

The Bones of The Soul

Rev. Kahuna Roxanne K. Cottell

Copyright 2017 Roxanne Cottell

Published by Roxanne Cottell at Smashwords

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The Bones of The Soul

Where we ache is not our heart

and why we ache is not all ours

Yet what we've seen and what we know is

evidenced by the nature of

The Bones of The Soul.

Where we rage is not ours alone

When we feel caged we need to Know

That all which has brought us here

Was fraught with the tide of pain and illusion of fear

and is Known deep down in

The Bones of The Soul.

When we cry the tears of pain and

when it seems that once again

that this sense of being here before

was something more

was in store

right there in

The Bones of The Soul.

When we want to seek revenge

and when the pain seems not to end

and when life feels like we'd rather die

than live again to fret and cry

'tis better that we defer

and refer

lest we forget what we felt

what we heard

what we saw

what we know

is still alive in

The Bones of The Soul.

Live or Die

Laugh or Cry.

Wherever we have been

the body will show

for there is nothing which can hide us from

The Bones of The Soul.

The Aching in The Bones of the Soul

Very few times in our lives are we given to examples of what the keys to life are, of where the answers to all of the mysteries of life live within us, and most of the time we would rather ache from within because it is familiar to us, than we would be bothered to seek where it is where the ache comes from. We choose to ache for reasons which end up making little or no sense at all once we look at a thing in its entirety.

You will notice that there are no numbered pages, that there are no chapters which have been titled or labeled, and nothing in this book that is anywhere near being a how-to or really anything other than the messages from the Cosmos which have been waiting for the entirety of my lifetime to this point and on this planet to come out and be seen.

There is something at this time in history that is bearing itself as witness to the great Shift in the thinking and the thought process of mankind. Suddenly we find ourselves collectively at a crossroads of Spirit and we are being, perhaps not forced, but more and instead shown the way and our Paths are being lit for us via the light of the heart and the direction and prodding of the Soul.

It is time now, for us all, to really look within, see where it is that we pine and what it is that we seek so diligently and be not in shock when we realize that the answer already has shown itself and we have, through the conditioning that we were taught was "the right way," that paperwork counts more than does the aching inside, that being seen as a "good" person in society through our works and what it is that we can show people we are made of and prove to them that we are good by their measure rather than our own. We are all entitled only one thing promised to us when we enter into the agreement with Spirit to come into Being on this plane for however long it takes for our Soul to convene with other souls so as to go out "into the wilderness" as did Christ and "tell it on the mountain," so to speak.

We can never rid ourselves of our hurts. The hurts we go through and experience will always live within us as a memory and our Soul cannot forget the lesson that we learned through that event which is why we remember what we do and sometimes we even learn from it. The things that happen to us do so when they do and to the severity that we can handle them because in those hurts, the hurts which ache and bother us and make us cry and make our souls cry out for relief as well as release, all the way down to the very Bones of our Souls.

We do not think about it when we say we are "so tired that our bones ache," but when we think about it in terms of an ache in the Soul, we know, too, that somewhere within us there needs to be made free or at least accepted that there is a change happening outside of us, and that those very changes are taking place because someone, at some time in history, our history, someone had the temerity to want to change a hurt and had to hurt for the change, but not for the lesson at hand. While the learning of our lessons hurts, we are never going to be in pain for those lessons into perpetuation because that is just not the way that the Soul learns and neither is it the way that it works on our behalf.

The Soul is meant to be with other souls, and because of this we find that throughout the course of our lives we come into agreement with other like-minded people and it is all for the purpose of bringing to fruition the purpose which is ours alone but is tantamount in importance to other Souls realizing their purpose in this lifetime as well.

When it is that we ache so very badly and when we find ourselves huddled in a ball on the corner of the couch, looking out the window into the backyard but most assuredly not looking at anything specific and we happen upon a solution to a problem which we thought was endless, we find that the endlessness was never in the problem itself but only in the ache that we feel which pounds mercilessly and makes us crazy.

We needn't hang on to all the craziness, all the hurt and all the things that were the facets of the lesson. All we need to do is learn again to Love, for that is the lesson which is contained in every single thing that we bring into this lifetime and more, everything that our Soul has cherished about itself since its own inception.

We are meant, as Souls, to Be, in Love, and our human side will not allow us to be vulnerable, to be accepting and to be all that it was meant to be, and this is because of what we have been taught is right and good according to other people.

"The Bones of the Soul" is the Soul speaking on its own behalf, allowing us to see what it pines for, what it needs and more, questions why it is that daily we are more inclined to pay homage to the things and the situations outside of ourselves which, without the Soul's involvement, we cannot experience because there is no experience that can be had first without the Soul's desire for the experience, and more, the need that the Soul has for the outcome of the experience.

Indeed, "The Bones of the Soul" has been created not as more than the wistful pining and whispers of the Soul as it stands always in judgment by the body and never taken for what it is really meant to do for us.

The Soul is the part of us which is eternal, which feels and gives and Knows only Love. "The Bones of the Soul" brings light to the things that every Soul desires for its own self

And what the Soul desires, so too does the body and the Ego, but the Soul requires that we deal with our own misgivings about what it is that the Ego thinks it wants the physical manifestation of the Soul to do....

That, my friends, is what this book is all about – it reminds us, from the whims and the very Desires of every Soul, that which is of the strictest, highest, most important to it, and we find every time, that the greatest thing that the Soul desires is the ability to see to manifestation the perfect, higher Love brought through to the world through means of imperfect yet constantly higher-striving human beings. The aching we each feel in the very Bones of the Soul is our wake up call to get rid of the things that we think are important but which rob us of the joys of completion, even as completion is never to be had but by the passage of time and these physical bodies. However, without the pain, without the ache, and at the end of each lesson, we find that we are stronger by far than we first believed ourselves as being, and we, too, find, that there is perfection in our very imperfections....

Aloha !!!

Rev. Roxanne Cottell

Why are we so angry?

Crying

Human beings want to know why we are so angry, why it is that we cry for seemingly no reason, and there have been times when we will all at the same time wonder these very same things. I have always wanted to know what it is that compels us to hang on to the things that make us ache, that

make us hurt, and that make our lives become the magnificence or the messes that they end up being. My own life, up until yesterday, was a mess, at least to me, and I am sure that there is a small handful of people with whom I have close relationships who will tell you that I am all right, that I am the strongest woman on the planet, even as the things which haunt my life still have prevalence in it, still have weight, still control some little part of me and who I am.

My soul will not allow me to sit here any further and wish that things were different. I don't like pining for change – I like making changes, because that is what people do – we change things . I always accepted the idea that someone like me who was "just a mom" would become what I have, which is something that is many-fold, much as we all are. Yet, even this is not the reason that I am compelled to sit here and write this book about things that we hang on to and things that we place our greatest hopes and dreams upon, and we do so on a shaky foundation – we build our lives on the lies we have been told, on the things that we were told were true and expected to believe because someone else told us it was the truth. While it may have been their truth, no one else's truths have to stay our own.

No one tells us that we were, upon our entry into this lifetime, meant to hurt, meant to cry, meant to rage and meant to be made to look foolish, and though you have read a million and one words on the topic of things meant to be and have read that as humans we are not meant to suffer, what I have come to know as the Truth of things is that the word "learn" can mean the same thing as "suffer." When we must learn to make a change, a part of us suffers for the change, dies for the change, and in that death, no matter how miniscule, there is much borne to the idea that when we hurt, we learn, and when we learn, we grow.

When We Learn, We Grow

When we are learning something it means that we do not know something -which hurts because no human I know who is still alive and breathing and walking the earth knows everything. This means that no, you do not know "it all". When a person doesn't know something, it hurts. No one can claim to knowing all the facets of Love and Life, and no one can tell anyone else that they can live without Love in their lives because one depends on the other. One of these two things cannot be in existence without the utilization of the other in an ongoing manner. Life needs Love to proliferate, and Love needs Life as the proof that the All That Is gives to us the meaning that we hold about Life and about Love. These two things present themselves as they are meant to be seen and how they accord themselves within our own private lives.

Hurt and hurting are all relative. For a person to need or to want to learn anything, whatever it is that they want or need to learn is relative to things in their lives which may bear similarities to that of others,but just like no two snowflakes are alike, no two lifetimes are alike, not even for identical twins. If we were to have all the same identical experiences there would be no reason for the lessons, no reason that we would actually need to hurt as we do. While we are not meant to suffer, to hurt is to be human within and without. We need to hurt, need to be in the company of things that break our hearts. We need to have experiences that hurt us so that we can see the difference between hurt and that which is not hurt, the difference between dark and shadow, the differences between us that make us each all who we are.

We all hurt, but different things make us each individually hurt. The person who was abused as a child and who did not receive any sort of acknowledgment will, by virtue of what they did not receive as a child, perpetuate that hurting into their adulthood. The abused child will still remain alive and well inside of the adult's Soul, begging and crying and maybe even stomping their feet, all in an attempt to make their own pain subside. And just like no one can tell us how we will receive what we are expected to take as the truth, no one can also tell us how to feel about the truths we have been given by someone else.

The truth about a child who is the victim of abuse is that said child will grow in one of two ways – he will perpetuate the truth of those same horrors visited upon him throughout his childhood and go on to abuse his own family, or, he will grow into the whims of his own Soul, toward Love, toward healing, and toward the Knowing and the belief that what he is experiencing is not his fault. He knows that it is not his fault, and he endures the pain of not being an accepted part of his parents' life to the extent and with the measure that he truly was meant to be.He grows into an adult who has taken his pain, taken the aches from the Bones of the Soul, and has learned the value of who he really is to him and not the diminished sense of who he has been told he is. There is a great and marked difference between the self exacted person who knows without a doubt that his life on this plane might have started out as being a harsh reality, but he knows that his is a life that has the potential to become more than even he knows that it can and it is because he changed his belief in things, and the person who never bothers to see the truth in the abuse that we impart onto others who cannot or perhaps do not have the tools to make a change.

Changes in what we each believe will ultimately change the way that we see the world in which we live

Changing our belief in the truths of others is the first step that the Soul makes when it is aware that it needs to grow.

The Soul is never not growing. It is a constant and energetic state. If our Soul has been rife with sadness, the imbalance is that the body in which it lives and is supposed to thrive is having experiences which need to happen. The body needs the sadness so that it can help the Soul learn the reason for the sadness and why it is that it chose to learn it at all. When we ask for a change in the way that we believe in things, in truths belonging to others, we are asking for our entire way of seeing things to also be shifted to this higher perception of things that we want in our lives. We want so badly the things that we see and the things that we intend upon, and most of the time we can see to it that the thing, the end result is what we want, but there are those among us who cannot and do not see the end because they are so very worried about what they went through that they are not prepared for what they are about to go through.

We will always be revisited by the lessons we choose to avoid. Humans abhor change, just as much as the Universe abhors a vacuum. Hence it is wise that we choose, rather than to avoid what we will be revisited by so that we will Know how to get through a thing the next time it happens in our lives. We want badly to be "okay" in life, but we are not willing, now or at any other time, the majority of us all, to go through the pain of the lesson so that we can get to the end of a thing and experience the comfort of healing.

The Pain of The Lesson

Your mother cannot tell you that you are going to be okay and that you are going to make it through the madness that is healing from the abuses experienced in life. If your mother also went through those same actions and words by the adults in her life and during her own time as a child - because to your mother those actions and words will become part of the fabric of her everyday life - much as she will impart those beliefs, no matter how they are exposed, onto her child. The people who could have at one time be considered the adults in our lives will never admit to the idea that what you were told and expected to believe as the truth was somehow flawed, because you are now poised and ready to tell these former adults in your life that they had a hand in creating the diminished person who looks like you, acts like you, talks like you, but is so not you.

Neither will these adults, because they still are gripping hold to that belief about the former adults in their lives and refusing to let go, bother to try harder to understand why it is that you are in your Now, in your adulthood, and you are a seething mess of rage, of anger, of things that you do not understand. It is all because you continued to believe a truth for the majority of your life that was not completely your own. This is the pain in life – the getting through the things that we no longer have purpose for in the time called "our lives." We are not required to hang on to other peoples' truths, and while they might not be lies, other peoples' truths are not now nor will they ever be "one size fits all." Truth is different for all of us even as some of them may be contained in the same words to describe them.

Your parents, for all of their parentalness, cannot help you out of a heartache that they helped you create within your Self. Try as they might they cannot. The very demons which live within you also live within them and have lived within them for as long as they can remember. While it might be that you are ready and equipped to no longer have to live with the demons put there by a lifetime's worth of feeling like you are not smart enough to figure things out for yourself, are not worthy of someone to love you, are not a whole lot of things and ways of being that you pine to be, your parents still believe the things they told you was the truth, and then instilled in you the idea that Spirit is Who wills us to be abused, so that must mean that we somehow deserved the abuses we received.

Ummm, no. That is not correct. You see, where it is that we do not see what we are learning about? Yeah – that will never just reveal itself. Get that through your head right now – just as you had to learn Algebra and had to no clue as to what it was all about, you still had to go through the pain of that learning. Just like the Algebra teacher had to teach us what they think the joy of numbers is, Spirit makes the lessons available to us through other people who come to our lives to share with us one part of it so that we can be given the learning experience that we need. Like those algebraic equations drove us all crazy, we either learned how to construct formulas or we learned to continue to hate Algebra. Taking this example I can say that we either learn to embrace the things that cause us pain and see it all for what it really is, or we can ignore it all and go through it over and over again and judge our lives as being less than all it is meant to be.

We Are Who is responsible for making our lives all they are meant to be, just as we are also responsible for making our lives all that they are not.

Your parents cannot help you in any way other than to be likened to your high school Algebra teacher. Lots of our generation's parents are still prone to the things that ate away at who they wanted to be. Your parents cannot do something for you that they cannot also do for themselves. They cannot undo your hurting from the things that they brought with them to this lifetime and gave to you as your first gifts of learning. This is not my rule but that of the Universe, that of the spark that makes us be, that of all which is right and good. We cannot expect people who are as childlike in some ways as we are to help us. In fact, it is strongly suggested that we NOT ever ask them for much more, when speaking in terms of things which mar us with the scars which have become the wounds of childhood, because their advice is given from a parental point of view.

Even as they cannot figure out what makes you so damned angry all the time, they also cannot figure out the reason that they are physically manifesting symptoms which usually are chalked up to heredity. What is hereditary is so much more than the manifested physical ailment, but this falls upon chosen deafened ears. Heredity can only be given so much credit for the things that make us nutty. Heredity can only be responsible for so much before heredity just becomes the typical and easy excuse for the way that we feel about our Selves and our Lives. Heredity can be given responsibility for our susceptibility toward physical manifestation of disease in our lives, but we are who are required to take the responsibility for the things that bring that hereditary thing within us to Life. We are who manifest our own health or lack thereof.

Our Own Health, or lack thereof

Our manifested physical ailments are like the receipts we receive after we have made a purchase. When we are children is when the major ailments in our adulthood begin. If we are made to suffer always the loneliness that comes with other people rejecting us or judging us harshly and we refuse to Know the Soul is meant to go through these times of cleansing, and if we choose to continue the deferment of lessons that the Soul needs to learn, we will experience an ongoing lifetime's worth of never really knowing what it is to be Whole, to be Healed. We humans are so good at Knowing what we do not want that we are not ever sure of what we do want until the thing that we do not want is a reality in our lives. Physical ailments are the manifestation of ills of the Soul. If a person has heart problems, it is because he has carried with him throughout the bulk of his lifetime a hatred, an anger, a raging within that has caused the heart to Know only those things. The heart was meant as a gauge for Love, and when we do not receive Love from the Soul when we are children it manifests in one way or another in our adulthood as either ailment or supreme health.

Your parents can never help you with the things that they impart on you if what they are imparting on you is what was also imparted upon them and was someone else's truth and way. In fact, it may very well be up to you to help them with this one day, so please remember that what they taught you was also taught to them. What was taught to them, the same way that they taught it to you, was also taught in the very same manner that you were taught. Because you are a different person, because you were born in a different time in history, to parents who were not your own parent's parents, you have the chance to make right again that which was spent during the history of your own evolution to this very moment right now, that which may never have been right to begin with.

It is never the same message in the sameness that are the lessons which were handed down to people who still follow that measure of the lesson's rule

You cannot blame your parents for not knowing any better, because the things that are normal for your generation are certainly not the same things which applied to their generation. Neither will what you were told was the truth apply to the generations which come after yours. You cannot put onto their shoulders the expectation that what they – your parents - went through, even though it might be "the same thing."

What we have experienced in the same manner as what you perceived as your experience when you were granted access to that Knowing your parents have handed down to you because that is what they know to be "right." They cannot help but to believe what they were taught. You cannot give them hell for something that they believe, for something that they might, in their hearts and all the way down to the very bones of their souls, believe to be the truth. When they were children and when they were told the truth of things by the adults in their lives, they, too, may not have thought it was right or correct or even containing the tiniest speck of common sense, but it is theirs and we, as their brood, haven't the right to tell them what they should and should not believe according to our own experiences.

Neither can they or anybody else expect us to adhere to what it was that was their truth to be called our own truth. It just will not work and will not happen – we are two different generations, and the new must come into the picture and replace the old methods and logic of thought. This is not to say that what we have been given by them is not valuable. The opposite of that is the truth. It is the truth because from those lessons that they gave us we were able to form our own beliefs and our own truths. There is never a lesson that is not of value to us. We learn so very much just from the world which we live in personally. Lots of times what we learn is not for us but for us to pass on to others so that they might learn. We are meant as truth bringers, but we are not meant as truth-down-the-throat-shovers. We can drag a human to a set of truths, but we cannot make said human think about them and apply them to his or her own life – that is theirs alone.

Our Ego is what compels us to want to make others believe that our truths should also be theirs.

We cannot expect people who believe a thing so intrinsically, so much as to push through what they believe to not be right about, so much as to force themselves to accept someone else's truth as being THE truth and then to eventually impart it onto you. We cannot expect, neither demand, or even hope that they might "get it." Even as you have, like I have, on many occasions and most likely through tears, told them about the thing that has lived in your Soul for as far back as you can recall. Even as you have been tormented by it, even as the things that you have fought within your Self for the entirety of your life, even though what it is that you have experienced as your reality and what you Know as being the truth of you was somehow shaped by the ugly things you survived, you can only expect that one day, after much grieving over what was done to you through or by them, they will, at very little least, acknowledge your pain and acknowledge that yes, they have a large piece of the responsibility for the way that you believe, or more, do not believe, the things that you were taught by them.

As long as we believe that being terrible to other people is the only way that they will learn anything, we will also continue to birth the demons which will reside as the ugliness of the soul and that ugliness will be felt down to the very marrow of the Bones of The Soul, all the way down to that plane of consciousness within us all that is the measuring stick by which we can gauge why we believe anything that someone else tells us is the truth to begin with. As children we want to place every bit of our little kid belief in these people who we were brought into the world by, and we do because of the familiarity and the trust that is meant to be there at birth, at least of all with our mothers.

When that trust is breached, we find out at that point and through means of what our own parents' beliefs in an action, thought or thing, according to whoever taught it to them, are. If we are of the belief that our parents are never wrong, it will be a painful reality for us when we come to the point in our own evolution to find out that everything we were told was right and good by our parents is not the truth which we must further follow. It is not wrong for them so long as they believe it, but if it is making you bristle at a thing, then you are being given signals that what might have been assumed as the 'right' thing for you is not and maybe never was. While there isn't a thing wrong with a difference in a set of values and beliefs, to assume that a child will grow into the adult of our own design is wishful at best, and horribly dangerous to our own Selves at worst. We are given truths by people who are also as clueless about parenting as we are at being children, namely when we are no longer children

We are expected to believe everything as the truth when our parents are the ones who are telling us about a thing or way of being. Even as they teach us their ways, they are not equipped to teach us how to deal with the changes to our own system and sets of beliefs and values, and it is because they themselves are still being led by the beliefs they were given as children by people, dependent upon how old they are, who may no longer even be alive in this consciousness. You read that right – while you might not think that your parents are playing with a full deck of cards, it might be possible that they concluded a long time ago that what they have believed and have given to you as your lessons and your truths might not be the truth to believe in. In other words, your parents might actually be questioning the validity of the truths that they so dearly hang on to because somewhere inside of them is their own version of their own inner child still needing to believe what it is that they were brought up to believe as being the only truth that will ever be.

If our parents believe that physically punishing a child is their right, that same child will also grow up to believe that they were given the truth, that they were given what is the truth according to someone else who also told your parents that it, and that whatever the "it" is, is still the truth. If a child sees his father beating another man down, it will be that child's belief, even if his father tells him otherwise, that the way to get your point across is to beat it into a person. If that father does not insist that the way that he'd handled the situation was the very last thing that anyone should even think to do, that child will grow up believing otherwise. We teach our children in ways that we are not aware of, and many times that which spews from our mouths is not the same energy being received by others from our very actions. If a man chooses to handle all his difficulties with violence, the only thing the man, if his children, and in particular his sons, will believe is that he who can beat a person down to their knees or with their faces in the dirt is also he who can get his way simply by means of bullying someone into doing something.

Our beliefs are our own. When I was growing up my family – the WHOLE family – was very, still are very "born again." And this is cool with me – we all have to believe in something outside of ourselves and I am sure that a belief in Jesus saving us is a pretty good one to hang on to. Let it be well known at this moment that I bear no ill will toward anyone who is a born again Christian, but while it is that I am happy that there are any people who believe that their version of Christ is real, what still bothers me a whole lot about the entire born again lifestyle is the way that people who are zealously born again stems from what I know to be the truth of things about human beings in general. Human Beings in general want and need something outside of ourselves to believe in. Human beings also have the inborn biological ability toward besting one another, with everything and anything, and the things that we like besting one another over are not things, really, but ideals and ways of being. I know this. I lived through it all and some days, even now, I still relive the hell that was brought to me as a child by the adults in my life.

Things brought to us in childhood by our Adults

Now understand that my own mother is strong and resilient, but even as she is both of these fine qualities, the things that she was brought up to believe have also rendered her to be very vengeful, albeit quietly so, totally mistrusting of people as whole, and passively aggressively having little tolerance for things and people and ways of being that do not equate in a manner which even she can understand or is willing to accept. The things that she witnessed and experienced were what shaped her to this day. The things that my mother understands as being "right" and "good" are the very things that she and the person whose care she left me in are the very things that they both may have taught me, both may have instilled in me, but neither of them, at least one of them, that is, neither of them has my experience with what they were taught and what they each, in their own way, neither way still fully understood by me, taught me.

Where it was that there was no understanding on my part because I was too little to understand was also where it was that my caretaker may have lost sight of the fact that I was a child, that I did not ever understand or even know about the thinking in terms of "hit first and ask questions later," and that to this day, even as I have gone through all which I have, by choice, I still do not understand it. I cannot understand it because it is not mine anymore to understand. I cannot say if whether or not it was ever mine or that in this Now I have not somehow gleaned some sort of something from them both, even as what I went through and what I know is markedly different than what they thought they were giving me and more, what they, themselves, learned from their parents and from me.

What we have all learned from each other is not what we each were taught even though the things and the way that those lessons were taught may well be materially the same

Where they might have thought that it would be a good thing to scare things out of me prior to my being curious about them only made me more curious about them. Where they tried to show me how a young lady is supposed to behave only caused me to not want to be their standard "nice young lady." Where they taught me that "a man is a man is a man is a man, "which was apparently meant to make me be more aware of the realities all young women face, only made me more curious about why they would say such hateful things and thereby caused me not only to be more curious about the opposite gender, but it also made me love them more as my friends than I would care to be with the same number of girls my age. Of course, things are far different now. I no longer believe that women are meant to be in constant competition with one another no matter what, and while I have issues with trusting men in general, I enjoy their company as much as I do company with my girls! Being taught that men are not to be trusted and that women are to be trusted less is what rendered me curious about the genders which separate us, made me want to know why it was that my mother would ever dare tell me these things that were her truth.

We have to learn to trust one another, just as we must learn to strike a balance between trust and doing. We can trust what anyone says for whatever reason we might have, but if there is no balance struck, no way for us to see the proof in the learning, we will yearn for what it is that we do not know and most of the time will go about that learning the wrong way. We will learn with our ego and our brain and not with our heart because that is what we were taught to do. We will learn with the things that scare us and which make us feel like we are not now nor will we ever be anything close to what anyone else wants us to be. Someone will always question what we are up to, what it is that we are bearing the fruit of, and for the very life of us we never know what the fruit of anything is if we are not able to plant the seeds needed for it. We cannot bother with the idea that who we are hinges on what other people want us to be. In doing so we give to others the things that we do not want to keep hold of ourselves. The sin in not wanting to keep hold of what we know is that what we know haunts us and we end up trying hard to not give those things to our kids. Luckily, most of us learn and know well what it is to live through the perception of not being received as we are.

The Truth Borne in Our Kids

Know now that it was not my punishing him, and neither him saying something which would escalate a thing, but rather and only my keen observation. One day, not too long ago, I watched my big son with his little brother. They played, and I could see his Spirit, and it was True and His and Big...they glowed. I had, at that moment, a very new respect for this human being with this great big light for everything and everyone around him, and I realized right then that this boy of mine is technically an adult at the age of 18 rather than the golden glowing Soul that I at that moment saw him as. I found that I have respect for the child inside, the little boy who I Know is still in there, still crying and still afraid, but never afraid to try.

My Big Boy is not scared to Love People. My Big Boy is a Good Person. I have always Known this of Him. His is a Beautiful Soul. He shines very brightly, even when the Sun is high in the sky Jeremy's light shines brighter. Through the things that I was shown as a little girl I learned that just because this boy is 24 years younger than I am, that his sister is 28 years younger than I am, that his little brother is 34 years younger than I am, it does not mean that they are without the need to be respected, without the need to be glorified, even if it is a quiet and reverent glorification for the Soul which is the True Child, the True Person, on the inside.

I take great pains on a daily basis to let them each know, even my two siblings, that they are honored by me and that it is an honor to have them here in my life with me. I make it known to and by them that I expect them to respect me, and they know, too, that I will respect them because that is an expectation that I place upon myself to show everyone respect as I expect and deserve it. I make it no secret to them that they are loved without limit, that they are going to screw up, that they are going to make me angry, but most of all, that how I feel about them will never change. They know within them and all the way down to the very bones of their very young and beautiful souls that their mother has loved them forever, and that I always will. This is the thing that we all believe we have when we are born, and it is the thing that we each strive for and pine to have as part of our own lives as we get through this life as children and then adults. We are taught at a young age by our parents that we either are or are not worthy of their Love, their approval, and their Light of Heart. Most of the time we each get these things that we so dearly need for the growth of the Soul. Sometimes, though, we don't, and it is at that point of finally accepting that the rest is up to us that it seems the skies open up and out onto us rains the showers of relief – we are relieved that we have the truth and relieved that now, no matter what we know from childhood, we are free in the idea and the belief that it is now our turn to Be Who We Were Meant To Be.

The Beauty Which is the Soul Within

I believe my mother when she tells me that she raised me with as much Love as she had, that she cares about me – she'd reminded me of what I had known, but also after many years of not knowing, what I so dearly needed to hear. I wanted to ask her if it was so hard to tell me that she cared, why was it that everyone else knew that I was doing a good job all those years in hula, that I didn't know from them, but from the people they'd gone and told?

My mother, I find, is a person who is very good and very skilled with her hands. She crafts the most beautiful items that people buy up quickly from her. To see these creations is to take a look at the beauty that is all her own. Yet I will never understand why it is that somehow there is always a reason as to why she cannot make them as often, why it is that she will defer to the things that she believes limit her. When she explains to me why she cannot do what she loves to do so much, I am stricken with the feeling, actually the tightness in my chest that comes to me when my Soul is trying to tell me to pay attention to my Bones because My Bones never lie to me. My Bones tell me that they ache, not because I know that she would make a whole lot of money from her creations, but because she believes, somehow, that no one will Love them like she Loves them, and that no one will want them, even though she knows that she would buy them herself if she'd not been the one to create them.

This is the madness that becomes us, the thing which permeates who we are and where we are in our lives, and this is the thing that makes us want to be more than we are right now. If there is one thing that my mother taught me that I am sure she is not aware that she has, it is that our limitations make us more beautiful. Our limitations call on us to reach down deep inside and find a safe place to rest when it is that the entirety of the human world is out there trying to pry into us and make us think that we are somehow not good enough. I know that the reason that I love hula as much as I have always is because it is the beauty of my Soul, much as are these very words you are now reading. Without the creativity within, we have nothing. Without the creativity within, we have no guide as to how to creatively work through our issues and come out on the other side of them healed. Without the idea in our heads that there are no limits to the gifts we have been given at conception that we are here with Purpose, then we are just here taking up space and not doing much at all.

To risk ourselves creatively is to risk who we are for real. To place into the world the thought that we need to risk a piece of ourselves in exchange for something new and better is to place the seed of possibility. Within the seed of possibility is that needed Love energy that becomes us more than it hurts us. It hurts us because at the Soul Level we are crying out for change in our lives and we are trying hard to release the things that we so do not want to be a part of us any longer. When we can look at something through the eyes of Love and know that whatever it is that is there before us is as perfect and unique as it needs to be we can finally be at peace with things, or, at the very least, we can Know for sure that we are taking steps toward our own wholeness. My mother, I guess, never cared much to go outside of the things that thrilled her Soul even as she was curious about them. She was too, is too scared.

And yes, there are a plethora of health issues that my mom has always had. Her energy and her zeal for Life cannot be hidden. My mother cannot sit still when she is creating something, and it bothers me that she does not believe that she is stronger and bigger than her weakening vision, that she is a more formidable foe than she is willing to risk believing she is, and I know this because she speaks it often. Yet, her eldest child can see the cracks in the foundation brought to her by time and by heartache. I can see through it all, can see that my mother is not long for this world, and because she believes firmly in everything that is truth to her, this is also what compels her to believe in her heart and for those with whom she shares an entire set of generational beliefs, that she is earning her way to Heaven, still convinced that there is only One Home and that We All Return To It when the lessons in this lifetime have been learned. I cannot and will not try to convince her that there is no hell, that some people on the planet who were raised in the church have become like I am – sort of androgynous when speaking and thinking in terms of how and what we each singly believe in.

She defers much to her health issues, and wears them on her sleeve, and uses them, I feel, as the thing that soothes her worries – she worries a LOT, about things that with her mouth she will tell you are none of her business, but with her energy, the light that I see which surrounds each of us, I see hers shrink a little, because the thing that she wants me to believe is that she has no opinion about how I believe in Spirit. Yet, her energy tells me that she is hiding her hurt, her grief at the death of my Christian Soul. I hope one day she will heal from this and see that I was taught to believe in a thing as strongly as I do BECAUSE of my very Born Again upbringing, not in spite of it.

Being Grateful For the Stuff in Our Lives which seem to make little sense at all

I learned of my gifts in places where Spirit supposedly lives, but the truth is that Spirit only goes to church when we go to church – why would Spirit not always want to be around us? Aren't we Spirit's kids? Don't parents always want to be at least near their kids? I know that I do. When I met God it was Mom's God. Then one day I went to a different church and instead of a Hawaiian band there was a kick ass heavy metal band and forever my Spiritual views changed because for the very first time in my Life, at the moment the very first screech of the guitar was sounded,Spirit was COOL and in that moment, my God ROCKED because my God had His Own Heavy Metal Band!! That was the day that I met MY God. And the way that I saw God at that point is the way that I still see God, but unlike the God of my childhood in the church, the God of my Lifetime now goes by the Name "Spirit," and Spirit is with me everywhere.

This is the lesson that I learned from my mother, Auntie Sheila, who, for all of her complexities and everything paradoxical about my beautiful, timeless, and endlessly Philosophically Wise Mother, and for every single Churchy Born Again thing that she believes, I Know that so long as I believe in the Spirit of my own Life that Spirit will never not exist for me. We are who make Spirit real, and Spirit shows this realness through our getting a clue, through our being able to still pray when things are good because it is thought that people only pray when things are other than good. Spirit is real to us all, no matter what, and it is because we have made Spirit real. The God we all were raised with has grown up with us, has been there throughout the good and the hard times, through the times when we cried like babies and when we raged like mad-people. Spirit never leaves. Sure, we may send Spirit away, but rarely is Spirit really ever that far from us. Spirit hears us, really, and we are so jaded about life on Earth anymore that we see to it that we make this...Spirit...of ours, somehow and only convenient. We are who makes Spirit all that Spirit is or is not to us, and not some guy with a smirk and a three-thousand dollar suit.

A Scary Old Man Named God

While the God I grew up with is still a scary old man, I am no longer the scared little girl. I am no longer the wounded child who seemed to have disappointed everyone because they felt that I was not smart enough (for them), or witty enough (for them), or whatever enough (again, for them). I shocked myself the day that I came to the sudden epiphany that these days, when I say that the people who I call my "Soul Family" are my real Family, I mean exactly and just THAT! They know this. I will repeat this over and over again because it is that important. Family is not only who you were brought to the world through, because no one is ever guaranteed that they are even going to like their relatives. Family is who you choose it to be. My Soul Family Know Who They Are. They Know Their Place and They Know They Are The Very MOST Important People in my entire life. They Know this because I tell them that I love them and I tell them how important they are to me and that without them I would not be right here and able to tell the world that yes, we are all connected. We are All One Family, and all of us have the chance everyday to Know this and to choose who we will include in our lives as our Soul Kin. Now, is this NOT the MOST beautiful thing that you have read today?

What the world sees as our gift and attributes and maybe also our "meal ticket," is not more than a glimpse at the beauty that is everywhere about each of us and all around us, everyday. If we just pay attention we will see for ourselves exactly how it is that we each fit into someone else's life and where we fit into their lives. No matter how near or far they are from us, all around us are the remnants of our Selves in and around the lives of those who we each Love the very most. In my own life these people all know who they are and they know how and where they fit into my life, because I am less than quiet when I let people in. They always, from the very beginning, Know – and they would all attest to this, what I say next- EXACTLY who they are and their place in my Life. They Know that when I tell them anything, that I am good on my word and I maintain my integrity with my word. Those who know me best also know that the last statement is the very truth of me. I sit here knowing this and am honored very well to know this.

And I DO Know this!! Really. I believe that these people Know that I Love Them, each and every one of them. They know that it is the truth when I say, to them, about them, in or out of their presence, that if I Know You and I Love You, that you Know I Love You. Each of Them would attest to this not just being what they have heard, but also what they believe and most of all, Know, about Me. They Know that I Am Love...Know This ! Dearly. Deeply. Truly. Know. More importantly, because they know that I Am Love, I also Know this same thing and it is a beautiful thing to know without doubt that we each are made of Love.

We All Know That We Are Loved, and should Know that We each ARE Love.

We all know that we are Loved. We all know that there is at least one other person on the planet who is not our parent who Loves us. We know that there is one other person on the planet who Loves us. Everyday we are shown Love, even by strangers. Everyday we have the chance to make a difference to someone else. Everyday, if we have taken the opportunity to help someone else, in some small way, to make someone else's life, for a tiny moment, a little better, we have done a great service, not only to the rest of the world, but to ourselves. The good we do comes back to us. We only get back what we send out

More importantly, and if no one has said it to you yet, you, we, I must know that we are Love. We are the Love of the Brilliant Creator and we are the Divine Manifestation of the Love which has always been in existence. We would not be here if there were not some Divine Energy which surrounds us and this Mastering of things unknown if we are not meant to exist as Beings made of Pure and Perfect Love. We are many things and few things, and we are on the level of Spirit rather than in the reality that is flesh and blood. If we believe that we are not worthy, we will not believe much else, and it will be our truth that we will make as the reality for us and others as well. If we believe the truth that is true – that we are worthy, as worthy as anyone is – it will be our truth that we make as the reality for us as well as someone else. We can be many things to many people, but we can only be the perfect and untarnished version of Love that we are meant to be and have always been.

There comes a time when what we are expected to believe falls under at least some scrutiny, especially if it is not one of our own personal truths.

We can only be expected to believe so many things that we are told are true, things that others expect for us to believe is our own truth because it is their truth. We grow out of the truth that was right for us as children. What is the truth for us when we are adults will be what we teach our children. Just like when it was our turn, there is nothing guaranteeing any of us that what we teach our own kids will be what they will also continue to believe when they are not children anymore. We do not raise them to turn out onto the world little versions of our same selves. We raise them to bring goodness to their world so that they will go out and give that goodness to others in the form of Love. I learned from the things that I experienced as a child that there is always a way to Love others and that our way will not always match our parents' way. We feel guilt when the day comes that we no longer can apply the beliefs from the things which we were born into to the things that we have as our experiences now. It would be like putting our adult feet into the tiny socks we wore to our first day of elementary school. This is the thing that no one ever thinks about when they speak or do anything.

People are willing to tell us their own truth, will expect that we will believe what they believe without their having any kind of respect or regard for the way that we believe what we will. A mother can give her children lessons in religious belief that on her own she came upon, and with the lessons she was given by her own mother in terms of religious belief said mother will pass on to her own brood, maybe not the same religious beliefs, but the same degree to which those kids will believe whatever it is that they will. But even this is not the sort of belief that I am trying to get across.

We are willing to believe the bad things that others think about us, but we are not willing to believe the good that we know that is inherently there. We think with our ego-selves rather than with our Souls, and while it may seem odd to anyone that I would say to "think with your own Soul," what I really mean is that if we bothered to think about the things that make us hurt, that make us crazy, that make us angry and unreasonable, we will find that within those kernels of our beliefs at that very moment in time are shards of disbelief, are pieces of who we are according to someone else and when we choose to look at us from the perspective that someone else gave to us, we are not seeing things from our own Soul's eyes.

