CHAPTER 1
Why Is Self-Acceptance a Focus In Finding the One?
We close off and protect ourselves in an effort to prevent future harm, but ultimately cause the very pain we are seeking to prevent. Each chapter reinforces and reminds you of the immense benefit of opening up and letting in the good that is waiting for you. Your life is waiting to be fully lived. This book will inspire the remembrance of your inherent goodness and caress you into allowing the abundance that is seeking to be expressed as you.
You are enough. Being you, is more than enough. In fact, being you is the key to happiness, healing others, and love. Your authentic self cannot be made in the material world or discovered through study. Your authentic self is uncovered through self-love, feeling your emotions, and expressing the writing Creation has written on your heart.
No matter your current occupation, you can be a healer and an inspiration to others. When you internally give yourself full permission to be you, you set others free. Whatever we perceive is lacking in a relationship it is something we are now allowing within ourselves (Teaching from A Course in Miracles). Whether you are single or in a relationship when you realize the One within, you align with the incredible partner waiting for you. Your vibration raises others to meet you.
Why is self-love and inward "opening up" so powerful? Because life will match how you feel about yourself. As you love "your crazy," you realize your innate wholeness and beauty. What you judge or repress gets bigger, and what you accept releases. Self-acceptance is logical when you realize that the lens you look through is the life you live. How you see yourself is how you see the world.
We all need to be reminded to clean the smudges on the lens, not through more self-criticism or blame, but through love. As you look within and compassionately witness your feelings and thoughts, you open up to the unified field of love. Allow your life to be seen through a clearer lens. The good is waiting for you! It is hard to see through the smudges!
Thank you for loving yourself. Every person that lets more of their inner light be seen and expressed directly affects their body, their family, their community, and our/the world. The world needs you to love yourself. You are an important thread in the fabric of Creation.
CHAPTER 2
The Guest House
Tasting love in your cells and feeling the divine expressing through your life starts with self-acceptance. Holding within your psyche that you are both a fragile, vulnerable human and a magnificent, gifted, powerful being is one key to happiness. Most of us are identified as broken and insecure, or powerful and amazing. But what if we are all both?
We all have the duality of our humanity and our divinity. This perceived separation and contrast is more apparent to those that dare to achieve. For example, most gifted artists don't have the psychological foundation to handle their talents. Experiencing the genius of their craft while having the vulnerabilities of being human can drive someone mad. I understand why Robin Williams couldn't accept himself. I saw a similar split in myself when I stepped into my gifts fifteen years ago. I was able to facilitate great healing in sessions for others, but when I left the healing room the insecure little girl rose up to be loved. Feeling "her" fear and insecurity with compassion, I realized more gifts and let myself be loved in the process.
Spiritually, when you accept your humanity you realize the next layer of your divinity. Your vulnerabilities are the fertilizer to realizing a greater you. What you perceive as weakness is actually a strength.
We all crave interdependence, connection, or oneness. When guided by narcissism and selfishness, we search for love and identity outside of ourselves. When we honor our humanity (vulnerabilities, feelings, and thoughts) we organically feel a greater connection to our full Self (divinity). When we feel this inward permission and love, we then feel safe to be loved by a group, by Life, and God. It is "lonely at the top" only when we forget our own humanity. In humility, peace and true love is found.
When you accept yourself as an equal, and do not place yourself beneath or above anyone else, you stop denying your feelings and trying to painfully rescue another from their self. When you know yourself as magnificent and flawed, you touch the cosmos. You stop giving your authority to be happy over to a loved one or boss.
When you feel discomfort around someone, it is not because of them. No one has the power to make you feel any certain way. When you don't give your feelings or expression permission, your ability to simply be yourself is suffocated. Anything you use to shield yourself will eventually lock you in a house of your own suffering. Peace and authenticity are inseparable. Inner peace is a practice of being in the world without hiding your feelings, or trying to impress. When you allow the connection to your fragile and powerful self to be felt, you have found the one.
Rumi - The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary
awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your
house empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them
at the door laughing, and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes, because each
has been sent as a guide from beyond.
