This time two weeks ago I was relaxing at the beach, reveling in gratitude for the spiritual retreat I had just led with six inspiring women. We gathered on Friday evening, all day Saturday and for several hours on Sunday. The theme of the retreat was self-love, and as the weekend unfolded we shed layers of habits and doubts and should’s and must do’s – and to each of us, a brilliant inner core of magnificence was revealed. It was profound and wonderful and genuinely transformative. It was also, dare I say, fun.
And very, very real.
Let me say that another way: we were living in reality.
I’ve noticed that many people have a strong tendency, after having experienced something like a retreat or a deeply nourishing vacation, to view it as somehow apart from reality. How many times have you heard yourself or others say, as the vacation winds down and it’s time to go home, “Now it’s back to reality!”
Somehow we’ve come to associate “reality” with work and responsibility and obligation and struggle, oddly ignoring or marginalizing the moments of our lives when we experience joy, contentment, peace or delight. We haven’t yet fully grasped that reality is what we make it, and we’re “making it” every moment of our lives with our intention, our energy and our attention. Every bit of our experience is real, and we have a lot of creative power to experience reality in fresh ways that empower and uplift us rather than through past conditioning that disempowers and diminishes us.
When we dare to step away from that old conditioning and immerse ourselves for a day or a weekend or a week with a clear intention for self-connection, we aren’t stepping away from reality. We’re actually plunging ourselves into it. The sparkling, funny, inspired, creative, bold and brilliant self we discover in moments of profound awareness is who we really are – it is our most authentic Self. And giving that Self a little air time is amazingly refreshing. It rights our perspective and reveals our intuitive knowing about how we want to live our lives. It reminds us of our talent and creativity and absolute worthiness to live a life we love. It helps us remember that it is only through loving ourselves that we can grow into our magnificence.
And once we’ve awakened to this truth of who we really are, we can take that expanded awareness back into our day-to-day lives. We can choose to set aside time to remember those moments of profound self-connection - and bring them into the present moment through our loving attention to those memories. We can include in our daily lives the practices we learned at the retreat, simple things such as meditation and journaling and chanting that connect us with our magnificent, authentic Self. We can set a clear and firm intention to live true to that Self, and let that intention guide our moment-to-moment choices.
And that’s really what it’s all about. Stepping away from our usual habits of thinking and doing, with the express intention for connecting with our deepest truth, opens our eyes to the many subtle – and not so subtle - ways we may be diminishing or even betraying ourselves in daily life. With that newfound awareness, along with a strengthened connection to the brilliant inner core of our being, we can declare a renewed intention to live true to ourselves. And from that intention will arise new choices – in everything from how we think to what we prioritize to what we let go of – that will change our lives.
In other words, we can bring the reality of the retreat – an expanded awareness of who we really are - into the reality of our day-to-day lives. And in doing so, we create a whole new reality.
That’s why I’m a huge fan of retreats, both the extended kind and the mini-retreats we create by giving ourselves time out each day for quiet self-connection. They are absolutely essential to a deeply fulfilled life, for it is only through profound self-connection that we come to know ourselves, and it is only through knowing ourselves that we can fulfill our unique potential…and it is only through fulfilling our unique potential that we can live in joy.
During our closing ceremony at the retreat, we spoke aloud the following poem by Raymond Carver. May it inspire you to retreat into the reality of your true, beloved Self.
Late Fragments
And did you get what you wanted in this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Sunday, May 6, 2012
All We Are Is Love
The following is excerpted from an article to be published in the June issue of Living.Well Magazine. The full article will be the first in a series of three which summarize the highlights of my extraordinary interview with Anita Moorjani, author of the best-selling book Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer to Near Death to True Healing. You can listen to the amazing conversation here.
Let me tell you a little about Anita Moorjani. She is kind. She is generous. She is warm and supportive. She is funny. She is incredibly wise. She is gracious. She is respectful. She is someone with whom I would love to have talked for hours. (And very nearly did, thanks to a technology breakdown during our across-the-globe call and her generosity in making up the time we lost…and then giving me even more.) If Oprah still had her talk show, you can bet Anita would be a sought-after guest.
And that’s because her message is so profound and inspiring. It is also elegantly simple, and our busy, complexity-loving minds might be tempted to dismiss it as simplistic. Yet it is a message that, as we let it sink into our hearts and minds and the very marrow of our bones, can literally transform our lives
Here it is: We are magnificent beings whose very essence is love. Our forgetting of that truth gives rise to all that we would consider unwanted in our lives and in our world; our remembering of it restores us to wholeness and joy.
This is where Anita and I started our conversation. She spoke with great clarity and passion about the realization she gained, during her near death experience (NDE), that she was loved unconditionally – and that she deserved this love just because she existed. She understood with complete clarity that we are not here to work or perform or prove ourselves worthy, and all of our efforts to do so are futile: there is no need to prove what is already given. In her words, “Because you have been put on this planet, you are deserving of good things coming to you.”
This may be a message you have heard before. (I hope so.) It is certainly one that I have heard and embraced and shared with my students and clients. And yet hearing it from Anita opened me to feel it more deeply, to know its truth with greater certainty. From my perspective, her very presence – and her generous, loving commitment to share her realizations with the world - affirm this potent message in a way that helps us embody it more fully.
