices mingled with work in the world. If any of us come to understand something about the human collective endeavour toward love, family, relationship, and individual and collective strivings for heart-growth and the positive uplifting of some of humanity, then my efforts to present his and my research and ideas will not be in vain.
No one person does this. Though one person may write a book that lights something that wants to move forward in goodness, the whole process involves many voices. Mine is just one. Rudolf Steiner spoke of how in our times, in the West, human beings are not simply following gurus any more and that we must never be expected to give our sense of self away to anyone else to control or design our destiny for us. No one has the right to authoritarian rule over another, even if they "author" ideas that have some very deep, truthful, and soul-spiritual human impulses in them. Having experienced many dedicated, humanitarian and authentic souls in this lifetime, I get the importance of autonomy within community relating. I don't claim the perfection in it that I have borne witness to in some very rare and free others, but my striving is committed.
As a responsible therapist, I am not looking to have people follow or mimic me, but only to stimulate healing conversation and activity, and hopefully, to help to create a large and strengthened community among Pearls to overcome the stigmas and to open greater avenues of harmonious heart growth. That said, we all need friends and community with soul brothers and sisters, and I truly hope to do onto others what I would wish them to do onto me. That wish lives in a wide spectrum of love.
And so, in offering these books truly out of an impulse for the good, I humble myself in the process, and as the work moves forward in discussion, in workshops, and in what others make of the ideas in the soul-spirit wrestling, with a very charged and challenging subject, I hope to learn from others and feel a kind of brotherhood-sisterhood in that connecting from a higher place. I don't expect to get everything figured out to a perfect satisfaction or peace with everyone who comes to read the book. I wish only for the best that could follow out of the intentions of an earnest heart striving among many people who seek some kind of meaning and understanding around their family break-ups and the divisions that call us all to heal our hearts.
Finally, as an author of books about children and adult children of divorce, I can't intend to get into much discussion about the issues between the parents themselves, as those are their own subjects and many authors and therapists have spoken openly to that over many decades and continue to do that kind of human relationship investigation. Only directly, in on-line workshops that offer some safe containment, do I intend to enter into those discussions, occasionally.
These books, and this place, is for the already very full task of helping adults to help the children caught or wading water in the middle, and also for the adult children sculpting lives of their own between conflicted parents. The intention, wish, hope, and faith in me is that we all become mindfully whole and maintain a sense of soul-psyche health, perhaps finding enough greater inner peace and stability to have, or contribute to, truly supportive community around our often, necessarily, autonomous lives.
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