Something Had to Give
May 15, 2008
Ms. Summer Breeze
Tags: action, core beliefs, family, finance, friendship, heal, intuition, learn, learning, love, meditation, nature of love, opportunity, reaction, realtionships, recent, renaissance, romantic, spirit, spiritual, teach
Ahoy Mateys!
Rick James here, and I hope you’re doing well.
It’s been said that what we teach we are learning (A Course in Miracles). And, I must say that I’m learning about the nature of love. I recently re-found a book that had been buried in the mass Formerly Known as My Storage Room That Was Meant to Be My Office/Meditation Room. Now that the space is brand spankingly new and cleaaan (hello, carpet, my old friend! I can see you now!), I came across this book that I hadn’t gotten along to reading.
At Renaissance Unity, Kem said that when we’re truly ready to change, the doorways open to usher it in—but we must first tell the Universe that we’re ready. I was recently at a point in my life where I knew that “something had to give”.
I knew that my knee-jerk reaction was motivated from a deep level of fear, and I was skerred (yeah…not scared…I was SKERRED) that the other option would be more dangerous, risky, than anything else (to not choose fear). Note: Reaction is very different from action.
Yet I realized that this fork in the road was an opportunity—as Neale Donald Walsch would say, “A grand opportunity to choose to be Who You Really Are” (just as we re-choose and choose over and over again with any situation in life). So be that as it may, I looked at my life and all of its facets—family relationships, friendship relationships, romantic, finance, spiritual, the whole gamut—and asked Spirit to help me heal any core beliefs, that were false, that I was operating from.
They always say to be careful what you wish for—and sure enough, WHOOOOOSH! Within days, this book found itself in my hands. A friend offered very sage advice regarding intuition and my gut. Another showed up with further wisdom. The DialAThought (seriously, an untold gem, 586.758.3333, a new recording each day) was timely each and every time I called in.
Ultimately, the Universe answers when we ask—but we have to get to that point, sometimes when it’s the most scary, to jump off the diving board and ask, and to be willing to listen and act upon, the guidance.
What follows is a few moments from the book…Before you read it, open yourself up, affirming that any thing that is to be understood by you will be, and that you will read and hear all that Spirit is trying to say to you. May it benefit you with your unique needs, from romantic relationships, familial relations and to your deep soul-loving friendships. All is love…and an opportunity for the perfecting work of your soul.
Blessings Lovelies,Summer
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David was ten when he knew. I was older, perhaps fourteen, when I knew.
We knew the possibility of being in a loving relationship in which one’s soul draws to itself the perfect partner. This partner would not fill our empty space, but would perfectly complement the fullness of our inner selves, our spirits.
As children in small-town middle America in the 50s and 60s, we did not have many role models for such a loving and fulfilling relationship. As the two of us passed through puberty, there certainly was no mention of being with one’s soulmate and having a joyful partnership. But we knew that there was a remarkable way in which to be in a relationship, and we would not stop the quest until that way was found.
The prevailing message to women of that day was that men were to be tolerated at best. The common belief was, ‘can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.’ Most men were saying the same thing about women. Both camps in the battle of the sexes were fortified with enough anger, hostility, unmet expectations and cruelty to keep the war going for years. Most relationships were, and still are, about doing battle with each other in an attempt to manipulate the partner into fulfilling our unmet needs.
Yet the flame of another possibility continued to burn, and in the face of no tangible evidence to support this inner certainty, it stayed with us. Through two early and unfortunate marriages, it stayed with me. It was true of David as well. He also experienced two marriages that ended in divorce.
In my soul I knew relationships were meant to be holy, not hell. Loving another meant loving him all the time, not just when he was doing what I wanted him to do or saying what I wanted him to say. Love had to be unconditional or it wasn’t love. Being together would be easy, not work. We would naturally be kind and considerate of each other. To behave otherwise would be unnatural. We would be comfortable together. We would have a great deal in common and respect each other’s differences. Our essences would connect.
As Leslie Parrish Bach says in her husband Richard Bach’s book A Bridge Across Forever, “A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys to fit our locks. When we feel safe enough to open the locks, our truest selves step out and we can be completely and honestly who we are, we can be loved for who we are and not for who we’re pretending to be.”
We would know God together. The sexual aspect would be easy and pleasurable but would only be a piece common element of the magnificence. Our love would embrace other people rather than exclude them as a threat to our relationship. Such a relationship would bring a touch of heaven to our daily lives.
Elizabeth Bowen wrote, “Certain books come to met one, as do people.” A spiritual text entitled A Course In Miracles came to meet me in November 1976. I fully agree with Marianne Williamson’s description of it as “a self-study program of spiritual psychotherapy.” As I began to study the Course in depth, my soul resonated with the spiritual teachings it contained. Although the materials were similar to what I had been coming to know was true through my study of Unity’s teachings and through meditation, it brought every aspect of my life into clear focus. It became the foundation of my spiritual understanding, and its instruction on relationships, and its affirmation of how glorious they can be, is clearer and better than anything else I have encountered.