To see with the "Eyes of the Soul" is to be able to see one's own self in a manner which is Loving even as it might scathe at us with certain degrees of anger, and to see with Anger through the eyes of the Soul is to be able to see ourselves objectively and from the point of view that is ours but is colored with something that someone else told us. We might think that we are strong and capable, and no one would ever notice that we were not only those things until something happens that forces us to break down a little bit, to become more human and more apt to receiving things from others that may not make us too happy but will absolutely make us see that there is more to us than we have been told there is. More than that, we will sooner see that there is and always has been more to us than what we believed there to be.

We hear of beautiful women, and we hear of beautiful women getting everything their beautiful little hearts desire, but we are not told that inside of those women, in the middle of their very selves, they hurt. They know that they are getting their way, and they know that through their beauty rather than their actions, words or ways of being, they can have the world at their feet. What we are never shown, though, is the other side of that reality, where those beautiful women, are crying on the inside, are sad, are lonely, and even as they have all of their things and all of the goodies that men (or perhaps even other women have brought to them) have given them, the picture of them is still very incomplete. Their story has not been completely written because not only have they lived this life of gain and ease outwardly, but because they have denied the idea that what came before all of this windfall they may have come from a hard-scrabble life, might have been homeless with their own mother and vowed to themselves that they would do whatever it took to never have to live like that again...and it didn't matter what that meant or what they had to do in order to not live "without" again – even if it meant that they would trade pieces of themselves in order to have material security.

Trading Pieces of Our Selves for the Material

There is the false sense of security brought about by material wealth. No one ever tells us that we can have more money than we had ever had in the past, that we can enjoy the life of a rich man and that we can have the security which having money brings with it and not also tell us that money and things are finite and we can go on throughout our lives in that manner in which we are thinking and being what we are not at our core but are rather and only those things – wealthy and secure because of that wealth - outwardly. We can have

what seems to be "it all," but if inwardly we are mistrusting of ourselves, if we are not able to see toward the future and see to it that we can have that same sense of security in ways that have nothing to do with monetary worth, nothing to do with things and instead have everything to do with who we know we really are and can maintain that kind of security, we will find out that the outward security and the inward security go hand in hand. We will discover that all those times in our lives when we chose to rely on our own truth, on those little hints and signs that make a person's words also their truth, that we can see in others that which we are ourselves.

...that which are ourselves...

It is a universal belief that we are mirrors to each other, and if this is the truth then I have much to be glad for. With mistrust there is the gift that being forced to trust our selves first, the perils which life will throw at us and make us know our worth to ourselves, our value to others and ultimately, our place in the world. We first learn to trust our selves because eventually we began to learn that those we thought or were told we could trust were not trustworthy, and it is not because of anything other than that we have grown beyond them. We have changed.

We find that we cannot NOT be secure if we are secure with the things that we are willing to believe and those beliefs somehow serve our grander purpose in this lifetime. We cannot NOT live with great Spiritual and emotional ease if internally we Know that we are secure in who we really are, and we cannot NOT have the very world we imagine in our minds and in our hearts if we at least are very willing to believe in our own beliefs about our Selves.

Our pain is all relative, really. Whether anyone believes it or not, we actually choose our pain. That's right – we choose it, and I say this because at the beginning of any relationship, not including that with our parents, even as that relationship is the one on which we will lay the foundation of things that we will do, and more, not do, as we progress along the path of enlightenment, whether it is a friendship, a love relationship, a work or other social relationship, our Souls know that there will be pain, there will be disappointments, and that it is up to us and all on our own that we will Know where the pain will come from within ourselves.

The Pain Brought From Within

Pain comes from things said and done to us, but more, it comes from the way that we perceive what it is that is before us. If we have been told over and over again that we are not good enough for a certain activity, or that we will never "rate" in the eyes of our work peers, or perhaps it is something else, no matter what it is, it is not only the thing that was said or done but more the way that we received the message. If all of our lives we have been compared with others, then it will be our own and our only experience with others that we would have to try to compete, even with the things that we ourselves have accomplished in the past, not only for the attention of other people, but for any attention at all. Yes, even seemingly "bad" or negative attention.

How we perceive ourselves to be according to our own thinking is going to be far different than how someone else will perceive us – no one's perception is going to be the same, and we are either going to agree with someone else about who we are in their eyes, especially if the picture they paint of us is alike with perceptions brought about by others, or very simply, we will not agree. If we choose to believe what it is that they think of us, all of our thoughts will bring to the surface actions and words that will match the perception of other people.

We have been told for so many years throughout our lives to be mindful of others, but what is not clearly conveyed to us is that while someone else's ideal about who we really are might be correct, it is only partially correct because we are all a collection of all the things up to this very moment that has happened to us, for us or by us. We are never just static in the things that we think, because like all else in the energetic universe, so, too, are we energetic beings as is the Universe itself.

If we can think about the things that we have allowed ourselves to think is the truth of us, and if we can think about where that thought originated, and if we bother to do some studying of the truth of us, we would find that the things we have been told to believe about ourselves is either only half right or completely wrong in that our beliefs about ourselves should not ever come from the opinion of anyone else. We cannot grow and Be who we are meant to be if we are more worried about what others believe to be the truth of who we are. Who I am is different than who my kid sister is, and who my kid sister and I are each singly is different than who our brother is, and collectively the three of us are different than are those we call our "other half."

If I believed everything that people have said about my brother in the past, and if I chose to see the negatives that people have given to me about my sister, I would be remiss to think that number one, if what was said by another and told to me were true and I chose to believe it, this is giving all of my own power to think my own way about anyone else, let alone my siblings, to someone who does not have my experiences in my own life with these two people. Number two, it would mean that somewhere within me is the capacity to think on my own, but because there is seemingly a collective belief that if we do not agree and we do not believe that what is said is the truth in fact, people are going to think badly of us because we are going against the grain of things and trying too hard to stand out.

Trying too hard to stand out

There is nothing at all wrong with forming our own beliefs. A lot of the pain that we experience throughout our lives stems from our having a certain set of beliefs that were handed down to us by our parents and our families and our social circles as we were growing up. I say this because it is the truth. It is the truth about us that all of us get our hearts broken because we found out that what we were told by someone else who is not our parents who can also be thought as being a trusted source eluded to us that perhaps the thing that we believed was the truth might have cracks in its foundation. It might not be the most believable truth, and that we might want to check it out on ourselves. We find out that the truth that we thought was ours as shown to us by others is no longer the truth of us, even though it very well might still be the truth of the person who gave it to you as your truth back then. You have found your own truth, and yes, you were right, it is not the truth about you, but only the truth that is you that matters now.

The Truth That is You

On the face of it the person who is not more aware of why this thing has visited their lives is not aware that what they are now feeling is Pain. Pain brings itself to us in a myriad of ways, and one of those ways is that when we are questioned about why we believe what it is that we choose to believe. When I was first asked by a Spiritual Teacher back in 2000 what about Christianity it was that I was so adamant about hanging on to, it was much to both my surprise and my own horror that what it was that I thought I believed was so far removed from the truth of me that it sent shock waves through me. I went through a whole lot of self doubt, a whole lot of fear about my own place in the eternal order of things, but it was also an event in my life that led me to a greater understanding of the reasons why it was that while I respected that where I came from was where I came from, what I did not realize was when it came time for me to believe that maybe I had outgrown the religious beliefs I was brought up with that I had some very serious problems with resisting my own change.

I did not want to believe that everything in that book my mother still holds in such high regard was perhaps not the absolute truth but were more general truths which applied in a general sense. I did not want to believe that there was no hell, that bad people who sinned against God were never going to be able to touch me, did not want to believe that every sin I had committed from the age of 12 until the year 2000 were what would send me to the lake of fire guaranteed. When I came to question why it was that I DID believe that which I was raised with, and when I further backed my beliefs with scholarly proof, I again had to go through the pain of what my mother and my now retired minister father would think of me should I venture outside of the Spiritual upbringing they'd provided for me.

I felt almost dirty and wrong questioning my parents' and my entire and extended family's beliefs. I felt like these people who'd judged me so wrongly and more, so harshly, for as long as I could remember they had were going to continue to judge me and that now that the cat was outta the bag, so to speak, they were going to have yet one more thing to bust my already weary chops with. They didn't. In fact, my believing that their reaction to the subtle changes in the things that I offered to talk about regarding belief in a Higher Power were met with the same level of resistance that they had been and still are. In my own thinking I envisioned Dana Carvey's "Church Lady," which, my fondest memories of my childhood at church with my mother were, in fact, when she was all the minister's wife she could be and in all the glory that Mom felt came with being a woman for and of her God.

I wrongly and in my mind accused my parents of no longer loving me because I believe in things that they had vehemently opposed my involvement in when it came to religious belief. I envisioned myself terrified with the idea that my parents would disown me and rebuke me and my name for studying Astrology, for taking up an interest in the Tarot, for the idea that yes, their oldest daughter somehow knew things before anything was said about a thing. I thought, due to the fact that I'd grown up in the religiously inclined atmosphere which I did, that my parents would go and "tell it on a mountain" that their oldest child was no longer "in the church," and I believed that my lifelong friendship with a girl named Dora would be over with because she was and still is staunchly Christian and I am staunchly considered a Light Worker and a Child of the Grand and Great Cosmos.

When we choose to go outside of the things that we Knew when we were children is the same time that we grow a little. The time that we let go of the things that we held on to for so very long is a painful time and it is painful because we are not, at the time we accept the changes which have taken place, letting go of the thing that for so long in our lives was normal and was the normal for like, a whole lot of other people in a whole lot of other places in the world. And all those people can't be wrong, can they? No, of course not. They are not wrong and what they are honoring is fine- for them, but not for us all Humans do not like change. We resist things and ideals and ways of being that are new to us or that put into our minds the idea that we have to think, that we have to deal with shedding the old for the new. We know that when changes must take place that there will be the pain of no longer doing things in the manner which we had grown so accustomed to. It is human to be lazy, to want to not shake things up with needed changes, and we know when the needed changes are meant to happen because we will start clinging ever-more to the things which we are denying need changing.

If you thought of it the way that one would think of changing a dirty diaper we would find that we do not care to change the diaper because we know that there is something very unpleasant awaiting us when we do. We know that even though we do not like the surprise, if we choose to not change the diaper, it will be bad for the baby wearing the soiled diaper. In the same manner, just as babies grow out of their need for wearing diapers, so, too, will the Human Soul evolve when the things which are outdated and still within the Soul and used by the Soul for growth no longer serves us. We are no further served by our resistance than is the parent is to open the diaper and find out what is in there. In that same light and using that same example, if we looked past the fact that we have a screaming and crying and uncomfortable infant who dearly needs to be changed, and we see the diaper only, and we hesitate with the diaper, we know that the infant in the diaper is going develop a rash and since it is that we are the infant's parent, since it was our own resistance to changing that baby's diaper, the end result is diaper rash that we will have to treat and hope that the baby isn't too uncomfortable. And yes, Baby will cry – a LOT...I promise.

We Might Not Like What's in The Diaper, but it Has To Be Seen To, just Like Needed Changes in Our Lives Are.

If what we really need and what we really want is change then we have to be willing to go through more pain. Yes. Change is painful most of the time. It is like the man who has been without a woman in his life permanently or at least for long stretches of time and neither, in his past, due to the women he'd courted in that past, believes that he will never marry because he cannot see himself sharing his life with only one woman, not when there are so many other choices available to him. One day what inevitably happens is that this same man meets a woman, or perhaps it is a woman who is the single person all her life, and they find out that just as the mold said man or woman was fit into because of their words or their actions or both, who just happens to be everything that those others in their past were not, over time that same single person can begin to see themselves with this person who up until they'd walked into the single's life, was a person who did not exist. The reason that this new person did not exist to the single person is because the single person was so entrenched in the belief that maybe there wasn't going to be another person on the planet for them who could be all the things that they'd wanted in a companion but were not able to find in the companions they'd had in the past.

To let go of one's own ideals about how any group can be is to let go of the belief that we have held for so long, a piece of us that we might have felt defined us. That is a very scary place to be. To never think for one moment of our lives that we will change our ways or our beliefs is not only asking that those things happen, it is guaranteeing it. There is the common knowing that once we breathe life into an idea and once we have mentioned with our breath that we believe something to be other than what we were told it was is the very moment when we begin to see that change is not going to not happen, that when we have the thought cross our minds and at that moment we are not aware that the changes which we resist are the very ones which we need the most. Finding out that change is inevitable is one thing, but knowing that change needs to happen is quite another.

When We Find That Change Needs To Happen

When we find that we need to change something about ourselves we will do everything within our own power to make the change not happen or at the very least, happen when we are more ready for it emotionally. No one is ready to accept that no one is ever ready to

change and that the changes which present themselves to us when they do are there for one purpose and that one purpose is so that we can allow ourselves to become all we are meant to be.

Spirit does not differentiate who needs to change more than who – Spirit just ensures that it presents itself and we are who make the choice to go with it and allow change, or resist it and deal with the painful changes with more pain than we would had we bothered to simply elect to go with the flow of our own evolution. There is no gender that does it more than the other, and no race of people who do it more than another – we all do it, in one way or another. Men and women all do the same emotionally charged things to each other. Each gender is equally as awful to the other. We beat each other up in many ways even and including physically, and we expect to believe that we can sustain our Spiritual nature if we close ourselves off from feeling the joy of simply being in the presence of those who we Love the Most. I try very dearly to see three of the very most important people, teachers, really, in my life, as often as I can, opting to be with them all equally, sometimes equally and all together, and it is because they each deserve the Love they Know I have for them, and in the same manner, I Know well, too, my place in their Hearts and in their Souls because in terms of the Soul, it is where we each have always lived.

Hurt

Hurt. Even the word smacks of things that make us want to cry. Hurt can be had in a myriad of ways, but the one way that most of us feel it is lingering and painful and most of the time needed, believe it or not.

If we are not aware of the pain we are in, we cannot begin to deal with it and all we can do then is merely feel it. When we feel it and do not understand it, we live in it. When we live in it, it becomes us, coloring every part of our daily lives and investing in the time line that is ours the cuts and bruises we suffer Spiritually. When we give in to the hurt and realize that it is with us until we no longer can feel it and no longer can or will bother to allow it to be what is such a normal part of our Selves is when we can begin to let it all go.

People do not realize that they hurt us when they do, because for the life of us none of us knows that the real reasons we are so angry, why we shudder when we hear the name of a certain individual, why we do the things that we do that seem to make no sense to other people but make perfect sense to our selves and those with whom we hold close counsel. When we hurt our Souls send out a distress signal, send out a warning to the cosmos that one of Spirit's children is suffering. We pray for relief, yet it never comes to be and what we are not thinking about at the time we request an end to our suffering – and what we are not thinking about is that when we pray, and more – what we pray for- will come to us, but it might come to us in the form of another teacher, another lesson in being hurt and another lesson given by someone who we trust, who we Love, and who will shake things up in our minds and will break our hearts. Sometimes, though, the lesson is simply to learn from the hurt by pushing through it.

If there is one thing that humans are good at it is our ability to hurt others for no other reason than that we can. Who will tell the caretaker in charge of her sister's children that her ways of disciplining those children are not the best ways? Sometimes it will not be those kids' mother because the truth of it all is that the mother may very well be afraid to confront her sister. While the mother will never admit to it, it may be the truth and may be the thing that said mother needs to "push through" in order to understand her own issues when speaking in terms of fearing things and people.

When we give into our fears, we give into the people who placed those fears in us. When we choose to not create new ways of thinking about something, when we defer to the

patterns that hurt us and call them "normal" is when we perpetuate the hurts, the heartaches, and the wrongs that were done to us by others.

Hurt is meant to show us where we need to find balance in our lives

Hurt is meant to show us through our feelings where it is that there is an imbalance, where it is that we must seek a better method of knowing why it is that we hurt so badly. Many of us go through our lives thinking and believing that all things which were done to us that hurt us so badly are actually things that are good for us. How is that possible? How is it possible that the things which make us ache so badly and make us cry, sometimes for days at a time, the things that make us wince and pine for the way that we believe things should be and can see with our mind's eyes, those things which we believe would be the salve for our very injured souls?

There sometimes is nothing other than time which makes the hurting go away, sometimes it is only acceptance of a thing and looking at it through new eyes and from a perspective which is ours and is unfiltered by the excuses that were given to us as the reason as to why it is a good thing that we hurt.

We hurt because we need to learn, yes, but while it is that this is truth, what is not truth is that we must hurt in order to learn, that we must go through pain first before we can have the glory that is Love and Light. This is not the truth. The truth is that we are Love, that we were never NOT Love, and that when we hurt there is an absence of Love in the area in which we hurt emotionally, like a cancer that will end the life of a human when said cancer is left to go unchecked.

That we hurt is one thing, but what we do with the hurt is quite another thing altogether. When a child hurts, we find that it will be the entirety of the whole village who will come to the aid of the child, given that the child in question is a favored child. Children are our most precious gift in this lifetime, and because we are taught to be good adults while we are children, the lesson of imagination and of unconditional Love go by the wayside and seem to be forever forgotten about. Yet in that unfiltered Love are the lessons embedded into the psyche of mankind as a whole, and we ignore it for pursuits of a more "adult" measure.

To quell our hurts, rather than imbibe like mad fools, rather than indulging in depravities which no good human being should, we should refer back to the time when we were able to laugh at silly things, when it seemed that a nice little game of pretend was all it took to make us no longer hurt. Pain is what is left behind from hurt, and we can find ourselves reeling from the pain and maddened by the hurts that have been left by others for us as their own legacy of heartache. We can never render ourselves to be at the mercy of others, no matter what. This might mean that we must give ourselves more pain in the form of no longer being in the lives of those who told us the untruths of childhood just because their adult minds could not handle the pressure of the hurt that they would place upon us.

Stepping Up Courageously

To choose to no longer hurt is to choose to step out courageously and take a stand for the things that matter – things like Love, Faith, Hope, Joy and Reverence for things unseen but Known. To choose to step out onto another Path, the Path which leads ultimately to the goal and to the thing that appears as being Our Own Soul's Purpose in this lifetime. Choosing to do things in a different manner doesn't mean that you step up and out against that which you feel has taken from you anything that might matter in terms of where your own Soul is

meant to be in this lifetime. We are given choice, and when we choose to not hurt, we know that there is a tiny measure of pain in letting go of the things and people and memories that hurt us so badly. Being brave and going down the path less, perhaps even not traveled by anyone in your own life may even be the thing that was meant to be, may have been the purpose that you have held but did not know you did.

We can never know what our own purpose in this lifetime is without our also knowing what it means to fail when we embarked on paths which were not going to first serve us. Sometimes it is the apple which not only falls from the tree that spawns a new tree, but sometimes it is that same apple which is planted with a new seed alongside it, a seed which would bring about fruits which no one could have imagined, and in that one second of "do" or "not do," that one moment of brevity where even as the time is infinitesimally important, the decision to have courage and step out bravely into the unknown is what makes the decision life changing.

We must decide our own Path, must choose to live the way that we know we should. We should welcome Love that we thought was not for us because of a technicality, must shun what it is on the outside of us and welcome what it is that is the pining and the yearning of our hearts and Souls. We must stop believing that what other people think of us makes or breaks who we are, and we must realize that no matter what we think is the right thing to do, what we never think about is that maybe the right thing to do is the opposite of what we have supposed it was all along. A man in Love is a man in Love, and while the woman he Loves may be "spoken for," he cannot deny that what he feels is real. Yet, he will deny himself and perhaps even the woman of the most Divine sort of Love that there is, all over a technicality. He will fight himself, day in and day out, try to find someone to fill the space that the one woman he Loves is meant for, all the while finding things in the one who he chose that are not within her, denying himself the luxury of the Love that he himself called into his life.

People will abandon who they are all in the name of not making themselves look bad to other people. This is a ridiculous thing at best. We all do it, because none of us wants to look like an ass in front of good company. We will take the publicly favored and highly touted "high road" and deny ourselves the luxury of learning, the velvety texture of the Love we asked for, all because other people might think that we could have done better. But I ask you, could you really have done better? How much better could you have done knowing that the person you are with is not who your Soul Knows you are meant to be with, knowing that the job that you have is nothing near the work that you were meant to do so as to fulfill your soul's very purpose in this life, knowing that everyday of your life and in this lifetime will be spent thinking that you were somehow meant to live in a purgatory that is hell, and worse, is one of your very own creation?

Going Against All That We Each Are Is Not the Only Choice We Have

We go against all we are when we go against our own better judgment and do like "good" and "fine and upstanding" people do. You must ask yourself why it is that you care so much about what anyone else thinks, and lose yourself in the idea that you are meant to be Loved but are not meant to hurt long and far in to perpetuation. We were never meant to suffer, but only to learn. We were never meant to be in contention with one another at all times, but we surely know how to be. We were never meant to think that other people care more about us than they do themselves. We were never meant to try to cram ourselves into a mold that is "one size fits all."

We are all and each uniquely created, Divine and Sacred creatures, all of us. Because we have the capacity to care about at least just one other person, we are also open to the differences that we will have with them, open to the disagreements which will inevitably be part of the knowing between two people. We were never meant to be alone in this world, and whether it is that we seek out a partner with whom we can share the daily remembrances of times gone by as well as the carnal delights which we are all privy to once it is that the Soul has decided within its own Self that it has received the message that there is one other out there in the great big world, that one other who complements your half and makes an astonishingly complete whole, or simply we choose to forgo the softness that is a Love between two people, no matter what, we must travel through this lifetime fully aware of our own Self.

We cannot depend on another person to make us whole – we must discover wholeness on our own, for it was not anyone else who helped us feel as though we are fractured. While it might be that someone else has placed a hurt upon us, it is not their weight to carry, the hurt which follows, that we will feel – it is ours to understand and to placate with the understanding that it is all Love. It is all the Soul's wish to be fully aware of itself, of how it shares with like-souls and how it is that we all converge and converse on a grander and universal level.

We cannot heal our hearts if what we try to heal them with is more pain. It will not work. We cannot replace our broken egos with that of another person's broken heart. We cannot give Love the way that we know we can and that we should without first correcting within ourselves the wrong things that brought to us the pain through daily living. We might one day, after much hurt and heartache, choose to never be but by ourselves again, and as this might suit most people, it will not suit us all. If you choose this way, it means that you have allowed the hurt to engulf you. You have chosen to forgo, whether it is the love of a romantic partner or a friend from the time that has gone by, because you have chosen to learn in a way which will cut off all life giving energy in certain areas of your life, you have chosen to deny yourself the gifts which are given to us upon our conception.

When we enter into this lifetime we enter into agreement with the Divine, to be here, fully present in our lives. If Spirit should choose to test you on your choices, and you should find one day that you were not thinking the way that you are now, and you see that perhaps it is that you need to be able to share your life with just one other person, in whatever capacity you choose to, and in that moment that you are choosing this new way someone with just the right offerings comes along and blesses your life with their presence, know now that that other person has always been there. Know now that they were waiting for you to become fully and absolutely present in the life that you are now living. While it might be that you believe yourself to be fine and good alone and while it might be the truth of you, what is not the truth of you is that you can do your life without companions.

To be the person who believes all that he or she is told and to be the person who hangs onto the truths of others as their own truths is to be the person who is not fully present in their own life. When we think and believe that who we are on our own is all that we need and not have anyone else in our lives is setting ourselves up for loneliness and it is the sort of loneliness that is permeating and the void is deeper than the blackest deepest dark night.

Learning to be with others is a good thing, really

We have to relearn to be more compassionate with others, because no matter what,

we are all we have – that's right ...all we have is one another, so we really need to think about the idea that when all is said and done, when the fat lady sings, so to speak, and we are all trying to get our ducks in a row, that when it comes right down to things that matter, we need to be more gentle with ourselves. We are harder on ourselves than we are with anyone else, and this is part of the reason that we have come upon a time when we must choose to be Loving and compassionate with one another, choose to see that we have more in common than we don't, and learn to grow into one another and learn to accept that we are all different on a singular level, but on a level that is Universal, we need one another.

Compassion is not weakness but instead is a strength. It takes a big person to look at someone who has been bad to them in the past and tell that person that they are forgiven, to tell that person that they somehow were meaningful in the life of the confessor, were somehow there for the purpose of being "bad" so that we might know what is "good." We might tell ourselves that we can't do one thing, but what we are not realizing is that there is a list of other things that we WILL know and CAN do that no one else can in quite the same manner that we can. NO ONE is perfect, and we all deserve some sort of compassionate measure not doled out to us by other people but to our very selves.

We are so very worried all of our lives about what other people think about us that we have not even bothered with how we truly feel about who we are and what our place in this lifetime is really all about and why we are here to begin with. There is no secret formula for living in the light of Love – you just live there, daily, and you stay there in the safety and the light that is the Love that comes straight from Spirit to us. We worry if we are good enough to be with other people, and we worry if our things are as expensive as theirs are and we worry that our kids are not as smart as theirs are, and we worry...worry worry worry...about things that truly haven't any real meaning for us or for our lives.

We waste time with the tiniest things and most of the time those tiny things carry no weight in our lives, at least not as much as we want to think they do. We fret over things that we would never have before we had the audacity to care about what other people think and what their opinion of us is. We rarely stop to think about all the other things in life – things like what we are in terms of people who share our lives with us who we actually care about, who we would do almost anything for and who, in certain terms and with certain people, who we Love the very most.

Do Not Fear Love or Being Loved

A woman who would die for the person she loves might not die for her sibling, and in the same manner, that woman's siblings might feel like she owes it to them to save those who she shares DNA with rather than the DNA of the Soul. A person can spend a very large portion of their time and their life dedicated to causes and be happy knowing that they did what they could for as long as they could, and then one day they could turn tail and be the opposite. What matters is not that they turned around and went the other way, but that they thought about it and chose the other way to begin with. We have so many chances to make a choice every single day of our lives but sadly we defer to the idea that safety matters more than does choice itself.

We can no longer be scared to Love one another. Life on the planet is already bad enough and to add to it with our own leanings toward attrition and toward indifference toward one another is not just suicide, but genocide. If we continue to try to outdo one another, continue to be in competition with each other over things and not in congruence with one another about the condition of our collective soul as a species, we can be guaranteed that if we believe that right now is a conflagration of our ideals, as we have expected others to lead the rest of the world by, but not by our own selves. We want to tell others how to live but we do not want to live the way we tell others to, and we want the world to be at peace but we do not want to be the ones to begin taking action because we are too busy wondering why it is that we are always the ones to have to exact change.

Why not be the ones to exact the changes we want to see, and why not practice compassion and unconditional and undying Love, with ourselves, with each other, all the time and without reservation and without regard for who is watching us do as we will? Why should we even consider doing like our ancestors, both living and not, and choose to war when Love is so much grander in the scheme of things that are alive and well in the Universe? When we choose Love, we choose to Be One with the All that Is. We choose to continue the Path we walk, alone or with others, and we do so in the Light of Love – the very Love that we wish to have. What most people do not realize is that the Love we want is inside of us, and with that Love comes the peace that is The All. The grandness that is the Love of the Universe is limitless and soothing, is the thing that we all pine for, opine about and do not know that we already possess.

When we deny ourselves the changes that we know we must make, we are denying the rest of mankind the goodness that is ours and more, the goodness that is also belonging to the rest of the world, the goodness that we were born with that is not meant as ours to keep but ours to give away and to share with everyone else. The rock band Tesla sings a song called "Love Song," and in that song there is a line which states that "Love will find a way, darlin' love is going to find it's way...find its way back to you...so look around and open your eyes...love is going to find a way..."

Love ALWAYS finds its way to us, no matter what. It is inevitable. We are meant to Be, in Love, and in Life, with one another and to be of good service to one another, for as long as we are upon the very crust of the earth. There are no two ways about it – we must Love, or else we will surely die. It is not the kind of Love that we see in the movies between two people who are romantically involved, and neither is it the love between family members, between friends, between a parent and child, but it is all of it. Love is the most permeating thing in the entire Universe and it is the thing that is in abundance and the thing that we are meant to share. Unshared, Love becomes akin to resentment. Conditional Love is not Love but expectation and expectation leaves in its wake much disappointment.

We can Love our kids, our friends, our families, our communities, but until we can fully grasp that the one person who we have got to Love is Us, we will never really know what real Love from the Soul is. We cannot Love someone else until we know what it is to Love at all. We cannot know Love unless we know it ourselves. This same thing can be said of anything else on this earth and in this lifetime. What we are granted at birth we are guaranteed throughout our lives. What we have in abundance we grip and grasp as though it is only meant for us, and while we are able to choose who we will Love, we can also choose to give of it freely and without expecting it back.

Expectation is not part of Love, but part of Manifestation

That which we draw to ourselves has always been ours, and the people who we draw to our lives are meant as being players of parts in our lives so as to bring it all together and one day make all kinds of sense. Yet, when we really scrutinize what it is that we know is the

truth of us, and we analyze all that we have done up to this very moment in time, we see that had we not had this person or that one in our lives at the time that they were there, we would not be who we are right now in this very moment. Had I not gone through all that I had gone through when I was a child, I might not have had the experiences as an adult that I did which led me to this very singular, very compelling, very important moment in time, this moment when I am sitting here, pounding away on this keyboard, churning out these sentences as they come to mind for me.

Every little thing that you have gone through to this moment in time was meant to bring you to this time, so that you could have a greater awareness of this moment. Maybe you are going through a very ugly time in your life. What we do not think about is that the pains and the trials in life can be thought of as peroxide for the Soul. Our pain exposes us to the truth. We must take heed lest we should bother ourselves with the same lessons, and the same pain, and the very same things and events and types of teachers sent to us to reteach a lesson that we have been given, over and over and over, only to return again to our habitual ways of returning to what is both painful and familiar. We can no longer bother ourselves to want different things to happen if we are not willing to seize an opportunity for change when it presents itself. We have the option to do things differently everyday, and everyday it seems that the same things we have chosen to go through we still go through.It is because we resist the change and the growth and the opportunities which have been brought to our very attention in the form of a person who breaks our heart, by a situation that we cannot see our way out of, by the things that come to our lives by means of the river of Life, and by the very whims of the Souls we are upon which we choose to heap the great and burning coals of attrition and with the shards of our broken spirits.

No one has to stay broken. We are equipped to "fix:" ourselves. We never have to, never had to go through the things that we have, over and over again, if we are mindful and learn very well to deal with who we are in relation to all the things that befall us, then we can never fail in our lives no matter who says or thinks what they will. When we choose the Path that is harder, everything else is done with not but ease. Things seem to just fall right into place. If we can choose to be all that we are totally meant to be, we can imagine the possibilities of our lives as being "endless."

Acceptance

Acceptance is not what we think it really is, at least not on the face of it. People will tell us that they accept us as we are, but we know the truth, because if they accepted us as we are they would not bother with trying hard to make us see things their way as it pertains to anything having to do with ourselves.

We have been taught that acceptance is right, but we have not yet been shown, as if we had been, there would be no one in the world to write a book about things that seem to be lost on almost the entirety of the human race. We humans do not like accepting things that do somehow fit neatly into our lives. We do not like other people coming into our lives and bringing with them their ideals as they pertain to whatever it is that we believe to be an infraction to the privacy of our own lives. We want others to, expect others to accept us as we are, to Love us in the manner we see fit, but the same is not to be in reverse. While we want others to see our point of view, we feel as though we are somehow owed the right to take their opinion as fact and argue our point over their opinion with them. It is just an opinion, but is an opinion which may call on us to rise above it and not look at things with only our own thoughts and only the things that we think are right and good in accordance to our own selves.

We have to grow into the idea that we must allow others to accept us. That might seem very much as a strange concept to us all, but many of us judge how others judge us, never minding that we have a strict opinion of them but that we do not want them to have as strict an opinion of us. We want them not to be offended by the idea that we believe that what is right for us is also right for everyone else, and everyone else might not think so. This is not my rule. It is just as it is and it is something that many humans have a very hard time accepting.

We want our lives to be phenomenal, and we want to get to where we feel we should be in life without so much as a tear falling, so much as our teeth gritting. We want to get there unscathed and without the idea that along the way there will be some things that just happen to happen. Along the way it might be that we will have a change in heart or a change in plans or both and the things that applied at the beginning of the thing that we are choosing to be in full denial of is now the thing that we must accept as being also the thing that came along to help us change our own point of view to accept that not everyone is going to see things as we might or do.

Learning to accept that others have a different view of things, and knowing that we are okay in the idea that what we want our own lives to be like is going to be very different than will be that of our friends, and more, the more that we want a thing or situation, the more acceptance of truth as it is with other people we must go through.

The child who grows into the adult and sees their parents as being right all the time is the adult child who is still very much the child they have always been in that there are going to be times in our lives growing up where the truths we have been given that are truths which belong to others are also truths which will end up being tested by the facets of our own private lives.

We can continue the madness of trying to proliferate someone else's truth, or we can learn from the mistakes we have made on our own about people and life itself and be brave and never have to deal with the second guessing of ourselves. Our lives ache because the Bones of the Soul ache, and they ache because these Bones, they know the truth of things. Our Soul is the barometer of truth, our own and the truths of others as it applies or more importantly, does not apply. We can no further push ourselves to believe a truth which may have applied when we were children, but as adults we must bother sometimes to question the truths which applied to us as children, because when we are children we understand things as children. When we are adults, we want to be able to understand things as adults and we want to not question what we knew was the truth when we were children. We want to, essentially, live in the Now and in the past, and we all know that that will not ever happen.

The man who will diligently seek his answers in truth on his own as an adult will find himself questioning why it is that he no longer believes the ideals of parents who may or may not even be part of the conscious world anymore, but the man still believes what the boy held as his truth. Confusion comes to the man who will fight the whims of his heart and soul, because he was taught that he needs to follow his heart, but not at the expense of his intellect. What a man knows as having been given to him by his parents said same man may never question, may never have his own beliefs in the elements of his own life where things which seem uncertain abound. He knows he loves a woman, but is afraid to lose the freedom of being able to choose for himself his own identity apart from her, and loses in his quest for companionship because of an outdated belief in things that were likely not his own ideals to begin with. It will not be until this same man can trust his own leanings and know within himself that he can be trusted without the supposed judgment, not by those by whom he has led in the past, but those who led him in the past and whose ideals and judgments were more appropriate to that person's time and that person's life.

Thinking that what someone else held to themselves as being the truth and applying to ourselves the sameness that was correct at a time in our lives when we were learning our motives for the morals which we chose at that time for ourselves is still the truth of us is a dangerous thing for the Soul. The Soul knows that a man has the capacity to Love, and the Soul is aware of the man's Soul's needs, but mankind, in all of its egotistical pining and all of its neediness, has forgotten that children are meant to grow and to be who they are meant to be in this lifetime. Parents can not ever set the level of learning or the Soul's wish to learn something new in this lifetime. The man who will continue to apply the acceptable rules for Society to Love him robs him of things and ways of being that he needs for his own soul's growth.

We entrust in others that which we will not entrust to ourselves. We follow the advice of other people blindly, yet we are prone to allowing the Voice Within us to go unheard.It is because less than we trust our physical bodies to do what it is meant to do, we trust the Soul to Guide us to the most perfect Peace, the most Perfect Love, and both are found within us each. If we choose only to see that which can go 'wrong,' then the only experience that we will have in Life and in Love will be the things that happen which are other than good. If we choose to see only the positive things which happen, we are robbing ourselves of the joy of the pain which cleanses the Soul of the residue left by the lessons lived through in the human experience. If we bother to open wide our hearts and Souls to the very truth – the truth that we are not privy to choose who we will Love, to choose with whom our Soul naturally gravitates toward, and we give no appendage for the Soul to allow itself the velvety luxury of not only learning to Love but also to experience what the absence of Love is, the Soul's evolution stalls, and we go through the sameness of pain, again and again. When we should be open to allowing the Soul its growth is when we are truly closed to the growth it so badly needs and wants.

If we are to Love with wholeness, and with the end result being that we have learned something of value, have been given the ability to see within the Soul's growth the human being-ness that was there, that was being used as the vehicle through which the Soul would learn what it must, then we are to also learn hurt and loss, for it is through hurt and loss which we learn our own personal and Spiritual value. The person who has lost all of their material wealth, so long as that person understands that a human's worth is never in what he owns (because truly what we own owns us...I dare you to try to take just one pair of my shoes from me and expect me to not come almost unglued...) but is in rather who he is, is the person whose abundance never is released to the whims of the Ego-Self.

That Bastard Called The Ego-Self

When we choose with our Ego-Self instead of what the Soul wants we begin to see what the Soul sees in the Ego. Our Souls know that the Ego is the part of us that needs reassurance, that needs to be able to see with its own eyes the value that it holds for the Soul. The Ego is that part of us that is known as the part that the world sees, is essentially our game face and the part of us which experiences everything on a physical-world level. It is the part of us that gets hurt, that makes a man never want to trust a woman again, makes a woman believe that the words men tell her are meant but only to get the best of her and then they will move on to the next conquest.

This is an entirely wrong way of believing the motives of those around us. Where there is not but Love there can be nothing which can harm the Soul for the Ego and the Soul, when it is right, and there is no more fear around the Loss of the Love. This is because the Soul and Ego, when they work together, produce for us the most magical thing of all, and it is a thing that we have not been taught to rebuild until and unless we have somehow been at odds with both facets of our Selves and have chosen to believe that which is said of us to others and by others. We can no longer believe that the whims of the Ego are always in line with the needs of the Soul, because there is nothing more painful to the Soul than to accept with the idea that the Ego Self is learning the things that the Soul knows are untruths for it. Understand that not all which does not apply to our own Selves is a lie, as what is a lie to one person may well be the truth for another.

