Who is it for?

Certainly our inner work is for us.  Our journey to find all the ways in which we lost connection with love, all the ways we were treated by people that my mistakenly  professed were love, but were not, all the ways in which in not making us feel sufficiently loved those made us feel unsafe and therefore limited our capacity to feel love and express it without, all of these things have to be explored in our deep inner work to reclaim the original child essence in us that contained our most pure innocence before it was corrupted and return to love which I believe is the basis of our true nature.

One of the most corrupting and damaging things that I believe my own Catholic education taught was the belief in original sin.  In some prayers we are told to reject Satan and all of his works.  I always found that problematic, for Saturn was once an angel and he fell into the darkness but he had real lessons to learn there and so do we and paradoxically darkness is what the original sin concept takes us into.  And I do not believe we were born knowing Satan but only knowing love but love is not what we necessarily find when we are born.  As Marianne Williamson says  : “love is what we were born with, fear is what we learned here” and if this is true, I believe it is, then we are here to learn about Satan/fear and understand how the critical super ego can block our pure nature child essence from its full expression and experiencing of love.

Others super egos block us, with all their prohibitions about who we should be and what we should do to be accepted or loved and if we are born to those limited in their capacity to express love and even to see us as a separate unique individual then our entire development becomes highly problematic.  We have a lot of work to do to reclaim that essential side of us, what John Bradshaw has called our ‘wonder child’ or ‘soulful child’.

Being around young children is something that I find enormously healing and enlightening.  If you are around children in their young years if they have not already suffered severe abuse you know you are in the presence of an open, curious spirit who just expresses, often they express a thirst for knowing, they see the world through eyes of awe that are open to wonders of life and nature that we tend to become blind to in later life and they are full of questions no longer believing they know the answers.  Keep an open mind is one of my favourite AA and Al Anon sayings, it implies that there is always something I can learn.  This is not to say that I should not trust the deeper knowings of my own heart and intuition and I do think one of the profound gifts of childhood is that children operate on a more intuitive level, if they are naturally psychic, for example they may actually see non physical life forms such as angels.

I recently read a book by a woman whose own psychic gifts had been blocked in childhood. Her mother didn’t believe her daughter when she spoke of the things she saw and so this person shut down her own knowing.  It took a major crisis to put her back on her psychic/intuitive pathway, now she helps those who are also waking up to these kinds of gifts themselves.

I started this blog with the question who is it for?  What I was thinking about how our work to reconnect inwardly and find the source of love inside of ourselves is most certainly for us but surely it is not only for us.   The question I have is perhaps whether the waking up process of recovering our depths and capacity to love is about becoming a love warrior, just as Glennon Melton Doyle has written in her book on the subject.  Maybe our waking up process is about finding a path or destiny in which we find a path to being a voice for love on a planet that so dearly needs this message.

I wrote a blog earlier this week on grief in which I spoke about the wish I had to be a grief warrior in that I wanted to be able to share and help others to know that grieving is a necessary process of feeling and self expression from deep in one’s heart and soul that when thwarted leaves huge scars.  That often only an awakening to our deepest grief, actually opens our path to love and compassion.

We cannot be naïve in this life as there are those out there who for their own reasons are invested in not allowing us to grieve or love, maybe because they lack the stamina for that work.  Or they want to block and protect their hearts against further pain and so they close us or their own feelings out.

Most certainly if our grief is caused from abuse it is showing love for ourselves to protect our heart from further abuse, but along the way after we grieve at depth and experience all the complex emotions of that process, we actually come to a point where we find that we now are in full possession of our own heart, a heart that has become strong enough and deep enough to feel the depth of suffering and compassion for the shutdown of a soul that would effect that kind of abuse.

We come to see how others lovelessness comes out of inner blockages.  We find compassion but we also know that at some stage each heart and soul makes a choice, either conscious or unconscious to open up, feel, expose and heal or to shut down, numb, close off and refuse to love or open again.

And that is when we can become a voice for love, if we have found the depth of courage to make the necessary surrender, we will know so deeply that we are loved and that others are too, but that often souls do chose for one reason or other to turn their backs on love.