When I began studying and applying these spiritual principles, I stepped onto a new path, a path that led me into a number of trainings, teachings and spiritual adventures. My life began to radically transform, and I began to view all of live from a different point of view, seeing relationships in a way that I had never been taught. What I had known in my soul to be true was now being confirmed in these teachings: it is possible to have love without conflict, to totally forgive the past, to have happiness as the purpose of relationships, to know that relationships were meant to be holy. I held to these truths and began an incredible journey of transformation.
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Note: Sam and Kathy are introduced, a couple that the author met. Sam saw Kathy as being able to take care of him, and Kathy gave up her career to move with Sam to other places that were helpful for him. Kathy saw herself being able to, in time, change those aspects of Sam that she didn’t like.
……Sam and Kathy’s romance was on-again, off-again for a couple of years, but all their friends could see that they truly cared for each other and had a “special” relationship.
A Course in Miracles teaches a radical view of what “special” means. Specialness is not seen as something wonderful, loving and positive, but rather as something that isolates us and fills us with fear—fear that at any second what we perceive as love and the union of two souls will be snatched away. While living in a consciousness of specialness, we view all others as separate and apart from us, fiercely denying through our beliefs and actions our underlying oneness.
When seen clearly, special relationships can be viewed as codependent, compulsive relationships. Held together by the ego, these alliances are doomed to fail. We must realize that “special” is a poor substitute for what could be. We have accepted specialness, what separates and causes pain, in place of holiness, which joins and brings love.
Specialness is not love. It is a substitute for love. When two lovers are in a special relationship, an impenetrable wall remains forever between them, keeping each one separate and apart, lonely and isolated.
While in specialness, we are every ready to assume the role of judge, jury and executioner to our lover for any behavior or attitude that does not correspond to our image of how he or she is supposed to be. Specialness continues to live only through the defeat of our former lover, through devaluing, judging, or discounting him or her.
Consider the times you have dismissed as unworthy or insignificant a person you once claimed to love or whom you at least care for deeply. That’s specialness in action. Here are some red flags of a special relationship:
You care for someone for what he or she can give you, for example, name, home, security, children, wealth, sex.
You feel a need to rescue the other person.
A lover quickly turns into an enemy.
What you once called love soon becomes disdain or even hate.
The physical aspect of the relationship is of utmost importance.
Bodies are everything: essence is not very important. You focus on the outer package and never examine the inner essence.
You feel the need to remake your partner, giving the message that he or she is not good enough the way they are right now.
You always point out what is lacking in the partner.
The relationship is filled with judgments, guilt, hurt and anger.
You always hold the “object of your love” at arm’s length to be reviewed or scrutinized.
You trust no one except yourself.
Almost from the beginning of a new relationship you start to give up parts of yourself that make you unique.
You make constant comparisons, attempting to establish your worth by devaluing your partner.
You regard others as either beneath you or above you because you focus on people’s differences rather than their similarities.
Through specialness you are ever ready to attack, find fault, adjust, make over, correct, or alter in some “helpful” way.
You look to your partner to fulfill your needs.
You see the other person as an object, rather than as brother or sister, someone just like you.
You place limits on love.
A little whisper you do not like, a circumstance that does not suit you, an unexpected event—any of these can upset your fragile world, hurling you into chaos.
Your relationship is threatened by everything.
Our individual lists of specialness can take myriad forms, but the underlying thoughts and feelings are always clashing with our divine heritage and adamantly denying the depth of love that could be experienced. The end result, no matter what form of expression it takes, is always the same—pain! We choose specialness instead of love, specialness instead of heaven, specialness instead of true love.
The idea that the root cause of suffering in relationships is the desire for specialness can be traced back 2500 years to the teachings of the two renowned Chinese philosophers, Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, the fathers of Taoism. They understood that all our woes occur because we create a separateness and specialness for ourselves. When we separate ourselves from others, we are in conflict with them. Our desire for specialness is why we suffer.
…Many real and deep problems continued to rise to the surface in what appeared to be a happy relationship. At the time, neither Sam nor Kathy had the tools or the wisdom to successfully resolve these conflicts. After a couple of years of each one coming from the position of, “If only you’d change, everything would be okay between us”, both were emotionally drained. Sam didn’t want to change those characteristics that Kathy found irritating. In fact, Kathy’s constant nagging about them became an extreme irritation to Sam. The situation continued to deteriorate until Kathy and Sam separated and then divorced. For same and Kathy, the end result of eight years of ego struggles, breakups and makeups was a divorce after three years of marriage.
The divorce rate in the United States is not at 40-50% because we are all experts in creating loving, supporting, lasting relationships. What most of us know how to do is short-term romance or flings. We play nice just as long as our ego-based needs are met. When these needs are no longer fulfilled, most folks pack their bags and run—if not physically, then emotionally and mentally. That is, we may stay for 50 years and lead lives of “quiet desperation” as Thoreau put it. All of us know couples who fit this description. Maybe you feel this describes you.
Whenever we are in a relationship based on what we can get rather than what we can be, do and give, it is “special” and will not last. Special relationships are the American model. We come together as two wounded, unhealed people who hope to get our needs met. Most likely, we do not recognize the true dynamics of the situation and may never identify the real problem.