We cannot bother to live in the ideological leanings and truths from childhood all and alone. The things that we could apply as truth then will not apply now, and will never apply when it is that the life and the times of the Soul which is fighting what it knew as its truth many lifetimes ago in childhood knows, too, that nothing is really "bad" but is really just another one of those learning experiences that all Souls must convene in so as to understand its own relationship to all the others.

A man who believes that a decree in writing is the most heavily weighted thing in a person's lifetime is also a man who does not realize how surely and severely he has limited his own Soul's growth. Again, I will elicit the example of a man in love with a woman who he feels he cannot have because of a truth which applied a lifetime ago is a man who has chosen to stay complacent in the idea that someone else gave to them, when in reality, this same man knows within his own Soul that should he choose to not, after time and thought have quelled his own guilty feelings for loving anyone, he will have to go through that same lesson, again and again, and eventually the lesson will go unlearned because the only thing the man will have learned is how to hurt from his inaction rather than how to allow his Soul to feel free for what is merely a blink of an eye in the grander scheme of Universal things.

Love Courageously

Too often we rob ourselves of the joy of the truest Love that we could ever have in this lifetime, and that Love comes from within ourselves. We do not realize that the Love we call into Being first must come from ourselves before it will ever materialize on the outside. This is a very hard lesson for us to learn simply because from the time we were children until this very moment we have believed that that which we hold as good and true and applicable to us and our own lives we must work for. The truth about much is that Love is effortless.

It takes little for our Soul to Love, because our Souls are born of Love, are born of that which we find so difficult to keep. Yet when we think about Love in all its forms, we find that after we have learned to Love our Selves, that giving our Love to others is easy, as it was something that we did not learn in childhood but bestowed onto others that which was all

we were able to give away as children. We are at our monetary most vulnerable as children, and in everything we are looked upon as ignorant rather than innocent. This is the reason that children are victims of society, because the adult world has no room for children in it, Loves nothing that is not hard fought or worked for, and has little regard or respect for the world which is not seen by our hardened adult eyes but still Loved by the child who lives within.

It is the child within who guides a man away from the truest heart of a woman who may very well be the very love of his life. He will never know this if he is only bound to the ideals of outer society, bound to what he feels others might think of him should he act on what it is that his Soul begs him to do – which simply is just to trust it. We must trust the Soul, for it is the Soul which is responsible for our being in this lifetime to begin with. To be in Life is to Learn and to Learn is to grow and if we never grow out of our own outdated truths we will never know who we are in completion. If we are more able to come to terms with the things that we know are robbing us because of an outdated belief in a certain measure of living that applied in another time of our lives, then, too, we can see where the madness of man surely lives – it is not in our daily doings and neither in the things which we will orate, but more, lies where it is that the hurt child still hides behind the facade that is the man who lives today.

The man who lives today in the truths which applied in the past is a man who has not truly lived. While this man may be of a most cosmopolitan sort outwardly, he is, to his own slow and chosen detriment, the man who lives the lie of clinging to the past. He will wonder why it is that Love takes so long to find him, never knowing that it found him but that it was dressed as something that he was not really ready to accept. Yet, once the acceptance of that Love becomes real, we find that this same man is in the bliss of letting his guard down because now he Knows without having to be told that he, in following the draw of his heart and the pining of his Soul, is finally living in a truth which he has created that is of his own. It is this man- the one transformed by the pain of the lie borne of the truth that no longer applies- who begins to see his life from a different perspective than ever he had in the past.

Drawing on the conclusions which applied to him in the past where he found himself at the crossroad of a decision regarding something as weighty as Love, we find that this same man has, in one simple fateful change of heart, grown. No longer is he tired from the days spent thinking that he is unworthy of the one he Loves but rather has never not been worthy and that it was only his thoughts that made the impossible, possible. This is where the man must have the strength, courage and energy of the Lion as well as the propensity like a Lion toward self-fulfillment. Unless this man will see his Heart as a part of his own Self, and unless he can accommodate the Soul for the things that the Soul needs the man to experience, but the man's Ego-Self will not allow, this man will not grow.

Growth Requires Risk

We cannot grow unless we are willing to take a risk. A woman can Love her family all she can and with all her might, but if said woman is prone to falling victim to the ideals and ways of being set aside for her by society, this woman will not learn to live to her very fullest potential, not only as a woman, but more, as a human being. The woman who is afraid to Love is a woman who is still the little girl wanting to sit on her father's lap or needing badly the validation that she is a whole woman even as inwardly many facets of her are still a little girl in need of her mother's approval. Lest she should take on the world on her own, stretch her Soul's wings and fly into the unknown, this woman will never know more than what is presented to her by her physical reality.

Her physical reality might be rich with wealth and with all of those pretty things that comes with marrying "well," but there is no joy in things handed to us, no feelings of accomplishment on a level that only she herself can bring about. When it is that we choose to live without the risk of hurting for the sake of Knowing and gaining Wisdom, we also choose to live in a prison which is without the constraints of the bars before us, and we place the bars before us because someone else's ideal of what a "good" woman is has been indelibly inscribed into our belief system as far as women and their place in society is concerned.

A woman who marries a man who she has reservations about risks nothing in the way of the Soul other than the growth of the Soul. Outwardly this is nothing, for her physical needs are seen to. However, years down the line, the same woman will look back and see that her accomplishments were never for herself but for the man in her life, so that he can realize the joys of knowing what it is like to have married well and to have married a woman of humility and proper respect toward men in general.

The subservient woman is not a woman but a child in a woman's body. While this woman might be able to actively make her own choices, she does so reservedly and with resentment because in between the years that she was to become all she was meant to be, and when it was the time in her life that she was meant to grow and to experience all the richness that Life has to offer us all, she was busy playing house with a man who will teach her the lessons that she will miss out on through the pain and the redemption that is young womanhood. She will never know how to make her own choices without some fear that the man she married will judge her choices as her father would have judged the boys she chose to date. She will look to her partner for support and instead will be chided like a little girl when the issue at hand may be a very adult one.

The Vessel of Life

Society has chosen for the vessel through which life must pass a label which makes it dirty and evil, a threat to all mankind. The vessel is woman, and the label need not be written out for it is an evil label and one which is rife with no amount of Love and neither compassion. Women have been blamed for the ills of society because women have made the unconscious choices that we have. When we choose to stay childlike in our belief of outdated things, we are no more the woman on the outside than we are the child on the inside. When we can look a person in the eye and know that every single word we are breathing to them, no matter what those words are, we can trust, too, that we have, in that moment, grown past the fear of never being taken literally and for our words as they are.

There should be no hidden agenda and the words "I Love You" should ring as true as they should – with an absoluteness and with a conviction as strong as a that of a Lioness. We should, in our words, be mindful of the things that we say, for it should never be with a forked tongue and neither any malice that we should look upon the deeds of others as being "bad" but rather and only for the purpose of the learning, the purpose of healing the things which have infected our lives. No longer should there be the fear of not loving another human being once it is that we have, ourselves, been hurt down deep and to the very Bones of our Souls. No longer should we, if we should also and in effect, expect others to trust us to handle ourselves if we are not also willing to do the same. We have for many generations chosen to allow the world to decide for us, thereby keeping us as little children – lost, confused, and too afraid to ask for the truth of things.

We want the Love of a Good Man, but we are not aware of what a "Good" Man is. We know that men Love women, that they Love to treat us like we are the jewels that we are. We know that they love to be chivalrous, but what we do not realize that in all of our caring and in all of our well intended Loving action we have become their mother. We do not need to be a mother to them – we just need to be ourselves, because as ourselves we are able to better see where we fit into the fabric that is the life of the men who share our lives with us. We needn't bother with the idea that the only thing any man is interested in is owning us, that the only thing they want from us is physical gratification, but this is the ugly lie that has been pounded into our heads since the time that our own grandmothers were young women on the verge of knowing what they thought real Love was. They didn't, and none of them were equipped emotionally to handle the things that we are able to in this present time called Now.

We women must be ready to risk losing what we thought was the truth, and the truth is that men love us, they just don't understand us. When we tell them that they are our heroes, we must also remember to make it known that just because we feel this way that it does not mean we need them to rescue us and that it should be known by them already that when we need them, we will let them know. The woman who is evolved enough to know this will live this way, never minding the idea that if she just tries to, the man she is enamored of will return that same feeling back to her without his also feeling perplexed by the idea that she needs him for something. Yes, she needs him to understand that her Love – the Love of an evolved woman – comes with the respect that he desires, but does not come from the damsel in distress that he is convinced he must save from her own self.

Men in Love must remember that just because there seems a roadblock, that real Love is worth both the wait and the hurt that will be caused and will be felt because it is within the hurt that we all grow, that we all find out what awaits us on the other side of that hurt. If we cannot trust that the hurt will subside, we will remain steadfast in the idea that what we have in a spiritual sense is enough and this is not an option for the Soul. The Soul needs new experiences, and the Soul pines for everything that we are to become all we are meant to be. It is dependent upon the way that we perceive events in our lives, dependent on a willing participant with a physical body to be out in the world and to do well and to do well with Souls of a like manner.

Men do not have the ability to read a woman's mind. Women have been practicing this way for many generations, but it is part of the reason that so many marriages falter and go by the wayside, because we are so idealized with the belief that if we change for them that they won't need us to tell them anything – they will just know what we are thinking. No, they will not, and it is an unfair predicament to find one's self in to be Loving a person and to also feel like that person is not keeping the combined Soul of the two of them intact as one acting unit of Love, of purveyors of the Divine, of two Souls which were placed into this lifetime to bring to the world only that which those two Souls were brought here to do. This same thing can be applied to all else in Life, because unless we are ready to receive a truth as it is in its purest form we will always be mistrusting of not only other people, but our Selves, as well.

Unless we can look past the things already manifested and see them as being the product of what two unbalanced Souls achieve, we will always be short of the goal, for it is without saying that the truth of things always end up being Known, no matter what. A man can do everything in his might to hide his feelings about another person, but always, the truth is revealed. A woman can try and be it aimlessly so to attempt to Love a person who is not the match to her Soul, and she will find herself endlessly disappointed and under the assumption that all "love" is as empty as the Love which she feels she is trapped in. Love is not a trap. Love, when it is real and when it is based on the truth of those within that combined Love will only manifest and will only Become all it was meant to Become. Regardless of what it is that the human Ego-Self wants, when the Soul needs its release, there is nothing that a mere human being can do to make that desire for exposure not happen. At some point in the lifetime of those Souls, the truth comes out.

The Truth Comes Out

The man who swears he will never Love again does in fact Love, but it is a limiting Love and one that will madden him unless he realizes that in the Love he feels is forbidden by one thing or another is the paradoxical nature of the truth in that it is the Love he feels he cannot have that will free him. He will not believe this, at least not at first, because there are too many judgments on his Soul, too many demands which will render his Soul to be like that of a starving homeless man who knows that he has an address, who is, in effect, a rich man but is still stuck to the old belief that he cannot have what is rightfully his own because someone else told him that what he Knows is not what they know so that must mean it is not the truth.

The man who was beaten in his childhood, should he choose to only recall the calamity that life brought to him through the misinterpretations of parental Love and discipline as a child will, if nothing is brought to his attention as affection and if nothing is taught to him in and as measures of that affection being real and true, will continue throughout his life living in turmoil. He will continue to mistrust others, will continue to bring into the situations of his own life those very same situations which were uninvited by him yet so prevalent in his life as a child.

Unless this man will address the beaten child within with Love instead of dishonor, with respect instead of anger, with softness instead of the hard-scrabble nature of abuse that was given to him as a learning tool, he will live his life as though the world owes him a reason as to why it is that he should not exact his own brand of what he interpreted the beating as being. He will further the sins of his father as meted out to him in a manner which will manifest itself as abuse upon those who he Loves – and he does Love them, but his is a Love which is fraught with anger and control, with bitterness and resentment, and with the idea that somehow, the family which he created now owes him the peace which comes with being in control of his own life and those of the people who he claims to love. Yet, this is not Love.

Love is not a measure of control but a gift that is the one gift that we are encouraged to share and to give to others. Yet the one who suffered in his father's hell is the very one who has no idea how to release the grief for the loss of his own stolen childhood and neither the anger from the cries of his own shattered spirit. This is a truth that is hard to know, to know that this is the reality of people who are strong in so many ways but in the ways of truth and love and all that is to be respected, they are mindless. And sadly, there is a mindlessness to the larger majority of people walking the crust of the earth.

Mindlessly, we wander around all day in our lives, thinking about things in a perspective is that is ours but not of this world and neither of its thinking. And rather than all of us paying attention to what our bodies are telling us and what we know intuitively to be the truth of us, we choose the safer of two things. We choose the comfort of already knowing the present discomfort of our lives, and we choose that boring and heavy discomfort because we

are familiar with it, and fearing what we do not know will happen if we choose otherwise, we go with what we know...rather and instead of what Our Soul Knows.

Our Soul Knows what its own version of perfect Love is, and all the time there is only and always a picture of its Self surrounded by others. This is the same thing for us all. We all have, at this moment, the same picture of the Self with all of the other Selves in Being, and in Being all at the same time, we are all, or at least should be, thinking that same thought. Right now, whoever is reading this book at the same time, you are all seeing this same thing right now, and you are right now all asking, in your own way and as it applies to the beauty that is your life, what it is that you are here to do. Well, first is the simple answer. It is the obvious answer – you just saw it, and you saw it at the same time as other people. You saw You with everyone else in your life. Your reason for being here has to do with you and all of those people in your life so that together and through it all you can all together bring about the greater Love and Peace which is a Universal need.

Right now you can see you in the middle, then your family - and remember that family is not always going to be blood related...we all Know who our family here is on Earth. We choose each other. We do. Magnetically we choose each other, and whether you want to believe it or not, we are in one anothers lives because we are meant to be there, period. For the man who seeks out a mate and has no one in mind and is happy as he is, but one day really thinks about it...He sits quietly, alone and in his thoughts. And he doesn't realize that he is quieting his mind around that thought and he thinks nothing of that non-thought. In fact he sleeps that night and many weeks' worth of nights and then one day just out of the blue, there she is. You are drawn to each other like bees to honey. You just are not really sure at the beginning of this particular exchange of energy that it is right. You cannot see sacrificing the friendship when it might be that the friendship was meant to lead two people to always be right there at the right time, even when it seems like it is the wrongest time, and he just knows that this woman, she is somehow a very large part of his life. And it is strange, but it is as nice as it is strange to even think this way of this woman in this manner.

No. No it is not strange. In fact, it is the absolutely one most natural thing in the world that he feels this way. In fact he has allowed his mind to wander on many a night, when there came a song on the radio and immediately and in his mind, without reason, there she was, in his thoughts. He recalls the last time he'd seen her, and the last time he'd heard her voice, smelled her shampoo as her hair is flipped expertly from one shoulder to the other. And he knows that this...this is not a show. In that moment this man knows that this person is a gigantic part of him. He cannot figure out, though, not for the life of himself, how she fits there. He just knows that she does. I speak of those things that each one of you – each one of you knows a man who is this man, or maybe is this man, and you have had these thoughts at one time in your life about one person in your life and you can see them, right now.

Sometimes you are angry with the person in your mind and you cannot deal with being angry with them, but there is no way that you can do your life without them. It is just not a feasible thing. Other times it is purely physical, and you can shut your eyes and see this person, and a bolt of electricity shoots through you. Your eyes seem to clatter like thunder after a bolt of lightning, and something ...always something that brings us all back to the reality of things, and at that moment we find out just how human and vulnerable we are,as humans, and in the person we have idealized we can see our own vulnerable nature.

We idealize those our Souls impress upon us so much about. There are few people who do not, and it is because inherently the Soul knows that it is looking at a piece of itself. It knows that everything in our lives and everyone in our lives is a manifestation of ourselves in others. The woman a man has idealized as the perfect woman in his mind, and eventually, also in his heart, will continue to draw that type to his life. Yet there will always and only be just One who will always be the One who, without his realizing so, has captured not only his eye and neither his mind, but too, a piece of his Soul. And it belongs to her.

It belongs to her. It is no longer his, but hers, and while on the outside of things he might be the man to keep all his things, the one thing that he cannot keep is that one tiny piece of his Soul, which, in reality, is probably the very biggest piece and he doesn't realize or accept it that way yet because in his own mind, but not the Soul, he cannot accept that this is really how he feels about her and it scares him. It scares him because his past Loves have hurt him, and his past Loves have made Love seem like it is an option rather than the greatest requirement of all things required by the Soul.

A man can only know a woman truly and only if he can first know the contents of his very own soul. In others we find that there are resemblances of ourselves that we either want in us or we have in us. The man who sees certain beauty in a woman whom he cannot bear to lose as a lover will not realize that this is her place in his life, will take a loss on the Love of his Life, because he would rather live with only what "could have been" and still have her as his friend because it would kill him to lose her as both his lover and his friend. The loss is too much for his Ego to bear and in so denying himself his true Love for the sake of never seeing her again through the loss of that Love. Sad story, but true. We all know someone like this. I know many like this.

While it might seem as though I have turned the woman into an object, on behalf of all the men in the world about all the cluelessness, that is how you guys think. You think in terms of work and we don't, and it's okay, because it just is. (Work means "able to buy stuff." You win. If we can explain it to you in terms you get, then there you go. It isn't that a Love thing with you would be bad, but if you break up, he's scared he'd lose all the way around and you wouldn't be his friend anymore and that means he loses his thing...the friendship...he knows you are not a thing, I promise...it's just guy speak, really. )

A man is taught that he must work to gain his life, but he is not taught that he does not have to work for real Love. He is taught that women must be sheltered, that we must be kept and that we must be shown how to live, but when one comes along and shows the man Love, and shows him his worth to just her, suddenly he knows the bigness of his presence in her life. And believes in that "bigness" in her life, and takes care not to shatter it, knowing that for so long, she has lived shattered. He neither raises nor dashes her hopes. Yet he is willing to live without the hurt that has not come to him but could most surely if he were to...

...and make no mistake...he wants "to"...but won't, at least not right away and not until he can assure his Soul that this is indeed The One who he has been thinking of, dreaming of, the One who he Knows is "her." He will deny himself the Love he invited into his life and pine for it – and she knows that he pines for it...men aren't hiding anything from us, I Promise – rather than take the risk, not only at risking his friendship with her, but also his long held belief that paperwork outweighs the pounding in his Soul for this person who breezes in and out of his life...and it's always when he is just plain old doing nothing other than wandering in his thoughts...

Then there is the other man, the one who feels like he totally owns a situation when in fact, it owns him instead. When we feel compelled to tell people that we have control over a thing or a situation, what it is that we actually have is a lack of control, but it is not a lack of control over anything more than the way the man actually feels about a situation or a person.

A man can have all the things in life that he feels will complete him, but what this man doesn't realize is that very truly, his things own him. In this life we own nothing, and we are owed nothing, and we owe no one anything, but with our own human failings and our own thoughts and opinions about things that we have little to no control over. He is who makes it a point to ensure that the people around him are aware that he feels some sort of entitlement, some sort of something that he feels that he should just be granted for simply just being him.

Yet this person is not someone who understands the very intricate balance of things as they are, does not care to learn the lesson brought to him that he asked for without knowing that he asked for it. There are things in life which we assume are ours, and we assume such things because for the entirety of our own physical human lives we have simply been granted things upon demand. The Ego-Self becomes accustomed to getting its own way, to having itself seen to and pandered to, and the Ego-Self wants the Soul to take it upon itself that the Ego is in charge when in fact the Ego is very much out of control of things, even as it might seem that outwardly it is fully controlling a situation.

Allowing Our Material Worth to Occupy the Space of Our Soul

When we allow our things to occupy the space of our Soul we find ourselves always wanting for more – more things, and when it is that we can no longer fit one more thing into the fabric of our lives, we, even with all of our things, end up feeling more empty than we did before the thought occurred to us that change must take place or else we will stagnate. We stagnate when we continue to do the same things over and over and get the same results, over and over, to the same and pressing issues that we had and have gone through for the bulk of our lives. The man who is satisfied in his life, with or without the things that he would or does believe makes him happy, is the man who can deal with the little things, because every person on the planet knows that it is the little things in our lives that make or break us. When we can appreciate the little things, whether they are "good" or "bad," we begin to also see to it that we are in process of moving into the light of Who we Are for real.

Stagnation begins when we become complacent in the desires of our lives, when we expect other people to take action for us and for our lives and on our behalf without our own action being taken toward a specific way of being or place in our Spiritual lives. To place more value on a person because of their monetary worth is not giving credence to the Soul's place in the grander scheme of the lives of human beings. To believe that one man is more worthy than is another merely for the fact that one man has more things than does another is to give credit only to the physical leanings of the Ego than to give light or understanding to the idea that all things in existence were first a pining of the Soul rather than a want of the Ego.

A want of the Ego is a physical manifestation of a desire that the manifestation represents. A man can pine for a beautiful wife, but if it is his Soul's wish to have a smart wife with superior intelligence, the man will experience, time and time again, a Love with a beautiful woman only to find himself wistful for a beautiful woman who is possessed with a high degree of intelligence. The process will go on and on until the Soul has found the match which satisfies its own needs as those needs pertain to the Soul's mission in this lifetime's experience.

We can only expect to experience those things in life that cause us to grow ever closer to the Soul and its needs to be seen by other souls. When we choose, in the beginnings of new parenthood, to choose those things left to choice for our children, we choose what we think will benefit them and we leave nothing for them or their choosing. We mistrust our own brood to come into this life without a modicum of intelligence that will further them through this lifetime, and we give no credit where it is due in terms of things and ways of being that the child must display in order to realize the growth that said child's Soul needs. When we tell children that they are expected to behave a certain way is normal, but when we expect children in their thoughts to be able to decipher the language that is best kept in the realms of the adult world we take from them their unique ability to grow, their only chance to become all what they are meant to become at that moment in time, and we rob them of the richness in Spirit that belongs only to a child.

Children are the purveyors of Love, for they know no other way unless the adults in their lives make them aware of the ugly things they will experience through abuse, through heartache, through the nasty little things that make their lives richer for the experience. We want to save them from their heart ever breaking and we want to make things for them beautiful and bright so that they never have to hurt, but hurt they will. Every Soul has come to this lifetime for the purpose of healing, learning and Loving, and it is aside of ourselves that we should impede a child for the sake of appearances. When we are children we are meant to do as children are meant to, for it is in adulthood when we will begin to learn the intricacies of the Life which is lived within us each that will always pertain to the lessons imparted upon us as children which are the most important in measures of the growth of the Soul.

It is during childhood that we first have our heart broken, and it is during childhood when our social learning begins with the first day of elementary school. It is during childhood that we are taught to share and to trust people, and if the people who are meant to be the ones to care for our needs are not trustworthy we will find that children will grow into adults with childish tendencies. A childish tendency is the tendency to stomp our feet, have a tantrum, do things as a child would in order to get what it is that we think we need, and normally it is a thing in the outer world, or perhaps a situation or a way of being that we want to see in our lives. Because we were not given that which we needed as children, the child within lives but only in search of the things that his or her Soul needs. When the child reaches their adulthood the lack of a thing will become evident, as the lack of things will be shown in all of the relationships that the child will form with others. This is not something that can be avoided, because in the hurts and the not getting what we want or need as children leaves us wanting for those things as adults.

If we have been shown Love, we will Love All. If we have been given respect, we will find that we have respect for all. If we are shown integrity, we will live with integrity. If we are shown a strength of character, then it is an adult of good moral character which will be realized. Conversely, if we are told that we are not able to do something, we will carry the weight of another's opinion about our abilities throughout our lifetime with us until a lesson can be presented to us from which we can learn to do the thing that we are told we will not. If we are not shown Love as children, our only reality will be that Love is something that is set aside for "good" people, and if we have not been shown how to be a "good" person, then throughout the life of us we will exhibit behaviors which will make the "bad" in us apparent and we will not be able to grow past what someone else has given to us as the truth.

Our Truths Are Our Own

We are not told but must find out that our truths are our own. We must learn what they are throughout the course of our time as children so that we may go out into the world and impart our grace and our wisdom and our truth onto the world, for ours is a most profound place to be in when it is that we find out that the truths of us as given to us by others no longer applies to our lives, and it is a freeing moment for us when this happens. No longer are the truths which were not ours applicable, and no longer are we to bear the sins of the people who gave us the baggage they did when they also gave us their truth. We can only trust someone else's truth for ourselves for so long before we find not that their truth is wrong, but only that their truths no longer apply to our mission in this life time.

We can wish and hope and even believe that what we want is what we need, but unless we are willing to do the work needed to see to it that the thing at the end of the work is the most perfect manifestation of the Love which begs to be seen in fruition in the physical world, that which we desire so much will never be seen because there is truth to the fact that anything we want in this lifetime and anything that we want in physical form requires change, requires thought, requires that we hurt and that we ache a little bit, because with change we find that when one thing is thought upon differently, so, too are the actions and the manifestations which follow.

We find that when we can hurt in a different manner, when we can see our pain through different means, when we can color the ache from a different perspective we find, too, that we have stretched our Selves a bit. When we stretch our Soul a bit, it hurts. It hurts because the truth that was there before we questioned it has become different, has evolved and is now scarier because it has become workable. And when it becomes workable it means that we are now given to the idea that we now have to do our part in making things become what we experience in our lives.

We are who manifests the world, not the world manifests us. We are who bring into our Being the Light which is us, no matter how strange that sounds, and we are the ones who are totally responsible for the way that things turn out because once it is that we have created the thoughts about a thing or a situation we find too that the more we think about it in its former way, the more, even through the pain and the aches, even as we can still see it in its former way, we can also see the potential that it holds now, that it has always held, because we were willing to see the thing or the situation in a different sort of way.

When we first set out with a thought about anything – a person, a thing, a situation- immediately we become fixed on the outcome without regards to the way that we will get to that outcome. We are rarely prepared for the lessons which will come with the change of perspective, and we, as we always do and have, will fight this new thing with an old front and for the life of us will continue fighting what it is that we feel about that thing. What was once just a flight of fancy now stares at us squarely in the Soul and now, even though we fight against it, we Know, from the very middle of our Soul and possibly all the way down to the barest of its Bones, we find that there is no escape.

A man who sought the perfect Love and diligently seeks that perfect Love may not find it because he does not realize that his own perfect Love is himself. He will seek one special Lady, but does not realize that his Soul has already chosen her. He fights the compulsion to fight against it, and on this day he finds a freedom in the not knowing of how things will turn out, of what it is that he has really found himself in the middle of. Yet, his Soul prods him forward, and for no other reason than that his Soul will simply continue to present him with this same woman, again and again, and he will fight against the whims of the Soul even as it was his very Soul who he'd entrusted the finding of his life mate to. He fears what others will say, fears no longer living up to the identity which he'd built for himself, and fights himself because he has never felt the way he does right now, about one certain woman, and he cannot figure out why it is that he feels this way about her specifically.

It is because his Soul knows that she is the One in whom he can entrust everything, Knows that it Knows better than he does the lessons that he must learn and be willing to learn, for they are the lessons which he himself set out upon learning long before he was manifested in to this consciousness as the Being who he was born as. We sell ourselves short when we feel as though the only thing which matters in this lifetime is what we acquire through our hard work more than what it is that we have been willing to have our Selves ache through in order to learn. Our Own Truths will not ever allow us to escape them, no matter what. The man who loves this certain woman will only do so from afar, and it is with grief that he does for he knows that he has fought the one thing in him that he lacks, that he will continue to lack and the lack was a choice he made. He will choose the guarantee that he will never have to change for himself, and he will choose to just be the same person he ever was, and he will live secretly wondering "what if...?"

The Lack Within

Our fears about anything come from a lack within, and we ignore the lack within because we want to believe always that we are above those words and actions which are not Loving and which are meant to hurt. We care to stay within the confines of the things that we believe because those things give us meaning in what seems everyday more a meaningless, thoughtless and Loveless existence. What we never realize upon this one thought is that we can do something about it. We can do what we must to get through the hurt, get through the pain and get through to that place where higher thought reigns and where nothing more can make us ache from the things that we are choosing to not be aware of.

Things such as hatred, anger, the proliferation of belief that we have always known was somehow not the right belief for ourselves and our lives, these are the things which make us be and these are the things which we cling to and make claim to in the clime of our lives at any given time. What we are willing to believe usually does not come from our Selves, but from someone else who was well intentioned at the time that we were given their truth as our belief. My point in this can be illustrated as a person who Loves someone else who is not willing to give to themselves what it is that their soul so obviously needs. It is with little thought that a man will say "I cannot Love her, because she is bound to another," and while that may be the truth in a technical sense, at the same time it is the biggest lie of all because it is the lie that we want to believe as the truth when in reality, we can Love others, no matter what, not even mattering would be a piece of paper which binds a person to another.

Just like a restraining order has little power physically over someone who is hell bent on redeeming themselves through threats and acts of violence onto another, so, too, is any piece of paper which 'binds' two people – the paper might bind people together in the legal sense, but the Soul does not recognize paperwork, does not see signatures, and never will it honor something which is interfering with its own needs. No matter what happens, if you are meant to be with a person, even if that person is somehow bound to someone else, your Souls will, whether you care to think about it in this manner or not, end up as one because that is its desire. You cannot stop the Soul from doing it what it must, cannot stop it from recognizing what it is in someone else that it is desirous of, and never for the rest of your time as both a Soul and a body will you ever be able to get around that one thing about the Soul.

When The Soul Makes Its Presence Known and Felt

Once it is that the Soul has made its presence felt to us, we Know things on a higher level, and we can see, or at least begin to see, the reason for the hurting, the reason that you ache all the way to the Bones of the Soul, and surely after that moment happens, we see, too, that all the pain, all the heartache, all the things that broke our hearts were never for nothing. There is nothing more gratifying than to see, at the end of a thing, that we have come ahead of ourselves, that we have been made stronger by the hurt, by the anguish, and now we can see, too, what we deserve and why we deserve it and more, we see, too, that if we let go of all these rules and all these things that get in our way, including ourselves, that we get to the reason for the suffering that much faster.

We all know this but we do not all believe this. We want to keep holding on to what other people have told us is the truth, and it has been repeated throughout this writing that other peoples' truths no longer apply to us when those truths are no longer our own. As we grow and get older in our physical bodies, we learn our own lessons and form our own truths as they apply to us. Never should we bother ourselves with the pain of forcing our Soul to make do with what has been presented to it if what has been presented to us in whatever form it is is not in agreement with the climes of the Soul. Our lives were not meant to be a force of anything other than Love, but we believe that in order to have anything or to be anything in this lifetime we must force the issues of Love, of what we think real Love is and who we believe that Love comes from.

The Love within us is the Love that is also outside of us, because without us giving that Love away there is no Love. The Love that we have now is the same Love that it was many lifetimes ago, because the Soul cannot see the "end" of Love, just as it cannot see the beginnings of it, because Love is endless. A mother's Love for her child is an endless Love, and a Twin Flame Love is a Love which has learned about itself throughout many lifetimes all with the same Souls and is also endless – there is no end to Love, if truly it is Love.

There is no end to Knowing what you Know because your Soul tells you that it is so. There is no end to the idea that what you Know you also Know as your own Truth and it is the truth that you can trust because it is the truth which is born of the Soul's Love for the person whose body through which that Love of all Souls will be given and had. The Soul operates on the level that is Love, that is All Love, and when we operate from the Soul's level no wrong can come of a thing because it is within that area of the Love that we have for each other that the Soul can only come from. The Soul cannot see measures of hatred, because it can only feel the terror that comes with the hate. The Soul cannot ever Know what is the absence of Love because the Soul is Love in its purest, highest form.

We should all be with the thought in our heads that the pain we live in daily is pain that is good for us, because Pain becomes our teacher. Pain becomes that pain in the butt math teacher who had the nerve to call us stupid when we just were confused. Pain becomes that English teacher who told us that run-on sentences makes us look like we have no true measure of how we look on paper to other people. Pain comes in the form of a lover who has broken a pact of silence, and pain is the thing which we find the most Love inside of.

We cannot hurt without a reason. No one can. It is not possible to feel hurt, new or not, unless it was placed there to begin with. We cannot ever know what someone else is thinking if we are not able to query them for their thoughts, for the thoughts are the things that give the Bones of the Soul their life and give the Bones of the Soul their reason to want to not hurt anymore, to not ache with the memory of what has gone on in their lives and for all the things that made the hurt happen. We are not privy to knowing what it is that is going on in someone else's mind unless and until we ask, Spirit or the person, for the permission needed We are all simply guessing and believing that we know all the truths when in reality we are not even aware of our own truths. We are too busy trying hard to decipher a truth that is not our own, and the reason that we cannot Know it and understand it is because of that one thing – it is not our own.

We must be willing to go out into the world, both the world within and the world without, and seek out our own answers and learn to know our truths and more, to believe them as they are from within our own Selves. We have been taught to not trust ourselves, but to trust those whose predilection is with something that they themselves have no idea will or will not be the truth of them. They go through their lives believing something that they are too afraid to prove as being not what it was intended to be and it is because those too scared to try are scared to let other people down.

Do Not Fear Letting Other People Down

We must face the fact that we will let people down. It is inevitable. To try to be all things to all the people in our lives is a maddening process at best and never will the end result be what we think it will be. Someone within the thing that is needed to be understood will be let down because trying hard to make someone believe anything means that the thing that we are trying to get them to believe is something which tests the limits of what their Soul will take as being the truth. The Soul knows what is the truth and what is not the truth, and it also knows that within each person's truth there is a message for all of us, but the message, just as the truth, is bound to be different for everyone. Yes, even you.

We can no further make it a point to not let other people down and sacrifice ourselves at the altar of their acceptance. When we do what we are not ready to do, or when we do what is not in line with what the Soul needs we take away from our own healing, take away from all the Soul work that we have already done. It is too much work to even think that we will not take notice of the things that are presented to us in the manner in which we asked to present themselves.

Awareness, impeded

Our awareness is impeded. Truly, Really. Absolutely. At least most peoples' awareness is impeded, and it is impeded by choice. We choose to trust others' words even though we do not trust the people giving those words to us, and while the reasons that we trust their words (because they may very well be the truth, the words) rather than what our own Soul is telling us to believe or not to believe, we still want to cling to the truths that mattered when we were children.

Many of us in our current adulthood continue to cling to the things that we thought were truth, and again – at the time that we'd heard them and the time that these truths were being told to us, we were meant to believe them because it was at that point that our learning began. In fact, if we are inclined to believe anything at all, it should be that what we heard then will not apply to now, UNLESS it is still a truth for you. We would rather wrap ourselves in the blanketing comfort of a truth whose time has passed than we would bother ourselves with forming new truths about who we are, but that is not anything that will help anyone until they've chosen to accept that the truths which they live their lives by at this point are the truths in deed and in fact.

We form our own truths, we human beings do, and we form them from our experiences and not from the 'he-said, she-said." We go through our lessons in life, our Guides and our Spirit s right there with us, guiding us throughout and never leaving our sides for any reason, and the only time that they have no contact with us is when it is time that we make a choice- and the choices that we are making when we start the process of finding or creating the truths of our own lives, we find that there is no other Being there to help us with that choice because choice, no matter what, is left up to us. This is the magical part of being the only animal on the planet who has the ability to reason. While it is that in the wild an animal will choose who eats first, in the wild, the animal is given only to the devices of his own innate and inborn primal nature which makes a carnivore chase its food. It does not stand to reason on its own what it will catch as its dinner, only that it has to catch it, regardless of what it is.

But the human animal has the faculties with which to make choices for its own life, has the ability and it is expected that the human being will choose wisely and according to its needs and its Soul's needs rather than choosing via the whims of the Ego Self. We choose out of our thinking that we need other people to approve of us when in fact we do not. We need only to follow the guidance which we have the audacity to ask for but not the wherewithal to follow. It is not that we do not have the tools to choose, but rather that we do not have the conscious to do so because the ugly truth is that we were taught that we have the tools but we were warned against using them because using them meant that we were going against Spirit, going against the grains of knowledge imparted us as children. If we were to use what we were given, all the truths that were given to us by the adults in our lives would be made out to be liars even though the things and the truths that they shared with us were not even theirs to begin with.

If we had the temerity to do half of the things that we are equipped to do the human animal would be more dangerous as a whole than already it is. Evil madmen and tyranical women leaders all know that the human animal has the greatest gift of all when thinking in terms of things we are capable of. The majority of humans on earth limit ourselves and we do so on the truths of others. We do not Love one another like we should because in that Love is the idea that we are responsible for the way that that Love makes other people feel. We know that to some, the word "Love" is equated with romantic Love, but Love is much broader than that one thing.

Love is something that the world is severely at odds with itself over. The inhabitants of Planet Earth know well that in order for the human race to be sustained, it must Love for without that one element we are nothing and we are beyond saving ourselves let alone the planet if we are void of Love. When we are called to have loving thoughts, even if that Loving thought is about someone who we are not willing to Love from the Ego's perspective, we bristle at the thought, believing that we must earn someone else's Love, but the truth is that Love is already ours. The truth is that Love in its purest form is the one binding concept, the one true thing that we are all privileged to have at our behest, but is the thing that most people fear.

We fear Love in all of its forms because of the way that Love has been presented to us. We have been taught our lives long, for many generations, that Love is meant to be between two humans when in reality it is between two Souls who have again met in human form. We fear the concept of Loving others because we think that we are going to have to give up a part of ourselves to accommodate others' needs and whims but the reality is that Love is not going to be had by anyone if first it is not given.

