Our intimate relationships are gifts. They bring light to us, reflecting our own magic presence back to us and we fall in love with ourselves over and over again.
Relationships are mirrors, nothing less and nothing more. We attract those who are able to reflect our imperfections back to us, those imperfections that need to be healed and embraced so that we can move further away from separation thinking, further and further towards oneness. And when the mirror sends back to us an image of loss, abandonment, pain, exactly that which we need to heal in ourselves, we back away in horror and we discard the mirror. And often we buy another mirror right away, seeking the beautiful image of ourself over and over, never able to integrate the pain, the abandonment issues, continue which will, inevitably, be reflected back to us from every new mirror, eventually. And every time we acquire a new mirror, we miss the opportunity to heal.
How do we find the courage to go on?
We find the courage by understanding that honesty is what it is all about. But we also need to understand here that the ego disguises honesty as an attack, very often, in order to protect itself. Blunt honesty, “telling it like it is”, is very often nothing more than an attempt to gain space, to hide, to step away from the inevitable mirroring of that which needs healing, yet again.
Honesty, true honesty, the ability to talk to our partners with the intention of assisting healing for them, is about healing ourselves. About understanding that no relationship should ever be left unhealed, because when we remain unhealed, we will encounter the same challenges again and again and again. The fear of hurting others often keep people trapped in relationships for lifetimes – know that fear of hurting our partners by being honest in love and kindness allows our pain to continue unhealed, disregarding the reason why we are in the relationship, and allowing the relationship to become a prison in which we become more and more disempowered.
We need to heal every relationship before we can leave it, because the healing is ultimately about ourselves.
Be gentle with your partner. Understand that their pain is their healing, and that yours is yours. Have the courage to stand back, to give them time to heal, and recognize that your pain is yours to deal with. There is a lot of talk of sharing in relationships, but I think that that is about sharing the good stuff. When pain and conflict arises, it is necessary that your partner knows that you are there, that you love them, but that you cannot go into that dark place with them. And when they eventually surface and are able to be open again, you will simply be waiting with open arms.
© Nina Ferrell 2009
How to Access the Power of Grace
Is the power of grace real?
What role does grace play in healing?
What would it be like if you knew how to access the power of grace and utilize it in your everyday life?
In her latest book, Defy Gravity: Healing Beyond the Bounds of Reason, best-selling author and medical intuitive Caroline Myss, answers these questions and more by exploring the power of grace and its impact in our daily life experiences.
“Grace is not just a vague divine substance or some poetic ideal that mad mystics came up with in an altered state. Grace is a subtle force beyond the grasp of reason. It is a divine power, a force that the laws of nature are often subject to rather than the other way around, as in the matter of miracles. Grace is what heals.” – Caroline Myss
The Truths of The Soul: Keys to Healing
In her over twenty-five years as a medical intuitive and teacher, Caroline has observed what she calls the five essential “truths of the soul” which are the keys to healing and accessing the power of grace.
The five truths of the soul are:
• You can’t reason with illness, crisis, or God.
She shares that “the people who have described their healing process…have many beliefs and attitudes in common. First and perhaps most elemental among them is the realization that it was essential to give up the need to know why things happened as they did. Until you surrender the need to know why things happened to you as they did, you will hold on to your wounds with intense emotional fire.”
• Connect with meaning and purpose.
She explains that “the quest for meaning and purpose…is an inherent yearning to become a whole person, liberated from the fears that pervade the heart and mind and take control of one’s life force. It is a rare person who can pierce the veil between ordinary life, consumed with matters of physical survival, and pursuit of the empowered path of purpose and meaning unless he or she is motivated by a crisis.”
• Courageously navigate the dark night of the soul.
Caroline discovered that no matter how much we think we understand all that we must do to heal, there is always something in us that fights the healing process.
It is here, we encounter the seven “dark” passions of pride, avarice (greed), luxury (self-entitlement), wrath, gluttony, envy, and sloth (laziness).
She notes that it is only through facing our dark passions that we can defeat them. From the darkness will come the seven “gifts of the spirit,” which are the illuminated graces that naturally heal disease and pain.
• Rely on the power of your graces.
“You cannot be a fully healed, or even slightly healthy, person without your graces flowing. To know grace fully and directly, you must turn inward. Grace makes itself known to you through prayer.” – Caroline Myss
And so, it is through the power of prayer that we invoke the power of grace in all of its expressions. Caroline defines these expressions as the seven graces of reverence, piety, understanding, fortitude (courage), counsel, knowledge, and wisdom.