A special relationship is our attempt to relive the past and this time have a different outcome. This kind of relationship is based on ego needs and not on love. We may call it love, but it is not. When we exist in this kind of partnership, we always see the flaws of others, especially our amte’s. If only he or she would do this, be that, say this, then my life would work. I would be happy. We project our ability to be happy onto our partners and expect them to make us happy, fulfill our needs and live according to our expectations.
…Couples often become entangled in a web of bartering (If you meet my needs, I will do what you want, be what you want) and keeping score (Who last did what for whom?). But this will not work. It cannot work because love is not a trade-off.
What Your Parents Couldn’t Teach You
One of the most important lessons about relationships was never taught to you in school. If you had been so instructed, it would have served you well. Your mother and father never taught you either, because they did not know. They were never taught by their parents. Here it is. Pay attention and think about it. No one can fulfill your needs but you. No one! We’ll search on and on, never quite finding the right one. We keep believing that if only we could find the right person all our problems would cease.
Accept it! For it is the truth. No one can meet your needs but you. You can cry about it, rage about it, pout and scream about it, but the result will be the same if you don’t live by it—misery. You can try to coerce and manipulate, seek to compromise, or even make yourself physically ill, but the result does not change. Two unhappy people will be lost, unhealed and miserable if they believe that it is the other person’s responsibility to meet their needs and make them happy.
Seeking and not finding is the game of the ego. We are forever seeking outside ourselves for an answer that can only be found within. We desperately want to find it in the outside world, but it is not there. The sooner we can comprehend that what we are looking for not to be found outside ourselves, the sooner we can get off the merry-go-round of failed relationships and move forward. No one can give you what you are unwilling to give yourself.
In a special relationship, each party keeps portions of herself or himself separate from the other. Within each lurks an overwhelming fear that if the partner were ever to see what lies deep within, he or she would recoil in terror. The truth of a special relationship is that we do not love ourselves enough to be able to truly love another.
…Our insistence on specialness keeps us from realizing the will of God in our relationships. God’s will for us is always to know love. God’s love is given equally to us. In this love we have free will to decide whether we accept love’s message now or at some distant future time. Until we accept the ways of true love, there remains in us a knowledge, however faint, that specialness will not give us what we truly want or recognize who we truly are.
Instead of living a heaven on earth, as God’s love would have it be, we have created a hell here and now and called it home. While in specialness, we are asleep, surrounded by a world of loveliness we do not see. Living in a world of specialness creates is like living in a bad dream and not knowing it is a dream. We stamp our feet, insisting within the dream that it is reality. If we are to free ourselves from the damaging effects of specialness, we must be willing to question every value we hold dear. This can be a terrifying process that can cause egos to go berserk.
Finding who to blame isn’t helpful. Finding the underlying soul wounds within the psyche that attracted such a relationship is.
Note: Tim and Ann, another couple…Ann changed to make Tim happy, Tim was never satisfied.
…In a special relationship, what first attracts us is exactly what we later want to change. If a partner is extremely outgoing and vivacious, we say, “How wonderful! He is so open and so much fun!” Yet we will later feel threatened by this same personality and will be critical of his never being serious enough. The same is if the woman is very meticulous, and later criticized by her partner for taking so much time to get ready or keep up the house or being unable to relax.
It doesn’t take much to upset the precarious balance of such relationships. Anything and everything can quickly come between the partners in these dysfunctional, ego-ruled alliances. The problem with Ann and Tim lay in the fact that these two basically decent human beings were both filled with their own oozing wounds and had been unwilling to acknowledge them. Denial of our problems does not make them go away. Actually, they only fester and worsen as we deny them.
We are like the man who one night is searching under a streetlight for his key. A stranger passes by and asks what the fellow is looking for. He responds, “My key,” and the stranger joins in the search. Unsuccessful at finding the key, the second man asks the first, “Exactly where were you standing when you lost the key?” “Oh, I was standing in the house, but the electricity was off, so I came out here to search under the light of the lamppost.”
The key isn’t out there. It wasn’t lost out there, and it isn’t going to be found there. But by God, how we do try to insist that it is there. Man spend a lifetime searching for the answer outside while it sits in the center of the soul and waits.
Special relationships always involve a great deal of pain—not just emotional or physical pain, but pain that goes through the psyche and into the soul. While we are in the throes of a special relationship, that knowing part of us does not disappear. It is gently instructing us that there is another way to be in partnership, a way that does not demand sacrifice and pain, which we must then convince ourselves is love.
Sacrifice: An Important Piece of the Puzzle
What a dreadful and manipulative word sacrifice is. It took me many years to learn that sacrifice comes only from fear and not out of love. And, as we all know, fearful people can be vicious. Sacrifice then becomes attack and does not resemble love. When I learned that, I knew that I had at long last found a piece to my puzzle.
Nearly all the popular psychology of the day espouses some form of sacrifice. It may be called compromise or negotiation, but it’s still sacrifice. It doesn’t work. Whenever you feel you must sacrifice some aspect of yourself or your life, you will end up resentful and angry. You will feel like the loser and set a course to win next time. Everyone loses in the game of sacrifice.
The mere idea of sacrifice is out of alignment with spiritual truth. God did not initiate the sacrifice of your spirit, essence and uniqueness. The whole idea of sacrifice is a human creation. Sacrifice is not spiritual. It is not God’s way, but it certainly is the ego’s way.