We must give that which we seek, that which we need, and we are scared to give Love because we have labeled it as something that ends up as a sexual relationship but there are more kinds of Love than only the eros kind. There is the Love that a parent has for their children, and the Love that one person has for their siblings. There is Love that is between two friends, and Love that is between two People. There is Love for an activity, and Love for a thing, and Love for a sense of belonging to something bigger than ourselves. Love is abundant in the great big Universe, and it is to our detriment that we believe that it is in limited supply. No one believes that, in a limited lifetime, that there is enough of anything to be had by all, and we are the ones who perpetuate this thinking, making it the truth by which legions of people live. If we could bother ourselves to think a little bit about how all this Love is there for us all, and bothered to believe in ourselves enough so that we would also Know that the Love that is in abundance we are also a part of.

We are no more not a part of this Universal Love than we are not. We are who makes the Love perpetuate. We are the ones who stop the Love. We are the ones who place holds on what we see as the truth, namely when it is our own truth. We do not trust ourselves because we have been conditioned not to. There is always an expert who can tell us what we need and this means, in the minds of the many, that we do not need our Soul's direction. We know it all. We know what we need. The Soul doesn't know because to a lot of us the Soul is something that we turn into when we die but the truth is that we are Souls before we come into this lifetime and we will continue as Souls when we live this consciousness.

Our thoughts are what bring us to a place where healing is needed, because it is our thoughts which have led us, coupled with the backing of the perception and the beliefs we have held for so long, to this place where it seems that only calamity has a place in life, and only calamity will bring us through to the surface where we can breathe again. I am in agreement with this. We consciously accept that calamity is our natural state, but in reality our natural state is that of Love. We cannot further our own Selves let alone the destinies of others as our place in their lives allows into a future that is certain if what we have held as our beliefs for so long

We have our hearts broken, over and over again, throughout our lives, but it is in childhood when we learn best how to relate where the Love in the hurt resides, and we can feel for the first time the hurts that we will go through during the course of our lives as adults. It is when we are children that we are meant to not know why it is that people are mean to each other – we just know that they are, and it is in childhood that we begin to form our own identities as they will be during the time of our lives and during this particular consciousness when we will, without a doubt, learn whatever it is that we are meant to learn.

We will find out on our own all about our hearts aching, all about how very and deeply our Souls will mourn with grief over the things that we missed willingly and the things that we refuse to look at through the eyes of the Soul. We will hurt and we will want for things and we will want for those things the way that we have always wanted for them, and the Soul will always respond with its own inclinations, and it will always tell us when what we are planning on choosing is the right way to go or if it is not.

We have been taught not to trust our own Selves, to not trust our own leanings, and to be dependent upon things and ways of being and truths that are not our own. Like little children we bristle when we are not comfortable, when things seem to be a bit too overwhelming and we end up feeling like all the work that we have done throughout the course of our lifetimes has been for nothing. What we are not willing to see is the sameness- no, not the sameness that is included or in regards to the things that are alike between two people, but rather, the sameness that is the very unenjoyable facet of life that is repetition of things or actions that did not work before.

We are creatures of habit, humans are, and we automatically do what it is that we have been taught to do, have trained our own selves to do, and we find out too quickly, with each subsequent action that we perform that is the same as before, and the same reaction to it not working out (again) and we end up feeling the very same way as we did, if not worse, than we had prior to the thing that we wanted changed which did not change. We drive ourselves to almost the point of insanity when we choose to not venture out in to an area of life which is scary to us, simply because we have never been there in the past, to that place where what we are faced with looks the same, feels the same, but each time is different in that we know how we are going to face the issue. Yet that is all we know – that we need to face the issue, and we "face" it because we have to, and we do not like doing things that we "have to" do.

There comes a time in everyone's lives when we most assuredly will end up at the proverbial end of the rope, at rock bottom, and when we are there what we forget is that as we look down into the depths of the thing that is invading our lives, we forget to look up, to the Light, to the Freedom of being just plain old "ourselves" and we fret because the view from the bottom to the top seems like a lot of work to get out of. We see only with the perception that we have right then and there. We forget that it took us time to get where we are and we abandon the idea that we can be calm throughout the mess that is our lives and our spirits, and we look to the end of the thing without any appreciation for the process.

When we are at the bottom of anything we feel like we are going to be stuck there forever, our feet stuck to the stickiness that has become life for us. We want to deny the tears, deny that what we are going through is somehow needed. We want to blame everyone else, and we want nothing to do with life. This is okay, for a minute, because we all need time to move away from the issues, away from the things that have come to our attention over and over again, the things that we refuse to look at and see with our new eyes. We do not realize that what we are going through is the beginning of our healing, the beginning of a process that will take time, will break our hearts more than anything else that has in the past and it is not for any other reason than that finally, forgivingly, we have been exposed to the truth.

When we have been exposed to the truth we find out that for too long we have been empty, and when we didn't feel empty whatever was there that made us feel like we were somehow full was nothing more than our inability to not hang on to things for the sake of hanging on to things that do not serve us and probably have not served us in a very long time. This is where we end up feeling like we have done so much for so long already and we ask why it is that we should try harder than we have, is why we wonder why the hell God hates us so much so as to put us through what we go through.

We go through what we go through because we exact the Path to healing ourselves. Our Souls Know what we need, and we ignore it because we think that we have endured so much hurt that we cannot bear anymore. We know the inner work is going to hurt, we know we are going to have to change, and our Ego Selves will only allow us to do what we can so that we do not make us look bad outwardly. Yet, when it is that we need to be able to make the changes is when it will no longer matter, when it will just be another thing that we have to choose to no longer do. Even if we choose it and even if we make the changes and make them not for ourselves but so that everyone else can bask in our own perceived glory, the work that we perform on us will be without cause because rather than choosing to go through the work so that we can be a better version of ourselves we do the work so that other people will say that we are somehow different.

This is not doing the work, not doing the changes from within that need to take place. When a woman is in search of a Love which will fit the place in her life that she is preparing for that one special person, most times it is that she will work on what she looks like and what she does for her money and most times it will be the outward appearance that she alters and not the inner Soul work that really must be addressed. When we change us for the sake of others without also having our own selves in mind, we find that we are doing no good service for our own lives when we choose to be better in some small way than we were previously. When we do things that we think will make other people "love" us more, we are not thinking about who we really are at that moment.

We cannot be who we are not. This is not something that no one knows. This is not news. It is the proverbial idea that we cannot fit a square peg into a round hole and more, we cannot convince people who are looking at that square peg sticking out of the hole that a circular peg is meant for that it is the correct place for that peg. It will not happen. No matter how much we want to fit in with certain life situations, if we are not meant for that situation, it will not happen, and if it does, it will not be permanent. The Universe, even as it is in a constant state of flux, is permanent – it does not change the way that it is to accommodate all of the living things within its reach. It remains filled with mystery and Light and it remains an abundant place so long as we humans are willing to Know and believe that we are part of it, and that we are not the most important piece of it, no matter what we want to believe. While it remains that we must be the most important part of our own personal Universe, we must never forget, ever, that we are part of the greater Universe and plan at large. We can never lose sight of this one truth.

What is meant when the situation that we are not meant to be in, simply means that we cannot ever manipulate a situation that we want to have into being. It is a Karmic debt that we will create in doing this. We cannot do this without karmic repercussion and we cannot do this without impeding another person's Life. Impeding, not impacting. Impeding, because it messes with someone else's free will. Impeding, because it means that we actively and actually had to think about the person who our actions would hurt, and in that process we knew that this was the wrong way because we felt it bodily.

When we are being alerted by Spirit, our bodies tell us so. When we have made a right choice because of our right thinking we will know it. We will physically feel it. This is the evidence of Spirit within us all. This is the proof that many people have waited for, and the proof has been there all along, but we choose always to ignore it. We ignore it because we worry about what someone else will think of us. We worry about the way we will be judged, and for what? Because someone else thinks differently than we do? Really? You mean to tell me that all these years that I have not worried about what other people thought of me, when I worried about what they thought of me, I was wasting my time with that effort?

Yes. I was wasting my time with those people, but I know too, now, which people the effort is never wasted on. I know that there is one certain set of people who I can ask any question I want to at all and I am guaranteed to get the straight answer. I know. I have done it. No one can ever know how much weight is lifted up off of a person's shoulders when they know that we know they are upset with us. People appreciate it when, if we have hurt them in some way, we ask if what we have done has affected them. They will always, if they live their lives with integrity, answer you truthfully, and if you live your life with like integrity, you will know that you can trust their answer. You will know this because they will know that you cared enough to ask them what your actions have done and you will know they are telling you the truth because most of the time, they Love us enough to not want to carry the weight of our not knowing our infractions.

When we know what it is that we have done that has affected those we love the very most, and we can stand there in their presence, requiring ourselves to make right that which was made otherwise, and Knowing that this moment is monumental in Spirit, we also, at that moment Know One-ness. We experience monumentally spiritual moments when we are at our very lowest points in our lives. We all go through times when we experience loss and grieve those losses. We know that there is a Soul within us each and also a collective Soul of which we are all part of, and every time we are found to be in a state of change, we are also in a state of lower energies. We are sad, we cry and we go through a range of emotions that unless we are aware of it, we do not realize that we are part of a greater awareness which is also of this same One-ness.

Choosing to Be, In Love

When we can choose to Be, in Love, this is when we can truly begin to see the work that we have done as it pertains to the things that can be called the "whims of the soul," and it is on these very whims which all else rests.

Without our knowing that we are in pain we cannot start healing. We must heal. Mankind is phenomenal at the destruction we see in life and while it is that we are terribly wonderful at rebuilding that which we have broken down, we cannot begin to realize that things do not need to be broken in order for us to need to see to them. In this manner we can see the Soul as being something that has been beaten down and battled with, and we chose to go to battle with ourselves, and this is the highest "sin" of all. We go to battle with ourselves every single day. People who want to be Loved fail in their desires because they have idealized that Love to the point where it scares the hell out of them, thereby making them lonely and miserable and all of those other terrible things that come to mind when we are in the middle of the hardest, most Love-empty times in our lives.

What we are not thinking about at those times is that when we are lonely we ascribe higher thoughts to that of the human egotistical means of thinking without a thought being given to the idea that the way we got to where we are at that point in our lives was through thought. We humans don't like to think so, but the truth is that everything that you see in your own world was brought there on the wings of thought.

When there is war, someone had to think of a way for there to be a reason to have war. Then someone else has to think of a reason why one group of people hates another group of people enough to go to war. Then there has to be another person who thinks about who else they are going to go telling their story of hatred to so that there will be the masses who also think that there should be war, and war is usually enacted over something thought – religion, politics, differing views of culture, and so does war ensue.

When we are in the throes of things that were brought about by someone else's truth we find ourselves mesmerized by the pain that it brings with it. The pain allows us to swim in the ocean of feelings and the pain makes it so that the Ego can make sense of the loss that the Soul has experienced. We wrap ourselves in the blanket that is our pain and we wade in the hopelessness that we believe is ours and that we deserve to have at the time. We hang onto our old pain and our old hurts that those things just become so much a part of our own personal experience that we have a hard time letting go of it all.

We want so badly to not experience the depth of the pain that shoots to the very core of us. We stay complacent in the things that we call "real" and when finally we are brought to that place within where we ask if what we are going through really all there is to Life, we see that we have been wrong all along. Wrong in the idea that who we are is still who we were as children, and wrong because we have applied all the right ways of being to the wrong ways of thinking, and whether we want to believe it or not, every little thought that we think and every little pain that we feel impedes our lives is there because we let it stay where it is to ferment and rot in the middle of our Souls and eventually it attached itself and grows like a cancer, a cancer that we feel permeating us down to the very core of the Bones of the Soul.

Like the aging rock star who thinks that the same things would apply to his life all these years later, when the groupies have left his presence, when there are no more awards and no more accolades, when there is nothing "rock star" about this person anymore, this is when the truth of us comes shining through. If we worry too much about what we used to be, and we choose to stay living in that mindset where who we were counts in the present, we will find ourselves very chained to what was. To be chained to a memory and never to have learned from it is the part of being human that eats away at who we are for real, and who we are for real in the present is no where near who we were! To bask in the glory of what was is to bask in the errors in our thinking, is to be like a rock that is never moved and neither ever changing other than by the environment in which the rock will remain.

The Soul is that part of us each which will never guide us in the wrong direction, yet humans have seemed to, for generations, neglected the Soul, have ignored the aches which arise from the Bones of the Soul and have opted to make ourselves feel like we feel better by salving ourselves with things and with medicines which will never heal us and will only make the pain last longer in the long run. Once it is that we can get past our hurts, we can learn that what we have gone through really wasn't much more than lessons needing to be learned, and not because we were bad but because we needed learn these things. Sadly, we neglect ourselves and our Souls in trade for something that does not guarantee a thing in regards to our healing from our lives as we remember them, doesn't ensure that we will learn from what it is that we have gone through and from the places where we have been led into in the past and were never led out of.

If there is ever anything which is dearly needed at this point in our collective lives, it is clarity, as clarity is the thing which the entirety of humanity dearly needs.

As soon as we can be clear on the things that we need rather than the things that we think we need, and more, that we want, while the things that we are visited by are things which also breaks our hearts, we at least know, at that point, that Love is in us.

It is not but the illusion that there is an absence of Love which is making us hurt. Yet, it is never an absence of Love.

Simply, sometimes, because we must Love, We Also Must Hurt.
PART TWO

Well, now...that first part was pretty gnarly, right?

This is the part of this book where I throw off the proper-wording gloves and get down to the reality of things. This is where most people are given the real me, in writing, and where it counts – right in the middle of your very tortured Soul.

We can think of ourselves as being perfect creatures who have no lessons to learn, none to teach, no Love to give and nothing to live for except for the day that we die and either burn in hell or live eternally and blissfully in the everlasting light that is Love the way that we were told it was when we were all little kids sitting in the pews every Sunday morning, fidgeting while the preacher spoke. I guess I got lucky in that I was the Preacher's kid in her purest preacher's kid form, and no way was I going to not think for myself.

If I believed every little thing that I was told was a sin, and believed that everything is static and stays that way and that change only happens to those who have no capacity to do things to make their own lives a little more liveable for themselves, I know that I would not be sitting here right now writing this. We have been taught that there is only one God, and taught that there is only one way to believe, and taught and taught and taught things that may have applied to other people and maybe even to the people we were back when we were children and in a totally different time period but which totally do not apply to our own lives now.

The reason that I say that the first part of this book was "pretty gnarly" is because it is. It is "gnarly" to think that all of those things that we want to believe, want to hang onto, want to make our Truth but never really knew that they were our truths – it is way, way gnarly to think that all this time what we believed, while not a lie, so to speak, was somehow not true for us and for our lives. When we are children we are meant to trust our parents, meant to hang on their every word and meant to believe what they tell us is the truth.

It is inevitable- We Grow

We grow and we learn and we find out other things that are more preferential to our own lives and we seek out things which make our hearts soar and our souls feel like they are weightless. We do so many things for other people that it is a wonder in my own mind that we are able to do much of anything for ourselves, and it is simply because we are not taught to do for ourselves, at least not in the sense where we know that what we are pining for is somehow meant by the whims of the Soul to heal us from the Bones of the Soul outward into the reality that we share with the rest of the human race.

We want to save everyone else but we do not even know how to save ourselves. We want to live in the light of Love but we are not willing to suffer the darkness of the Soul first. In every single little thing in our lives and with every thought we think and every action we take we find that the similarities between us far outmatch the differences.

We all are very aware of what we DON'T want

It has been said over and over again by countless "gurus"that we know what we do not want, but do we know what we DO want?

Most of the time we are worried about not getting what we need, and so we think that we have to work our fingers to the bones in order to have the things in our lives that we believe will make us happy. What we are never thinking about is not the thing itself but rather the process that we go through in getting to the "thing." In question, and while it is that we are not worried too much about what we are going through when we are working toward a thing, whether it is real and we can touch it or if it is not real in the material sense and we cannot touch it, no matter what, when we are working toward a goal we do not realize that there is an entire process of stuff happening beneath the surface that sends out the signal to the thing or the situation that we want to have. While we might be thinking in our head that we may never have the thing, the thing that we do not realize is that in that moment, as long as we can see to it that it is the Path there, wherever there is, is what matters.

It is never the thing that is in question but rather and only what we learn on the way to the thing. We are so very aware of what it is that we do not want in our lives. We do not want emotional pain in our lives, so we opt for the loneliest place on earth – our own minds, and we believe that being there is also being safe. While it is safe, sort of, it is not the truth. What is the truth is that most of the time we really do want a companion in our lives, most of the time we are so worried about what other people think of us as it is, that to try to have more, no matter what more equates to for any one of us, would seem like we are stepping out of ourselves. We are not stepping out of what we think is "ours" when we step out in faith and know that who we are is enough to get us through, is enough to make all the loneliness worth the wait.

Wait? For what?

Wait for what, huh? I'll tell you wait for what...anything. Think of anything that you want right now that you would love to have as a part of your life. It can be anything at all. It can be something as benign as a new pair of shoes that you have been coveting for months and months. Or, it can be something as big and life changing as no longer being in a relationship with someone because the relationship no longer fits who you are. Think of any one thing that you would love to have and to see and to be a part of in your own life and think about how you are feeling when you think about that one thing. Notice that you feel lighter when you think about the good things, heavier when you think about the things that are not so good, and you will know exactly what it is that you have been waiting for.

It isn't that you have been waiting for a new life, but a new way of looking at the one that you are currently experiencing now. It isn't that you are thinking that you need to love someone else in order to be loved in return, but that you believed that Love was not within you to begin with and maybe even believed, as I had for so long, that other people were responsible for making you feel Loved. It doesn't work that way. It never worked that way, and if you believe that it has then you are not thinking correctly.

You have been waiting for so long for someone to come along and make things right for you, and you have been trying to make it seem as though this is how it is meant to be, and for so very long you have come back to this point again and again only to be disappointed by the things that befall your awareness and all these years you have believed that somehow you were left alone and it is your fault. Somehow, you have been made to think that you were not ever worthy of a thing to be successful by your measure of success, and for too long, you have squandered the Soul within you,giving away who you are to people who have no idea of what to do with the gifts you have imparted on to them. For far too long You have bothered to be all you could be, and for as long you have given your gifts away to people who, while worth the thought, are no where near the effort.

A little bit of effort

It will take effort on your part, by the way, to get to the thing that you see in your mind. It will hurt. It will, at times, feel like you are just spinning your wheels but I promise you that there is a reason that you see what you see when you are on your way to your Soul's healing. You will see things that on the cover of them make no sense, and as time passes by you will be reminded of that thing that made no sense. You will think about it. You may even dwell on it. You will ponder it, email your friends about it, and then one day after you have discarded all hope that someone has an answer for you, you just no longer do anything with it other than let it be.

Humans don't like to leave well enough alone. We never have. We want to think about the thing that bothers the hell out of us, and we want to understand the things that hit us the hardest, but it seems like we are afraid to see or to Know the things that we Desire. We are really afraid of our own Magical nature. We don't realize our truest power is within us, and we fear the thing that we paradoxically also Desire. We want to have success, but we don't want to let go of the things that we Know are the same things that we need just to release. By this I mean that we are more inclined to hang on to a nice idea that, in our heads looks AWESOME, but when we think about how much of our time and heart and energy and more – our Love – that we will be required to put into it, it hardly seems like it is worth the work. We want the outcome now. We want to take a short cut and we want to just have those things that we value now which are in manifest and we want to have them all without a little bit of effort.

If we would each take the time required to see a thing as it is right now, and also see that same thing as it is in manifest, and also see it in its manifested form and how it is conjured in our thoughts, we would find that there is not a whole lot that we cannot make it through. My own story is simple. I wanted to write for my living. Writing, other than dancing and teaching Hula, has always been the thing that has helped me to live on many more levels than just "it's my job." Writing has helped me throughout the course of my life to understand things from a different perspective and has on many occasions been what has brought out of me the answers which I so dearly sought out. When we take the time to think about something and we can see it with our mind's eyes and we can also see to it that we believe that what we are seeing is possible we are also taking the time to learn a new pattern of belief.

A New Pattern of Belief

In the first part of this book I wrote for you several different things that have irritated mankind since the beginning of time recorded. In the first part of this book I told you about how we go about making choices that do not fit our life or the situation at hand, how we would sooner fail again and again because we fear the outcome of the other things that we have not yet tried, and we have not yet tried because we are scared of what we do not know will be the outcome. How is it better to go with the same old thing that we have always done, expect a different outcome for it all, when what we are doing to change it is not different?

Think about a time in your life when you were so sure of yourself and more sure of the outcome and then think about the measure of the thing that you did with surety to bring about a different outcome even as you were employing the same method of seeing to a thing. Now, when you look at the situation at hand, no matter what it is, we find that much of the reason that we refuse to trust anything new is because someone else told us that according to them and their self-formed opinion of a thing, whatever it is that you want to apply to this situation that is a new thing for them and according to them is not going to work, and it is not going to work because they don't think it will. They will give you scenarios of what could happen, build up a big fat gnarly story about what they assume is going to be the outcome when in reality they know about as much about it as anyone does.

No one knows what it is that will happen. Outcomes happen all the time, and while it might be the truth that trying something new will make or break the outcome, not trying something new guarantees that the outcome will be along the lines of what said outcome has always been. Going back to the analogy of the baby diaper needing to be changed, you can avoid changing the diaper, and the diaper and its contents are NOT going to change, and you can sit there and contemplate everything that you want to about how that diaper got dirty, but as with all things like that diaper, the outcome still will be the same if you do not change the diaper. While you sit there contemplating the diaper, its contents and how to best go about changing the diaper, the baby sitting in the diaper is getting madder, the smell in the room is no longer that of scented candles, and now you have no solution, an angry baby who is possibly now suffering the beginnings of diaper rash, and of course, the longer it sits dirty, the smellier it gets to be.

Using the same diaper analogy we have the dirty diaper, the not-angry-yet baby, the idea that we know that if the diaper stays dirty, not only will the baby start screaming his head off, the room will begin to smell like...well, a dirty diaper. Rather than sitting and contemplating the best way to avoid the angry baby without changing the diaper is a fruitless effort, and the only way to make anything easier on ourselves, the baby and the room and its smelliness is simply to go headlong and change the baby's diaper.

In this same manner we want to take a situation into our control and we want to see to it that we are the ones to exact the difference in that situation, but if we remain scared of what the outcome will be, even when it is something as "duh" as changing a dirty diaper and know already what the outcome will be, we fear having to do the work because the work is ugly and messy and stinks to high hell. We don't want to do the work because in the working and the finding we are shown where it is that we took a shortcut or maybe did nothing at all. When change is in order, it is not one change to one facet of our Selves but a change which serves the entirety of the whole. By entirety of the whole I am not only referring to our whole selves but humanity as its entirety and as its whole. Returning to the diaper and the baby, if we did not change the baby's diaper, he will end up with a rash and the rash will make him uncomfortable. When he is uncomfortable he cries and when he cries everyone in the house can hear him.

If everyone in the house can hear him and he keeps crying then everyone in the house will begin to get irritated. When everyone in the house is irritated arguments will start from the tiniest little assumption about the way another person's message and words were delivered, and then once that happens there is only yet more guaranteed anger and hostility to be had by all, and it all comes down to the fact that the changing of the dirty diaper should have occurred the moment that the first indication was apparent rather than pondered upon. If we believe that not changing the baby will make him cry a little we will do this same pondering about what it is that we need to do in order to make a change.

If we believe that what we are doing and what we have always done will be the thing that will make the needed changes that we know we have to go through in order to have a thing in our life we are going to find ourselves to be sadly disappointed. We will have allowed ourselves to believe that what we are doing is somehow the right thing to do even though we know that the outcome might end up being the thing that we have seen again and again. Eventually the outcome will be the same thing over and over, but because we will have gotten to that point in our own thinking that "things never change" we will have also allowed ourselves to cement that belief in our heads and make it be continually the truth. And the worst part is that yes, it will be the truth that nothing has changed, and that things are painful and will continue to be painful for us.

The Same Things, Over and Over and Over Again

We want to believe that one day, doing the same things over and over again will produce the result that we want. We want to hang on to the belief that the way we are handling something the right way without thinking that there may be other "right" ways to do a thing but that we have not yet accepted that one right thing. To change our minds and to see a thing with new eyes is like asking our brains to not believe that we are the ones who are making up the thoughts which form the opinions that we have about a thing.

In order for us to experience a new way that things will happen for us we need to be willing to not do the same actions that we have always taken in the past. We know from our past and the things included in that past are also things that on the top of them seem like they are fine and good. Yet, inherently we know that the thing that we are seeing and accepting as OK are so not OK. The thing that keeps us believing that all is well is that we have, time and again, happened upon this same outcome and since it is not bugging us as much as we think it isn't we choose to remain with the idea in our head that this is how it is meant to be and to stay and that if it were meant to be different it would just be that way.

Well, no, it wouldn't be, and it is because we have chosen to think of it – the thing – in the manner that we have for so very long now that it just seems like it is the normal thing. Normal things will not make us crazy, will not make us question our selves, our thoughts and more, our Selves. Things which have made us crazy and have made us crazy for many years will continue to make us crazy because the thing that is making us that way is the very thing that we want to continue believing is just meant to be the way that it is when in fact it might well be that the reason it keeps on presenting itself is because the thing itself is asking you, almost literally, for that change. And we just keep on "telling" the thing that it is fine as it is, even though it bugs the hell out of us like it does and has and if we choose not to change a thing about it, always will.

Becoming Free of the Things which break our hearts.

Changing our beliefs about things will free us from the things that break our hearts, seriously. I say this because in the example of the crazy making thing that we are trying to no longer have in our lives we find that there are more people willing to bitch and complain about the thing but not a lot of them willing to actively do anything about making the change. When we are readying ourselves for change we will know it because while we have been thinking about and forming opinions about the thing that keeps breaking our hearts we are giving out that eternal energy of "I think this needs to be changed" or "I am ready for things to be different," and when we are not ready, that, too, will be revealed in ways that we are not able to know because those changes will happen to us and not for us and will be brought to us by our own thoughts and our own feelings about stuff.

We must respect the Process

Most human beings have some sort of impatient streak in them, and I am no exception. We hear so much about this thing called "The Process" that we barely bother with much more than knowing that such a phrase exists. The Process is that part of learning where the actual lesson is contained, where we find our own measure of worth in relation to the things that we want to see in our lives to materialization.

The Process makes us see those things that we thought were too painful and makes us face them all. Every single part of us has to go through this thing called "The Process." We went through a process of growing and of learning when we went from being a little kid to the adults that we are now, and even then we were very impatient with the learning of the lessons that we were given, both real and ethereal. We do not like to wait. We want what we want right this minute and we want it as beautiful and glorious as we see it in our minds and we want everything that hurts us to no longer hurt us but we are not willing to see to it that what we have in our midst at present also was part of a process.

It is a process that children go from being a blip on a screen in the doctor's office, and a process going from that blip on the screen to a bump in the belly, from a bump in the belly to the first wail of life, to a toddler,a child, a teen, a young adult, a fully grown and self actualized adult. Or at least we believe that we are well and self-actualized but the truth is that we are not that well off. The truth is that we don't trust the process, and because we don't trust the process we find ourselves in a whole lot of situations which make no sense. We don't realize, though, that one thing remains the same, and that one thing is that the process does not change.

The Process remains as it is. It can be likened to an unruly child that we must and on our own figure out how best to deal with. We can calm a crying child, and we can ease their fears, but when it comes to things like the Process for Change and the Process for Soul lessons we cannot be so reckless with the things that we assume are going on when in reality what is going on is merely the shifting of things so as to bring about the perfect climate for the changes which we so need to have in our lives. The only way to get to those changes is to embrace the Process and Know for sure that we are one with it as well as one with the grander Universe as a whole.

We fear the Process because we fear change. If we deem ourselves as being "a loser," imagine the scariness that possibly becoming a "winner" in one part of our lives would bring with it. We only know one way – perhaps that one way is failure or maybe it is having to do the same monotonous task, day after day after day, for many years. We fear the process because we fear doing well because the truth is that we have never given ourselves a chance to do anything well enough so as to exact the right conditions for our realities to match our intentions. We fear the process because in it are the seeds of the future, and if we have been out and about in the world, damning the future what might happen is that we will see that future in fruition and will then have a reason to blame ourselves, or so we think.

We want so much out of life, and if we are too have all that we see with our mind's eyes then we have also got to let go of the way that we think we should get to the end of things. We expect a whole lot of ourselves, as we should, but we want to be able to expect the unexpected, all while not having to fear that in those little kernels of the unexpected there will be truths revealed to us that we were not sure we wanted to know or that we were even ready to deal with.

There are people who visualize the perfect life and they end up with that perfection and then one day their vision of perfection pales in comparison to what they want to see happen with that ideal of things. With that ideal of things comes the crushing blow brought to us all with the idealization of an ideal.

The Idealization of an Ideal

This is related to the beliefs we hold. We believe what we are told in church when we are growing up, and once it is that what we believe in has been questioned we begin to feel, physically in some cases, our own beliefs chipping away. We find ourselves asking over and over why a thing didn't work out.

"Ideal" means that whatever it is that we believe to be the ideal of a thing, a person, a concept, basically anything, we believe to be the very most highest form of that thing. We mostly idealize people, but we do so with false reasons. We see in others what we do not realize lies dormant within ourselves and lies dormant because we are afraid of the opposite of that idealization. We do this a whole lot when speaking in terms of the people who we love the most. I will never be able again to not know what it was that I went through as a child, and I will not ever be able to go back in time to fix what happened, and more, I will not ever be able, again, to idealize my parents, ever. This does not mean that I hate them, that I no longer Love them – in fact, because of what I was told and because of what I went through and knowing how it is that they both grew up I now have a better understanding of the things that broke my heart and crushed my Spirit for so many years. I idealized them from the point of view of a child, and I carried that idealization with me throughout my years in this lifetime and felt strongly that they were right, that they raised me their way and not the way that they were shown.

Imagine my own Soul's dismay at that revelation of not only what I had gone through but more, what they, particularly my mother, still go through, and the worst part is that because they have such a strong belief in what they were told was the truth and was expected to also be their personal truth my parents, mainly Mom, adhere to the truths of a dead man far and longer than they will form their own truths which do not color outside of the lines of their own upbringing. It was a hard thing to get through, and there was a lot of my own beliefs in those beliefs which were not my own that I wanted to hold on to but knew that I would not be able to and it was simply for the fact that I knew then what I now believe I have always Known within the deepest recesses of the very Bones of The Soul that I was, like many of us are, not meant to live in the beliefs which were imparted to us as children.

Many of us have evolved past the point where it is okay to hang on to what we will for nostalgic reasons only. Many of us have decided on our own that what we think is the truth is no longer applicable to us because we Know without being told that ours is a place in this life which does not adhere to the rules, the beliefs and neither the truths of others. It is not that we are allowing the inner children within us to run amok and wild, but more that we are parenting our inner children and making it okay with that part of each of us which was never allowed, much by our own doing, to grow past the fears which we were given as beliefs as children.

While I do not doubt that there is evil in the world, I refuse to believe that mankind is meant for the self-destruction which is prevalent in this world. While I do not doubt that things of a spiritual nature can and have affected the lives of many people negatively, I Know now that the reason why those ways of Spirit turned sour on them, and the truth about those things – truths which I found on my own – is very different than the truths I was given by someone else. I Know the reasons why anyone would fear anything, because there are millions of us who, for whatever reasons there are, fear living. We are afraid to step outside of the boundaries which were set for us before we were born by well meaning parents who themselves were and likely still are living the truths which someone else gave to them.

We must Know what is meant for us. It is simple as that. We must know what it is that makes us live in a state of bliss and we must go to that place within where bliss reigns always. We must no longer fear the demons of remembrances from childhood and we must do what we can in order to heal the frightened child. The frightened child knows only to be told, and we keep telling these children who live very much within us that there is much to fear . Yet when the question from our own Soul begs to be answered as to what our reasons are for the fear, we have no answer other than we were told so, were told that everything is in a state of absoluteness when truly, nothing in this lifetime is as concrete as we believe it to be. Nothing is concrete, and nothing is absolute, other than evolution, other than the daily chance to change our lives.

We are easier to change when there is a reward we can actually feel and see tangibly. When it comes to measures of the Soul and the healing of the Bones of the Soul, there is no tangibility – only Spirit.

There seems a pill for everything that we label as being "illness." Yet there is no pill, no quick fix for the ailments which befall us squarely in the middle of our Souls. Heartache is an ailment, as is depression, anger, rage, hatred, self-loathing, and the like. We see mental health professionals with the hope that these strangers will give us the key to our happiness and the more that we deny that we are unhappy, the further and further away from happiness we feel we are.

It will not soothe you to know that there is no quick fix, is no happy pill, no doctor, nothing at all which can heal that which makes us ache down to our marrow. We forget when times come that we are in the midst of turmoil that always there was a better way but that we chose to forgo that way because we knew that it would take work, that it would take dedication to the thing at hand, and most of all, it would take measures of unconditional Love, compassion, empathy and mostly, forgiveness. Forgiving those who have hurt us is not an easy thing to do. It never has been. When we have to forgive another person for things that have come into our lives and have caused us pain we almost feel like we have somehow lost something, but what we are not realizing is that the thing we are losing is ourselves in an endless pool of Light where the shadow of not forgiving is blurred between Ego and Soul. Of course, it is painful to not have that energy that we think is strength when in fact it is anger that has gotten to the point of our feeling it in our bones and knowing it in our Spirit, and eventually that unforgiving thing about us becomes us. Suddenly we find ourselves unable to forgive or forget, even when it comes to our very selves.

We place blame onto others until there is nothing left of them in our minds that can be attacked, and when they leave us emotionally we have the nerve to feel abandoned and as if they somehow owe us something because they hurt us and we have to forgive them. For many people the very act of forgiveness is filled with things that haunt a lot of us and what we are not beginning to even think about is that when we let go of the anger and the pride and the blame we are gifted with freedom and peace and an abundance of Love. Things such as too much pride, too many rules set up by the Ego Self as to why it is that we cannot ever forgive this person for real. We breathe the words "I forgive you" without truly meaning it, and then we go on in life mad as we've ever been, blaming someone else for how we feel. This is torturous on the Soul, because the Soul only knows Love, only recognizes the good and forgives the sight it sees as the "bad."

We expect others to free us through their acts of forgiveness, but we cannot see ourselves letting go of our prideful nature, a nature which is a false nature long enough to see through the expectation, through the thing that caused the friction, and more, we cannot see through the miry darkness of our unforgiving nature and through to the Love that is there, that has always been there, and the Love which will always remain. We must forgive others. We cannot expect to be whole souls without the ability to forgive, and in this life there are many opportunities for us to practice the art of forgiveness, but we are so worried about saving face or winning a battle with someone that the art of forgiveness becomes a lost art indeed.

When we refuse to live in a Spirit of Forgiveness we also refuse to live in a totality of Love. Love is the thing, we all know, which kills the demons found in the darkness of the closets of our minds, and Love is the element that we find does the most in terms of recovery. Most of all, Love is the thing which we are more apt to forget is the most abundant thing in the Universe and that Love is what all beings in this lifetime require. And there are, as I have stated many more times than once, many different kinds of Love. We modern types like to think that we have the keys to happiness, and we are right in that thinking but terribly amiss in the idea that we possess what it is that we need. We are more inclined to seek those things outside of ourselves, more likely to fill in the void of Love in certain areas of our lives with other things and more, other people. We don't need others to Love us, at least not as much as we think we do and not for the reasons that we want to believe.

We thrive on Love. We thrive on the other people in our lives Loving us, and if we are right and just and not straying from our own Path, we know that Love is the thing which compels us toward the thing at the end of the long, dark tunnel of unforgiving, of hate, of anger and rage, of self-doubt. Once it is that we have chosen the darkness, to wade through it and let it wash through and around us, we will know that sometimes, the painful things in our lives are not meant to be avoided but walked through. We pretend that we are warriors of life but most of us wouldn't recognize the real "fight" if we called it out and told it to make itself known to us. It won't, because sometimes we have been in such denial of it all that we don't care to see it there in all of its ugliness, and have chosen to label it a different way which makes it acceptable to our limited egotistical thinking. Other times we know that it is there, this ugliness, and we see it for what it is, and at the time of its discovery we find it hard to look at, hard to deal with, not only because it is such an ugliness that we have allowed to stay with us for so long but more, because we are used to this ugliness and have called it "normal."

It is not normal for us to live a life that is not reigned by Love, that is not filled with Integrity and not filled with the things that make our own life story a true story. We prefer the fairy tale, the lie made pretty by the Universal truths contained in those stories. We want so badly for the prince to make himself seen that we don't see that the guy who was there all along and listening to us is the one who we were meant to see all along, but were too blinded by the prettiness that this other guy brought with him that in that greatness that the princey-poo wants us to believe is his, were too busy seeing the prince's fake shine that we were not able to take in our own luminescent brilliance.

Learn to Love You, because You are who you need to make things better for you. There is no prince or princess, no castle to be swept away to. There is no perfect family with the white picket fence and the chocolate lab named "Lucky." There is no lottery numbers picked just right or contest that you must win in order to Be, in Love. To Be, In Love, means to Be at the highest elevation you can be according to your own Soul's measure.

We all MUST Be this way, as there is no other way to Be. If we are not willing to Love, then we are not willing to live at our highest best. We have, for so long, been living in the lie that we wanted to be the truth. We have mistaken our material worth for true abundance, and we have taken our own worth and spilled out on to the world and squandered it on things that cannot hold value for us for longer than we can be enthralled by it.

While we are all born with the capacity to Love (because we Are Love and therefore cannot ever not Know Love), what we are also born with is the capacity to reason, to choose, to do what we will with the free will all humans are born with. It is not until our intellect gets in the way that we start to place a hold on the Love that we Are, to place conditions on it as though it were somehow not fluid and not tangible. There is no rule of Law for Love, because we Are the Rule Itself, and because of this we have within us the option to Love or to do otherwise. When we choose to do otherwise always we will be brought right back to square one, right in the right place and at the right time, and that place and time will look a whole lot like Rock Bottom.