She offers specific prayers to invoke and access the power of each of these seven graces. Her insights penetrate to the core of each grace and how they relate to our daily life. As a result, she has created a template and model for healing ourselves, not just physically, mentally, and emotionally, but also on a soul level.
What could be more powerful than that?
• Defy gravity and learn to reason like a mystic.
The key to “defying gravity” (i.e., operating outside the realm of reason and logic) is by learning to think and perceive the world as a mystic does, beyond the limitations of conventional fears, social beliefs, and programming.
How do we develop this type of mystical consciousness?
By being in alignment with what she calls the “five mystical laws,” which are:
1. There is only now.
2. The necessity of forgiveness.
3. All is illusion.
4. Trust in divine paradox, irony, and synchronicity.
5. Maintain spiritual congruency.
Here, Caroline describes each of these mystical laws and offers specific ways for “falling into harmony” with them.
I found her insights to be thought-provoking and helpful.
Here are some of my favorite ones:
“How do (you) let go of the past? It’s simple, but not easy. You have to give up the need to punish the people who hurt you.”
“Without forgiveness, you remain anchored in your past, forever in emotional debt.”
“The ability or inability to forgive affects the outcome of serious illness.”
“The mystical truth is that forgiveness has nothing to do with the person you are forgiving; it is a self-initiated act of transformation in which you release yourself.”
“Why events happen as they do in your life, from the grandest or most devastating to the most seemingly insignificant, is beyond your ability to know. The deeper truth is that there is not one reason why a particular thing happens as it does.”
“(The ego) bases every decision on either what it already knows and is familiar with or what it views as safe, all of which Buddha identified as pure illusion.”
“People who look to their past will not do well, because the past is no longer relevant.”
“Learn to endure. Remember that no plan unfolds in an afternoon. Have no expectations of anything. Let everything be a surprise.”
“Be outrageously bold in your belief that you will be guided but do not have expectation of how that guidance will unfold.”
How to Access the Power of Grace
Caroline reminds us that “learning to defy gravity in your world — to think, perceive, and act at the mystical level of consciousness — is the greatest gift you can give yourself, because it is the gift of truth. And as we are bound to learn again and again in this life, the truth does indeed set us free.”
So, how do we access the power of grace?
She encourages each of us to:
•
Live as if you were liberated from ordinary thought, beyond the boundaries of logic and reason.
• Be bold in your decisions and creative and imaginative in your thoughts.
• Think and live with the soul of a mystic, seeing the world as a field of grace in which you walk around as a channel of light.
“Live these truths. Become these truths. This is your highest potential. Live as though you have the power to change the world — because you do.” – Caroline Myss
To learn more about healing and living in a field of grace, please check out Defy Gravity: Healing Beyond the Bounds of Reason by Caroline Myss.
If you find this article or site helpful, please leave a donation for Raymond so you can feel the joy of giving too.
http://zenchillcom.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-to-access-power-of-grace.html
“In our disease defense system we build up huge walls to protect ourselves and then – as soon as we meet someone who will help us to repeat our patterns of abuse, abandonment, betrayal, and/or deprivation – we lower the drawbridge and invite them in. We, in our Codependence, have radar systems which cause us to be attracted to, and attract to us, the people, who for us personally, are exactly the most untrustworthy (or unavailable or smothering or abusive or whatever we need to repeat our patterns) individuals – exactly the ones who will “push our buttons.”
This happens because those people feel familiar. Unfortunately in childhood the people whom we trusted the most – were the most familiar – hurt us the most. So the effect is that we keep repeating our patterns and being given the reminder that it is not safe to trust ourselves or other people .
Once we begin healing we can see that the Truth is that it is not safe to trust as long as we are reacting out of the emotional wounds and attitudes of our childhoods. Once we start Recovering, then we can begin to see that on a Spiritual level these repeating behavior patterns are opportunities to heal the childhood wounds.”
“I spent most of my life being the victim of my own thoughts, my own emotions, my own behaviors. I was consistently picking untrustworthy people to trust and unavailable people to love. I could not trust my own emotions because I was incapable of being honest with myself emotionally – which made me incapable of Truly being honest on any level.”
Codependency is an incredibly insidious, treacherous dis-ease. It is a compulsively reactive condition in which our ego programming from childhood dictates how we live our lives today. As long as we are not in recovery from our codependency, we are powerless to make clear choices in discerning rather someone we are attracted to is a available for a healthy relationship – we are in fact, doomed to keep repeating patterns.