The notion of sacrifice has controlled people, women especially, through the ages. [Those that sacrifice] deny their aspirations and dreams, snuff out their great passions. The result has been the creation of a lot of very angry people. Do without for someone else’s supposed good, be it your partner’s, your children’s, or your nation’s, and then honestly evaluate how you feel. You feel put upon, deprived of your worth, angry and then guilty for having those feelings. Sacrifice produces guilt in us as surely as love produces peace.
Sacrifice will get you nowhere. There is always a way out of conflict and disagreement in your relationship, but sacrifice, yours or the other person’s, surely isn’t it. If you have believed that sacrifice is love, I ask you to consider sacrifice as not being an expression of love, but rather as separation from love. Sacrifice does not draw us closer together; it pushes in a little farther the wedge between us.
Initially, it is merely impossible to conceive of love without sacrifice, since the connection of the two is so pervasive in our culture. The notion of sacrifice is born out of the idea that there is not enough—not enough love, kindness, thoughtfulness, opportunities, time, money, caring, fun, pleasure, beauty enjoyment.
Whatever the perceived good might be, the idea of sacrifice says there isn’t enough good for everyone to have some. It is the notion that we live in a world of scarcity, that we must give up what little we have in order for another to have anything at all. Sacrifice is a family of five sitting down to dinner with four servings on the table, and the mother says, “Oh, it doesn’t matter, I’m not hungry, you have mine.” Meanwhile, she’s exhausted and starving. We have all denied ourselves our rightful serving and said, “It doesn’t matter,” when it did. It mattered a lot! Just because the idea of sacrifice is everywhere does not mean that it is true. Each time we believe sacrifice is called for, we are denying who we are and who God is.
A Course in Miracles teaches that our confusion of sacrifice with love is so profound that we cannot conceive of love without this sacrifice. It is this notion that we must look at; we must come to understand that “sacrifice is attack, not love.” The teaching continues, “If you would accept this one idea, your fear of love would vanish.”
In the game of sacrifice there are always seeming winners and losers. In the game of love everyone gets to be a winner. It took me a long while to understand that. When I was living in mental and emotional confusion while in a special relationship, I thought that if I gave up who I was, I would get the love I desired. All of us seem to excel at creating our own dramas and outrageous situations. I have come to understand these dramas as desperate attempts to get the attention of our innermost self.
The Monster Driving the Steamroller at You;
Or Do I Have Your Attention Now?
My friends in Alcoholics Anonymous speak of alcohol being like the elephant in the living room. Everyone in an alcoholic’s household tiptoes around the elephant, never mentioning its presence, pretending it isn’t there. All the while it is dominating the life of every family member, not just that of the alcoholic.
I have noticed that many of us have an elephant or even a monster living in our household, and we attempt to pretend it isn’t there. This monster is always an outer manifestation of unresolved inner fears. Fear is the great destroyer of relationships, dooming them to failure even before they have begun. Fear can quickly turn our special love into a special hate. Fear lives in the heart, mind and experiences, but it does not exist of its own accord. Even though it often seems otherwise, fear has no life. It exists only when we give it life. Fear is a parasitic thought, which, as we feed and nourish it, appears to take on a life of its own. Fear is then able to take over our lives. Fear is a monster so hideous that you and I deny any association with it in our attempt to keep it from penetrating our conscious awareness.
In most instances, our unresolved, unhealed fears are so enormous, that, even when love is gifted to us, we are unable to receive it because fear has barricaded our hearts. My monster was so destructive and enormous that it rampages through my life driving a steamroller.
Perhaps, someday, we will all be able to look back at our lives and clearly perceive a turning point, a point where we made a decision that would forever change the direction of our lives. My point of change came the night before leaving for California to officiate at my lifelong friend Ginna’s wedding. I had not known until that day that my then husband, with whom I had a fear-filled, special relationship, had discovered a small reserve of cash I had been squirreling away. I was planning to leave him just as soon as I could save enough money to afford my own place.
His discovery of my hidden cash tipped him off that I was indeed planning to leave him—maybe even that very day. We had some very fearful, insane scenes before, but nothing like that night. I was right on the edge of an emotional breakdown and yet knew my hysteria would only fuel his behavior. Through prayer and the grace of God I made it through that night as he first hurled my packed suitcase against the wall, its contents flying about the room, and then grabbed me around the neck and held me down on the bed, making terrifying threats. My life had turned into a nightmare. Me, a spiritual teacher, in the throes of domestic violence. I was frozen in fear. I was traumatized. I had become a battered woman.
Why? Why had I stayed for so long? This was it! My fear for my life was clearly greater than my fear of a second divorce, my fear of starting over and being on my own again. Why? How had I let it get so far?
I had shut down to love and knew it. I tried to pray, but I was so traumatized that all I could say was, “Help! Help me, God!” Then later I was able to add, “I promise I will never put myself in this insanity again. Get me through this night, and I will work on healing on my soul and go on.”
In the midst of my trauma, two messages from A Course in Miracles began to repeat over and over in my head: “Only perfect love exists” and “Only love is real.” In the several weeks leading up to that fateful night, I had been studying these two teachings but had not quite been able to understand them. That night, even in my fear, I finally recognized the truth within these two lines.