Rock bound is more like it, really. Rock bottom denotes an end of things, denotes that there is an end to things and and end to things that did not quite turn out the way that we had hoped. Yet Rock bottom does not mean hopeless or like there is nothing left that we can do. It actually has a glimmer of hope of getting through things, or back on top of things. However, to be rock bound means to be covered with rocks, bound to something by the weight of them and meant to carry that weight wherever we go. This is the truth of ourselves that many, many people. Humankind has chosen, for the most part, to carry the weight of the world on its shoulders without hope that there is a better way. We would sooner take on the load than to allow the load to just no longer be ours.

We are not aware that we are not required to carry a load, but rather, and only, to learn. In our physical lives if we care to we can put down a heavy thing when our arms no longer can bear the weight, when our backs grow tired from the weight, when we cannot move anymore because our legs hurt. This same thing can be said of the weight we choose to carry, and lots of the time the weight that we carry has been imposed on us by someone else. We are not responsible for their load, only our own, and like most human beings we offer to carry their weight because for some reason we feel that they cannot carry it on their own. Most folks would be too happy to give their load to someone else to carry, not realizing the burden that they place, not only on others, but more, on themselves, and it is a burden that they will have to carry. It is a burden that gets heavier and it gets heavier for us because it has been added to our own weight.

The Heaviest Weight We Carry is Usually Not Our Own

We like thinking that we are doing someone a favor when we listen to their impassioned and painful pleas, and this is okay, at least for a little while, that is. It is when these same people return to us, again and again, knowing well that we will listen and that we will care and the ultimately we will be sympathetic to their problems. All of this is fine and good, but there comes a time when we must bother with the idea that there are some folks who are parasitic in their need for healing, and they often do not realize that they are in need of healing. More than that, what neither you nor the other person knows is that this is a crippling energy and one that will rob you of Joy.

When people come into our lives it is with a specific purpose. Sometimes the people we love the very most who have been in our lives for very long periods of time have come into our Knowing because they have a lesson to teach us. When we hear or read the word "lesson" we sometimes feel very guarded about it because all of our lives we have heard the phrase "I'll teach you a lesson," and it is never a good thing when we hear it. Lessons, as I have come to know, are good for us even though the things contained within those lessons sometimes are painful. They are painful because the truth is painful. The truth shatters assumptions and the truth makes us look into the eyes of the darkest demons and makes us face them with full force.

Facing the demons with full force

We are taught that being good to other people is the only way to be, but we cannot do that without hurting ourselves if we are also not being good to ourselves. It is not a selfish thing to want to no longer have to deal with whatever "bad" stuff that keeps happening in our lives. It is not inhumane to want to feel better and keep whatever it is that is "good" for our own use and our own Spirit's purpose. People would rather allow the demons of the past to continue to make them ache and wish for a better way to do things, but what we never think about is that when "bad stuff" happens to us we are being given the very lessons and more, the way out, of the situations that keep coming back to us.

If a man is given to not trusting women, it is up to that man to take it upon himself to either learn to trust them again or not – no one can do this for him. He has to take the time with a woman to know her and to know who she is and know of her ways. He has to understand that life is rife with hurt, that not all women are out to get him, and not all women are out to get her hands on his wallet. A woman can have been abused on many levels by the one person who it is she is supposed to be able to place all of her trust in, but unless she accepts the idea that not all men are going to be abusive, and as long as she keep putting them all in that same category of "abuser," said woman will never experience the fully formed bliss of what it is that her Soul so needs, and no, it isn't only the Love of a Good Man, but more, the Love of her very Self, which is the very Love of a Good Woman.

We miss out on so much in life because we give into the fear of what we are not sure of. We end up robbing ourselves of explicit joy and we live our lives "almost happy enough" and one day, when the truth hit us the hardest, we find out that what we have allowed into our selves and into our lives has actually been there all along. We find out that it was our own Self which caused us to miss out and it was not the Soul which cared that we wanted to save ourselves the heartache, but instead was our Ego. We want love but we do not want to hurt, and we want truth as long as it is a beautiful truth. What we never think about is that all Truth is Beautiful.

All Truth Is Beautiful

All truths are beautiful. Truth is beautiful because truth lights the way for us to seek our answers and to make us whole.

Truth is the thing in life that we never want to look at, especially if our truth is not one that has been a truth that we do not like or can have any sense of appreciation for. People who live for gaining the approval and the accolades of others do not live in the totality of Truth. I say this because all of their lives they have been told that they are great, brilliant, and worthy, and because of their brilliance they are blinded by their Ego's sense of need for praise. We become dependent upon the praise of others, but are prone to editing our thoughts when it comes to praising ourselves.

A man can be the height of all that is in the industry in which he is employed, and this part of him will take the lead in his life because it is where he gains the most validation from. Once it is that the job is no longer there and the praise is gone, what has he left? He has the potential to become great, that's what, but he won't see it because he is still living in the idea that he is the best at what he does for his money, and in his mind it equates him with being the best all the way around. I beg to differ.

Just because we are good at what we do, it does not mean that we are happy with what we do. In a lot of lives there must be a monetary incentive for a human being to do anything, but in just as many lives, the incentive is far greater that we be able to do for others that which they perhaps are not able to do for themselves. This is where we trip ourselves up. We do for others, lots of times, for selfish purposes. We do it to get praise from people for the good thing that we have done, and we do it so that the tiny shards of our Selves will not ache into the Bones of the Soul over some long passed thing we did that was maybe not the greatest thing to do at one point in our lives.

We give so much of who we are to other people who are just not willing to give back as much. We give Love, and keep giving Love, sometimes to our own detriment, without the promise that it will be returned. We give support, and we keep giving support until we have none left for ourselves. We do what we will when someone asks us to, but rarely do we do anything simply for the exchange of Love between Souls. This is not to say or even to imply that humans do not do for others out of the kindness of our hearts. It is to make it clear to us all that when we give it should be done without the expectation of anything being given in return. This sounds like a bad deal, but when we can think about this act of giving in an exponential sense, we can see that what we give will compound itself because when we are genuinely good to others, those others will have incentive to be genuinely good to more people, and the incentive is the feeling of bliss that we receive when we give from the heart and from a place of Unconditional Love.

When we give of ourselves we are giving a piece of the Heaven within us to the rest of the world. When we give from our Soul automatically we are giving the go ahead to the Heavens to heal us through our showing of Love. If we bother sometimes to let go of that which no longer serves us, we find that the weight we were carrying was useless, was something that may not have even been our own. When we choose to no longer do for others what we would never do for ourselves, we find that we are stronger and better able to heal our aching bones.

That Which We Do Not Do For Ourselves

We hear always that we do not need to feel sorry for ourselves, and this is the truth. No one benefits from someone else's constant pity. To pity someone weakens them, and while they might think they like being in a state of spiritual weakness, the reality is that their souls are weighted down, not only with their own self-pity, but also with our pity which is likely very well placed.

No one would really want someone else to feel pity for them for an extended period of time, but many people thrive on it because it is the only attention that they have ever had throughout the course of their lives. To be pitied is like being a millionaire beggar – you have what you need to make your life completely blissful, but you are so needy for the attention of others that you cannot see past the glittery yet false sparkle of the feeling you get from the attention that you cannot begin to think that maybe the pain of spending a little bit of those millions would give you back the strength that you need so badly. There are so many people on the planet who feel that they need more, but what they really need is less.

They need less reason to be fearful and more reason to be strong in their Souls. They need less reason to not do something because of the Ego's way of making them feel guilty for doing what they always wanted to do, and more reason as to why it is that having done the thing that they saw as "not okay" is the very thing that they needed to see to it that what they are feeling about a thing is a reality and not something that was brought to them by any other means than by the very whims of their Souls. We are who places the restrictions on ourselves. We can blame everything and everyone in our lives and everything and everyone no longer in our lives for the things that we go through, and even as there are always going to be people who have hurt us, it has always been our own option to forgive, to let go of the pain, and to move on. Sadly, though, we don't. We choose instead to hang on to worn out ideals, truths which no longer apply to us and things that never applied to who we have always truly Been.

Who We Have Always Truly Been

We start out in life like a brand new sheet of paper. Along the Path that we travel we take notes on that sheet of paper and pretty soon there is no more room on it to write anything else. We fret and whine and behave as though our life is at a standstill because there is no room on the sheet of paper, not realizing that all we really have to do is turn the paper over on to the other side. We humans are phenomenal at the paradoxical thinking manner in which we teach ourselves to believe the things that we assume are correct. We wait for the bad things to happen and we cannot picture that anything good will happen. This is a learned behavior.

We are so accustomed to being disappointed that when there seems that there might be a chance at not being disappointed again we are there in our own way, sabotoging our chances at happiness and they are chances that we asked for. We do not trust our own Selves, do not trust how we feel and do not trust that we are worthy of all that we Know we are deserving of. We feel like what we were told throughout our time in this life that what everyone else thinks of us is the truth, and this is before we bother to really think about the people who are saying these things to us and why they are saying these things to us.

Why People Say and Do Awful Stuff to Us

People are both gorgeous and nasty, beautiful and ugly, nice and not nice. We have this duality because in life there is a balance between things that just has to be in order for life to be. To each and everything in our lives there are two sides – a light and a shadow. From a very young age we are taught that we have to outdo each other, that we have only to think about winning, about doing well, and we are taught that we have to do this better than anyone else. Add to that the guilt and the feelings of self-loathing that we have after we have hurt another person specifically for our own gain.

We are ready to take loved ones out of the proverbial game if it means that we do not have to suffer the feelings of being unworthy. Human type people have a tendency NOT to want to lose, for any reason. It will make us a "loser" if we do not win, and people will think we are not good enough for certain situations in our lives because we are not good enough for this, that or the other. We have been told all of our lives to try, to win, to score, but we have not ever been taught how to not win and not win graciously. We do not know how to not take it personally that someone might be better at something than we are, and we do not realize that while we might very well be good at a whole lot of things, there is the fact that we are not good at everything. This is how we end up in situations, emotionally, where we feel like it is up to someone else to make us feel better about our not winning. In reality, it is not that we need to be cheered up for not having won, but cheered for because we tried.

No matter who tells anyone else that they are good at doing "everything," those who would say such a thing fail to realize just how big it would be for anyone to be good at everything. The truth is that yes, there are people who are good at doing everything that they do, but this does not mean that they are good at everything. And let's look at just how big everything really is. Think, for a moment, how many people there are on the planet, and then think about how massive just one ocean is in comparison to how small a large seafaring vessel really is when a human type person stands next to it – the human is dwarfed, and the ship and the ocean next to that human seem monumental. Now, think for a minute just how much there is to know when someone tells us that they know everything. Too much to think about, isn't it?

For anyone person to believe that they know everything is a person who is not truly at peace with themselves. They do not know everything. If they are telling you that they do, they are lying, not only to you, but to themselves as well. To have the attitude that you know way more than other people do makes you ignorant. Ignorant to the talents and gifts that other people bring to our lives. You are ignorant to the concept of balance and how important it is that all human type people retain a measure of balance in their lives no matter how small it might be. Ignorant people have a tendency of not seeing things from another point of view, of speaking without thinking, of doing things with only themselves in mind and to hell with everyone and anyone else.

Ignorance is Ignorance. Ignorance is NOT Bliss!

No one who any one of us knows is one of those people who really think that being ignorant to a situation is somehow blissful. Ignorance is caused by fear, and ignorance is where most of our pain begins. We are ignorant to the fact that when we are berating a person for something that they did and we are acknowledging the person by calling them names or making them feel like they are stupid is NOT what they need to hear. They need to hear, instead, that what they DID was stupid, because no one on earth is really very stupid. More people are ignorant to many things because they choose this way.

The reason that ignorance over having a clue might seem better is because then we do not have to deal with digesting the truth of things. We would sooner buy into a non-truth, would rather buy into someone else's pretty lie because that is what is preferable. A woman who is overweight because of her poor health choices is different than the woman whose health will not allow her to do certain things or eat a certain way. The woman who eats like there is no tomorrow and who does not bother to at least take a walk everyday and get some activity going on in her body is the woman who is ignorant to the idea that SHE is who is to blame for her health and not the fast food industry. The other woman is the woman who may well be envious of the woman choosing to be unhealthy because the woman who can choose to be healthy does not realize the value of the things that she can still do.

Ignorance of a thing allows human type people to hide behind the mask of "I am sorry – I didn't know," and "well, no one told me that," or "It isn't mine to worry over." If this is the attitude, I have news for you – there is no apology that will take away the hurt caused by someone being ignorant and choosing to be clueless when the hearts and souls of others are involved. No one needs to tell anyone else that they need to have some sort of clue about things when dealing with the emotions of other people, and choosing to take the stance of a thing not belonging to us when we are the very ones who caused the pain in another person just because we could means that you are clueless. This is called "being ignorant." One person from one ethnicity calls another person from another ethnicity a derogatory name, and it stings our psyches with a scorpion-like venom. Each of us is seeing this played out in our own minds, and it is the same story but with different ethnic groups. We each have a predetermined ideal about which groups we would each singly describe as an "ethnicity," and which group would just be called "white."

If you are from an "ethnic group," as I am, that word white has meant many different things throughout your lifetime. Most of the time, it is what the "white man" did to our ancestors, and we end up hating them for no reason. We hate strangers not based on who they are personally, but from which particular group of ethnic origin they come from! This is also said to happen – this division of groups – with religious belief. Wars happen over religious belief and political affiliation, and that is a fact. For as long as history has been recorded, we find that more wars between people of similar origin happen because one group decided to follow and believe in their version of the Creator one way, while the other chose to believe in their own way.

By all appearances, it would look as though these people, if they could see their similarities rather than tear each other apart over something that is thousands and thousands of years old, and notice now what is the same between them, they would find that each and every one of those people shooting at each other all each Love at least one person on this planet. Each one of them has a favorite song. Each one of them loved a parent or maybe both. Each one of them has gone to a religious service. Each one of them has suffered immeasurable personal loss. Each one of them have cried angry bitter tears. When we think about what is the same between us, somehow, what is not the same no longer is as important and now our focus has become shifted to these similarities.

When we think of war-torn places in the world, we think of the Middle East, or we think of Communist China. When we think of these places in terms of what they are infamous for our minds immediately show us pictures of such turmoil. When we can think about what is the same about us all – the things that we each experience as human type people- we begin to really see things as they are and not for what we have been told they are. This is the reason that now, more than ever, it is important that we learn to shed the fears, even if it means shedding lots of tears. We have to learn to Love again. It is not that we really forgot, but that we learned to do other things that we were told were more important. And we believed it.

Things that we were told were more important than Love or learning to Love

Parents are meant to teach children how to survive in this big world. Survival is more than only about being able to pay the bills, being able to support yourself, keeping a roof over your head. If we do not teach them that there are good things about them that people Love, they will have a hard time believing it later. Even if they know it on the surface of things, in the Bones of the Soul, they do not know. We are given our measure of worth by how much we can produce for our families without figuring out what it is that we Love to do. We praise our kids for going to a certain college, and we give them their measure of worth by what a tiny letter on a sheet of paper has on it placed there by a stranger.

Please don't get me wrong – bad grades are not okay, but we as parents sometimes think it is okay to tell a kid that they are stupid (because we are angry and disappointed) rather than bother to ask them why they didn't do so well. The point is we can get a lot more across to a person who understands that we do not think they are bad people, that we do not believe that this one bad grade makes them a failure, and that yes, we indeed still do love them. When we can ask a question and address a problem is when we can get ourselves further along to where we need to be than we ever will telling anyone that they are bad, stupid and that no one loves them. Yet there is an entire generation of men on this planet who still adhere to the idea that they have to work for their worth in the eyes of their family.

We have been given the message all of our lives that we have to work for someone's Love, that on our own and our just being who we are is not good enough. We are compared to with others in our extended families, and we are bullied by at least one group of people who we are expected to Love and to respect but not to expect those same things in return. We are told so many things, so many truths which apply to us when we are children, and we are told these things until we are well into our own lives as adults, that when we are shown a truth which better applies, not only to the time in our lives but more, to who we are now, we shy away from it because we do not want the child's heart within us to be broken again, because for far too long that same child within has had their heart broken again and again and again, and the only person who has ever had the power to change that feeling of hurt in our hearts is us. Of course, this is also something that not too many of us are told, let alone taught.

We are told and taught, through the actions of other people, that Spirit only Loves some people but has reservations about the rest of us. We are told and taught that because we are imperfect humans that we have to work for the Love that we so desire, and we are told and taught that Love is not for everyone, and these truths came from other people who also got them from other people. Some of the people choose to strike out on their own paths, but the majority of us all – yes, me included up until recently- tend to make our choices with the hearts, minds and feelings of others in mind first. Rarely is it that we will choose to be there fully for our selves and rarely will we believe that what we have been told might not be the truth for us anymore.

We believe what we were told because a child's first Love is their parents. Our parents are the first ones to break our hearts, and we are the second. They show us through telling us when we are wrong that the world and life is filled with opposites and that sometimes those opposites are the very things that make us crazy and that those opposing "sides" are meant to be there for us to make better decisions according to what it is that our Soul is needful of and NOT what it is that everyone in our lives feel they need from us. Whatever it is that they tell us that they need from us, they can access it themselves. Whatever it is that lives in us also lives in every other human type person on the face of the planet, and whatever it is that we are feeling toward that thing that lives in us each is also not something that is not typical to us all.

We want so badly for the truth that used to be truth for us to always be the truth, but it can't be, because we grow and we have different life experiences that cause us to Know that there are other, more fitting truths for us. When we try hard to apply the same truths that once were to things that have no similarities between two events happening for us at different times in our lives, we end up fighting who we really are so that we accommodate that truth and that truth has caused us to bristle on more than one occasion. The thing about human type people is that we do not like our comfort zones to be bothered, and we would rather not have to learn anything new.

Learning Anything "New"

Everyday we have the opportunity to learn something. Everyday we have the option to look at a situation with new eyes so that we can, from that observation, perhaps create a new truth with it. Yet when that opportunity to learn something of value comes along, it does so in a way where we do not recognize it to be anything other than a bother, than a reason to sit and judge it, not just because we are not comfortable with it, but because we are not familiar with it.

Familiarity is both a good and a bad thing. We are drawn to the familiar, drawn to things most similar to us, and we are drawn to the things that are both good and bad, and lots of times the things that we want to judge as "bad" are not bad at all, but only "not familiar." Things which we have no information about tend to get forgotten, as though they were never meant to be a part of our awareness. Things which come to our awareness come to us by way of our own Souls' needs. When we need to be cosmically bitch-slapped is normally when it is that we will find within us those reserves of being "good enough" because without our having been prepped for it, we do not realize that the reason we have been faced with a thing not familiar to us is so that we can become familiar with it. Things we need to become familiar with present themselves to our lives via other people or through situations which make us crumble into a mess of tears, make us want to reach out and hurt someone instead of being of good service to them. Things that break our hearts are the very things that we fear, not understanding at the time that we are being taught a lesson about something, that we are learning. Learning, most of the time, is not pleasant. Learning life lessons is harsh and hurtful, but at the end of it all is the beauty that has been reached because of the hurt.

We do not Know Love the way we are told that we are meant to. We do not Know Love when it comes to us in a form unfamiliar to us because we shun the truth as it comes to us in this unfamiliar form. We do not Know Love because we have not witnessed it in a form other than what we have been exposed to, and learning to Love others is what we think we Know how to do.

Learning to Love our own Selves is the hardest lesson of all.

Lessons in Self-Love are the hardest, not because they are meant to hurt and DO hurt, but because we have to let go of everyone else's truths about us. Self Love is not taught even though it should be. Self Love, as we are shown to understand it, is not an act of selfishness but the opposite of that. Self Love is not something that someone else can give to us but is instead something that has to be cultivated and raised like children.

Because we have been given the idea that to love ourselves is to be selfish, we have been given to also believe the idea that we should never be good to ourselves and should not expect that we deserve to be treated in a manner that is befitting of a human type person. We want to take as truth the idea that Loving who we are is somehow wrong and selfish. We have believed these lies for so long that they have just been assumed to be the truth. We have told ourselves for so long now that what we were told must still apply and that we will be happy "eventually," as long as we are willing to give up who we are and give into the idea that we will never be okay with us.

If we chose to look at things logically in matters where someone else's truths are concerned, and we can see the truth that we have been given all of our lives and we can see the messes that have been part of our life experience, we can see that no, the truth as it was is not the truth as we can live it anymore. We have grown from the physical child, but on the inside we are still choosing to be that scared little kid, to be that crying and lonely child who even we cannot console because we do not understand the child. We only understand that here we are in our adulthood and we feel sometimes like that child we used to be. Here's some news, guys...we still are that child, and we don't – many of us, that is – realize it.

The Crying Child Within is Afraid, still, of experiencing a lack of Love.

There are people on the planet who are angry, who are depressed, who are a vast array of ways of being, and these people have all kinds of reasons as to why it is they think they are the way that they are.

They are the way that they are because there is a part of themselves which has not yet been appropriately "raised," and because they have not been "raised" yet, they handle certain issues in the same manner they would when they were children. In each of us there is still alive and not so well a wounded child, and all of us has one to take care of and to raise. Yet most of us are barely aware of this. Most of us want to believe that because the age of independence is 21, that when we turn 21 we become instant adults without issues which can make life on planet Earth very difficult should we believe this. And make no mistake that there is an entire population of people on the planet right now who are convinced that they are grown because they are over the age of 21. While they might be physically grown, they have not yet had enough learning experiences in their lives to be able to make it in the big ugly world, not without some sort of help and certainly not without someone guiding them through it all.

This is the mistake that we make when we raise our own kids. We want them to believe that they are going to be done learning anything that they need to learn when truthfully no one at that age is ready to face any kind of truth at all. Our egos are so huge at this time in our lives because let's face it – society has glorified youth and made it a bad thing to get older, but in reality there is nothing quite sweeter than being able to walk the crust of the earth with a CLUE ! And there are not too many 21 year olds who even know what the hell an actual clue looks like. They are not equipped to know because they have not had the life experience to recognize it. This does not mean that they are completely clueless, but that they are not old enough yet to know what it is to learn a lesson and not take it too personally.

Taking things too personally

Why we take things personally is something that there are many theories about, but the main reason that we take anything personally by anyone is that our feelings have been hurt, we have been challenged about the truths we believe about ourselves and we believe that we are somehow wrong about a thing.

The only thing that we are wrong about is taking things too personally. I do it. You do it. We all do it or at least have done it in our lifetime where someone said or did something to us, not meaning to do any harm, and harm was done. This is the reason that it is of utmost importance that we learn to think before we speak. This is not meaning that we have to monitor our thoughts all the time, but it does mean that we should be in the practice of being mindful of other people and how other people react to the things that we share with them, namely our words. Words, it is known, have the power to bring a person to their lowest point as much as they do the power to raise a person to heights unknown.

Words

Words are powerful and words carry within them meaning that is different for everyone. Words are the things that the world is made of, because without words we have no meaning for anything at all. We need words to describe things, and we need words to convey thoughts, and while numbers are very important, words are the very things that have the power to bring down entire nations, all at one time, and it will be words which will also be that which repairs legions of broken hearts and the weariest Bones of the Soul.

Our words have the power to give to our loved ones gifts that no one else can give, and in kind, our words also have the power to break blood-bonds Words are the things which so many of our real emotions and true selves are contained in and we fail to understand sometimes that what we say carries our energies in it all, and what we say precedes what it is that we do. When a person tells another person that they are loved it is with immediacy that the inner workings of a person's physical body can sense the truth in another person's words. This same thing happens when we are being hurt by someone else's words, and our bodies will feel the hurt, literally,physically, and sometimes, if the hurtful words are continuous, that hurt will manifest itself as chronic disease and even life threatening difficulties.

When we choose to speak our own truth we are giving life to the things that we believe as our truth. If we cannot believe our own truth then we do not have any reason or right to say anything at all. We must intend for our thoughts and actions to be congruent with our truths. A woman can wait for the Love of her Life in hopes that he is the right man for her, only to, some time later, find out that she waited for so long for the wrong man. If it were her truth to be the woman to wait, and she did wait, with the hopes that somehow, in the end, how he felt about her was all that mattered to her, and even if things did not turn out the way she'd hoped they would, even as the end result was not what she wanted, she still lived her own truth.

When we choose to not be absolutely in line with what it is that we are feeling, and if it is that we would sooner hide the truth of ourselves so as not to hurt someone else, then we are as bad a liar as the person who willingly lies. This is so because lies of omission hurt sometimes far more than do outright spoken ones. Lies of omission are lies which hide the way that a person really feels about another person or a situation, and in the lies of omission we find that the person who is not saying anything, the liar through omission, is fearful of his own losses. When we lie to others we are robbing ourselves the chance to stand up to the monsters which we allow to continue to take up residence in our minds and hearts. This is true because we fear hurting them, we fear not being all we think we are to them, and we fear to truth because we, ourselves, cannot handle it.

Allowing Our Irrelevant Monsters and Demons from the Past to Live in the Now

We all hang on to things that are irrelevant to the people who we become. We hang on to hurts from old relationships, to memories of people who used to make us crazy and make us beg for their Love and attention, to things which, if we would just look at them collectively, we would see that they are all part of who we were but certainly not who we are or are becoming. We cannot deal with even the thought that maybe what applied in the past no longer applies anymore, and we wonder a lot why it is that we keep on doing what we are doing, never realizing that the lesson we were being taught was learned by us, and that it came to us quite truly on the wings of angels.

When we ask Spirit to give us what we need, we are not also prone to thinking that in the process, whether we believe it or not, we are also being asked if we can manage giving up some of the things that we believe are the truth of us. We ask for Love, but we want to place conditions on it. When we ask for Love, we want the picture we see in our minds, and when we do not get what we see, we become angry and we want to revert back to what we knew. Yet, there comes a time in our lives when reverting no longer happens. This is not my saying that you will not think about the past or where you have been or what you have gone through, but only that you will see these things as being mile-markers of lessons that you have learned throughout the time that it took you to get your heart broken what seems about a million times.

We hate learning, we human types do. We cannot stand to think or believe that what we know about a thing is not all that there is to know. We do not like thinking that others in our midst may be going through more than we think they are, and we abhor the idea that other people hurt, too. We do crazy things, too, us human beings. We chase Love when we do not realize that we don't have to, that the Love which we so badly want and need is already in us. We beg for other people to accept us and when they don't we try hard to change who we are, how we look, what we believe in to suit someone else's needs without thinking about our very own. We do not think about the things that we are doing to ourselves when we try to hard to please other people without also having ourselves in mind.

We must learn to Love us first. We cannot Love anyone else all the way until we Know all the way down to the Bones of the Soul that we are Loved and that we are worthy of that Love until we can do for ourselves first what we expect others to also do on our behalf. We can perform all the acts of selflessness we care to, and we can give until it hurts, and we can run ourselves at a deficit and into the ground in search of other people who will validate us and who we are, or we can do what we know we have to and begin the journey inward back to our own Sacred Truth.

Our Own Sacred Truth

Everyone has their own set of Truths. One person may Love another person, but because that intended target of affections is attached to someone else by the signature on a piece of paper, Real Love will not be Known unless we can see it in our Selves. Our Own Sacred Truths are those truths which we have come upon through heart ache and through things that made us feel like we could dangle our feet off of a dime. Our Truth is had on our own merits caused and brought to us through calamity and through things that make us cry. Our own truth makes us lose the illusion we hold within that we have to behave this or that way so that we don't make other people think badly about us. Our own Truth makes us Know that we are okay in going outside of the invisible lines we have drawn for ourselves in the sands of time and memory.

Our own Sacred Truth is that part of us which will not let us accept anything that is not as Sacred or Divine as we are. It will not allow us to backslide into the behaviors which were once a part of our reaction and our own truth will not allow us to do more than respond thoughtfully and respectfully and our own truth does not allow us to lose our dignity for any reason. We happen upon these truths when we are at our lowest point, when it seems that there is no lower we can go and while it looks like a long climb back to the rim of the world where daylight exists, we Know, in that one moment of pureness, of absoluteness, of Divine and Sacred Knowing, that yes, we will make it back to the light, one step at a time and one moment at a time.

Our own Sacred Truth will make it Known by us that we are strong enough to get through a thing, that we are good enough to be Loved and to give Love and to honor those we meet along our own Path. Our own Truth will set us free from the things that we thought were ours to carry with us throughout this lifetime, and our own Sacred Truth gives us a different perspective on things that we never had before. Things like making sense of things and events that occur that had no meaning suddenly have meaning. Actions taken on behalf of others does not come before taking right action for ourselves that is not selfish but is more selfless than we can imagine it to be.

When we can live in our own truth, we find that life does not kick us around too hard, or at least not as hard as it seemed to in the past. We can bother with the details and we can learn to love what it is about us that we used to loathe. When we can deal with the idea that no one is born perfect but we are imperfectly perfect, this is when the fun begins. Very suddenly things that made us cry no longer brings us tears but instead leaves us with a pondering nature about why it is that we chose to go through what we went through and if we learned anything at all. Miraculously, we find that that which made us angry no longer bears more than a tired shrug, and the shrug is tired because the weight that was carried with the burden of things unkind to us.

The Burden of Things Unkind to Us

It is preposterous to bear the burden of other peoples' nonsense. We carry their burden when we choose to listen to their pleas again and again about issues that are decades old. We carry their burden when we choose to do more for them than they are willing to do for themselves. We carry the weight of others without ever knowing the ease and the grace of not carrying their weight along with our own. Sometimes, when it seems like life gets to be too much for us we want to run away and hide in the safety of other peoples' problems. We don't understand that once we have taken on theirs that theirs becomes part of ours.

We carry other peoples' burdens with them and sometimes for them because somewhere in our thoughts we have given to the belief that who we are somehow is made more whole by taking that which is not ours and making it our own. Does this not sound like we are stealing something? Does it not sound at all like we are trying to save others because we do not think we need to save ourselves, or maybe that we do not want to look at our own selves and see that the reason that we would want to even think to try to help them is so that we can look away from our own problems?

Stop trying to save everyone. It is not going to make you a better person and it will neither make you better off for having tried. We cannot do more for others what we are not able to do for ourselves. We cannot Love someone more than we Love us. We cannot try to be everything to someone else without our first trying to be all that we are to us. We want so badly to be loved by everyone that we are more willing to outdo them with everything that they are trying, or even not trying, to do for themselves. When we come to others heavy with the load we bear and they turn away from us, while we might not think about it at the time, they are really doing us a favor.

We fret so much over how other people feel about us that we forget about how we really feel about them. One person may Love another immensely but when matters of pride and ways of being arise most of the time we will assume that the other person won't understand why it is that we are the way that we are. No one else will not take it as though you are somehow not trying to hurt them simply for being you. We get upset when we are given the truth because someone else's truth makes very little sense to us, and we cry a lot over things that we have no control over, not remembering that we have control over our part of the way things turn out.

Our Part of the Way Things Turn Out

Human beings forget that we have a huge responsibility in life, and that responsibility is to always live with the mindset of Love. We have to get into the practice of expecting what we want to have in our lives or something that is better than what we see with our mind's eyes. We scurry through our lives thinking that we are fine and that we will be fine as long as we stay busy. If we stay busy enough we might be able to forget that we are here for a purpose. If we stay busy enough we might forget that we are not perfect, that not everyone is going to love us as we want them to, that we are not the best that we can be. We keep our bodies busy and our minds don't have to worry so much as long as we stay focused on the task at hand.

Eventually the task at hand ends, and eventually we are smacked again with the hot spatula of truth, and eventually the house we built is without a foundation because we were not willing to not be busy with our hands so that we could be busy with our Soul work. We don't realize how important our Souls are for us, don't realize that one day we are going to need a fortitude of strength and the Wisdom to see beyond what is right in front of us. We dilute the thoughts that come to mind for us, hoping and praying that maybe that big old God up in the sky will magically give us everything we want and more and we like to excuse ourselves when we do not get what we want from the responsibility of feeling the truth that we feel.

When we feel hurt, we should be more inclined to work through it than to deny it. When we feel angry, we should have no problem expressing it as though it were the only emotion that is important for us at that time because at that time it is the most important one. We deny all these emotions, all of these things that we feel and all of the ways that we learn to be because someone else has told us that it is better to deny what we feel so that no one else has to know that we hurt and then be hurt for us. This is not the truth. People who really Love you will listen to you, will not pity you but will soothe you, will tell you that you are not meant to hurt forever but that right now we can think of the hurt as an emotional tool that will guide through it all.

We live in a world of pain, of people trying hard to make life more difficult for other people just because they can. People are not as evil as they wish they were. People like to use the idea that if they can scare someone else in to the thinking that there is not enough of the power, glory, praise, whatever else you want to list here, and those people live in a world where lack reigns, where the only way to get what we want in this life is to scratch and claw our way to the top and without thinking that the people who we ran over on the way up were meant as our help up and rather than taking the help we chose to step on them, stand on their heads and behave as though it was somehow an unspoken truth that in order to get ahead we have to hurt others.

We never have to hurt anyone to do anything, and if we feel like we have to hurt someone else, it is time then for us to make it a point to delve into the Spirit of us, into the very marrow of the Bones of the Soul, and look at why we ache.

Our part of the way things turn out becomes obvious the longer we wait to allow ourselves the ugliness of our own truths. Once we have found a reason that is decent enough for us to want to hang on to some of the things that we are feeling and it is a good enough reason to do so, we find a little bit of solace in the idea that we got to this point on our own and that in doing so created situations for us that would reveal the very truth of our selves and of the condition of our very souls. It is not until the dust has cleared and the mist of what was rises that we can see the glorious nature of the rubble left behind. It is much like seeing the contents of boxes left in our grandmother's attic – old stuff. It interests us and we Know it like we Know who we think we are, but we find that most of it is useless and that it is all there for sentimental reasons. No matter those reasons, and no matter how much we care to cling on to the things that held meaning for us at one time, we know within us that all things must either change on their own and become meaningful for us and that if that doesn't happen then we must release it and all of the other things that we think are meant to be part of who we are.

Part of who we are is also who we are no longer and who we are no longer can also not survive in the climate of a soul that is cramped and dark.

A Cramped, Dark Soul

A cramped, dark soul is not an evil soul, but a tired one. Tired because on many levels this same soul chose to take its lessons the hard way, the way that served everyone but itself and in doing so didn't see the damage that it had done to others.

We do damage when we are not honest with who we are, damage because on the surface of things we present an image of peace and calm, but beneath the surface we are a mess. Our lives are upside-down. Our hearts are barely being held together from all the times that they'd been shattered that it is no longer recognizable as what it is meant to be.

What it is meant to be is not the remnant of what was but the possibility of what it now is. What it now is can be recognized as something new and untarnished, something that was once wrecked and used and something that no one wanted. There is always a reason why something "was" and no longer "is." While it remains that whatever it is that becomes of us lies in our ability to no longer be part of the rubble or the remnant but rather and only the new edifice in its place there will always be a little piece of us ourselves that has the ability to refer back to the remnant, but never the ability to return to it. We can never not be the changed person whose Soul chose change. We will always be what we are. We will always, no matter what, be the truth of us.

Many shun a cramped dark Soul, but it should be the other way around. Like the scared and crying child living within us all needs to be embraced and relieved of her fears, so, too, must we embrace the shadow side of us. The Shadow Side is that side of us that is a little bit naughty, is that demonic part of us all that would savor the pain if we could just hang on for a little longer. What we do not realize is that the Light within already savors the pain and knows that the Pain and the Shadow are both just parts of who the human being is. We fear both what we know and what we don't know. We fear not being trusted. We fear not being Loved. We fear that no one will want to be in our circle of Knowing. We fear and the fear cripples us to the point where anything at all that we want in our lives is right there, just right out of our reach, and it seems sometimes that it will always be this way.

Most of the time, we have no idea why we are afraid of anything

Humans are biological creatures and this means that just like the gazelle in the wild run from the hunter lions, we, too, run away from things which seem to want to eat the very soul of us. We fear things that we have no clue about. Actually, it is the Ego which fears the unknown, because in the unknown are our frailties and in the unknown lie the truths which we are too proud, too small, too arrogant, too afraid to face. We needn't fear the things we do not know, but only embrace them. That which we fear is ours alone. No one else can carry the weight of the fear, and more, no one else can take that fear away. It is ours. We own it. We have the option to keep it and embrace it or keep it and allow it to rule our lives.

Our fears make us do silly things. It makes us accuse our spouse of infidelity. It makes us mistrust our teenage daughters. It makes us think our sons are up to no good. It makes us crazy and makes us do anything but think clearly. What we fear we own, and the moment that we take ownership of that fear is the moment that we also control it. When we can see the reality that is our fear and realize that we are afraid of ourselves we can grow. When we can see our fear as a part of ourselves that needs Love and we are capable of Loving that fearful part of who we are is the point at which we are able to experience clarity.

Experiencing Fear and Gaining Clarity from it

LOTS of "Gurus" who guru us about fear, about Clarity, about things of a Spiritual nature do not reach into the Soul's tenets enough to tell us that sometimes fear IS clarity. When we think about the word "fear" suddenly thoughts of the things that scare the hell out of us. Because I have been an expert scared person for years, you can imagine the relief which came with the clarity which was coupled with the fears within me. No, I am not scared, really, of anything (Okay, spiders...I cannot stand them) other than the unknown.