Anita came to this understanding during her extraordinary NDE. She recognized that her cancer was not some karmic punishment for past wrongdoing, nor was it her “fault” for having made unhealthy choices. She saw clearly that her cancer was the manifestation of her own magnificence that had been repressed. In effect, her magnificence had been turned inward, which was an unnatural state; it was meant to radiate outward. And she knew with equal clarity that, in returning to life in this physical dimension, her magnificence expressed would heal her body.
As she explains so simply and eloquently in her book and interviews, it was fear that had repressed her magnificence - fear that she wasn’t good enough (and, later, fear specifically of getting cancer). Like so many of us, she grew up feeling inadequate in many ways and thinking she needed to change in order to be liked or accepted. Her story is one of both racial and gender biases, yet the conditions giving rise to any of us feeling inadequate are many. Anita said during our conversation, and I would agree with her, it’s likely that most of us feel inadequate or “not enough” in some way – and nothing could be further from the truth.
And this gets to the breathtakingly simple heart of her message: it is in realizing, or remembering, who we really are that we open ourselves to vibrant health and joyful living. And how might we do that in the absence of something as dramatic as a near death experience? This is the really good news: we open ourselves to remembering our magnificence by cultivating genuine self-love.
Since our very essence is love, it is through self-love that we connect with our authentic, magnificent selves. And in being our authentic selves we live the joy-filled lives we came here to live. In fact, this is where things get really juicy and fun. As Anita said during our conversation, “The more authentic you are, the more you attract what is really yours.” We talked about the pure creative power of being, of allowing and attracting into our experience that which we desire.
More on that later. For now I’d like to leave you with the heartfelt message that Anita shared at the end of our conversation. She said, “Find your joy! Listen to your emotions and do what makes you happy.” We may be tempted to dismiss that as impractical, but honoring this truth is what restored Anita to full health and vibrancy, and put her life on a whole new trajectory. What could be more practical than being healthy, happy and successful?
And we can begin that new trajectory in our own lives by committing to loving ourselves, right now. Let’s be willing to be amazed at how magnificent we really are.
Let me tell you a little about Anita Moorjani. She is kind. She is generous. She is warm and supportive. She is funny. She is incredibly wise. She is gracious. She is respectful. She is someone with whom I would love to have talked for hours. (And very nearly did, thanks to a technology breakdown during our across-the-globe call and her generosity in making up the time we lost…and then giving me even more.) If Oprah still had her talk show, you can bet Anita would be a sought-after guest.
And that’s because her message is so profound and inspiring. It is also elegantly simple, and our busy, complexity-loving minds might be tempted to dismiss it as simplistic. Yet it is a message that, as we let it sink into our hearts and minds and the very marrow of our bones, can literally transform our lives
Here it is: We are magnificent beings whose very essence is love. Our forgetting of that truth gives rise to all that we would consider unwanted in our lives and in our world; our remembering of it restores us to wholeness and joy.
This is where Anita and I started our conversation. She spoke with great clarity and passion about the realization she gained, during her near death experience (NDE), that she was loved unconditionally – and that she deserved this love just because she existed. She understood with complete clarity that we are not here to work or perform or prove ourselves worthy, and all of our efforts to do so are futile: there is no need to prove what is already given. In her words, “Because you have been put on this planet, you are deserving of good things coming to you.”
This may be a message you have heard before. (I hope so.) It is certainly one that I have heard and embraced and shared with my students and clients. And yet hearing it from Anita opened me to feel it more deeply, to know its truth with greater certainty. From my perspective, her very presence – and her generous, loving commitment to share her realizations with the world - affirm this potent message in a way that helps us embody it more fully.
Anita came to this understanding during her extraordinary NDE. She recognized that her cancer was not some karmic punishment for past wrongdoing, nor was it her “fault” for having made unhealthy choices. She saw clearly that her cancer was the manifestation of her own magnificence that had been repressed. In effect, her magnificence had been turned inward, which was an unnatural state; it was meant to radiate outward. And she knew with equal clarity that, in returning to life in this physical dimension, her magnificence expressed would heal her body.
As she explains so simply and eloquently in her book and interviews, it was fear that had repressed her magnificence - fear that she wasn’t good enough (and, later, fear specifically of getting cancer). Like so many of us, she grew up feeling inadequate in many ways and thinking she needed to change in order to be liked or accepted. Her story is one of both racial and gender biases, yet the conditions giving rise to any of us feeling inadequate are many. Anita said during our conversation, and I would agree with her, it’s likely that most of us feel inadequate or “not enough” in some way – and nothing could be further from the truth.
And this gets to the breathtakingly simple heart of her message: it is in realizing, or remembering, who we really are that we open ourselves to vibrant health and joyful living. And how might we do that in the absence of something as dramatic as a near death experience? This is the really good news: we open ourselves to remembering our magnificence by cultivating genuine self-love.
Since our very essence is love, it is through self-love that we connect with our authentic, magnificent selves. And in being our authentic selves we live the joy-filled lives we came here to live. In fact, this is where things get really juicy and fun. As Anita said during our conversation, “The more authentic you are, the more you attract what is really yours.” We talked about the pure creative power of being, of allowing and attracting into our experience that which we desire.
More on that later. For now I’d like to leave you with the heartfelt message that Anita shared at the end of our conversation. She said, “Find your joy! Listen to your emotions and do what makes you happy.” We may be tempted to dismiss that as impractical, but honoring this truth is what restored Anita to full health and vibrancy, and put her life on a whole new trajectory. What could be more practical than being healthy, happy and successful?
And we can begin that new trajectory in our own lives by committing to loving ourselves, right now. Let’s be willing to be amazed at how magnificent we really are.
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