Only love is real. From deep within my soul I was remembering a lesson learned long ago. In all of life, in all of the world, so much that appears to be real isn’t. It is a brief, fleeting circumstance. It lacks substance. It is nothing more than a ripple in the great ocean of life.
The only reality is love. Love is not fleeting or brief; it is eternal. Love is the pulse of the universe. It was as if a soul strength or knowledge buried within me was being called forth from the depths of my being. If I was experiencing fear, and I was, then I was experiencing something of my own making and not of God’s creation. God creates only perfect love, which is real. As Buddha taught, fear is unreal, impermanent, and thus can be called an illusion. I can make a fearful mess, which in the truest sense can be said to be unreal, because God didn’t create it. And only what is divine is real and lasting. Everything else is impermanent and changing.
From then on I clung on to these two truths—only love is real; perfect love exists—whenever my enraged ego would rail at me that fear was real and that attempting to give it up was crazy.
Only love is real. I knew that this was the truth. I also knew that I did not understand it, but I was willing to do whatever was necessary to understand. There are always signs to tell us whether we are doing the right thing or making the right decision. Fear is a signal of the strain that arises when our desires conflict with our actions. Listening to our personal egos, we often choose actions that conflict with our ultimate good. We ignore the obvious signs telling us to slow down or to go ahead or to turn right.
What I came to understand was that my inner essence, my spirit and soul, had been attempting for quite some time to get me to wake up and move on with my life. I hadn’t been willing to pay attention. In the web of confusion in which I was caught, I thought that my former husband was my good, or that he somehow possessed my good and wasn’t giving it to me. What I came to understand through the healing of my soul was that God not only has my good, God is my good.
The scene that night got my attention. Soon afterward I became willing to look not only at the fear it produced, but at all I had feared in life. I began to experience life from an entirely different point of view, moving out of victim consciousness and into being the victor.
The beginning was slow. First I learned to crawl, then to take tiny baby steps, then to walk on my own, and finally to soar.
I was praying for a healed relationship with my former husband. I believed that if I loved enough, the relationship would be healed. I finally came to love enough. I loved myself enough to flee from a physically threatening and emotionally scarring environment.
After that terrifying night, I was finally miserable enough to get out and do some deep, introspective work. I was finally willing to do whatever was needed to deal with the core beliefs I carried that caused the effects I was experiencing.
Discomfort helps us become aware of the need for correction. Well, I was pretty darned uncomfortable. It could definitely be said that my discomfort level was up! Isn’t it curious how we have to have our backs against the wall, our lives flashing in front of us, before we are willing to change? I became willing to begin, right there, to perceive the situation differently.
To perceive differently is to see an old situation in a new light—to see the gory details of your past relationship as a lesson held out to you rather than as karma, a punishment or a payback. W e can get so caught up in the excruciating details, the telling and the retelling, that we miss the lesson. Each lesson in life that we miss is presented again and again until we get it. Go back and look at the significant events of your life. See if you don’t discover a pattern. The names, faces, and events may vary, but the underlying script is the same.
I have noticed that, with each repetition, the intensity of the situation increases. The earlier lessons were obviously not powerful enough to get our attention. We miss the first several road signs of life because we are in such a fog. Then, the signs and signals get bigger, with flashing neon lights and waving banners. For some of us, as the signs and signals get bigger, our denial of any problem grows proportionately larger. And on and on the insanity goes.
“My God, what’s happening?” we cry out. Many people conclude that God is punishing them. They project the responsibility for their situation onto a distant, stern, revengeful deity. What’s really happening is that our soul has agreed to the creation of our particular monster in the living room. It has done this in an attempt to bring the necessity for correction into our consciousness.
Once we realize that whatever is occurring is happening through us and not to us, then and only then can we do anything about our relationship problems. As long as you stay in the belief that everything is happening to you, you will stay in a helpless, hopeless, victim state. Life can be heaven. Why do you insist on making it hell? You have given your power to the negative situation rather than to your inner, invincible spirit. Once you wake up and take personal charge of cleaning up your negative beliefs and patterns, nothing can stop you. You will proceed undaunted.
What I needed to do with my former husband, with whom I had a special relationship, was not to shoot him, but to forgive him. Discomfort is aroused only to bring the need for correction into awareness. Look at all the discomforting circumstances and events in your life. Instead of viewing them as happening to you, begin to see them as happening through you as a means of getting you to perceive how great is the need for correction within you.
Mild, sweet gentle circumstances seldom get our attention. On the other hand, there’s nothing quite like a monster driving a steamroller at you to get your attention.
Do You Love Me or My Body?
…Many of us today have attempted to turn the body into God. Most give it far more time and devotion and money to its care, pampering, and shaping than is ever given to the spiritual aspect of our life. We view ourselves as only for our bodies. Others view us only as our bodies. We view others as only their bodies.
…Just as long as we continue to view ourselves and others as bodies is how long we shall continue to experience a sense of alienation and disconnection with the true self and with the inner essence of another. A nearly impossible, but necessary, lesson to learn is that we are not our bodies. Yes, if you are reading this, you obviously have a body, but your body is but a tiny speck in the vast sphere of who and what you are. You are first a spiritual being who happens to possess a body. In the Bible it says that a deep sleep fell upon Adam. When we begin to look at life spiritually, we realize that we have all been wandering in a state of deep sleep. As we sleep we dream a collective dream that we are only bodies.