The "Unknown" can cause within us unfounded notions that what we are and who we are is somehow connected in truth to those things that we are afraid to face. Going back to the man who has found his One Love, he doesn't realize that who he is is what and who he should be in love with long and far before he tries to have anything permanent with another person. People who haven't a sense of permanence as to who they truly are, people who seem to have it all together and people who are prone to not realizing what is going on in them are people who end up being given a sense of clarity through their fears, and their fears NEVER fail them – their fears either render them as being what and who they are now and will always be, or, their fears force them to grow into what God or Spirit needs them to be. Sometimes all they are being called to be is an example to others of what and how not to be, while at other times it is the haste and the fear which these same people end up growing into who they are meant to be.

It seems like it would be crazy for someone to wait on the fear like one would a sick and dying relative, but in truth it is our going back to how we did things as children. If we grew up with an air of fear and had that air of fear instilled in us we will do what we will toward our growth with that same air of fear and not realize that Spirit is taking our fears from us through the work intended for us to lose those fears. Sometimes we grow so comfortable into our Fear-Place that it feels like home for us to be in that place where it seems that nothing changes, not even noticing that the changes we asked for are taking place within us. A man can love a woman who is not "his" for years, only to later find out that this woman is the type of woman who he should be aspiring and growing toward, not knowing yet that she is not The One. A woman can believe that a man is the perfect fit for her life as it pertains only to herself without realizing that the reason her intended target of affection is NOT The One, so to speak, but is the example of part of the person who it is that she will intend otherwise to her life.

It seems, sometimes, as though we will go to great lengths to be with people who do not match our lives, and when we are not prepared for that transition to our own "next level" of things the changes hurt us and we think and believe that Spirit is not on our side, that we are meant to flounder alone for the rest of our days, not even thinking for one moment that the things we go through are meant to quell the fears and make it known to us that our fears about things are mostly illusory and that all along what we feared was what we didn't know. It is not what we DO know that scares us, it is what we do NOT know that scares us. Here, I will show you...

A woman can think that men do not want to be with her because of her, and in that thought she is fearful that the horrible things that people said about and to her while she was growing up are the truth. She fears that no one will love her because she is not this-or-that enough. She fears that she will have to work harder than the rest of the women on the planet because that is the truth she has been given by others and according to them and that is the truth which she is choosing to be the only one that is hers. One day this same woman will look deeply into and at herself and realize that it is not the men who have been wrong, not the men who have to accommodate her, but her very self. She will come to terms with the idea that she is actually a pretty good person whose attributes are akin to those which at least one man on Earth will Love and nurture within her and who will allow his attributes to be in line with her own.

For things to be "in line with her own" there must be several different Spirit based factors involved. One of those things must be her willingness to let go of certain facets of who she thinks she is. Another is believing that she can manage to. When we are presented over and over again with a situation which demands that we pay attention to things we are more inclined to see the things that we think others need to change in themselves but what we are not realizing is that perhaps the changes need to be ours. Perhaps it is that we have honed in on a certain aspect of someone else's nature because Spirit or God is trying to tell us something and in our arrogance and our egotistical foolishness the only thing we can do is to take the spotlight off of ourselves and shine it directly onto someone else, and that someone else is always – not sometimes, not maybe, but always someone who we Love enough to refer to as family.

Our Irrational Behavior is Trying to tell us Something but we are ignoring it

Every single person on Earth knows at least one other person who is irrational in their behavior. Allow me this – there is not a lot that can be done for someone who is vehemently irrational to the point where who they are becomes impeded by what they think is the right way to be. This person will absolutely point out other peoples' sins as though they have something to prove. This person will "go tell it on a mountain," so to speak, choosing to spout off to anyone who will listen and more, anyone who will choose to agree with them on their points while they refuse to not let anyone else have their own point of view.

We can preach our own message til we are blue in the face, and we can spout about anything that we believe in, and we can be affected by people who we thought we loved in the past, people who we know that just yesterday were there for us in large and giving form. Yet unless we are willing to address that we ourselves are not perfect, unless we are willing more to live in that truth of who we think we are, we are no where near where we need to be in terms of becoming the Whole Soul we want the world to take as being our truth. Recently I was told that we all have to be who we are, but the person who told me this, I believe, was saying so because they are seeking their own truths. In seeking our own truths we will seek out the truths of others to see if theirs matches with ours. When we find that the two are not matching but are more complimentary is when we have barely begun to scratch the surface of the truth.

Our irrationality will never fail us in terms of finding out the truth of us. This is not something that is new, but it is something that not a lot of people will think is the truth. When we are irrational we are also, at that time, afraid. We are afraid that what we believe is somehow not acceptable to other people, and we are scared that we do not believe what it is that we are preaching. We become so comfortable in who we think we are that we are not able to discern our truth from the truth that someone else has imparted onto us as a truth that should be ours, even when we, down deep, know otherwise.

What we Know Otherwise

There comes a gentleness with Knowing otherwise the truths which are our own. We learn to settle into what is ours and learn more to not allow what others think of us become who we are. A wife can defer to the whims of her husband's quiet demands and on the outside she looks like the strong warrior wife she is becoming. Yet her failure is not in the doing but in the thinking, because beneath her surface lies the truths which she has fought tooth and nail to believe but which are also truths which no longer resonate. As a younger woman she might have believed that she was meant to become all the domestic darling that she has been told is a virtuous woman, but truly what is really a virtuous woman? Is she a woman who lives biblically and does so because she wants to make her very Biblically inspired husband to accept her more, or is she the woman who is the opposite of this, or is she perhaps both?

The truth of said woman is that unless she believes in what she is saying and doing, and unless what she is telling everyone else is the truth of her is really the truth of her, she will continue to be controlled by her husband and his own ruling whims. There is the woman who has chosen to use her words and her tongue as her choice of weapon, and this said same woman may choose to elicit the attention that she needs from the actions and words that she is taking and giving away as what it is that she thinks is right, but when the message is delivered we find that no where in any of what she has chosen as her rhetoric is there a grain of truth as would apply to her. When we go about the world touting the treasures we have found as being our own mode of survival, and when that survival depends on someone else for us to have it, it is then when what we have come to know as the truth as being what is alone ours. There is no judgment to be made or placed a label upon anything when it is that relationships have seemingly "ended" when truly what has really happened is not more than that the two souls have learned the lessons that they must.

Learning the Lessons that we must

Our lessons come from the strangest of places. Where we least expect to learn we will be taught, and what it is that we think we need to learn may already be something that we Know but are not aware that we Know.

Those with whom we hold close counsel are normally the way the lessons come to us. A woman who is of particular means will absolutely choose for herself those means, but when it comes to how she intends to keep those means a variety of things come into play. She will choose her Self over those she loves, and when it comes to choosing who she loves and who makes her life important to her, she will always choose her benefactor if in fact that is the place in her soul from where she lives.

She will choose to live under the hand of a man who loves her and cherishes her life, and if these two things are not apparent to her, she will then be forced to choose who is more important to her – her husband, or her Self. She will think in terms of who can do more for her, and will follow the regiments of the thing that she calls "survival." If it is that she is to live by another's rules because the reason is that she is surviving from their doings, then that is what is for her and there is nothing more. Some women can do life this way, and others would never dream of such a thing. Yet there is a sweetness in the realization that there is more to living than merely surviving. There is redemption in knowing that no one has tomorrow promised, and that nothing in this life is for sure, only that we will live each day as we are meant to and that at the end of the day we are better for the learning we did.

The Days and Nights and the Learning We Do

The learning we have to do in this lifetime is meant to be permanent. When we ask to be shown what we need to learn always the lesson will present itself. We will never be given the reason why, and we will not ever be given the "how" of a thing, only the lesson. If we were told outright what we need to learn we will never learn it to the extent that we must because we will place expectations on it and we will manipulate an outcome that is preferable to our Ego rather than the Soul's need to grow.

If we are exposed to the thing that we need to learn but are perplexed as to why we must learn it, while we have the answer and we know who we are in that lesson, what we do not ever know is the "why" that we need to learn it for. It can be for any reason, really, but it is not for another reason than that the Soul must grow or it will have to return to a physical body in another time to relearn those same lessons until learning has been completed. What we learn now is meant to take us to those places we have asked to be taken in this physical form.

A woman can only go so far in her life alone, and if she wants for things that take to to happen, then she has to not want to hang on to her total independence from a man and relent that part of her to the learning of how to become that woman who will be able to swallow her pride and her sense of Being to the man's need to take care of her, to fix her life for her, to be all that she has been praying for. Yet, this same set of two people will not stay static in who they are presently, and this same set of people will, with time, begin to see changes in each other that neither were prepared to see. The enlightened Soul is thrilled when it can measure its own growth with its twin soul. The enlightened soul is the soul which accepts that it needs to experience things in order to get to the next lesson.

The days and nights of the learning that we do seem to drag on and on for some people. The longer that it takes the ego to let go of the thing that it seems to think it needs for its own growth, the more times the same lessons will be brought to it until it has learned what is needed. The person who is constrained by the things in his own awareness without regard as to what is in front of him that is NOT his but that of someone else's is someone who will be taught his lessons again and again because he has chosen to turn a blind eye to the lesson that maybe he needs to pay attention better to the thing that he is not giving to someone else. He needs to think about the thing that is in front of him or else the thing that is inevitable and ahead of him (the lesson) will just be put off, but never will it not come to be the thing which will engulf him until he has bothered to relent and learn what he must.

If he treats women as though they are beneath him and there only for his own needs then most surely he will be met with these same kinds of women who will treat him the way that he thinks about women in general. If a woman has chosen to see a man as but her meal ticket then she will only experience men and even other women who will show her that this person is not her bank account, that this person is not meant to be anything more to her than her respected equal, and if she should continue to see men as but her only means of support and her only means of self worth then over and over again will the lesson for her be to think otherwise of them.

If a woman will choose to see herself at the mercy of someone else, then she will go through the things that women who give up their power to others have known. She will know that she must answer to another human being and not to her very Self. She will know what it means to be at the will and the mercy of a man. She will know things that she never thought would ever befall her awareness and she will know, too, what it is like to hurt from those choices. This is not to say that she will be aware of them perhaps not being the right choices, but over time she will find out that she needed to add herself to the mix of things that are all hers.

The Mix of Things Belonging to Each of Us Singly

We are each a mix of things that belongs only to us. While our "stuff" might mirror that of other people, we are singly alone in this life. We travel the Path we take with others, but for different reasons and with different purpose. One woman may be in a marriage that she knows is meant to be and meant to be with a Divine purpose, and another woman may know, too, that her marriage is meant to be but only for the purpose of making her purpose more apparent. One marriage may be her life purpose. The other may be a catalyst to the purpose.

No matter what any of us thinks about our reasons for being here in this lifetime, know how that it is with a purpose and a Divine one at that. We are all here to teach and to be taught, to Love and to be Loved. We are here to know who we are and eventually why we are here, but we are not here to question without purpose the reason for people being in our lives and more, the reason that they leave our lives. We should be more inclined to be thankful for what we learn from them and go forward, ever lightly into our own Destinies, without every thinking that we cannot trust what it is that is meant to be for us.

Friends come and go, and more than not they come to our lives because there is something within them that we need and also something within us that they need. Never are people in our lives for no reason at all, and it is an event of monumental proportions when we find out, either quietly or in large manner, what it is that we were meant to learn from them. When we learn anything from anyone at all it is with purpose, and while the lesson might hurt us a little bit it is never anything that will, unless it is our purpose to be so, kill us. The cultivating of our own Divine purpose on this earth is to bring with us through our human birth the lessons that other people are waiting to learn from us.

We think we learn to love, but in reality we do not need to learn to do anything that we are borne of. We are all borne of Love, and so to think that maybe we are meant to hurt is wrong. We are not meant to hurt and when we hurt is when we are meant to learn. Yes, some lessons come on the wings of Angels and are lovely to endure, but for the most part our lessons are harsh and they expose us for who we are and what we are to ourselves. If we bother with the ugly things that people tell us and we are more inclined to see things in a manner that is hurtful then we are missing the point.

I could sit here and tell you all of those wonderfully flowery things that a lot of books on Spiritual living have within them, but I would be denying my truth, my true self, and all that I was meant to do for not only everyone else on the planet, but more, myself. I will not lie to you and tell you that things are not going to suck because things will invariably suck from time to time. I cannot sit and tell you that you will not have your heart broken or that you will not break someone else's heart, because that is not the truth. I can, however, tell you that if you are diligent in your learning and actively seek the truths contained in them and also contained in the truths which belong to other people, you will find out for yourself that there is a definite cycle that we all go through, that there are times in our lives when it will seem like not even Spirit loves us, but we know the truth of things.

Yes, We Indeed DO Know the Truth of Things

There is nothing quite more thrilling to know that where we are in life is never where we are meant to stay. The most frightening thing is not that we do not know the truth but that we DO know it and in that truth we know that there is a lot to live up to. We know that we are inherently good and we know that we are built by, with, and for the purposes of loving other people. We know that who we are is not dependent on what we know or who we know or anything material like that. We know that we are Loved by the greater Universe at large and when we believe it we are thrilled more than we ever have been before.

We must all know and believe that on some level we are so very Loved. We know that what we experience is meant to teach us and mold us, much like fire molds gold and much like it also burns away the impurities. We would not be able to give Love if we were not "made" with Love. We would not Know Love if we did not somehow also know that we ARE Love. Once we know this and believe this life becomes the sweetest thing to us.

We also know without being taught the truth of our very selves. We cannot follow a Path which is not the right one according to the Soul's needs for Learning its higher lessons. We cannot think to do things in the manner which is aside of who we really are. If we are meant to be one way, and we continue to try to be someone who we are not, always the circle will return us to who we really are. We can never escape our Selves or our own truths. No matter how hard we try to fit in, if we are not meant to fit in we simply will not. If the belief pattern with which you were raised no longer serves your purpose, you will be escorted out of that believing by being presented things which will challenge your outer belief by the tenets of what your own beliefs personally are. In example, the person who was born into a family of strictly Catholic people may not find themselves believing what it is that they were taught in their youth. That they were brought up in that belief is one thing, but that they learned what they did about it as to how it does not resonate with who they are at present time is when the real fun starts.

When The Real Fun Starts

Fun is probably not the best word to use to flesh out anything about when the realness begins. The "Real Fun" begins when we choose to take a moment and not judge who we are and not worry about who is thinking what of us. The real fun begins when we happen upon that time in our lives when the conditions are right and we are in line Spiritually to receive the thing or the way of being in Life that we have been intending purely upon and wish to see manifested. When I say "real fun" I mean the actual work toward the goal of realizing who we truly are to our selves. We can be no one to anyone else unless and until we are ready to face ourselves and see who we are to that other person, see who we are and where we fit into our own lives, and most of all, if what we are choosing will serve our higher purpose.

Everything in the lives of human beings is connected to our higher purpose and the greater service of the rest of the population. Everything thought we think, every action we take, every word we speak, every single little thing that we do is connected to the greater whole of things. We should be able to find comfort in this one thought, that we are all connected and that someone else on the planet is also going through some things that are not all that pleasant. More than that, just knowing that we are all going through something as a collective whole should make the wrong idea in the minds of humans everywhere that we are somehow all alone in this lifetime. In fact, we are so not alone.

We will find that when we are in that time in our lives where we are lonely, where we are pining for social connection, where we are seemingly living our daily lives in servitude to some gigantic unseen "thing" in the Universe, we are also very much in line in thought and physical action with many, many other people on the planet, and whether we want to think this is the truth or not, it would serve us all much better to think that apparently there is something bigger at work on the planet. We would be well served to think that we are meant, along with those whose lives seem to parallel ours, that collectively we are on a mission. We should all be thinking that somehow, what we are going through is meant as a catalyst for some other thing that we want.

The Real Fun begins when we are able to let go of outcome, to let go of fear, to let go of the old ways of being and doing and learn that no matter how much effort we put into an action or a thought, that yes, those things will materialize, but by that time and when they do, those same things may not be what will serve and the rest of the planet and will not be the thing that accelerates us to the wholeness which we seek both privately and collectively. We do not understand at the time that we "lose" something or someone from our lives that the time has come for something more suitable to be in its place and that when we are ready to receive it that whatever it is that we were looking for or at will just Be.

But we can't have any real fun...really real fun...unless and until we are ready for it. As odd as that sounds there is truly a time for everything. The time for everything is when it is time for it to be and at no time will any human being find themselves able to go over the power of the Universe to try to force a thing and more, do what we will in thinking that we will be able to avoid a thing. The longer we try to force a thing the longer it will be before we are shown that what we are trying to force is not the right thing for us. The longer we try to make things happen for us with that same measure of force, the more we will be constantly shown the different and better way. Yet, somehow we always prefer the way that is not conducive to our Path and we end up without knowing it having to start all over again.

Starting all over again

Nothing that we go through is a waste of our time, because in the times that we have to take a "redo" we are gifted with the sweetness of remembrances of the thing that might have made us have a change of heart about a thing or a person or a situation. We never know really what we are going to go through on the way to our goal and in the Light of our Soul's grandest Purpose. Starting over again brings to us the grace and the ease of already knowing where we have been and that where we have been is not unsafe, just uncomfortable.

Yet discomfort is a signal that something is changing or that something needs to be changed in our lives. When we find that we feel like we do not "belong" we also find that there is a misstep, and it is a misstep because we chose to not look at that one piece of the whole. In our choosing to avoid certain situations we find ourselves confused at the idea that what we thought was the right thing to do was the very opposite of it. If you are lonely, the last thing you would think a lonely person might do is shun their social group, cling to the things that are from their past that made them feel like they do now, and will not blink and eye otherwise. They will flush their lives of the things that they find to be too complicated or too time consuming and give little, if any, regard to the truth of them as it was.

The truth of them and the truth of things as they were or as it was is simply a perception thing. We want to be able to see what we want, and when we do not see it we turn the picture that we do see into what we think we want even though we know that it is not the thing that is the truth of us. A change in beliefs and an altering of the way that we perceive the things that visit our lives is the marker for the changes. When we have outgrown what we believe in it is an uncomfortable mess we find ourselves in. We become disoriented and the things that made sense at one time no longer make any sense whatsoever. Where we once saw a thing as immovable we can now see it as shifting. Where we once were so entrenched in the ideals of beliefs that were imparted onto us as kids we find ourselves eventually questioning those very things which once we thought were the very blood of our lives.

The Very Blood of Our Lives

We make the analogy that blood is akin to Life, and this is the truth. There is no life that can be lived without the blood running through the organism's physical being. We need blood. So very much is tied to the blood within us and we are all aware that what we are seeing in our lives is somehow akin to the blood that is of the Spirit.

The Blood that is Of The Spirit

Many formerly "churchy" people (and mind you there is not a thing wrong with being "churchy!" I was once very Churchy!) have recently found out that they are a part of the Blood of the Spirit. The Blood of things is what keeps us alive and well. If there is a problem with the blood in an organism there will be issues throughout the body. This is not my rule. This is not anyone's rule. This is just how things in the Universe tend to work. There is a reason for everything. There is a reason that we bleed each month and a reason why the seasons change. There is a reason for the moon having a 28 day cycle. There is a reason. The Blood is the reason. If we, the Blood of the Universal Soul, are anywhere near what would be the opposite of what is correct, the incorrectness will be felt through the reverberations of the souls which have felt the shock waves from it all, even as we might not realize where it is coming from.

As the representatives of Life itself human beings can only bother to do those things which are of the finest mind. We must think thoughts that are in line with finery, and we must Know, too, that that which we think has Life already within it and that our thoughts manifest into the realities that we ourselves create. We do not want to think this way. We want to think that someone else screwed things up for the rest of the human race and that we are somehow blameless as to anything that happens in the larger world around us. ALL of our thoughts collectively loan to the entirety of the Whole. It is like the blood which courses through the veins of the human body. If one cell is different than the rest, it is not the one cell which will be affected because the one cell is simply doing as it knows to.

Yet the rest of the cells become confounded by this stranger, and regardless if it is a beneficial stranger remains to be seen as to how the rest of the cells integrate themselves with that one odd cell. Like with all else in the Universe, the human body can be seen as a smaller universe in that things outside of us cannot affect us Spiritually or emotionally unless we allow them to. The physical body and the Spiritual body, while both contained within the same limited physical self, are not the same Being. The Physical Body is exalted by the Spiritual Body. The Physical Body is meant to perform the whims of the Soul. Unfortunately, we have not figured this much out yet.

We have not figured out that we are here for a Divine Purpose or that what we want, if it is not in line with the Soul's needs, will never be permanent. We have not figured out yet that who we are in the greater scheme of things is a very big deal. We are not aware of the fact that every single thing that we think, say and do are all Divinely timed and connected and is meant to bring about change. We abhor change rather than embrace it. We think that being stuck in the rut of Life is better than stretching our Selves just to see what we are able to accomplish and more, what we can tolerate. We tolerate so little, giving little way for others to Be Who They Are in the plot of the story of our life that we cannot see past the thing that we do not understand to the wholeness which waits for us to Be.

The Wholeness Which Waits to Be

Healing and to be healed is wholeness. The Desire to be strong and capable and empowered by who we are rather than what we can manipulate other people to do for us is wholeness. To know that Who We Are is the most imperfectly perfect version of our Selves is wholeness. To know that we are unique and integral in the web of life is wholeness. All these things and ways of being serve us to make better for us the Life that we so dearly want, the ways of being we so badly need, and the giving of Love that just needs to Be. Love is Wholeness. We are nothing without Wholeness, nothing without Love.

And Love, it appears in our lives in many different ways and sometimes the ways that it comes to us is not expected. When we are not clear in our intentions and we are not absolute in our thoughts we are not in line with the universal flow of Life. When we are out of synch we are experiencing a need for healing on a Spiritual level. When our bodies are rife with sickness and we try hard to make sense of the thing that has befallen us we are on the Path to Wholeness. If we choose to squander our own thoughts on worry for the sickness we most surely will become the thing that we are worried about becoming. No one sick was not worried so much in the past about a few things that they ended up sick. No one suck was not worried that somehow what they wanted out of their lives would not Be. No one sick was not worried that the life they saw in their heads was somehow out of their reach. No one sick has ever experienced true healing because even as people who are sick wish not to be sick, they still perpetuate their sickness from mind to body because of a "maybe."

Wholeness is something that we create for ourselves after we have created something else that I like to call "wholemess." When we dwell on unkind things, and when our thought is of the physical worrisome world is when we begin being further away from wholeness. We can see all the therapists in the world that our time in life will allow us, and we can try all the self help methods and see all the healers we want to, but there must be a very real belief in the thing that we believe will help us. We cannot expect something outside of ourselves to do the work. The work is our lesson. The pain is the result but the pain is also the indicator as to where it is that we are not whole in our lives.

When it feels like we are not loved there is pain. The pain is showing us where it is within us that we are lacking, and we cannot get what we need from other people. Getting what we need is all our own. It is like expecting to get a paycheck and not working for it. We cannot allow others to do the work for us. We have to be willing to go through a bit of needed pain before we have a reason for thinking that we need to be healed. Being healed is a process, not a one time thing. To think that being whole after a lifetime fraught with the things that break our hearts and crush our Spirit is wishful at best and dangerous at worst. Too many people choose to place their own Souls and their Selves into the hands of people who are teaching others what worked for them. This is not to say that teachers will believe that what they have to offer is the universal fix-all, but it is to say that it is a dangerous thing to place all of our belief in one way. There are a lot of people on the planet, which means that there are probably a lot of ways and Paths to wholeness. No one way is the right way. No one person is the only healer. We are all healers.

Physician, Heal Thyself (Luke 4:23)

The word "wholemess" is a word that I made up to show you all what a difference one letter in a word can make. I will continue to say that our words carry a lot of weight. As a writer I am well aware of their effect on an audience, no matter the size. There is a huge chasm of difference between being whole and being a whole mess. A whole mess is made when we decide that what someone else tells us is our truth will remain our truth for the entire time that we spend here in this consciousness. We are served better by the truths that are our own and that we have formed for ourselves than we will ever be by the truths of others which do not apply to who we are. We are made differently yet the same because we are all made in the image of the Grand Creator. Humans were made with a built in healing system. Humans, while not like lizards with the ability to grow their tails back, have the ability to grow our Souls back. It isn't easy.

When the physician must heal his or herself, said physician will find out the meaning of soulful pain A pain which is Soulful comes from a place within where the thing that must see change is also the thing which gives us the most pain. When we find out that who we are is not in line with who we used to be it is a painful thing. We grow out of who we were and into who we are meant to be. This is not something that is avoidable and neither is it left to negotiation. While we are all privy to freedom of will and choice, if it is that we are to be one way and we are refusing to be that way the universe will give us every single chance that we are not willing to not look at as an option toward wholeness.

The Option of Wholeness

Options are the things that make our human experience thrilling. Yes, we encounter times in our lives when things are less than jovial, but on the whole we are a joyful lot we humans are. We choose the lessons without thinking that this is what has happened. We come to our conclusions the way that we do because that is how human beings are. We want to see to it that the pictures and the results we want versus the ones that we are desirous of become the reality when we have not bothered with the work which is involved with not just changing our view of things, but also, the way that we perceive the options in front of us.

We are constantly bombarded with the things in life that drive us crazy. We want life to be gorgeous and we want it to be without pain and without the things that break our hearts. When we end up with options that all seem to suck we have a hard time choosing. Any way we look at what is right in front of us we want to believe that the worst is to happen. Yet, we do not know what that thing that is right in front of us will or will not be a bad thing. While it might suck, and we might get hurt, normally the things that we think are sucky are the very things that we need to learn about. A kid in high school who has no clue about how to figure out algebraic equations will fret a little when he sees the class "Pre-Algebra" on his schedule and the fear that he feels is the fear of not knowing what is going to take place or if he will understand what it is that he is about to embark upon.

Without the things in life that suck we have nothing to compare it to with things which do not suck. We cannot know what does not suck, what sucks mildly, or what sucks a whole lot unless we are willing to move headlong into the thing that we fear. Are you seeing now the role that fear plays in our lives? Are you now more aware of the idea that what you are afraid of you are scared of because you have no idea of what you are getting into and what you do not know scares you? This is the thing that not a lot of people are willing to admit let alone think about as being the truth of them, the truth of us all, really.

We are more afraid of the judgment call that others will make on us when we do something that they are either not comfortable with or more, does not agree with their opinion of things. A person can have a lifelong friendship with someone and in the time that seems like a blink of an eye we can find that said friendship will be changed or even no longer be if there is an element of change. Most of the time the changes are needed, but the ugliness which comes with the part of knowing that change is needed is what screws us up. When we are too busy seeing the proverbial splinter in our brother's eye and not concerned enough with the telephone pole crammed up our own ass we are blinded by what we want the world to think of as our own greatness. It is not a greatness of Spirit when we have the very nerve to call out in others that which we refuse to see in ourselves.

That which we refuse to see in ourselves

The more that we think about things in a manner which is judgmental of other people, the more we will be blind to the idea that the thing that we see in someone else is alive and well within us, too. If you can see or sense arrogance in another person, it is without hesitation that I say that somewhere in you it also resides. It might not be the same sort of arrogance that we see in someone else, but make no mistake that it does and truly lives in you. Things which bother us about other people are the very things that are bothering others about us. If you are told that you are arrogant, egotistical, anything that a person would deem as being a negative thought of you, rest easily in the idea that it is a gift that someone would tell you these things so as not to make further a fool of you. There is nothing of value in being arrogant other than someone else telling us that we are arrogant, who tells us that we are anything at all which does not resonate with our inner and truest selves.

We judge others harshly and we don't even realize that what we are doing is exposing to the rest of the world our inner condition.

Our inner condition is where our mind is at present time and is the way that people are given access to our inner world. If our inner world is askew and we are bothered by the actively getting rid of things that might be of value to us but not to the whole of a unit, it would be like cutting off a limb if we chose to cut off the person or the people who would be good enough to tell us things about ourselves, in a manner which is not hurtful even as it might be angry, those ways of being that need changing because those ways of being are not helping us grow and are not giving us any room to grow out of that way.

However, it is not the mark of a person who cares when someone who sees these things in us but does not bother to tell us, and the thinking there is that they have more of that same way of being and this is evident when they tell others that they are being too this way or too that way. If we are told we are being undesirable or we tell someone else that they are, somewhere inside of each of those people is that same undesirable quality. Whatever it is that we see in others lives also within us. Take for instance, the idea that who we are betrothed to, who we are enamored with, who we have amorous thoughts about and who is also presently in our lives at the time may not be the person who we are meant to be with. Who we are meant to be with is someone who we will know automatically, because that which is in them that we find desirable also lives within us.

A man can think himself lucky that he has had several beautiful women in his life, and the one day he meets yet one more beautiful woman, but there is a difference with this new woman. When he was a younger man it was only what a woman looked like which was of interest to him. He may only have been worried about what she could do for him from the Ego's point of view. Then this new woman walks into his life, and while she is as beautiful as were the others, there is something very different about her. He senses that there is more to her than what he and every other man sees, and, too, he senses that she is special and that he can see himself with her indefinitely. This is the magic of being magnetic and mirroring on the outside what lives within us. No, there is not literally a beautiful woman who lives within every man that he is aching to let loose on the world. Rather, there is the ideal mate that he sees, and Knows without knowing, and desires dearly to meet her and see her and to Know her from the Spirit within her, out into the seeing physical world where the Love which lives within him can be seen visually through her.

That which lives within will eventually be seen by the rest of the seeing, physical world

Who we are is not a secret. If it is a secret, it is the worst kept secret ever. We cannot hide who we are. We can try to not let the rest of the world in, but at the end of it all, we can never hide what we are from anyone. Who we are eventually bleeds out, good or bad, and who we are truthfully is who we are always.

We cannot hide our anguish, because it seeps out of us and bleeds out onto the reality that is ours. We cannot hide our joy, for it is that joy which is bigger within us than much else is. It is difficult for us humans to be able to hide our inner selves, and it is because the inner self is the true self in us all. If you are in pain, the world will eventually know it, and if you are living joyfully, naturally people will know and will be drawn by that.

Who we are is important. Who we are matters in the world, because who we are meets the needs and the soul requirements of others .As much as they meet their own needs, whether we realize it or not, they also meet ours. Who we are dictates what we do, where we go in life, who we will Love and who will Love us in return. Who we are makes up the world around us, makes us live and Be, and who we are is the person that the world at large is allowed to have access to. When we present ourselves in a manner which is not befitting of not just us but those within our midst, we are not only taking away from them but we are also robbing ourselves of the goodness that resides in both us and in them, and this is not the way that Life works, is not the way that we achieve balance and no matter what happens to us whether good or bad, we will never Know balance if we do not understand this one vital thing in life.

The Vital Things in Life

There are things which are vital to our everyday survival. No one thinks of the idea that there are other more vital things in life that have nothing to do with feeding or clothing ourselves, have nothing to do with gaining anything in the physical sense. And gaining anything in "the physical sense" means getting money or fine things without the benefit of also knowing, too, why you are getting those things (it is because you called them into being). We cannot Know the things we Desire in our life experience without also knowing why it is that we are desirous of those things. Without the knowing or the reason behind why we want the things we want there is no way that we will ever be able to appreciate anything at all.

A man can have all the finery in his life that we has ever wished for, but without the true desire in both his heart and soul present and real to him he will never know why it is that he has those things and more, he will never understand when the time comes and he loses all those things. He loses those things because he suffers a lack of appreciation, not for the things themselves, but for the process and the time that passed for him to acquire those things. He will never Know for real how he got them all, and will, for the bulk of the time that he has those things, think and believe that it was through his action only that he ended up with them all. The biggest lie that we each tell ourselves is that we have acquired all we have, no matter tangibly or intangibly, without help, and it is not help from anyone in human form, but help from the very middle of our Selves.

We are who is responsible for our own life experiences. No one else tells us to do anything. We do all that we do quite by our own hand and we do all what we do from the point of view of the Ego. The Ego tells a person that they want someone who is physically attractive, but the Ego Self does not acknowledge the person who lives inside of that attractive human persona. We end up with that person in our lives and having no clue of the reality of that person, we also lose them in some manner because we were never really fully present in our own lives. This is another big reason other than things and people no longer serving their purpose in our life lessons – it is because we do not give thanks or credit to anyone but ourselves when in fact there is absolute truth to the fact that we are so not in this lifetime alone.

We Really Are Not Alone

Hunches. Warm fuzzies. Thoughts that precede action are not given to us from anywhere else than Spirit. When we can bother to think about how big the ocean looks to us when we stand on the shoreline and out over the water, and we see the gigantic physical nature of it and can witness the power of it all, we either wretch from fear or we are taken in by just how big it really is and how physically small we are in relation to it. We are both awestruck as well as intimidated by its nature. We see that it is alive and the fear of its alive nature comes from what we do not know about what is hidden beneath the surface of the water.

When we think in terms of our being like one of those grains of sand along the shore and can compare that infinitesimal nature of our human own next to the power and strength of the ocean as a living thing we can see, too, that like Spirit knows how many grains of sand is on that shoreline, Spirit knows, too, that we humans would not ever have made it in this lifetime or on this planet alone so we were given companions to travel with along the Path we each take.

While we are all different and while we seem to be separate, we really are not. In fact, we are so not that if you thought about things in a bigger manner, you would be able to see that this is right, that we really are here together and connected to each other in a manner which is unavoidable. When we think about the type of people we want in our lives, it is almost like magic that we draw them to our lives and end up with the very people we were thinking about. We also bring to our lives the people and situations which we do not want which is the biggest reason as to why it is that we need to be mindful of our selves and our thoughts.

We should be careful when thinking of things when we are angry, because our thoughts are alive with the energy that is ours. We need to not call into being those things and people and situations which break our hearts and make us crazy when what we need is a Peaceful mindset. We need not fret about what we cannot have and see what is possible that we can have and that we do want when it is that we are thinking the thoughts that we think. We do not realize our own power until it is staring us right in the face and looking at us in the eye and telling us without saying a word that who we are is powerful, who we are matters, who we are is an integral part of the grander universal scheme of things.

When we have been hurt by a person who is hurting automatically we want to try to save them and try to make their reality something that is not so hurtful. They come to us with their lifelong demons and their lifelong monsters which have been residing in the closets in their minds. They come to us with their problems and we take them on as though we are somehow going to be able to save them from themselves. Eventually we get to the point where we have no more room in our lives or hearts, not for them personally, but just at all. We take on who they are in the hopes that we might save them and we do not realize that we can save no one – we can only care about them, Love them and wish them well. The bitch of it all is that at the end we feel guilty for not having been able to be all things to them when in reality they were already all things to themselves and their coming to us for our Love is just our feeding into that sameness that we have been comfortable with and comforted by for so long. We never think about the idea that maybe they are the reason that we have been held back for so long and we want to think and believe that things will change for them, but there is always that thought in our heads that they cannot change and we cannot help them any further than they are willing to help their very selves.

Feeling Like We Have No More Room

There is never a time in our lives when we will have no room for other people. When we feel like we have no room for other people it is simply time to reevaluate the ones who are there now and to really see how they serve their grander purpose through their experiences with us. When it comes time for us and we feel like we can take no more, this is the time when we should be more mindful, not of others, but of ourselves and the condition of our inner world. When we are revisited by the painful things in our lives and we find ourselves going over the same things again and again and we see to it that we hurt when we really do not have to, this is the time that we should be inclined to know a thing or two about our own reasons and our own meaning behind the idea that we must try to help those who are not willing to help themselves.

They tend to see us coming in their direction, the people who suction the very life energy from us. They know that we will try to rescue them and they know that they can remain dependent upon our energy and what we have to offer them and they take from us without ever bothering to give back anything in return. We begin to feel a deficit and physically their reality, since we have taken it on ourselves, becomes our own Spirit's reality, too, and the craziest part of this is that we chose to do this.

We choose the things we do, not out of preference, but for the familiarity of it all. That which is familiar to us we gravitate toward. If a man is accustomed to a woman who is broken, he will draw those types to his life and there is nothing other than changing his preferences and his thoughts that will make it different for him. It is when he sees that he is becoming broken, too, that he will choose to change the way that he thinks about the broken woman and will ultimately no longer want to draw that sort of woman to him. Conversely, this same man will one day, quite on his own, think better of himself, fully aware that he can have any kind of woman he can think of, and know well that he will draw her to him in the same manner that he drew the broken woman. This same man will see that his own inner world has somehow changed and the proof will be that the women he draws to him will reflect those inner changes.

Familiarity is nice, but it can cripple us on many levels. Familiarity is the thing that makes us choose to settle for something that we know we have grown past. It is the thing that also reaffirms the thought pattern that there is nothing else for us than broken people, that we have no choice other than to be all we can be to them, even if they are not willing to be all who they are without the benefit of our being there for them. There is only so much that we can do for another person before we start to realize that they are taking away from us rather than sharing with us. If someone only wants to be in our lives so that they can continue to have the comfort of knowing that we will be there for them no matter what, even when they are making us crazy and behaving as though we somehow owe them our Soul, we need to see to it that it is with care and Love that we excuse them from our lives. If someone is not willing to take on their own demons and slay their own dragons and they keep on giving us their bag to carry we, ourselves, will have a hard time getting to our own issues because their will always be the ones which we will be more inclined to do anything with or about. This is an issue that many men have and also one which many women continue to carry on as though this is somehow the right way to be and to do things. It isn't.

We must learn to heal our own soul's aches. We must learn to deal with the things that break our hearts and shatter us entirely. We have to be willing to do the work and no longer depend on other people to carry our load for us. We can keep on giving them our best, and they will continue to give us themselves at their worst, never bothering to change who they feel is responsible for changing their lives. We cannot depend on other people to make the changes for us. We have to want to change. We have to want things better because when they are better for us and our lives they become better for those who are part of our lives.