When we are fearful of letting ourselves be loved (or in other words, allowing ourselves to feel as one) we dominate what we need. Every human must eat food. Yet our agricultural processes rape the soil of its micro nutrients, pollute the water with pesticides, and genetically modify vegetables that our bodies have trouble metabolizing. How has it become socially sane to spend hours sculpting, cutting, and fertilizing a yard until it is perfect? This same time could be used for growing food or studying a new language. We only feel safe in nature when we can control her wild ways.
We dominate nature and we dominate the ones we love. Culturally we are taught it is weak to need. "Power" is doing it all on your own, by yourself ... and up a hill. How can we get our needs met and let ourselves be truly loved with these beliefs? Fearful of independent choices the "dominator" will impose his/ her will until the "loved one" submits. For every person that wants to take someone's power there are people standing in line to have their power taken.
We enter into relationship yet hide our deepest feelings; we work to keep that part of ourselves "safe" from being hurt. The problem is whatever we keep secret eventually becomes shame and "proof" of our unworthiness. In denying ourselves, we cage our Soul's authentic expression in strategies of false security.
Rumi
Love comes with a knife, not some shy question.
And not with fears for its reputation!
Love is a mad woman. Roaming the mountains,
tearing off her clothes. Drinking poison. Then ...
quietly, quietly, choosing annihilation.
You have been wandering the seas edge ... picking
up your robes to pick them dry. You must plunge
now 1000x deeper..... naked under.
When did the earth every loosing anything, by submitting totally
to the sky?? Untie the cords of your robes. Un-muffle the drums
and shiver in this new kind of love. Neither above or below.
Suggestions for Application
Are you ready and willing? Are you done settling and picking your robes up to not get wet? It is time to get wet with the full glory of love. It is time to let yourself feel so loved and beautiful. The journey will be rough at times. However this book will get you "'there".
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end
of all our exploring will be to arrive where we
started and know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot
You will return where you started ... back to You. Yet, you will know a You more brilliant and beautiful than you can imagine. As you fall asleep the next few nights say to yourself "I am willing to know a deeper love. I am willing to be loved. I am ready". Journal any insights the next day.
Every section, I will ask you to say affirmations or ask a question. Say affirmations with focus 3 times, and then let go. When instructed to ask a question, don't try to analyze or find the answer. Let the answer rise up in your dream state or when you wake in the morning.
Dating Quip
Like me and hundreds of people I've counseled, we play it safe. Not 'safe' in a healthy self-caring discerning way ... but 'safe' through compromise and settling. If hurt in adolescence or early childhood, we went toward a relationship that was practical and safe. We didn't know how to truly love ourselves, so how could we attract real love? We didn't know that real love required a deep embrace of our imperfections and gifts. We didn't know how to be shaking in vulnerability at times; how to be embraced by loves light. We forgot that love was supposed to be supportive, exciting, sexy, and evolving. We became complacent and comprised what we really wanted.
Realizing my nine year relationship was not love, was earth shattering. I didn't know what love was. But admitting I was starving, and stepping into the ocean of true love was the beginning of one of my greatest journeys.
My story is many peoples' stories. I was in a relationship I thought was love, and then like a thief in the night, I realized I was starving. Like many, I thought at first there was something wrong with me or I was being greedy. But life, my heart, and God called me forward. I began to see that this greater yearning for a deeper love is a desire for a greater embodied awareness of my own heart and God.
If you are single it is wise to discover an agape love within, so when the partner arrives you can be joyfully annihilated into an even greater love. If you don't have the inner structures to endure such a love, you will collapse back into compromised safety and sabotage the relationship. This is why 85% people who win the lottery loose the money in five years. If you are in a committed relationship, your inner growth can and will directly affect your partner.
Real love will evolve you, uplift you, and show you, your worst and best parts. It will be juicy, joy filled, and challenging. If you have not practiced self-love, when real love knocks, you will run away from the very thing that you want. If you are in a playing it "safe" in a relationship now, trust your inner changes can shift the relationship for the greater good of you and your partner.
CHAPTER 3
Receiving Love and the True Nature of Power
Receiving support and love is one of the hardest things for people to do. Why does vulnerability and a feeling of weakness arise as love is received? This may be because we simply feel more powerful when we give. This feeling is founded in the belief that it is weak to receive (help, support, advice, etc). This belief in its various forms comes from our hierarchical, scarcity-minded, competitive society in which we learn a power-over model verses power-with. This belief also comes from a culturally fierce individualism that has forgotten the value of community. From our mistaken definition of power we deny the very medicine we need to heal and express our gifts on the planet. Love received fully obliterates limited self-identification and stories of limitation. Unconsciously, we know this ... and we will block or fight the very thing we desire.