We continue to play out the scripted dream of being in our body rather than having a body and being so much more than this little speck of tissue, organs, blood and bones. When we perceive ourselves or others solely as bodies, the ego is the ruler. While we do so, we constantly experience the cruelty of the ego. It is impossible to identify so closely and solely with the body and with others’ bodies and not bring pain to ourselves.
As I write today, I am sitting at my table just 30 feet from the beautiful, vast Pacific Ocean. Watching the waves roll to the shore, it comes to me that the body is like a wave in the ocean that is God. The ego that sees only the body as a wave cannot fathom the entire ocean. We must actually train ourselves to give attention to the whole ocean, to get beyond the wave. This begins to happen when we cease judging ourselves or others according to color, size, shape, physical condition, or any other bodily characteristic. This doesn’t come easily, but when it is faithfully practiced over time, a new way of perceiving comes into view.
Relinquishing judgments is the first step in lifting the barrier of limiting one another to bodies. When we take this step, we can begin to bring the body into the alignment of who we really are. The body, yours, or anyone else’s, cannot contain who you are. The body is a limit on love. At first this suggestion may seem outrageous, but through the years I’ve had enough experiences to prove that we don’t even need the body to truly communicate.
I prayed for a long time before I met my soulmate and husband, David. I prayed to be healed, to forgive, to seek and find the love my heart desired. I meditated on it so much that I was convinced I would recognize him instantly when we met. Through the years I met a lot of men, but none of them felt like I sensed David would “feel”.
Then one night engaged in a complex exercise with a class I was teaching, I suddenly experienced an intense feeling of something remarkable going on that was totally unrelated to the class. I sensed, felt, knew, nearly saw an energy, a presence that was intangible but very real to me. This otherworldly sensation left a permanent imprint in my memory of how the presence of my soulmate felt. I did not feel it again, but whatever it was, until about a y ear later.
I was sitting in bed meditating early one Saturday morning when I sensed that same presence again. It was gentle and soft, yet powerful, and it seemed to embrace me in warmth and love. It felt wonderful. The whole experience lasted perhaps 15 minutes, but the afterglow remained with me. I somehow knew I had just met my soulmate. It was not a physical meeting but a spiritual encounter.
In those same moments David had been meditating on meeting his soulmate and extending his field of energy to go forth and find me. It had. I felt it and knew that it was from him, but knew not where he was. What remained with me was a certainty that when we physically met, and I knew we would, we would recognize each other’s spiritual essence.
When we did meet in person, David says I gave him what he calls a “Unity hug”. In the Unity center of where I am a minister, we are a pretty hugging crowd, and I have developed a way of giving a warm hug without it being sexual or passionate. That, however, was his first physical impression of contact with me. We did instantly recognize each other’s spiritual essence, and we laughed because it was our bodies that seemed so unreal. The spiritual essence was what we recognized, were comfortable with, and found to be real.
There is another way to perceive yourself and all others. It begins by experiencing an instant of seeing beyond the body. It begins by experiencing an instant of seeing beyond the body. Then later you glimpse it more frequently, seeing the lovely, seeing through the outer envelope and into the inner splendor. You come to know that in the end only this larger sphere is real. Everything else has been shadowy figures inhabiting your disconnected dreams.
Once we release ourselves form the misperception that we are only our bodies, we no longer wish to imprison others in the place from which we have escaped. The obsession with the body is gladly released in favor of the radiance of the inner spirit. The love of God calls us to recognize the spirit in one another and to no longer identify our brothers and sisters solely by their bodies. The attraction of the spirit is irresistible once we have become comfortable enough to let our guard down and explore our depths.
…In recognizing the spirit we naturally move out of living in a helpless victim mode into a life of mastery. It is impossible to remain a victim when we identify fully with our spiritual nature. As we understand that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, we begin to identify to more closely and fully with God, accepting the gifts of God as our birthright. Of course, this transformation of our thinking seldom occurs in a flash. Rather, it evolves and expands over a lifetime of spiritual awakening and soul growth.
People say to me, “Yes, Joan, this sounds great. I wish life was spiritually centered all the time, but it just doesn’t work that way in the real world.” To which I respond, “The world of spirit is the real world.” The world of seeing one another as only bodies, the world filled with feelings of pain and separation and overflowing with dysfunctional behavior, is not the real world. It may be the familiar world, the accepted world, but it is no the real world. Five hundred years ago the fact that most people agreed the earth was flat did not make it so. Just because millions of people agree that they and others are no more than bodies does not make it real.
Pain, suffering, sickness, war and greed are not the real world but they are “gifts” of the distorted world created by the ego. As we recognize the spirit within us, we begin the process of identifying more and more fully with our true selves.
Mastery is knowing who you are. It is a sense of ease and confidence with yourself and all of life. It is a sense of being in charge, not in a manipulative, controlling way, but of knowing what you are doing, where you are going, and how you are going to get there.
Mastery is being at the helm, feeling empowered and powerful. Moving into mastery, you accept your position as cocreator with God. When you choose to acknowledge the spirituality of self, a new orientation naturally follows, a new way of thinking and being that produces results quite different from the results of the past.