When we attach ourselves to someone and that connection comes from a place of pain, we must opt to heal ourselves on our own. We mirror each other. We are what we see and who we see. When a woman can look a stranger in the eyes and in that split second can see herself there in ways that she has never before, it becomes a healing mechanism. She might be stuck in a place in life where she would rather not be, and with that one glance she knows that all is well, that things are as they should be, and that the future for her looks brighter for the simple fact that she has seen her very self mirrored in the eyes of a stranger. This is the same for all of us. The idea that we are here alone is wrong. It is simply an opinion and is simply the way things are. When we are better for the experiences that we have had, we will know better that we are on our way to healing because we will be shown so.

We Will Be Shown

Who we are inside is real. We are shown who we are and where we are in our lives through other people. If we believe that we are worthy of a Love grander than we had ever known in the past, we will be shown and that proof will breeze into our lives unexpectedly and quite by surprise. If we are weary of things that have what seems a "rotten sameness" and we are sincere in the ways that we are seeking things similar to what we see with our mind's eyes, soon enough we will also see evidence of that change all around us. We will see that we are meant for better and we will be shown just how much better our lives can be, if only we will be willing to look at things not quite the same way we had in the past.

When we look at our new options in the same manner we have in the past and that manner is a negative way, most assuredly we will also experience the same pattern of things that happen. This is the lesson – to pay attention and to see where it is that this sameness of fruition of thoughts has us running around in circles like so many hamsters on exercise wheels. The hamster doesn't know that it is going nowhere. The hamster is just a biological creature doing what it does anyway, which is to stick to its routine. The human animal, conversely, does know better. Yet the human animal has the ability to reason and to make its life better and that betterment comes from a belief, not only that it can be better and will be better, but that the betterment comes from us alone and from no one else.

When we are shown how things can change and when it comes through people who we cannot fathom that lesson coming from we learn to trust in the process. Human beings have been trained to believe that we cannot believe things until we see it. Yet the reality is that once it is that we believe what we will, we end up guaranteeing that we will see what we want. All we have to do is believe it first and not need the "receipt" of our desires. We cannot put our faith anywhere else than in our own Soul's desires and leanings. We cannot begin to see what it is that we want to see until we believe that it is already in manifest and already exists somewhere that is not in our physical line of sight. We learned not to trust and this is why we want proof that we will not be hurt, that people will not leave us and we are good. We want proof that we are Loved when all the proof we really need is the acceptance, not that we are Loved, but that we are Love itself.

We do not need proof of who we are, proof of why we are here or proof that what we are purposed with is worthy of the work involved. We have to do the work. Our mission in this life is to learn and our purpose in life is tied to that learning. We cannot expend our gifts to the world if we don't believe in our selves and the power of those gifts. Some of us are gifted with empathy, and others with compassion, but we are all gifted with Love. We tend to want to hang on to our Love, doling it out when we feel the recipient is good enough for it. All souls are good enough for some measure of Love, because all Souls were meant to be here to share the experiences that we will, both singly and collectively.

All of us were meant to be here for one purpose, and that purpose is always tied to the furtherance of the Spiritual life of the entirety of humankind. We are here to do our Soul's work, to be with other people so that we can learn and evolve, and we are here to perpetuate the Love which resides within us. We are here for so many reasons but the biggest reason is to Love. We are made of Love, and it is our Soul's greatest joy to experience Love and to impart it onto those who we come into contact with. We are not here to pick and choose who we will Love. We are here simply but to Love and to do so with the abundance we have within.

We will be shown, introduced, if you will, to the grand nature of the Love within. Love cannot be hidden. It is magnetic and life giving and it glows brightly like the stars in the dark blackness of the night. We draw others to us by our sending out the signal that who we are is real and who we are is meant as the beacon of Love in our own way and to our own advantage, as odd as that may read.

It is to our own advantage to Love.

WE MUST LOVE ! While everything is always a choice for us, even the idea to Love others, we still choose, from time to time, to do otherwise than to Love.

When we judge others harshly, we are not Loving them entirely. We are seeing in them what it is in us that we do not want to acknowledge. When we label others with our own opinions, we are not being entirely Loving, because we are telling these people that we are better than they are when really we are just different and having a different experience, even as they are very much a part of that experience.

Often we will find ourselves at a place in our lives where what seems to be the only way – to take our Love away – to help someone else. In reality, if this is done the way that it is meant to be done, the person will Know without being told that they are needing to learn to heal themselves. This is not our taking away our Love from them, and really it is the highest form of Love, both for them as well as for ourselves, that we can show. When we constantly rescue people from themselves, we are not allowing them to be all who they are. We are not giving them back what they so badly need, which is the ability to learn not only to trust in their own personal power, but also, their ability to Love themselves completely and from a place which does not threaten even as that place is someplace that feels, to them, maybe, to be a very dark and lonely place. It is very much alone even though they themselves are not alone. They have the company of the angelic realm as well as the backing of Spirit to guide them. Their greatest error is not that they lean on others, not even that they refuse to lean on their own selves, but that they will not trust who they are to be the best person they can be at this very time in their lives.

Sometimes the very best person anyone can be is themselves at their very lowest point in their lives. Sometimes the best that we can do for them is to let them go and let them be who they are right now so that when the time is right they can grow and learn that they never had to be that person, never had to go through what they did in the certain manner that they did and that they alone chose it that way. Our lives are never a mistake, never something that is somehow not fixed when things go awry. We want to think that everything is planned, but this is in error to think this way. We like knowing what is going on all the time. We think we need to have every bit of information that is contained in a situation so that we can feel it when the pain is coming. Yet, that is not what life and learning is all about.

Sometimes, we have to get to the very bottom of our Soul in order to get back up to the top where we belong and where we can see better who we are in reality. Sometimes it takes the one person who we thought would never not be there physically to not be there in every manner possible. Sometimes we need to be jarred out of our resistance to change in order to make the changes that we need to make. Sometimes, whether we like it or not, the Universe will exact onto our lives situations and people who will make us come to the decisions that we have to make in order to see to it that we will no longer be stagnant and no longer be in the state that we are in. Negative emotions are like a void in us. The Universe abhors a void. We flinch from the pain of not knowing the entirety of a situation as it applies to us. We do what we can to avoid having to deal with making a choice that is painful for us, and even as we will do the work and go through the pain of what we will, simply to avoid more pain, we end up not learning and thereby end up starting the cycle of learning that one lesson all over again.

It is like getting into your car and getting ready to leave to go somewhere and you know you forgot something. You get to where you are supposed to go and look down at your feet and realize that you forgot your shoes. You go back home to get your shoes. You get back into the car and get to where you were going and you reach for your bag and it is not there, and so you turn around and go back. You do this over and over again until everything you need to learn has been learned. Then one day the madness just stops. One day there is no more painful circle and the lesson that you needed to learn, you learn.

Whatever it is that you need to learn, I promise – you WILL learn

All humans know when something is about to come to an end. We have the innate gift of knowing things before we are meant to, and we have this gift in us from conception. It is not until we have been hurt a million and one times that we learn anything at all. We can deny whatever it is that we care to and we can dismiss all that we know is our own truth, especially if we do not like the truth of us. Yet, the thing that we cannot ever do is not learn. We learn. Even if we do not want to, we learn. We learn because just like a dog learns to be hand-shy if its owner is awful to it – through repetition, and we choose the repetition over the pain of learning the first time the lessons that are presented to us.

Our lessons come in the form of a person or a situation who we think needs us or who we think we need. We are offered by the Universe the things that we have asked for in our lives, but those things that we have asked for do not come to us easily and neither quietly, but absolutely they do come to us. Sometimes we run right into them and by the time we find out that those times have come and gone we have learned something. We may not even know that we have learned something, only that we are somehow different and better for the pain in the ass time we just had. If we can manage to see to it that in each heartbreak there is something of value for us we will also find that lessons are not meant to hurt us but to make us become who we are meant to become.

It is not until we have learned that through the pain is where we are the strongest we will be. We are taught what we are made of when it is that we feel like we are too weak to get through a thing. A woman can be every bit of who she and the rest of the people who give a damn who also share her world with her believe her to be, but unless the inner work of all the intricacies of what we really think of ourselves can be seen to and known by her she will always feel like there is something not right about her life. We will see that in her life there is not a lack of Love, but a lack of quality of Love.

A Quality of Love

Love may be the only real thing in this lifetime, but what is also real is the quality of Love. We judge others about how they are judging us all the time, and in that judgment we see that there is a lack of quality of Love. It is Love, in error, and because it is this way we find that there is a deficit of things that need to be there and the deficit begins with ourselves. The quality of Love that we feel or think that we do not feel or believe we do not have and are not privy to or worthy of does not come from anyone else. It comes from ourselves.

It comes from a lifetime's worth of believing what other people have told us is the very truth of us according to them, and it comes from a place within where we have told the monsters and the demons that they may stay when instead we should have tamed and excused them from our lives, period. The Quality of Love is meant to be thought of as being the state of Love that we expect from others as we give it. And we can expect to be Loved and expect to Know Love but we cannot expect that we will be given the same exact quality that we really and truly pine for if we do not also give that same quality that we are willing to give to others also to ourselves.

The quality of Love that we should give to ourselves is the same quality that we want others to give us. When they do not give us that same quality it means that we are not truly giving it. When we feel like we are at a deficit it is not on the shoulders of others that this weight rests but rather and only on our own. We cannot expect people to just want to give us what we will not give to ourselves. We cannot expect people who are just as much flesh and blood as we are to be able to do what we are not able to do as well. If we want Love, no matter what, we have to give it in the same measure and to the same degree, because we only get what we are willing to give.

There is freedom in Loving effortlessly, freedom in knowing that we are able to Love and to Be Loved, because again, we ARE Love. We are Love to the highest degree and in the greatest form. We are Love in the manner which is romantic, and we are Love in the manner which is Universal. We are Love in that we can Love, and we are Love in that we know that if we are not willing to give what we have that we will not also receive what we want. And what we want is a whole lot.

What we want is sometimes not what we need

We make the case for the things that we want all the time, but we deny the things that we totally need. We need to be Loved but we need to learn to love first. We need to be able to reign in our unsophistication and our inability to be real, but we need more to not get hurt when others do not accept us "as is." We give so much of who we are away that when it comes time for us to no longer be in that same way we are at a loss as to what we are meant for and more what we need to do.

We pine for the things that we want and we send out the energy into the universe that we are needy and desperate when we do not have to be. If there is anything at all that is meant to be for us in this lifetime, it is to be Loved, which we all are, all the time. There is always someone on this planet who Loves us, who cherishes us, who wants what is best for us, and hopefully we each and all figure out that the very one who needs to do that for and with us IS us and that we need to first Love Us long before we can Love anyone else.

The things that we feel like we are missing in our lives are the very things that too many of us cannot see, even when it is starkly there and always in our face. Things that we want are always there, always waiting for us in manifest, and always at the ready for us to know that we are worthy of them, all of them, and that all we need to do is believe. We need to believe our own Truths, and we need to not question the ones that were ours in another part of our lifetime. We need to accept that we are loveable and we need to know, too, that we are able to Love.

What we need is to be able to see ourselves through the reality that is our own. We need to stop hoping for and wanting what other people have and know that we are good enough to have the things and the situations in our lives that we want and we have to live this way, each and everyday, and we have to learn to learn. Yes, I said learn to learn.

When we are more willing to judge, we are not willing to learn. When we are more willing to receive pity and sympathy, we are not willing to heal. When we are more inclined to be needy is when we are primed and ready for learning. When we have a failure in the things that we need because the things we want are so much more appealing we are no where near thinking or believing that who we are is enough to make our own lives beautiful and filled with the joy brought only by the belief in one's self that we are the purveyors of Love and as such are well able and adapted to the idea that we can Love Us better than anyone else can. While that notion might seem a little too far fetched to be the reality for a lot of people, it is the truth of us.

The Very Loving Truth of Us

Whether we care to accept it as such, we are Loving. Human beings are Loving. I said it – now deal with it. We are loving to a fault at times, and we are giving til the point of pain. None the less, it is our very lot in life to love and to be loved. This is not a rule neither a law. It just Is.

It just is that we are meant to hurt temporarily so that one day we will know that we never have to go through all the pain we did from that one hurt again in the same way that we had the first time we felt it. We learn what we do in spite of ourselves, and we do like we do when we are hurt because that is how we have been taught to do. We learn singly and collectively, the varied ways of Loving the Human which houses the Spirit. We know when we have had enough, but we take on more and more, which even as it is a proof of sickness in Love, it is none the less, done from the heart and done with Love and if that Love is the truth of us, we find, too, that not a thing in the world matters unless it is done from a place of Love.

No matter how many times it is that we are meant to suffer, no matter how many times our hearts get broken, no matter how many times we see ourselves through the proverbial ringer, time and again we know that even that pain is temporary and that that pain will also go away. We know that we are meant to be the ones to Love and while we might do a really poor job of learning quickly, we do eventually and with great and wonderful outcome, learn what we must. And make no mistake – again, we MUST learn, for it is really the only thing within us that truly makes us be all we really are.

All we really are is so much...so very, very much, and once we believe it we begin to see the things that mean more to us than we thought they would. We see that the kind of Love shared between two friends is made better by their fighting a similar battle together. We see that Love that was lost between two who were enamored with other people eventually find the One Who they are meant to be sharing in that manner of Love and it becomes, through those two people, much more than either person realizes it has. We see the Love that is created within a family turn that family into the tribe they were meant to be, and it is a tribe that extends to those who share no blood ties with anyone but is a family borne of our own losses, of our own heartaches, of our own, period.

It is when we have chosen to see to a thing, see to our lives, to our Selves, with Love instead of being bothered that we have to work for changes that we will also see that where we have been was not as bad as it seemed and that where we are headed is not so daunting to get to. We find within us the hope that springs from hopelessness, and we see also that we were fine all along and that it was a belief in something that was not ours to have as our own Truth that stopped us or tripped us up along the way. We find that when we were willing to hurt was when we grew, and we see that what it is that we Know now is far more than we thought we would or could ever come to know.

When we learn our own Truth we see that who we are is not who we were, that what we have gone through was a test of things to come and if we could handle it or not. We find out all too quickly that not only can we handle it, we never couldn't handle it. We find out that we were stronger than we believed and that nothing anyone has believed about us in the past was ever the truth unless we made it that way. We are the ones who make the untruths of others the truth for us. It never has to be this way. We can live through the truths of others, can deal with the idea that not everyone on the planet will think as we do, and we will rise like a phoenix from the very ashes left by the heat of the fire caught on the flames of the past which burn us and hurt all the way down to the marrow and the very Bones of the Soul.

When we can see past the hurt, past the anguish, past it all, and know that what we are well and good and that nothing can really harm us is when we have learned the complexities of the All the Is. We can glorify in the knowing that even though we might feel stuck right now and at this moment in time, with all that we have gone through and all that we know and with as much as we have grown and through eye which see with none but Love – this is when we have discovered our own Truth.

It is when the sun no longer seems to be the marker of days which run right into the nights, and when it seems like there is nothing left for us other than the pains we feel that we will Know what it means to have the beginnings of wholeness. When nothing bothers us that used to, and when people who used to hurt us no longer affect us is when we have learned what it is to just Be. When we learn to just Be, in our Selves, in the moment, in this Life, we find the peace we have been chasing which is the peace that has been right there all along. All we needed to do was claim it as our own because the truth of us each is that it never wasn't ours – we just believed what other people said for so long that it just felt like it was right.

We got so used to being told that we are one way and never questioned the idea that might not be what we were told we were. We allowed those things to guide us when instead and all along we were the ones in the driver's seat and we were the ones who held within us the power to choose how our lives would be. Our lives are rife with pain. Pain is a given in life, but it does not have to be the thing that dictates us. We can live pain free in every sense of the word. There is an absoluteness to the idea that our emotional pain eventually makes it so that we feel every bit of that heart ache, all of that anger, every single tiny shred of the waning in the worth of self that we felt for so long. We end up with physical pain and dis-ease and we were never told that we never had to live detrimentally, that we chose it that way, and like we chose it that way we can also choose to heal ourselves.

We just have to believe that who we are matters, and more, we have to be willing to face and to live our own Truth. Truth is scary. Truth is ugly, but it is neither of these two things that bring to us the thing in this life that we need the most, at least not on their own. The things that these two things bring to us is an absence of fear of the Truth, our truth, and that alone is worth the no longer having to ask the question if we are good enough for anything, including the ability to handle the truth, no matter where it comes from.

Usually, the hardest truth to deal with is our own. Yet, it is only hard for us to deal with because it is ours, and nobody else's. When the day comes that you find out that your truth was the highest one of all, you will know what it means to live peacefully and without the monsters who you have hidden in the closet of your mind for so long.

It will be like the sun came out from behind the clouds. It will be like the day that you were born, because in a way, it is like being reborn, the knowing of one's own Self-Truths!!

The Bones of the soul

are the bones which will not break

for they are the very bones

which hold up the spirit...

...in conclusion...

"My Own Bones"

(Na ʻiwi o Mapuana)

We have so much to offer other people, we humans do, but we are so much more inclined to keep for ourselves that which we feel we are at a deficit from.

My brothers and sisters, take heed to the knowing that your presence is so needed at this time in our lives. There is a lot going on all over the place, all over the Universe, and we are lucky to at least be part of it all. These last pages are those which tell the tales of the things which are contained in my own personal Soul. It is written so that you know you are not alone in your hurt and not alone in the idea that while it seems like a scary place to be, there is no greater nor sweeter place than here and now. More than that, for your own life story, there is not another person on the planet here to write it, to make it be and to make it real. That alone is all yours.

Here and now is when we get to be physically here in the world and in this experience. Embrace it. Embrace all the weirdness and the things and happenings that you do not understand. Forget trying to figure "it all out," because you never will. Life does not happen that way. Life happens in spurts. Life happens in the manner that we see to it and not the way that other people have told us. I have spent my entire life long pondering the reasons as to why it is that we ache so badly when we do. There are a lot of things that I think about it, but none more compelling than these next words.

When someone hurts you, and you begin to think that you are somehow the reason that you hurt, it is at that time that you ought really to think about the nature of your own hurt and wonder, too, why it is that the pain is so bad. My own pain stems from a childhood spent believing that I was not good enough to be Loved the way that my little Piscean heart did not realize it was aching to be Loved. For the most part I grew up with those in my extended family to one side thinking that I was not good enough to be completely a part of them without my Knowing, too, that I would not be accepted fully. I would never be totally one of them. To at least one of them I was not in the same name group which meant that I was not going to be privy to the Love that my little girl soul so badly needed. I know that yes, as a child I really needed that validation. I know this because my kids need it. My kids get it. I am healed through that alone. Our hurts are healed when we can give the same measure of Love to others without thought and without the idea that they have to work for it or earn it. Love is not payment. Love just Is. During the times that I felt like no one in my family loved me, I was too young to realize that I had a family and while that family was not and still is not blood related to me, they are my Tribe and they are who I would do anything for, even take a bullet. They know that I Love them, all of them, and they know that they can trust that this is true of me.

For the bulk of my childhood I felt unimportant. I felt like I was supposed to beg for everyone's love and acceptance. Throughout my lifetime I did what I thought I was supposed to, which equated me with my being also thought of as the family doormat. If you needed someone to talk to without the idea that the someone might need you to listen to them later, I was there, and lots of them know that this is the truth. More importantly, the ones who were not like this to me also know that they were not and also know that I cherish them, Love and Adore them, would do anything for them. They know this. They know it all the way down to The Bones of Their Souls and it is a beautiful thing, indeed.

Even as I knew that I was Loved by my parents, I needed more than only their Love. I needed to be accepted by their siblings, and one side of my family Loved and adored me and my quirks, while the other side pointed them out and called them my "faults." Couple that with the generational thinking that we had to prove our worth through our work which could be seen, I'd set out on the journey of the writer's life without realizing that I had. I didn't know back then that I would not be what I thought I was meant to be, which was a dancer on some stage production in New York. I was, instead, cerebral in nature, given to deep thought and long bouts of silence that was so loud sometimes it permeated my bedroom walls. I did not know then what I know so well now – I was born to write, to impart on to the world the things and words which come through my hands and in my voice but are not mine alone.

It took me a very long time to realize that I was good enough, that I did not ever have to beg for anyone's acceptance, that Love was free and in that Love was also the freedom from the pain of never believing that I was someone important, just as we all are. We are all important pieces of this puzzle called Life, and somehow, everyone who we meet during the span of our lifetime is crucial to our becoming all we are meant to be. When it was that I was in tears over their words was when I felt as though the world around me would fall apart. I would feel this way because all the while, growing up as the eldest of three preacher's kids, the thing that I was taught in church was Love. I knew all about the sort of Love that was Divine, but I was scared into the idea that if I followed my leanings toward things considered "evil" by those who meant for those things to be thought of in that manner, I would be sent to hell. I realize now at the age of 42 that none of us is truly evil, but that all of us have been part of someone else's idea of what it is to be evil.

You are not evil. Just because you like things that the preacher in the church tells you that you are doing the devil's work, it does not make it the truth. The truth is found in each of us, and the truth as I know it will never be the same truth as you know it, because you and I are different. It is in this different nature that we are found to be similar, and we all have the same desires and needs and most of all, we all have the capacity to Love. There is not one person on this planet who cannot Love and who does not also Know Love. We are all given to Love, given to the idea that we are magnificently designed creatures with lives which are meant to match.

Because I was so strongly opinionated, and because I have always felt a very real sense of justice and more, the bitter injustice that the world is rife with, I have always been considered a loose cannon and someone who cannot contain herself when things go awry or when life hands her a bad hand. It is not that they were not accepting of my ways, but more that I believed them when they told me that I was not acceptable, when they made it seem like I was not worth the time or the effort for them to at least be good to me. I didn't know then what I do know now and what I was so very good at being back then – I'd become the Black Sheep of the family. Me with my Motley Crue shirts and my ripped up jeans. Me with my mile high "Bon Jovi" hair and me with my love for Jack Daniels. Me with all my quirks, all my weirdness, all my "me-ness"...all of these things, early on, made me know that what I had been through, what I still went through was no where near anything resembling the things I'd been taught in church.

I was told not to drink even though Christ turned water in to wine. I was told not to listen to the voice within, even though I was told,too, that the "lord answers our prayers and we need to listen for his answer," and when the answers came to me it was not by the means which my dad, the preacher in my life, told me they would come. I was not taught that those nudges that we get when we have been seeking our own answers from the great beyond are what we have been waiting for. I wasn't told that Spirit is not choosy about who Spirit Loves because Spirit Loves us all. I was not told the things that I ended up learning throughout the course of my life because very simply, I was the Black Sheep, and the Black Sheep in the family is the one who is meant for greatness because we are who end up with the hardest Path to travel on. We choose it this way because we know we can hang. Not everyone can hang being the Black Sheep.

I was the ideal Black Sheep, the absolute epitome of the infamous "Preacher's kid," and it was during that time in my life that I found out what the truth of Love is, what the Truth of Family is, and I took with me from that time in my life and carry with me now the thought that indeed Love does conquer all, that Love is the ultimate and most important thing in the Universe and it truly is the thing that makes us all Be.

The sort of Love that I write about here is not the kind between a man and a woman, but the sort which resides in us all and is the most important kind of all – the Love of Self. We are taught our entire lives long to be loving toward others, to sacrifice ourselves at the altar of other peoples' truths, and we do so without questioning why it is that we are willing to blindly follow someone else's ideals or why it is that we are afraid to follow our heart and do what we were meant to do in this lifetime. While we are never privy to knowing upon our birth what it is that we are meant for, what we already know when we are born is that we are Loved and privy to it. It is vital to our existence. Hurt is not. Pain is only a lesson we must learn. We are scared to hurt and scared that we will never recover from that hurt.

I was afraid to hurt even though I was used to being hurt. When I found out that my hurts were never as big or as important as were my truths, as were the things that made me be who I am today it was almost like someone turned on the light-switch and let me in on the secret about Roxanne that no one would and that no one could. I could not expect other people to figure things out about me for me – that was something that I had to do all on my own. The biggest scariest truth of all was facing the fact that the man who I married is not the one who would make or break me, even though he thought he could. I spent two decades as a victim, and only recently found out the truth – that I am a survivor on many more levels than just that of a Domestic Violence and Emotional Abuse survivor. I found out that all the times that I got my heart broken that those times were meant to be, and they were meant to be so that I could find out just exactly what I am made of.

I find anymore that I am made of Love, that I have always been made of Love, and that no one – not an abusive partner, not a clueless group of uncles, not an abusive caretaker – not one person who is not me is responsible for me being okay. It was really a choice to be made whole, a choice for me to no longer suffer at my own hands and through my own thinking that I was meant as a martyr for those who are choosing their own cluelessness and who are forcing upon others as the only truth when in fact ours is not the only truth and ours will never be the only truth. It is a hard truth, though, and one that is often met with unbridled opposition that ours is not the only truth that is. Everyone on this planet has his or her own truth. You do. I do. Everyone does, and until we can respect, even quietly, that this is a fact of life, we will continue to live in the lies created to save ourselves from the truth.

It is truth that we will not be accepted by everyone and also a truth that we will try like hell to be. It is a truth that everyone is different, and also a truth that in those differences we can find our common ground. It is a truth that we are all meant to Love, but also a truth that we are not going to find this out until we have to. We all have to. We all have to accept that we are not inherently evil but inherently good. We have to accept that no one is perfect but that we are made perfectly imperfect in the Image of the Loving Creator. We have to accept that not everyone is going to give us what we think we need, but it is also a truth that while we believe that we are not worthy of many things, what we were never not worthy of is Love.

We learn the best of what not to do when we are being reprimanded. When we are being told what is the truth of us according to someone else, we know that we are better off to question their truth of us, because their truth of us might not be the truth that we still need to live by.

I learned a lot of harsh lessons on acceptance by others, through others, and I did not know then what I know now. What I know now is that there is nothing quite sweeter than our ability as human beings to be resilient, to be able to face the facts of things and to emerge from the darkness of not knowing completely unscathed. The world is not as ugly as we think it is, not by far. I learned that there is always Love in abundance, that when we allow ourselves to let go of that which no longer serves us we are open and ready to receive what we are meant to receive, and what we are all meant to receive is Love, unfiltered. More than that, every time we let go of a particular outcome, we openly give permission to ourselves to receive an even better outcome and possibly one that we didn't even think was possible.

Currently, I am sitting at the keyboard of a very old PC. When I lost my home in July 2008, it was somewhat to my relief. I look back now and see that it was meant to be like this, because there were things that I was not taught along the Path when I left what I thought, at one time, was the safety of the nest that was created by my parents. When I think back to the time when this place in my head was the biggest, happiest place in the world, I see now, at this point in my lifetime thus far, that I am a very different person than I was just last month...hell, last week. And...oh man, last weekend brought change to my life. With a loss that I thought would hurt more than it did, came also the realization that while that desert up there will always be home to me, the idea of "home" lives inside of me. It lives inside of us all.

Home is not an address, but the house that we see in our minds and the memory of that place as being, for most of us, the safe place that it was back then when it needed to be is not the same house that we sit in at what may be the most crucial of all times in our lives. Right this moment I am free. I may not be technically free, but in my head and my heart and most importantly, my Soul, I Am Free. I am no longer bound by the ideal created by me when I was a child. It is an ideal which no longer applies and can never again because when I was forced to leave my home, I knew that it was with purpose. I knew that when I lost my home that it was finally my turn. My turn, that is, to prove my point, to prove all of my points.

I have been known in the past to be somewhat a fireball of energy whose light is as big and as deep and as real as is the Love which I Know I am captivated by. From what should have been the most negatively defining time in my life – a life which included horrible abuses of the spiritual kind, and the kind that take an entire lifetime for anyone to overcome... IF they can, that is – right this moment of now.

Right Now, at This Very Moment, I am sitting here and reflecting back on these last four years, and I see that I have changed. In fact, I see that I have changed a whole lot, and in these four short years I have grown from a materialistic bitch, to a more Cosmic, perhaps even Divine Woman. I am a far cry from who I was just a month ago.

Just four years ago, almost to the date, I lost the house that I'd moved to that was physically my home. I see now, though, that the world is my home, that I am a Universal Cosmic Child and that I have a Deep and Abiding Love for all things Lunar. I see much of myself in the wide and bright full Summer Moon, and sometimes, if I am quiet enough, she talks to me, not with her Voice, but with her Love. I see in the Moon my own Sacred Self, and who that person is is not who people think I am.

I am called many things, but I go only by my own name, Roxanne, and I hated my name not too long ago. I have since grown into it. I have grown into the idea of me, and because of my past history as a chronic giver, people are not liking this Me, because this Me makes up her mind and goes through with a thing, no matter what. This Me is no longer crazy and loud, and this me prefers to be quietly strong in the safety of her very own Silence. This Me likes to think, and this Me likes herself...in fact, she Loves Her Self. Because she knows that she is worth while. She knows that she has tried in the past to save the world, even as she sacrificed her own. She knows that she gave up so much so that others could have what she could not, what she would not, because she still believed that it took action and payment for people to Love You.

Yeah?

Well, that's bullshit. It is, has been and always was. People keep on buying it as the truth. People keep on thinking and believing that they, as a whole, cannot Love. I don't buy that. It's not the truth of us. I know the truth of us. The Truth of the human race can be found in any neighborhood, whether it is the 'hood or is in an upscale neighborhood. I know that people in a community which is close knit behaves as a community that is close knit. This same thing can be said of the 'hood, the barrio, the shoreline, the mountains...everywhere...everywhere that there is human life there is also the potential for Love on a grand scale to be shown and observed.

People love their neighborhoods. They do. I did. I do. I try, no matter where I live, to make sure that the people with whom I come in to contact, no matter if I have known them for many years, or if I have only met them – if I expect to have decent people in my life, I needed to draw them to me. I had the best example of this in a tiny little desert town called Helendale. Helendale, California is home to a tiny golf course community called "Silver Lakes." Silver Lakes is where I spent a significant amount of time, planting my roots, making my friends and having a life. Many of the things contained in the first part of this book are about people who I have met up to the point I'd lost my home on Strawberry Lane.

I was not the wreck that I never knew I was until the day that I had to live with my parents again. It was at that time that my lessons began. I had to relearn what was not taught to me as a child, and when you learn those things as an adult, you learn them through your kids. I learned that our kids need our respect. I learned that they all have their own voice. I have to keep reminding myself that one day they are all no longer going to be in my care. One day, they will look back on this time and hopefully they will know that I always tried to make things as pleasant as I could, even though it was to my own detriment. I "put myself out there," and made myself open to becoming a slave, meant to spend her life in servitude, not to people but to old ideals and ways of being. I was never taught but always knew that one day I would sit at a keyboard and without any direction ,other than the Whims of the Soul, and start to write the greatest love letter to the rest of the world, and well, this is as close as it is getting.

I have been able to maintain, as these last four years have proven to me, that I am capable of Loving people. I am capable of forgiving people. I am capable of so much that no one ever told me I was capable of. I found out that I am not the only person on the planet who hurts, that hurts show up at our doorstep when we are ready for them. Ready for them because the things that hurt us also teach us. We should be embracing the lesson in the bullshit that leads to our pain. We abhor hurt. No one likes to hurt, but if we do not hurt for a spell, we won't learn. We have to hurt sometimes to learn. Not everything is going to be a fun ending. Not everything in life is fun...duhhhhh.....I mean...yeah, I have given birth three times and no matter who tells you that it is SO spiritual an event only tells people half the story.

It fucking hurts. It fucking hurts to birth children. They are not the same size as the opening is that their gigantic heads squeeze an ENTIRE HUMAN BEING OUT OF. That shit hurts, I promise. Yet, like all other things that hurt physically, so, too, do the pains of the Soul heal. One day we all just wake up and realize that we have hurt for longer than we should have and that we are the ones who are hanging on to our pains. We like collecting stuff, even our emotional stuff, and unless we are willing to release our selves to the demons so that we can find their strength while they taunt us, we will never be able to fully become who we really and truly are- ever. We must face what we fear. It took time to get to that point where what we fear dictates what we do and how we treat other people. It will take time for us to learn how not to fear getting close, because it took time to know what it feels like to get too close and get hurt. We do not like to hurt, but if we cannot trust, we will never do anything other than hurt, always.

I have been witness to the pain that hanging on to the hurt causes. I see daily what it is that a constant air of mistrust creates for us physically. If no one is worthy of our trusting them, then what kind of life can we expect to have? Can we really believe within us that there are no good people left? Have my deeds been so heinous and my words so caustic that you cannot bring your own self to see the "me" who lives in You? It is only in the hurts and the ugliness that we witness in others are we also bearing witness to ourselves. When I see other people, I see them for the Light they bring with them, because that Light is mine and belongs to me because that is what I give to anyone. If we can give grief, we can also give Light, and we can rest nicely in knowing that our combined light will change the world in which we live. We can live together, and we can have John Lennon's ideal of what Life here on Earth could be like. Most assuredly, yes, Mr. Lennon, indeed, I can imagine all the people...all of us...I can see it, Sir. Thank You...

I am witness to the pains of the collective losses around us all. We are not being stripped of the things important to us. We are instead being prepared for the real Thing, no matter what the Real Thing is. If you have been dwelling on things for years as to why it is that you have suffered in one part of your life I am telling you that right now you are here and reading this because you asked at one time why it was that a certain part of your Self suffered. Perhaps it was for a lack of camaraderie that we'd gone through the losses of friendships, and when it came to the losses of Love between two people it was so that either side could finally, through the eyes of a friend, see that same connection that happens between two people who never knew each other from the get go, but somehow, they just sort of belong in that moment. It is Real, in that Moment, and if you can reach back there and find what that felt like again, you will have it again and again, and it will be my proof, my friends, that you know that Love indeed does not change and does not die.

We find that the Love that was in that moment is forever more, even now, because you can reach back to that time and that place and your Soul will tell you that yes, that happened. That happened and you were there and you really saw what you saw. You were there and it was a defining moment, the kind that come from having to deal with the moment when your manifestations become your reality. You did not know until that moment that your thoughts are powerful so long as they are truthful and Divine. They must be pure and must come from that place within where we find that reality and the Divine come together and collide with the elements and in that one tell-it-all moment of silence you can see the veil that was there finally lift and you are free. You are free because you now have the truth of you. You have that one time in your life where what stands in front of you is a million and one possibilities and you are giddy and fidgety like children. You are elated and cannot believe the power of you, the power of your Soul. Yet, there it is.

There it is, staring at you, no matter what it is. That thing that you dwelled on, as I have already stated, is right there in front of you. Yours. You invited it into your life. And now, just like I was, like I am, for the first time you were given that one shot that you longed for. It was not that you were magical or anything like that but that you were somehow in that moment wondering what the hell it was that you did to score as huge as you did? Then you realize it doesn't matter, that how you got there does not matter – only THAT you got there. In that moment you are ecstatic and scared. You are scared by your own power -but it is a fear of God kind of scared and not you're a freakin' wuss scared. It's a fun scared. You start drawing to you exactly the thing that you wanted to, and here you are, not sure if it is that you are freaked out that you did it at all, or freaked out because now...you have to live up to it.

Do not bother yourselves with the thoughts which brought you the heartaches you are still suffering from ...we suffer because we choose it, choose to live back in the time when those hurts were meant to be suffered. If you were still meant to suffer them, there would be a reason. If your reason is that those things still hurt, I get it, but it ain't cool...don't live back there. Right Now is way better. Right now is where you need to be, and right now is the most significant moment you will ever have because right now you were meant to see these words and these words were meant to be here for you...well, here they are. You no longer have to suffer the pain from days gone by.

You no longer have to do anything that you have done in the past in order to illuminate what it is that has hurt you so markedly. You are not now nor have you ever been required to carry the pain from your past with you. This is your Now. This is when you get to be all you are meant to be, and this is the start of the changes that you want in your life. You can wish and hope for the impossible things, and those impossible things will remain that way if you should so choose to continue seeing them in that manner. You will find out that those things which seem impossible are not as daunting as you believe them to be. You just have to be able to see yourself in the way that you do when you envision the thoughts that you have.

There is nothing quite more lovely than the idea that we are who controls this life of ours. We have collectively, the most of us, over the course of the time that mankind has been in existence, managed to make ourselves the messes that we are. If we could just understand that even when we do not get the things that we see with our mind's eyes, and when we are prone to the lessons which will come to us, if we would just stop for a moment and think that maybe the thing we are fixated on and maybe the thing that we want so badly is just indicative of the thing that we want rather than the actual thing that we want, we would know for sure that always, Spirit has us squarely and permanently safe.

Spirit has us, every single one of us, and this knowing alone should be enough to get us all through our weariness, but it doesn't. It doesn't because a lot of us in this lifetime have yet to become absolutely and fully aware of our own Power. We think of power in terms of things, and we think that power makes us more powerful than other people, but the truth of the matter is that we are only as powerful as we believe ourselves to be. When we are ready to believe our powerful manner, and when we can realize that whatever it is that we need we will be supplied with, this is when things within us change to accommodate that wish of the Soul. The only way back to our power is to experience the weaknesses that we fear the most, for it is when we are the most scared that we are also the most powerful. We are the most powerful in that moment because we are meant to push through it even though we feel as though we are in a weakened state. When we are weak, really, we are strong and powerful. We have to be. We do not realize that we are being strong in that moment, that moment when we feel like our lives are falling apart and our world in falling down around us in glass-like shards. We do not realize it because we really are not meant to. We are meant to push through the bullshit to the Light. We do not realize our own power until after we have had to become weak to become powerful.

If you have pined for the ever-lasting Love that you thought you had in the past, rest easily in the idea that what you need will be yours – you just have to not have the air of belief that you are not worthy of it. That Love can be in any form, can come from any person, and that person or form will always be not only what you need to have, but also will not disappoint in the way it is presented. It will always be on purpose that you will find your Self in the Souls of others. You will always know your own Tribe by the people who are drawn to it. You will always Know when you are in the presence of Like-ness of Souls because you will have the comfort of knowing that you do, long before you need to have that comfort of Knowing. It will just be. You will just know these people because that is how Spirit works.