Emotionally we are drawn to people who feel familiar on an energetic level. That is, people who, on an emotional vibrational level, resonate with us as being familiar. It feels to us as if we have a strong connection to those people. In other words, we have an inner radar system that causes us to be attracted to people who resonate vibrationally in a way that is familiar on an emotionally intimate level. We are attracted to people whose inner emotional dynamic is similar to our most powerful and earliest experience of emotional intimacy and love – our parents.
No matter how much we are making an effort on a conscious level to not pick anyone like our parents, energetically we feel a strong attraction to people whose inner emotional dynamic is similar to our first experience of love. It was very important for me to get aware of the reality that if I met someone who felt like my soul mate, I had better watch out. Those are exactly the people who will fit my patterns – recreate my wounding.
It was very important for me to recognize the power of this type of attraction. And also to realize, tht on a Spiritual level, these people were teachers who were in my life to help me get in touch with my childhood wounds. It was vital for me to start being aware that if I met someone who felt like my soul mate it did not mean we were going to live happily ever after. What it meant was that I was being given another wonderful, and painful, opportunity for growth.
Becoming conscious of these emotional energetic dynamics was a very important part of owning my power. My power to make choices, to accept consequences, to take responsibility for my choices and consequences – and to not buy into the belief that I was being victimized by the other person, or my own defectiveness.
Recognizing unavailability in the other person does not mean that I have to let go of the relationship – at least not immediately, it could be something I will decide to do eventually.
What is so important, is to let go of focusing on that person as the cause of, or solution to, my problems. As long as we are focusing on the other person and buying into the illusion that if we just: work a little harder; lose some more weight; make some more money; do and/or say the right things; whatever; that person will change and be everything we want them to be.
Codependents focus on others to keep from looking at self. We need to let go of focusing on the other person and start focusing inside to understand what is happening. Our adult patterns, the people we have been in relationship with, are symptoms – effects of our childhood wounding. We cannot solve a problem without looking at the cause. Focusing on symptoms (which our society is famous for: war on drugs; war on poverty: etc.) will not heal the cause.
The reason that we get involved with people who are unavailable, is because we are unavailable. We are attracted to people who feel familiar because on some level we are still trying to prove our worth by earning the Love and respect of our unavailable parents. We think we are going to rescue the other person which will prove our worth – or that we need them to rescue us because of our lack of worth. The princess will kiss me and turn me from a frog into a prince, the prince will rescue me and take me to live in the castle, syndrome.
We need to own our own worth – our own “Prince or Princess” ness – before we can be available for a healthy relationship with some one who has owned their own worth.
It is not possible to love someone enough to get them to stop hating, and being unavailable, to them self. We need to let go of that delusion. We need to focus on healing our self – on understanding and healing the emotional wounds that have driven us to pick people who could not give us what we want emotionally. We need to develop some healthy emotional intimacy with ourselves before we are capable of being available for a healthy relationships with someone who is also available.
http://joy2meu.com/letting_go.html
Postscript from Nina:
We need to use that which comes up to heal – no longer shutting out what we feel, which is what has been keeping us from healing, but having the courage to embrace the pain, move through it, and heal.
Love, intimate personal love, brings to the surface all that from which we have been running, every single thing we have been keeping in the closets of our heart.
We have the choice, every time, to keep on running, to hide and turn our backs on these gifts, mistaking their wrapping for their contents, or to turn back and embrace our open wounds. We can choose to use these times of healing as the ground work for the steps to our greater selves, to greater understanding and compassion, and to our Christ nature.
We make the error of seeing our partners as the be all and end all since they bring with them such a radiant reflection of our most beautiful facets – yet they are but an extension of our Selves, bringers of great tidings, the tidings that love is all there is, and ever will be.
We can choose to see any sign of upheaval in our relationship as another chance to heal, or we can choose to focus on it as a negative occurrence, from which we must run.
It must be said here of course that there truly are relationships that cannot be changed, and at times like these we may need to consider the possibility that the lesson has been learned, and that we need to release the teacher.
Our obsession with stability and our need for constant reassurance comes from a place of lack, from a place of fear, and this is the reason why we tend to water a tree long after it has stopped bearing any fruit. If we are able to remember, once again, that we create our reality and our abundance, that we create our relationships as vehicles towards our expansion, we will be able to let go.
© Nina Ferrell 2009