I Thought It Was You—But It Was Me
After realizing the truth that we are primarily spiritual beings having a human experience, the second most powerful, freeing spiritual truth that we can comprehend is this: life is really going to work only when each of us takes individual and total responsibility for what occurs.
An expression in the 12-Step tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous and similar support groups says, “There are no victims, only volunteers.” Grasping that you are not the victim of your life may take a great deal of doing. Just coming to accept the truth of this statement can be incredibly painful. The pain arises out of beginning to release the long-held and false belief system. What we do is cling to these destructive and negative victim thoughts. We grasp so tightly that the clinging becomes a way of life.
Try this exercise. Hold your hand in a tight fist, hard, for 30 seconds. Hold tightly, using all your might. Don’t release until a full 30 seconds have passed. Now very slowly begin to let go. As you slowly release your grip, notice how your knuckles feel, your fingers, the wrist and forearm. Be still and experience the sensation of letting go.
Even though you are letting go of nothing, there is still pain because you had clung so tightly for just thirty seconds. Imagine what it must be like to let go of a false concept of self if you have clung to it for ten, twenty or more years.
The pain of letting go comes from the ego, not from the spirit. The ego goes crazy when it starts to lose its power over us. So the initial stages of letting go can be painful, but what release and relief letting go soon brings! The spiritually mature take responsibility for their lives. The spiritually immature are always looking for someone to blame.
A great spiritual truth that I have come to understand is that we meet ourselves in everyone we encounter. Two of us could enter the same room, interact with the same people, yet leave the room and report two totally opposite experiences.
To illustrate, I’ll use two extreme personalities. Ben and Todd enter a travel agent’s office. B en is coming from his spiritual center, and he’s excited about his forthcoming trip. Feeling good about himself and life, he walks in with this light and enthusiasm emanating from him. First he encounters the receptionist, who is on the telephone. She waves and signals that she will be right with him. This is no problem—he will just wander over and peruse the travel brochures. In a moment she’s free and warmly greets Ben, who proceeds to explain he’s there to buy airline tickets and secure accommodations for his trip. She inquires as to his destination, and he informs her that he’s going to Hawaii on a business trip and is sure there will be pleasure as well. She is pleased to direct him to acknowledgeable agent who recently returned from Hawaii.
Ben has a wonderful encounter with Liz, who is just as enthusiastic as he is. She tells him of a great offer—he can do his business in Honolulu and then stay on an extra eek and get free airfare to the neighboring islands. If he will tell her exactly what he wants, she will create the perfect package for him. He will have plenty of time to tend to his business and time to enjoy the aloha spirit. Ben is thrilled and leaves with tickets in hand.
Todd walks into the same agency 10 minutes after Ben. He’s angry because the parking lot was full and he had to park 2 blocks away and walk. When he enters the office, the receptionist is again on the phone with another customer; again she waves and signals that she will be with him shortly. Todd paces back and forth in front of the counter, then assumes a power stance directly in front of the receptionist and begins tapping the counter with his fingertips. She pays no attention to him and continues the call until it is completed. Todd is fuming by the time the receptionist, in her usual perky manner, asks how she can assist him. He barks at her, “You could have assisted me 5 minutes ago!” Remaining calm, she asks his destination and he responds that he is going to Hawaii on business. He is told, as was Ben, that Liz has recently returned from the islands and has all the up-to-date information he will need to plan a great trip. Liz is busy with a client at present, however. Would he care to wait for her or see Jack, who is available?
Todd goes to Jack because he has already waited and does not want to waste any more time in this office. He has a very terse encounter with Jack and he states his needs. He collects his tickets and hotel reservations and leaves, deciding not to spend any extra time on the islands. It’s a business trip and he can enjoy himself another time.
Todd leaves believing he was mistreated. Ben leaves feeling great and very pleased with himself for attracting such a great deal. Once again his timing was perfect. Todd is thinking that once again he came out badly on a deal. He feels he was charged too much for his ticket and was booked a 2nd rate room. What Ben and Todd experienced at the travel agent’s office was a reflection of their individual consciousness. Ben sees the world as supportive and friendly, and his experiences attest to the same. Todd sees the world as confrontational and hostile, and his experiences reflect his view.
Mirror, Mirror On the Wall…
In life we are always encountering ourselves. It is as if everyone we meet is actually a mirror disguised as a person. When I first heard this teaching, I hated it. I mightily resisted it. I thought it was awfully nasty stuff, insanity. In time I’ve come to know that it is true.
Everyone I encounter is a reflection of my individual consciousness at some level. When, in the distant past, I felt like a victim, there were those who were most willing to fill the role of perpetrator. When I was filled with fear, hurts and open wounds, all my encounters after the initial politeness would match the energy I was sending out. My negative energy was very carefully concealed behind a mask of niceness that women of my generation had been trained to keep in place. I was very good at pretending all was well when it was hell.
No one did this to me. I did it to myself each time I denied who I was, each time I settled or said it didn’t matter when it did, each time I looked outside myself for my answers rather than within. It wasn’t my former husband who needed fixing for my life to be okay. It was I.
