Presented to CommUnity on the Hill Congregation*

Washington, D.C. , January 24, 2010

I am an ordinary mystic.  This means I spend loads of time in Silence and in communication with all forms of Divine Presence and I also live in society.  From the outside I usually look pretty normal in the clothes I wear and the company I keep.  I have a home in the suburbs. I have been happily married 37 years and have two sons in their 20s.  I have gradually come to embrace my ordinary nature and my mystical nature publicly though the knowing has been inside a long time.

Earth Hour 2009 by Alicepopkorn

I realized one day that I was beginning to really feel that God and I were One.  I felt it deeply and uncompromisingly in meditation.  From those feeling I began to see all other distinctions about who I was, what I was doing, why I was here, and what I was facing, begin to melt away. Therefore, the seeming contradictions I had silently harbored of the mystic and the mother, or the mystic and the wife or the next door neighbor were really not contradictions, but merely different views of the whole that is me.

What I mean by God and I are One is this.  The Love, Passion, Power, Knowing and Light of God is the same Light of which I am made.  There is no difference except in my seeing this as indeed true.  I now feel this knowing has been true all my life and perhaps all my other lives as well.  And it is true for everyone in body regardless of what is going on in our lives.  We simply have to release the deep fears we have and call in Spirit to be with our Deepest Companion and Friend, The Beloved.

It is possible that I may have done this ordinary mystic thing before.  It feels much better now that both the ordinary me and mystical me have found each other.  Before this time, I had lots and lots of indications that major parts of my life were out of balance.  I had chronic, deeply serious back pain for 18 years.  I spent a lot of time defending myself whether I was leading a workshop or managing a dorm of 55 adolescent girls.  I spent a great deal of time, it seems to me now, getting angry at even the tiniest challenge to my right to be fully independent, competent and powerful as a woman.  I more than once laid into my brothers or my dad, men of the deep South, if they even hinted that I was “just a girl”.

I did not suffer fools gladly.  In fact, I embraced confrontation on a regular basis.  But all this was very wearing.  It was not fun and it was certainly not in balance.  So, there was a warrior spirit alive and well within me long before there was a peaceful spirit revealed.  Perhaps that had to be, so that I could even find a mystical path.  For the signs to introspection are not easily seen, nor culturally supported, nor readily embraced by most humans in body.  However, for whatever reason, I was pulled into a greater and greater balance in part, a great part, by my eldest son.

Our first child, a son,  came as the happiest, smiling person one could imagine.  We even called him smiley face, a lot.

Smiling Baby by Mallu 2007

When he was 10 he had what was considered routine surgery for a benign cyst in his jaw, discovered during the process of getting braces.  That began our odyssey into the world of medicine, fear, pain, loss, trauma and anguish.  When he came out of the surgery, he was a completely different person energetically.  He had lost his smile and many other aspects of his personality.  He was unable to study, focus, go to school, go to sleep or interact with anyone at all, in the way he had before.  He had so loved his lego creations and had spent hours creating happily by himself.  After the surgery, he would sit and simply not be able to create anything.  He was glum and withdrawn.

The surgeon declared the surgery a full success.  We knew differently however.  We were the ones sitting with him as he cried and raged 2-4 hours every day for months and months, and months.  We were the ones sitting with him until 2 or 3 in the morning when he might or might not fall asleep.

The first year, we saw 27 doctors and psychologists trying to get help.  I stopped my work to take care of him.  I had to. He was out of school for months and had all types of strange new behaviors.  He would suddenly freeze and stare as if blinded like a deer caught in the headlights.  He would fall down and shake or sometimes he would simply withdraw and not be able to converse.

We went and went, searching for medical help and the going wore us all out.  After 12 months our son came to my husband and me  one night and said he could not go to any more doctors, they were not helping him.  I cried myself to sleep that night with the deep fear that we would never find someone to help us if he would not go anymore to doctors.  We had been having great toughs of war for the past 3 months about going to doctors at that time.

In a great state of fear, I thought the only thing left for us was to really, really pray together, out loud and ask God to help us.  We had done all we could possibly do ourselves and it was not working.  Amazingly, my husband and I had not actually sat down together and prayed about this with God in the past year since it had all begun.  We did pray together, out loud and things began to change almost immediately.  At the time, we really did not know what had actually happened to our son.  He had had the surgery and then had to take his braces off and he had to go to eye therapy after the surgery but we had no sense of the source of the imbalances for him.