On the flip side as the giver of love, even if you subtly see receiving for yourself as weak, what message do you think you send to whom you give? I can feel when someone is feeling even slightly superior to me when they help me. This power-over way of helping feels repressing, sticky, and degrading. They may be giving the most beautiful gift, but the intention behind it feels unloving. Power-with means to welcome another to the table rather than throwing scraps to them on the floor.
Relationships based on power-over are the foundation to codependency. Those whom you rescue will need to attack you to reclaim their power. Every person yearns for personal sovereignty and yet is scared to do so. If they believe you are their savior they must "kill you" to have their own resurrection. Communicating your needs develops clear boundaries. Even so, how can you communicate needs if you think someone else is responsible for them? How can you know what your needs are if you are constantly putting everyone's needs ahead of your own?
In session "Leslie" would not take time to do any inner spiritual work because she said it "interferes with husbands and kids schedule". Yet she would yell at her husband and the kids when she was anxious or worried about them. In session one day she had this insight "My meditation helps me AND my family. It does not take away from them!" This insight completely changed her life, she began to meditate and even discovered a childhood dream.
The greater your sovereignty or autonomy, the deeper you can be in Love. You will resist coming into your full power unconsciously thinking it will keep him or her away. In other words, we play small to try to "get" love. BUT we will never "get" love until we have received it for ourselves. ... thus autonomy. Autonomy leads to greater inter-independence. When you anchor into the fullness of your being, you naturally feel the connection to God, people and the natural world, that have always been.
The "autonomy" principal also applies to your relationship with the Infinite-Creation or God. You are a unique and complete expression of Creation and at the same time One with It. Every time you allow the next layer of your magnificence to be received and make a deeper claim of your innate worth, a greater connection to all things results.
To give while knowing that you are all an intrinsic strand in the web of life frees the one giving to be fully supported within his/her own personal life. The intention behind your giving (love, help, advice, money etc ...) will define your ability to receive. When you give out of guilt or obligation, you confine both yourself and the receiver.
Your intent and inner self-perception shape the benefit of your actions. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches in his book Being Peace a person must take responsibility for what is within, and then serve. This is what he calls a true practice of peace. Likewise, you must come into greater receptivity of Love for your hands, feet and voice to be used in a way that truly empowers. Who we are teaches another, not what we say. Thus you can only give what you have received for yourself. When you give and receive from a knowing of your innate worth, you may truly feel there is no separation between the two.
We can't do life alone. "Inter-Be," as Thich Nhat Hanh calls it, or Inter-independence as I understand it, is crucial to happiness. Here is an example: the tree does not seem weak for receiving the sun or water, so why do you not remain open to love? Your fear of not receiving what you want is a signal that you are denying receiving Love in the present. Be willing to know your true beauty and worth. Life-Creation will begin to show you. Loneliness is also a signal that you are resisting love. Let yourself be loved; you have the power to open the "valve" and see your brilliance or close the "valve" and remain lonely. You open the valve by loving all parts of you through spiritual study (this book), meditation, self-acceptance, journaling and asking for help. The valve is not real, it is a creation of the egoic mind.
The mind is separate from Love. The ego mind will always get us to attack the very thing that will save us. The killing of loving beings such as Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King is an external representation of what we do within. We isolate and push away love, clinging to stories and addictions as if they will fill us. We become the lonely "hungry ghost," a symbol in Buddhism of a person with tiny mouth, long neck and large swollen belly. The hungry ghost is never able to get full, constantly starving as it continues to consume. Can you relate?
You are a complete part of a system, wherein the part contains the whole. You must claim your wholeness, to feel the oneness. If you try to connect to a Love beyond all boundaries without loving yourself first, you will be convinced into thinking this Love is outside of yourself. This is why in opening to receive, you become more yourself.
This reminds me of a story Joanna Macy tells in her book Active Hope. Two kings were having a discussion of their power. One says, "I can make any servant jump off of a cliff!" while the other one says, "I can have any servant sit at my table and eat" The first king represents power-over, while the latter king represents the new paradigm of power-with.