This does not mean that I took responsibility for his behavior. It is very important that you understand that. It does mean I took responsibility for his behavior showing up in my life. You are not responsible for another person’s behavior, but you are responsible for it being in your life. Simply removing yourself from an unpleasant situation is not enough to be healed. To be healed so that we don’t go out and create the same old misery again, we must get to the underlying cause and heal it.
Discovering just what the underlying cause may be in your life will take a very high commitment to being healed. To dive into those deep, murky waters is never much fu n, but it is always necessary in order to stop re-creating the past over and over again.
Consider for a moment just how many times you have found yourself in the same old situation. You swore it would never again occur, and here it is again. But this time it is worse than before.
When we are still asleep to our spiritual reality, we pretend that we have nothing to do with what shows up in our lives. We’re just quietly going along, not causing anyone any difficulty, and this awful stuff just keeps happening. Surely we haven’t asked for it, or so we try to convince ourselves and anyone else who will listen. We project what is really our own negative baggage “out there” somewhere, not recognizing it when it boomerangs and hits us in the face. “As hard as I try,” we cry out, “Why does this same old stuff keep happening to me?” It’s happening because of an inner core belief that you deserve to be dumped upon, to be used and thrown away, or whatever your negative bagged may be. You are not at fault, you are wounded.
Whose-Fault-Is-It? is a favorite game of the ego. Years ago, my first husband and I would bicker constantly. We were both immature children who had no business being married. In our habitual arguing, my spouse would ask, “Whose fault?” It was as if assigning blame in today’s argument would make everything dandy. The bone of contention was that I always felt that he was finding me at fault, no matter what the argument was about. From my perspective, of course, I could clearly see that it was his fault, since he wanted to know so badly who was to blame. Needless to say, these were not happy times for either for us.
Finding exactly who to blame is not your reason for being here. Healing your psyche, your soul wounds, through forgiveness and love is. Whenever we are tempted to condemn another person, it is because we secretly believe we are only worthy of condemnation. Each time we judge another it is really ourselves that we judge.
Whatever we see that we don’t like in someone else is a smokescreen attempting to hide what we really loathe in ourselves. We are terrified to even look at it in ourselves and use our energy to deny it oculd possibly be in us, when it is so obviously the other guy.
Take a clean sheet of paper and draw a horizontal line across the top. From the center of that line, draw a second line straight down the page. Now, at the very top of the page, write the name of a person who has been like sandpaper to your soul, someone who really bugs you. Then put a plus sign on the left and a minus sign on the right. In the plus column write down everything you like and admire about that person, any good you can see. When you’ve exhausted the plus side, move to the minus side and begin to write everything down you cannot stand about that person. It doesn’t matter how little or petty it may seem—if you think of it, write it down.
Now here’s the secret. The list isn’t about the other person; it’s about you. Sound outrageous or did you already figure it out? Now, read down the left column of your list and before each item, add the words:
“I love myself when I….”
Then go down the right column and add the words:
“I don’t love myself when I…”
If you can be brutally honest with yourself, this exercise is a real eye-opener. I have found this exercise to be incredibly helpful in getting quickly to the underlying issue. Looking at what we cannot stand in someone else, if honestly evaluated, lets us discover what is unhealed in ourselves. Our judgments are never against the other person, but always against ourselves.
A Course In Miracles states, “Everything you behold without is a judgment of what you beheld within.” The strain of constant judgment is virtually intolerable. A tremendous release and a deep sense of peace come from meeting yourself and your brothers and sisters totally without judgment. It is but our own self we see when we look upon another. It is ourselves we judge, condemn, or set free; it is ourselves we love and bless.
Look at yourself, your life, and see what has been in alignment with the spiritual essence of you. Look at what has been partially true and partially clinging to the false, and give that to Spirit. Be willing to release that which is totally out of accord, turning it over to Spirit.
A Course in Miracles speaks of our being willing to give to Spirit anything that would hurt us. Our false beliefs, judgments, and misappropriations have all hurts us and will continue to do so as long as we cling to them.
We must honestly ask: “Do I want to be rid of this pain? Do I want to be rid of this upset?” If the answer is yes, then yes alone is seldom enough to have the upset and pain vanish. Rather we exclaim, “Yes, I want to be rid of it!” Then, “Now what?”
This is the point at which we are open to help, help from someone who has a more complete grasp of the whole picture than we do in that moment. I am very comfortable identifying that helper as the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God available to us in a very personal way.
If you feel comfortable with that concept and name, use it. If not, try using “Lgiht”, as in, “I release my false and damaging perceptions to the Light.” Perhaps you feel a resonance with Divine Love or an angel, or a high being of your religious/spiritual orientation. The name you use is not nearly as important as coming to this vital stage of being willing to release, turn over, or otherwise get rid of what hasn’t worked.
If you have been saying for years, “all men are jerks”, and all the men you appear to meet are jerks, then you need to understand that:
- There are countless men who are not jerks.
- Your belief is a very negative one to cling to, and it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- You need more help right now than you are capable of giving to yourself.
This where you say, “Holy Spirit, please help me get free of this negative belief. Help me be healed, so that I will attract kind, loving, sensitive men into my life. I don’t want to live these judgments any more. I now release them to you. Thank you.”
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