After our evening of praying together, however, we were led just a surely as if God took us by the hand out of the dark times into the Light.

Holding Hands by annstheclaf

Our son took 2 years to appear mostly healed to us with some remaining remnants of those times still showing up for the next 12 years or so.  This experience catapulted me completely and wholly into spiritual healing.  Our experience dramatically affected our entire household in the most profound and unexpected ways.  We each know Spirit in individual and specific ways because of what we all went through together.

Come forward with me 16 years and here is what I have learned spiritually.

Spiritual health is THE basis of all health , happiness and well being.  Spiritual health and physical health are one and the same though we do not live our lives this way, for the most part.  We still think of healing and health as a physical phenomenon.  We still act as if the recurring pain we have originates in the body.  We and most of the medical profession look at health strictly through the lens of the body.

Our bodies are the encasing of our consciousness, of our knowing of All That Is.  Every nerve, fiber, cell and pathway daily reflects our sense of peace as well as our sense of anxiety.  Our bodies are no more than the outer casing for our consciousness.  We either exude joy, peace and delight or we exude burden, stress and regret and everything in-between.  The choice is ours.  We are our thoughts, our feelings, our traumas, our fear and our hopes all rolled into one bundle, we know as the body.

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*Comm-Unity on the Hill is a Unity Congregation which meets on the grounds of the National Cathedral in Hearst Hall at the corner of Woodley Ave. and Wisconsin Ave,N.W.,  Washington, D.C.  Services are weekly on Sundays at 10 A.M.  They can be reached at cothdc@verizon.net or 703-379-4450.  All are welcome.

“Loving myself seems indulgent.  What is all this stuff about loving oneself?  I get the best feelings when I help others meet their needs regardless of myself.  When I focus on myself,  I feel selfish.”

A spiritual definition of loving oneself might be a place to begin.  Indulging oneself is yielding to our wants, desires and whims whether or not they are good for us.  Loving oneself is making space for those things which feed our soul, our heart and our bodies.

Indulging oneself might be buying another tee-shirt in a color we don’t have or drinking the third beer when two is really enough for the particular evening.  Taking a walk outside to be in fresh air and allow all our cares to float away with the wind, is loving of self.   Calling a good friend to reconnect because we have been meaning to do it could also be loving of self.  The first examples are little treats we might want which we give ourselves permission to do.  They can be fun and though they are not really needed, we might say, “go ahead, you deserve them”.  The second set of choices are  gifts to ourselves of something we really need and benefit from, in order to feel love’s flowing energy in our lives.  They are both fine approaches to living, the latter though can bring balance and flowing energy to our sense of self and our bodies.

Hiking by Jofre Ferrer Swiss Alps near Grindewald

Why is loving ourselves so hard to do?

Perhaps because we have not ever seen this behavior modeled.  Perhaps because when we do things for others, we get recognition and appreciation from another which strokes our ego temporarily.  Perhaps it is hard to love ourselves because  we don’t recognize our real needs or even know what is a loving act for ourselves.

Loads of us put a very high value on what gets external recognition, reward or influence with others.  Others make daily choices that will “get them ahead”, “get them in good with so and so”, or “pay off in the long run”.  For example, Washington D.C. is one place I have lived where folks actually get together at breakfast meetings for the long run. When I first moved there, I was astounded to discover this repeatedly. When we continue to fill our days with such choices, our time gets filled up with things we think will bring us concrete rewards in the future.  The present can become stale and literally lifeless. Our self suffers.

Then there are choices to help others because it is the right thing to do, it is my role in life, it is required and it is certainly expected of me.  Frequently, women tell me they have no time for themselves because they are fully committed to their children, their husbands, their parents, their pets, their neighbors, their synagogue ( church) and the PTA.  Men often tell me between home and work, there is no time to even consider what might be a loving act for self.  The very thought of it is often strange to contemplate.