You will find out that you are your own ever-lasting Love, and that you were this all along. You will know that you are meant for certain things and certain people, and you will be given those things, and you will Know those people long before you even are told their name. You will begin to understand your place in your own life if you can manage to get out of your own way. If you can just believe in what you believe to be impossible as being totally possible, you will find out that there is nothing that truly is impossible and that you are believing only what might happen. Things that might happen only happen when we think that we are not okay enough for them to not happen.

When it was that I thought that I was never going to be good enough at a thing to complete something that I really wanted to, along came a lesson in the form of a broken heart that had always been the measure of my heart. It just seemed normal to me. Then one day, along came the confirmation that all along, I was incorrect in my thinking that I am not good enough. What I did not know was that I was not believing what I knew was true, and rather was believing only what others told me was my truth. I find now that it was never my burden, the weight of their judgment. It was never mine to carry, all those thoughts that I had and believed as being my own truth. I was not bad, but I was a good person who had done some things that were not in line with what I needed to do and more, needed to believe.

When we are more inclined to think that what other people say of us is the truth of us, we are, at that time, more inclined, too, to fall prey to our own foolishness, our own thoughts about what we assume is what other people think of us. There has been an air for many generations that staying quiet and keeping our own thoughts to ourselves as being socially correct, but how can we manage that when we look around ourselves at the world we have collectively created and believe that what we think about somehow is not evidenced in the realities that are ours? We do not have to go through the pain we choose to suffer, at least not as long as we want to believe that we do. There is a gentleness, a relief of sorts, when we think about the things that we go through if we are willing to go through those things with an open mind and a heart willing to find out what the pain is about and if that pain is meant for us to hang on to. My fast answer is that our pain is never meant for us to hold tight to. Even as it might seem like it is the right way to go, the normal way to do things is never to accept that we will be in pain but rather that our pain is not permanent.

Humans are funny like that – we hang on to things that are familiar, and we habitually try to make right those things we see as wrong by doing the same things and thinking the same thoughts that we have always. Managing to change our lives is a feat of monumental proportions. We go through our daily lives behaving as though all is well and that we have things very much under our control. It is when things seem to go awry that we are not willing to look at it all as a whole and see to it that there is a theme within the pain, a story being told and that we are the ones writing that story. We are who controls our own destiny. We are the ones who create the things that we see in our lives, and if you do not believe this much then it is time to take stock of the things that you think about.

Our thoughts are very much alive. If there were not any truth to this we would not see the things in our lives that we dwell on the most. If we see mostly painful things, we will be privy only to seeing those things which hurt us, because that is the only thing we are focusing on. If we see only the things that have broken our hearts and we choose to only live our lives in that area of pain we are doing ourselves a great disservice in that there is more to life than only what our ego misses as its own. We seek out great Love, and we see to it that we ruin ourselves for other people and we ruin ourselves by not being ourselves. We want to be all we can be, at our highest best, but we falter when it comes to the point where we must show ourselves as ourselves and not as the person we think they want to see in us. Other people see in us the truth of us, and we should be so inclined to understand that their ideal of us, of other people in general, is not our ideal. They are allowed to have their own ideal, just as we are, and when we choose to allow theirs to discolor ours is when we are also prone to the things from which mistrust springs.

Mistrusting others is learned. We are born of Love. Love is not mistrusting. Love is joyful and is plentiful and comes in all shapes and sizes and colors. We Love those closest to us the most, and when we are not willing to not do things for them only but also for ourselves as well we are at that time ready and able to receive that which rightfully belongs to us. What belongs to us is believing in ourselves, and what belongs to us is Loving ourselves, and what else belongs to us are all those things that we have been willingly throwing away by giving those things to people we know would never give them back in the same manner which we gave them.

I have always been the one to believe that what you give most surely you will get, and this is on all levels. If what we are more inclined to give is attrition, we will absolutely get it back. If what we are only able to give is fear, we will be given things and situations in which fear will prevail. We are always given those things that we dwell on the very most. If you fear being abandoned, you will be abandoned and the bitch of it all is that sometime in your life you felt the need to 'let go' of someone through means of abandoning them. While this might seem okay to do when it comes to trying to save your own self from the hurt of another person (again) it is not. It is not because when we leave without warning, unless it is through a physical death of our bodies, we leave a circle which begs to be made full and the fullness will only come to us through our own will to complete it.

Everything in life is circular. We live in a spiral universe. Proof of this can be had by watching water flow down the drain. It flows in a circular motion. We can see that the only way the water travels is in a circular motion. The planets travel in a circular motion, both singly and collectively. The planets travel around the Sun. The world is a ball, which is circular in motion. The pregnant bellies of mothers in waiting is circular. Everything, if we take notice, is circular. No matter what it is that we are trying to learn, are meant to learn, will come back to us if we do not or are not willing to learn it. We will be met again with the same hurts or happiness, the same tears or laughter, and those hurts and laughter may not be real, may be there only to take the place of the thing that needs to be, and the thing that needs to be is a wholeness of Soul. We cannot have it if we cannot Know it. We cannot Know it if we are not open to it. When we seem to not want to learn, the circle is left broken. It is only in the learning that we will know that the circle has been made full and that the lesson has been learned.

Our lessons come to us when we are ready to learn them. We are never told that we are ready to learn them. We only know that somehow, what we are meant to go through is meant to happen to us regardless of the pain which we also know will be involved. There is pain when we are meant to go back into a place within us where fear reigns. It is hard to believe people who have given us grief for the entirety of time that they have been in our lives when they tell us that who they are now is not who they used to be. It is not until those who tell us this are given the same thing in return, by us or by others, that the pain they gave is the same pain they have now. If you feel like your heart is always breaking, it is because you spent a lot of time breaking other peoples' hearts. It you feel like you are always being doubted, lied to, cheated on, have things taken from you that you love...anything that hurts at all that we go through is the result of a lesson that we consciously thought about and have imparted onto someone else and for no other reason than that we could do it. We had it in us and we could do it and dammit we did it for all the reasons that we said we would and we did it because it felt good to get our revenge.

Getting revenge on people is not okay. Revenge is already from a dark place, a feeling giving way to the things that we work so hard not to have to deal with when it comes to us through others. Being the target of someone else's revenge means that there is a deficit within them that we can see because it is also within us and is a deficit that we think is because of something that we said or did when truly the deficit is theirs because that is all they think of themselves as being worthy of. If we can get through the ugly feelings of needing to be vengeful and we can Know that our egotistically inclined vengeful feelings are not the cause of others but that of our own we can get through those times when we feel like the world is out to get us.

The world is not out to get anyone. The world itself is but a combined reality of thoughts we are all thinking at the same time. The things that we are thinking about all the time are the things that are most important to us, no matter if we see them as being good or we see them as bad. No one is meant to be here to be a pain in the ass to anyone, but it happens a lot and we are meant to learn to not have to feel the weight of that reality that is theirs alone. We can live with a person for the majority of our lives and would know well the things that make them tick but never really know who they are because they refuse to let us see themselves for real. They refuse to see themselves as vulnerable, and they refuse to allow themselves the velvety luxury of the pain that the feel because the pain they feel is somehow bigger than they are. This happens to us all.

In fact, lots of things happen to all of us, all the time, and it is our lesson which is contained within the shame and the hurt. We are scared to feel the pain of who we are when we are not all that we are meant to be and know that we are not all that we are meant to be. We are pained with the expectations that others carry within them regarding us and we are in pain because we feel like we need to live up to their standard even if we do not know our own.

Yup, that's right- we do not know our own standard. We never know what our own standard is for anything until what is not our own comes along and makes us take notice of who we really are in the world. Where we falter is when we are not willing to watch our own patterns of behavior as they are dictated by our pattern of things we believe as being the Truth. The Truth of things never fails us, sometimes hurts us, is always good for us, even if we think we have lost out on much. What we do not think about is that we are not at a loss if what we have had to let go of is somehow not serving us. Things which do not serve us will be led out of our lives and rarely will that happen by our own hands. They will happen when they are meant to happen and not when we want them to. When we are ready to receive the goodness that we are is when we are also ready to receive all that we are to others and all that we are in manifest.

I know well that that which I was able to allow into my life that hurt me came into my own life because I let it. I let things that people thought of me, let things that were done to me, let it all just get to me. I spent a long time thinking and believing that when my husband told me that I was worthless that he was right. When my parents told me that I didn't know better than they do, that they were right. When I allowed a friend to think that his was the last opinion of what I am going through be the truth of me and found myself trying hard to live up to that opinion of me and not allowing my own unfiltered Light and Love to Shine through me to others, these are the times when I allowed the lesson to become part of my life. And the lessons are not meant to be forever, but they can be lifelong if we refuse to learn them for the right reasons and not for the wrong ones.

Yes, we do learn what we must, and yes, it is even truth that we learn the wrong way and take away the wrong things from it. "The Wrong" way is the way of the Ego, the way that we were taught to deal with things by someone else's truth of things. We fail to trust our own selves because someone else told us that ours is not the best way to go and it was only according to them and by them that we would be perceived even by our own selves as being somehow "wrong." It is why we are revisited by those same lessons again and again, and sometimes it is the mere thinking and the opinion of the lesson itself, the wrong learning of it, that makes it possible that we have to learn all over again. We learn in spurts sometimes, and those spurts are what hurt us because we are faced with the truth that we don't want to look at.

We have to look at ourselves through the eyes of Love. There is no other way that we will survive this madness called Life or the pains which come within it unless we are willing to be balanced in it all. We cannot hope for someone else to change things for us, even as others are there in our lives and even as they are there like we are and in service to themselves. Being in service is not the same as being in servitude. Servitude makes us find those ugly places within us and look at them. Service to others is different. Service to others helps us become strong and bold and fearless. When we step out into a thing with the idea that we have to sacrifice who we are to help others be all they are, this is when we are in a mindset of servitude and being servitude means that we have given up a piece of us so that someone else would not have to give up that piece of themselves. This is servitude. When we feel like we are at a loss on account of someone else, it is servitude. When we are told that we should not be sad for the loss and we continue to feel the weight of other people and their needs, it is servitude. When we feel like we are obligated to save someone else and it is because they have come to us with that obligation and we choose to go with them and in that energetic pattern, we are in servitude.

However, when we do not feel like we have to do something for someone else and we just are compelled by the Love within us is when we are being of good service to others. When we are given a task meant to be completed in Love, when we go about that task in fevered pursuit of it all without thinking of anything collected by us when the task is completed, we are in service to others. This is what our lives are meant to be about – to be of good service to others and to help them through their learning by being a part of that learning. We want so badly for others to listen to us. The reason they don't listen is because their Souls know that we are not willing to do the things that we are telling them would be good for them to do. They are not believing us because we are not believing us.

If you no longer want to hurt then realize now that the part of hurting that makes you no longer want to hurt is You. You are the part that hurts and the part that keeps on hurting and you are choosing it. A wise person once told me that the only person he could trust is himself, and it was through watching him fret over things that made me realize that he could not trust himself, neither his judgment, and this is a harsh place to live all the time. If we are not willing to trust other people then how are we to expect that they would know that we trust ourselves enough to actually make our lives better than we do not realize they are already becoming? How can we act as though what we are saying is able to become the truth of someone else when we ourselves are not willing to trust it? If we cannot trust our own truths no one else will either. This is not my way. This is Spirit's way, and Spirit's way is always and forever perfect.

Our own perfection is housed inside of our imperfections. What we see as being "better than" is only our own thoughts about anything. We can see one person as the perfect fit for our lives and never work on ourselves to make that much true. Then one day we find that maybe that measure of perfection may have been right at the time we thought it was, and one day something more suitable comes along and changes the perspective entirely. Who we are is mirrored in other people. What we become is not hinged on who they are to us because who they are to us are who we are to ourselves. If we are good to ourselves we will automatically be good to the right people. If we judge and cause hurt, in kind we will also be given those kinds of people to learn through and with as well.

We don't ever think of ourselves as 'in utero" because that is a term used best when thinking of babies who are gestating. Yet we need to think of ourselves as being this way on a daily basis, because without this thought we have really no reality of just how huge we really are to the world and everyone else living in it who is not us. We do not know how great an impact we have on others until we have been impacted by someone else's reality. Once it is that we have been gifted with the things that break our hearts we also can depend on the idea that we are now on our way to our own evolution, a turning point of our own making, and it is a good thing. Change is never a bad thing. We hate change. We bristle from it, not because we think we are perfect but more because we are lazy. We ache from within from the effects of who we are no longer but we make no change to our lives because we fear the unknown.

Unknown things can be both good or bad, but we tend to label them all as being bad, all as being wrong, and all as being not the thing that we want for our lives, and we do this because we fear everything. We are afraid of letting people down more than we are afraid of much else. When we let people down we hurt and the hurt is two-fold because they are not the only ones who hurt – we also hurt, and those hurts become part of who we are in relation to them. We want them to be able to be all they can be to themselves without their taking away who we want them to be in our lives to us, and we selfishly confront people by trying to manipulate them into buying into our bullshit. If we do not have to change ourselves to rise to the occasion and we expect others to make that change on our behalf and we then have the audacity to turn it around on them, we are working from the Ego's place and working from a point of view that is dead. It is dead because it drains the life out of us, and dead because we are trying hard to make a magnetic resistance in us "fit" so that we do not have to change.

We are not okay when trying to manipulate people, namely when that manipulation is brought out so that we can have what we want, even if it means that someone else will have to be who they are not so that we can be accommodated by them. Accommodation should never be made so that everyone else has to change but that we never have to. This is wrong. This is something that no one needs to do and something that no one needs to be the recipient of. No one likes to be used. Sometimes I feel like I have been used by the people who tell me that they love me, who may indeed love me, but who fail to realize that there are things about me that I cannot change that they might not Love, and those are the things which have been the definition of me by them. Other people come to our lives to show us who we are, and sometimes what we see is not what we want to see. But it is there and is real and if we are wise we know to take what we see and use it. If we are prone to pining brought about by our egos we can rest assured that where we are now is where we will remain until we can accept the not so great view that others have of us.

We sooner will change who we are for a moment and to satisfy those within our lives who tell us who we are and who expect us to believe that theirs is the only thing about us which matters. Most of the time we cannot see the hurts we cause because the hurts we cause are stopped from surfacing because other people – the ones who we cause the hurt to – have a tendency to not want to hurt us even though we have hurt them.

When it comes to loving others, we either have to do it all the way, have to be ready to receive them as they are and make no judgments on them for being themselves. Too often I have been the target of those who have not come to that place where they are enlightened enough to know, too, that what they see in me also exists in them. What other people thought was great about me, or not so great about me, is also what lives in them. If someone was ballsy enough to tell me that I was a fuck up, they were too busy telling me that I was this to them, and while I may very well have been, it was not their place to bring it to life like they did for me. Theirs was not a good intention, but rather one that, in their minds, placed them ahead of me. This was not mine to deal with, but I dealt with it because that is just how I'd done things for so very long.

When we do things for a long time, it doesn't matter the outcome because we know the outcome. It isn't until we happen to find ourselves at a crossroads in life where what we want and what we need become the very same thing. This does not mean that it is a good thing, or really, a bad thing, but an important thing. When we are faced with every fear that we have, it is at that moment when we are called in to Being the thing that we most want to be, the thing that we have most asked to be, and we fail miserably. We fail because we choose to listen to everyone else's lies about us that might be the truth to them but is not the truth for us. We fail because we do not believe in our own Selves enough to know that if we keep on hearing and seeing and feeling all that we hear, see and feel, somehow we also know that we need to go forward, need to follow our heart's inclinations and find out what it is that we are so intrigued by the thing which now faces us. We fear our own Glory. We should stop doing that because all it does is make us feel shittier about who we are in relation to everything else.

And who we are in relation to all else is a big deal. You may or may not know this, and I will repeat it until I am blue in the face and without breath in me to shout it out loud to anyone who will listen. You are a big deal. You are meant to be here because there is a unique mission that you are on, and if you were not here, that mission cannot begin. Your place and your purpose is Love, but the way that it comes into being is all yours. This is the reason that you are so good at that one thing that you do so well. You are good at what you do because you have a purpose connected to it, you have a Divine accomplishment that is waiting to happen, and the only one who is able to make it happen is you.

That's right. I said it – now deal with it. You are a big giant deal. If no one has told you so in the time called your Life, here I am. You are such a big deal, in fact, that without your presence here on this planet and in this lifetime there are things that are connected only to you which are also connected to the Divine that are only able to happen when you let them happen. Without you there is no thing that was meant to happen by your hand that is supposed to happen. There is no freakish happiness over things that seem trivial, and there is no joy which is tied to the thing you are waiting for to come into fruition. Without you being the great big deal that you are, the miracle of your life cannot Be.

We cannot entertain the idea that we are here for no reason. I know that this is not true. Everyday we are each given the opportunity to be good to people and sadly we pass those times up as though they were somehow not Divinely timed. Know now that all things which come to pass in our lives are meant to happen. The reason that you are reading this now is sometime in your life at one point in time you asked for someone's point of view on why it is that we suffer and no one else had the right thought about it or for you than me. That is the way that this works. This is not to say that I know everything in the world related to Spirit because there is not enough time in this lifetime for any one of us to know everything about any one thing.

We do not do things on accident, and whether you believe it or not there are no such things as coincidences. Every little thing in this lifetime is meant to happen because there are too many people on this planet for us to not be somehow connected to one another. We are totally connected to one another and it is to our own greatest advantage that we are. I say this because there is no truth to the idea that we can do anything on our own. We might be able to exact things and begin them, but we end up needing help from time to time. Right where you are at this moment in time is where you are supposed to be. You cannot "do" your life without this moment. This is the truth. This is the reality of things. We cannot go forward in our lives without this very one moment in time because it is needed for the next one and the next one. Nothing in life is an accident- not even an accident is an accident.

When we can begin to see things in a manner which is not the same manner that we have seen things in the past is when we can see the changes we want to see in our lives. A big part of change is being able to accept change because without change and more, without our acceptance of that change, nothing happens. We eventually give in and figure out that Spirit Knows what Spirit is Doing, and once that kicks in we also know what it means to live in the very light of Love, the Light that is the Divine and the Light which belongs to us all. If we banish the light all the time we will never have peace in our lives. The Light within in the Light of which I speak and it is this same light that makes possible all the growing that we are meant to do in this lifetime.

We have the choice to either acknowledge or ignore the light all together. When we ignore what is so "ours" we ignore who we are for real, and who we are for real, as I have said already, is a great big deal, not only to me or to you, but to the entire whole of humanity. Without all of us here serving our purpose there is no miracle in this lifetime that can be performed by any one person who would choose to not do what they are meant to do.

So in these last few pages that I will write for you now, I will tell you that you are meant to be here but that you are not meant to suffer permanently. Suffering is a state of mind and we can change our minds all the time. We are meant to be here in Love with Life, with our Souls and with each other, and we are meant to bring to the world our combined light, our combined Love, so that we can all make it through another day. Whether you care to know it or whether you just do know it, I Love You. I cannot see you. I cannot hear you. But I know that these words will stay with you all day long.

And to those who know me for real, even if you have only met me once. We met and it was with grand purpose. No matter your Path, and no matter who you are in my life, know that you are very well and very truly Loved by Me. If it is that I have upset you in the past with anything that I may have said or done, I apologize. I forgive you for being angry with me. I thank you for giving me this chance to say these things to you, and Know that I will always Love you, even if you should one day just no longer be there. I will recall you fondly, often, and with much Love in my heart for you. You are important to me, even in your absence, because I know that at one time or another, I will meet up with another "You" and will recall the way that it felt for me to have to suffer your consequence. If I hurt you, again, I am sorry. I meant no harm.

If you have met with me in person, and you have heard from me since then, and we have had the opportunity to exchange energies, and that I am grateful to you for having shared that time with me. While it might have been a whisper of a moment, the fact is that every movement, every thought, every little action – our everything – matters. It fluctuates with the tides of our emotions, and we collaborate with other souls of a fine and higher mind to bring the most joyful experience we could have in this lifetime.

I applaud you, because you have managed to make it this far in your time on this earth, and you have made it through some very hard times. I know this of you, because I feel you. I knew you – all of You – before I met you, and you are always going to be a big part of who I ended up becoming. Whatever it is that I have become thus far and have brought to your life, I hope it was all you thought it would be, imagined it would be, and wanted it to be. I can only give a gift of my very Self, and while you cannot physically hold it in your hands, you know that I have left you with something to always remind you that yes, I was there, right there, with you, and yes, we had that very same experience. Yes. Yes that happened. Indeed, and I hope it was worth it, whatever the hell it was.

I want you all to know right now that no matter what it is that you are pining for in this lifetime that you can have anything that you want – all you have to do is believe that you are worthy of it. At the onset of this writing, I will admit, I thought I was very much in Love with a person who I now realize cannot Love me the way that I need to be Loved. It is not in his ways to do so, but this does not mean that I do not Love him in a way that he needs to be Loved, which sometimes is so not the way that we are thinking other people need us. When we are on the minds of other people, no matter the reason, know that it is most assuredly with a grand purpose that we are there. Perhaps it was that I was meant, for him, to be the ideal of whatever it was that I represented. It doesn't matter because the lesson from him was that I needed not to worry about who would love me but that I was Loved anyway because I came from Love, just like you came from Love, and that we are all Love.

If we find ourselves at that peculiar crossroads where all that has happened to us to a certain point seems all for naught, know now that there are particular steps that need to take place, things that need to happen and that your bliss is very near to you and is in fact contained in the heart of your Soul. Follow the whims of your Soul, because when you do you will find out that it was there all along, that it was guiding you and that you knew for sure that you needed to eventually follow it. You will never go wrong when you listen to the things that your Soul is telling you and you will never not get where you are meant to be so long as you are more willing to see to it that you do what is best for you as per the reasons and the inclinations of what seems to be your very tattered and beleaguered Soul. While it might seem to you that what you are experiencing is "bad," the reality is that it is just another lesson that each and every one of us will go through. Perhaps not for the same reasons, and no way for the same purpose, because all of our purposes are different, even as they lead to the same common end – the uniting of Souls on a grand scale to bring about Peace, Harmony and Joy for the collective Whole of humanity.

When thinking on things that we want for our lives, think more about how those things will affect the contents of your life, who those things will impact the most, and know now that the one it should impact is you. You are the most important person in your life and you should be. You should be happy to know that it is okay to Love You, okay to want to have the best and the highest regard for yourself, and that most of all, it is that you came to this life to be that person and you came to this awareness to give to the world the things that only you can. You are more important than you think you are, and the time is now to start believing this much. If you are not listening to you, then you might not realize that you are listening to what other people are telling you is right according to them about you, and no one is right about You OTHER than You! You are amazing in so many ways that you cannot even begin to know that once it is that you accept just the tiniest amount of this as being the truth you will know that at that moment you are on the verge of learning something more about yourself than you ever thought you would. In that tiny moment of passing time you will find out that you are magnificent, that you are the greatest You on the planet, and at that moment, maybe because someone else who is new to your life told you so, you might believe it just for a minute or so.

That minute or so is all you will need, because in terms of Universal knowing, a minute is long enough to know the world as it is, right in that moment. And in that significant moment you will, too, know that you are a remarkable part of the finer workings of Spirit, that you are meant to bring to this lifetime the many wonders that you Are. All you have to do is learn to believe your own Truths and everything else will be magically apparent.

When you are pining for something, someone, whatever, make sure to it that whatever it or whoever they are are worth the time and the effort and the Love which you have to expend in order for whatever it is that you are trying to bring to fruition. You are not obligated to do more for other people than what you are capable of and more, what they are willing to do for themselves. There is never a good time to decide that you are not worth that same measure expended on their behalf if what you are expending on them is all your heart, all your soul, all your "you," to the point that you become exhausted from the work. The work is only worth it if all involved will learn from it. You cannot do for others what they are not willing to do for themselves. We cannot continue to rescue those who do not want to be rescued, and we cannot try hard to not pity pitiful people.

Expectation is the thing that makes us lose our hope. Instead of losing hope, lose your expectations, and watch what happens in your life. You will find that there is an ease to getting what you want and that it is not when you want what you want to happen will happen, but just when you need it to happen – that is when it will happen. You cannot decide when you will fall in Love, and you cannot decide when you will be happy, and you cannot decide to not be here and fully present in the Now and still think and believe that what you are bearing witness to is the rebirth of your Self as the Self that you are meant as being. No one is meant to stay the way that they are forever. Sometimes we change our minds about things, and more times than not it is in those times when we have made a choice for our changes that we are most powerful. Our power does not come from the things that we have or the things that we are capable of – it comes from our being simply and only who we are, and I have stated, again and again, who you are, who I am, who we all are is very important in this lifetime. There is no time for you to think otherwise. Now is when you must not only know this but know it as the truth of you.

Do I care that I sound like the world's most rabid cheerleader? I hope so! I am trying to! You need to know that you are not alone, and you need to believe that no matter what – you are LOVED beyond reasonable measure. This knowledge should make you gleeful. This knowledge should make you understand better that you are needed here, that you were not brought to this lifetime for no reason, and no matter how big or small your contribution to the effort called "life" that you make, know that it is not without notice, that it is seen and heard and believed on a level that the rest of the unenlightened human race knows.

Do I care what you think? Do I care about who you are? Am I for real? You best bet I care, and yes, I am very most definitely FOR REAL! There is nothing that you cannot have in your life, nothing at all – you can have everything that you want and need and it is effortless for you to have it all. It will take work, it may even hurt a little, but none the less you can have whatever your little heart desires. Anything at all, no matter what it is, the moment that you think about it, it is already real. You just have to believe that it is. While I don't like sounding like I am some sort of crazy lady who thinks that with just the simple twist of your thoughts that you can have everything you want right this minute, the one thing that I know you can have right this moment is full Bliss. Yes, it is true – you can be blissful and you can live out that thought in your head and all it takes from you is to believe that it can be.

I mentioned way earlier in this writing that you have to believe in a thing,believe that it is yours and believe that it is in manifest and when you are ready to receive it you will have it! This is the truth of you. This is the truth of us all. What are you waiting for and more, why are you waiting for anything at all? It is YOU who makes this all Be, YOU who has the power to make those thoughts in your head real, and You- only You- who has the ability and the capacity within you to make your Desires into a reality. There are a million and one books on the market by a million and one "gurus" and "professionals" and people who are living the lives that they are also promoting. This is not different – only the language is different.

I won't sit here and tell you that there is a particular method by which you must do all these things, and I cannot tell you that there is a way to make this all be for you other than that you just have to go through whatever it is that you must and once it is that you have gone through it all you will find yourself on the other side of the proverbial hill. The problem with all of us humans is that we are lazy and want other people to do our work for us. No one likes wash dishes, but they have to be washed, and when they have been washed and can be used again we find this sense of relief that at least there are clean cups to use. This same thing can be used to demonstrate what it means to "do the work" within the Soul so as to bring about healing that, while it might not be the fastest way to it, it is the most gratifying.

Yes, my belief is that we go through what we will because we are lacking something in our lives that we need. What we need we are not privy to knowing because what we need is normally not the same thing that we want. What we need is to Know and believe that we are safe in the Universe, and we will never find that same level of safety in other people. We will find the security of what it means to be loved, and we will know that we are meant to be okay within ourselves if it is meant, too, that we have to deal with what we will when we will but that the lessons at hand only cease when we have learned them. If we believe that we are just, and good, and all of those other things that people like to tell other people to be, then we should also believe that we are able to make our lives great.

We should be more inclined to believe in who we are and what we are able to do than we are inclined to bother believing the bad stuff that other people tell us is in us. If they did not have whatever it is that they are calling in you also in them they would not see it there. We cannot know that something in alive in someone else unless we have It alive and well within ourselves. If we can see hurt in others, surely it is also in us. If we see the addictive behaviors of others, it, too, lives in us. Everything that we see we also are, so the next time you want to tell someone all that they are not, remember that you are also not all you are assuming that you are cracked up to be...at least not yet.

When you learn not to judge, not to cause harm or to label and when you can simply and only be a quiet observer of the life that is happening around you and see, too, your place in it, you will know peace. When you call in Love, you are automatically calling in Peace. Peace should never take our thinking that we need to rebuild it. Peace, like Love, Just Is. We must be able to bring that energy of Peace back to the world, back to mankind, and back, most of all, to our very singular selves. The only way that we can see peace in the world and in our own personal world is if we are willing to give up the compulsion toward war. War brings with it only more war. People in their places of power seem to be lost on this idea. Those who would be considered as "the powers that be" are clueless as to the way that things really are in the universe.

They are not aware that war makes more war, not peace, and they are not aware that the way that they are controlling things is only able to control so many people for so long before those people on the planet decide that they have had enough. We are there now in the idea that we are all tired of being told that our abundant nature is somehow not enough. How can that be? WE ARE ENOUGH and most of us keep on just believing what we are told rather than questioning what it is that we are force-fed as the truth. It is only the truth if we make it true, and it is only the truth if we believe it. Nothing is ever true until we make it that way. Nothing matters unless we make it matter.

We have to make things important, and we humans are very good at making our things important to the extent that we do. When we do this we give our things the power that was ours but that we chose to give away. Stop giving away your power! Stop giving your Self and your Soul up for people who are so clueless as to the way things are in the Universe and stop the madness that becomes you when you get hurt and your heart is aching, all on account of someone else's truth. NO ONE ELSE'S TRUTH WILL EVER BE YOUR OWN! No matter how similar a situation is with another person, no two lives are alike. There may be similarities all the way down to the very way you tie your shoes yet that does not mean that you are doing more than merely traveling the Path you are on and you are doing so in the company of others. Yes, other people matter – hell, we all matter, but when it comes down to you and your life, the only one who matters in that instance is You!

No one else can make your life the living testament to the graciousness of the Universe except for you. No one else will be able to do for you what only you are able to do for yourself. I can write all the words I want to, and you can read them and not at least try to make some sense of it all and realize that what you are reading is the truth, and nothing will change. You can spend all the money you want to on healers, on psychics, on things that you would not spend money on otherwise, and unless you change your thoughts your life will not change. You see, our lives are built upon our thoughts. Our thoughts carry energy and our thoughts, whether you believe me or not, affect the outcome of all happenings on the planet and in the Universe. It has been known that "thoughts are things," and is said often and over and over again, and we find that this is evidenced by simply stepping outside our front door, or our backdoor, and seeing what is there and living and alive.

Life itself is a miracle. All of us need to see it this way. The more we view our lives as a testament only to the pains we feel, the more pain we will feel. The more we view our lives as an unfolding testimony the more that we will feel like we are the miraculous beings that we really are. We cannot know that we are the manifestation of a higher power's Love and creativity unless we can see it and alive within ourselves. Only then will we be able to see it in others. It is not always the "bad" we are privy to pointing out in others. There is the idea that we can tell other people what is wonderful about them, and we can tell them about the good things happening to us. Not everything has to be a major bitch-pitch. Sometimes it is okay that we would feel down or upset, but know, too, that there is a reason and as long as you know and believe that those feelings are not permanent it will be just automatic that you will also know for sure that Spirit is good, that Spirit has a plan for you and your life and that Spirit is there and waiting for you to believe that you are every bit as awesome as you want to think you are. So go ahead and think you are, because truly, you are.

You don't have to take my words for it – simply take a look in the mirror and you will see, too, what I know is there without seeing it myself. You will see before you a magnificent creature who is meant for Love, who is meant for greatness, and who, most importantly, is a very big part of this very big world. You belong here and it is with purpose.

You can think yourself to not be the big deal that you are, but I would advise against it. I say this because the more that you believe that you are as big a deal as you really are, the more that you will see proof all around you. You will see the proof when you are looking at your own reflection in the mirror, and you will see the proof when you hear the birds singing and the wind howling through the trees. You will know that you are important because you will feel like you are. You will feel like you are because it is just the way this goes. ALL people, eventually, even at the point of their physical exit from this world, find out that they are important and that we always have been. That we would think otherwise is where we screw up every time. Thinking that we are not worth the effort it took for us to simply be in this lifetime is evidence enough for all of us that we are meant to be here in this lifetime, no matter the reason and that we are just here to be of good service to one another.

Whatever it is that has been breaking your heart, I know that it is hard to, but let it go and let it go for all of the right reasons. Let go because hanging on HURTS, and let go because you don't know what awaits you if you do. Let go of the things that make you cry and stop allowing them to make you cry. Let go and regain your own power and know that you are free and that you are strong enough to move forward without delay and without permission. Let go of the idea that you need to hang on to how things turn out, because no matter how you want them to turn out and no matter how much you try hard to manipulate a situation to "go your way," no matter what – the outcome is still going to be what it always was, and either way you will learn what you will from the experience. What you bring to a situation is usually not the same thing that it turns out to be. It evolves. It becomes more useful and adaptable to a situation and if it doesn't, then it is not what you need or want and it will likely not serve you or your purpose.

Everything that we do has a specific vibration. When we send out the vibration of lack we will go through more want. When we send out a vibration of joy, joy is what we will receive. There is nothing in this universe that makes no sense. There is nothing in this universe which is not at its most finest and highest best at the time that it can be. Everything that you see at this moment is right now at its very highest best. It doesn't matter that it might not seem like it in some cases, because when you think about the way the universe works you find out fast that everything is always in manifest. Everything that you are thinking right now, and everything that you are wondering about, and everything else, too, is currently in manifest. Whatever it is that you are waiting to receive, do not fret over it, and don't do like you might have by worrying about it and trying hard to figure out ways that you cannot have that which it is your heart most desires. Your heart desires that you be happy, feel safe, Know Love, and always is right there to lead the way for you. We are told to think before we do anything, and more times than not while we were thinking we were being logical and not soulful. Take that chance to live from the Soul for once and learn that you are Divine, that you are a Sacred piece of this grand scenario called Life and know, too, that you are more valuable than many diamonds and many pearls.

Within you are the seeds of greatness, and no one bothered to tell you this. You are many lifetimes worth of miracles which have been kept within you for so long that now those miracles are waiting to become and you feel compelled to hang on to them. Release them and let them Become. Release the fears you have of allowing, of receiving, and of all that is needed to make you Who You Came To Be in this Lifetime. Release what holds you from the Divine within you, and realize now that without you here there is no miracle called "You," and you are very, very important.

Let yourself feel everything. When you are sad, feel it, all the way down to the Bones of Your Soul and Know it and Live it and Be it. When you are happy, allow yourself the right to feel that way and don't let anyone else dictate for you how you feel. Don't allow other people to stand in your way. Don't allow others to tell you who you are. Don't allow You to not be all you came into this world to be, because the truth is that we are all waiting for you to return to being the realest you that you can manager being, and that is a big fat deal. Whoever you are for real – this is the person who the world is waiting to meet, or to be reintroduced to us all, and you keep on just being who you are not and trying to make your square peg of a self fit into that triangular space. Knock it off already, and know that while you might not fit in every place you want to, you fit in in life and not because you belong to this group or that group, but because you are spectacular and awesome and without you here none of us gets to know you, see you, be with you, share with you a measure of Divine Love unique to each and every one of us.

When you speak, do so with both a gentleness and with strength, and remain mindful of your words as your words will cause a change in the person who you are orating to. If you fill your rhetoric with hatred and rage, then hatred and rage will be the thing which is perpetuated. If you fill your words with kindness and with Love and with the intention of lifting others up, do so with the idea in your head that what comes of that situation has benefited from your words. Words are very powerful. Words have brought down strong men and made women swoon, have ended tyranny and have started wars. Words might not have the same energy as numbers, but they carry an energy which can be caustic in nature and can even sometimes kill a person.

When we speak our energy is given the breath of life, the Alo'ha within us. We are given a new chance every single day of our lives. Most people squander it believing that tomorrow will come and that they will be able to deal with it "later." Yet no one really thinks about when later will be and we just keep on putting things off. I wanna know why we would want to wait for later anyway? Why would anyone want to put off life changing action until "later"? I cannot see why that is a good thing and more than that I also cannot see how any of us have managed with our "later" thinking. Later is not the time to exact your changes...right now seems about the best time to do that!

And what would happen if you did make the changes? What, you would have something to look forward to? How is that anywhere near being "bad"? It is only "bad" because you have become too comfortable in the Now that you have created for you, and I am so sorry but if you think your Now is anywhere near where it could be called "The Awesome Now" you would be both right and wrong. Right because yep – right now is awesome, but wrong because there is so much more than only right this minute. However, never negate the importance of right this minute because right this minute IS important and is the most important minute that will be all day, and there are many, many "right nows" throughout the day that are just as damned important.

I will repeat myself – you are important. Your presence in this lifetime is needed. Without you here, there is no You. There is no personality like yours and there is not another way to make you be here. We are all glad that you are here sharing this experience with us. We are all happy that you made it here and dammit you need to believe this. You need to believe that you are important. It took me a very long time to believe this and more, to know it as my own truth. We do not know the impact we make on another person until we need them to be there for us. We do not know how special we are until someone else comes along and tells us what we should all already believe,know and live – that we are here for a reason, for many reasons, and none of those reasons are to hurt or to be in chronic emotional and Spiritual Pain.

There are a lot of people on this planet. With all of us here and present, there should be no abandoning one another, there should be no question of just exactly how abundant we each are. That we are afraid of everything is just something that we need to learn to not be.

That we are quietly willing to learn not to be is the key...and by now you have probably figured out that Love is the key and that you are the one holding the key-ring!!

I Love You All...aloha !

Please do share the link that you found this book at and let your friends know where to find it for FREE !!!

R   
ev. Kahuna Roxanne K. Cottell

Please visit my website at

 www.reverendroxie22.wixsite.com/LosAngelesKahunaRox