A choice to love oneself is foreign in a world where we so often measure ourselves by how well we are doing externally and how fully we meet our responsibilities.  A loving choice towards oneself only works when we move beyond finding pleasure in the way others see us, in our external indications of success and in the material possessions and experiences we can gather at will.  A loving choice for self, requires some deep time with our own integrity to even begin to recognize what that might be for ourselves. We may have to make some mistakes before we know what really feeds us on the inside.  Keep trying though, it is a pathway to the Divine.

When we love ourselves, we are actually able to come closer and closer to the divinity within. When we lose ourselves” to an endeavor of love such as a garden, a hot bath, a painting or walk up a mountain, we totally commune with ourselves.   We are One with All That Is.  We are not separate from All That Is unless we choose to be by not taking time to “be still and know that I AM God”.  Loving oneself is a spiritual act, an act of loving kindness which enables our deep well of love to flow without consideration of the outcomes, rewards or implications.  A choice for love enables us to be in the present moment which is all there really is, anyway.

Lots of by Sandra Mora

We are not loving ourselves when we are pushing ourselves to do ANYTHING. We are not loving ourselves when we see ourselves as sacrificing our health, well-being or personal needs.  We are not loving ourselves when we are trying to please others, influence others, impress others, get something from another or act some way other than in integrity with ourselves.  We are not loving ourselves when we constantly choose others’ needs over our own needs.

Well, what about if we have to do something and the only way is to push ourselves to do it? A mental and spiritual adjustment may be needed but pushing is really not loving of self.

I was a life time hoarder before I worked with my mother to clear out her house where she had lived 40 years.  I rarely threw anything out and the thought of spending an afternoon cleaning out seemed a completely distasteful experience.  At 86,  my mother finally decided she needed to move to a retirement center.   I was the only one able to work with her to clear out the house, make the choices for keeping, throwing and selling of her things.  I dreaded the thought of what had to be done.

I literally felt sick thinking that I had to do this but there was no other way presenting itself.  I knew enough spiritually to realize that I needed to clear my fear of clearing out the family homestead and my fear of getting overwhelmed doing it.  If I didn’t,  I would simply make the process agony for myself and my mother.  My mother was already overwhelmed enough for the both of us.

I asked myself, what is the most loving way I can do this without pushing myself, beating myself up, or going into anger and rage about what needs to be done? I decided to move my work around to allow for two days out of town with my mother each week until the work was finished.  That schedule, I could handle.  I could enjoy being with my mother if I was not paying heavily with my own life.  I could  have enough energy in small doses to actually  be helpful.  I could retreat at a given time and re-marshall my energy to be my most effective loving self.  This way to work with my mother was a choice for love, and one of the biggest I had ever made.  That time became a blessings for us so thoroughly and deeply, I could have never imagined it, ever.  The love simply grew and grew between my mother and myself and between my brothers and me as well.  The love simply took over and the work got done with the Grace of God, with Love’s Divine Presence!  That choice for love turned out to be one of the best experiences Mom and I had ever had in our entire life.  We laughed and cried with abandon and wove our hearts together in a new way.

When we choose to love ourselves, everyone around us benefits. We engage our highest self because we put ease, grace and love on the front burner.  The act of loving oneself is deeply sacred because it helps us really know the deep integrity involved in making a loving choice for ourselves.   One act of loving towards self can teach us more about love than helping everyone on the street and all our next of  kin.   When we put ourselves into the equation for loving acts towards others, we truly engage the part of us which acts from a pure place of service, loving without need for recognition, reward or attachment.

There is such a thing as a self-centered or selfish person.  That is different from making loving decisions for oneself.  A self-centered person operates from a space of lack.  I need this to happen in this way and these folks to act in that way,  for the following to occur.  A loving choice for self can only be made  from a completely different well inside.  In that well is integrity, self-acceptance, allowing and kindness.  From that one space, love can expand in infinite directions.

When we experiment and practice making loving decisions, then our choices to help others come from that well of loving kindness inside rather than from the well of shoulds, ought to and have tos.  We can then allow the natural order of Divine Love Energy to swirl around, up and through us and extend out to all we meet.  Make the choice for love of self with as much humility, kindness and gentleness as you can.  You and everyone around you will be richer for this.

What choices can you make today which are loving ones for yourself ? Share these if you’d like, in the comments section at the end of this post.