Over the last few months I have done a lot of reading of the work of Brian Weiss. For those of you who do not know he is a psychiatrist who specializes in hypnotherapy, who through his practice stumbled on a way to access people’s past lives in an effort to heal trauma. In reading the stories of his success with past life regressions I decided I would try it out for myself. As luck would have it I met someone who does regressions and I immediately set up a time with him to see what I could learn about my life.
The findings were incredible. I discovered that I was carrying a guilt from a previous incarnation that I was trying to rectify through my actions in this life. It was a remarkable discovery and an opportunity to not only understand certain behaviors that I had, but to seek forgiveness and absolution of the guilt I had carried for so long. In the eyes of those I felt I had let down so long ago I found forgiveness, and the incredible release of that guilt that had been looming over me for my entire life.
In many of the stories of Brian Weiss’ journeys with people, there is a resounding message that the true goal of our existence is to learn forgiveness, and to move closer to releasing the things that keep us from being able to love. According to the messages from countless regressions, being able to understand all walks of life is crucial, since it brings us closer to forgiving the actions of others, and moving closer to loving them where they are at.
In learning about all this and hearing the truth in these messages, it got me thinking about how many of us live our daily lives. How we find it so hard to understand one another, and we jump to conclusions and criticisms about the choices of others, and how those conclusions serve to keep us in a state of disdain with those we are criticizing.
In the teachings of my life coaching trainings I learned “there is no love where there is criticism.” The evidence of this exists when we stop to take a look at what happens when we judge others. We observe an action of another person, we assign a value to that action, and we judge another’s actions by values that we sourced from ourselves and projected onto another person’s choices. As a result of this process, we tend to harbor an unfair judgement of that person, and that judgement often creates a separation keeping us further form the potential of understanding what lead that person to the choices they made.
Through understanding, we seek to know why these actions were deemed to be the best choices a person could make at the time. If we seek to know what events lead people to make the choices they have, then we ourselves may even see that we could have made the same or similar choices given the appropriate circumstances, rather than imposing a self-created negative view on the life of someone else. So if the purpose of our lives is to learn how to love more fully each person in our human family, then what makes it so hard to to let go of our prejudices and accept others through the light of understanding and forgiveness?
I think the answer, is Time.
In the afterlife, we have eternity. We have eternity to learn the truth of our universe, and do our part to maintain it. In our incarnation, we are limited to some 80 or so years. Over the course of that 80 years we have so many things to achieve. We have to get through education, we have to choose a career path (hopefully one that aligns with our purpose), we have to create a family, secure a home, we have to continually produce something for the world we live in otherwise in the eyes of many we cease to have value.
When you get into all of the tiny details of what makes all of these life events possible it doesn’t take much to realize that there is barely enough time to rest let alone spend time working toward forgiving those who have hurt us. If we do find time, how do we actually begin trying to forgive someone. We can say, “I forgive you” to someone, but is that all it is? Does just saying the words allow you to shed the burden of holding on to the heavy burdens of our own pain? I know I have tried this, and I end up not feeling any differently than I did before. The answer then is to learn to forgive someone in your heart, not in your mind. What does that even look like?
When you are faced with the fact that you have a finite life span, a seemingly infinite amount of things that you need to achieve in that life span, it starts to look as though we do not have time to bother ourselves with learning the art of forgiveness. We have so many demands that we feel are so much more important than fostering or developing the relationships in our lives that these tasks often fall to the back burner. We’ll get to it later, at some point in time. If the true meaning of our lives collectively is to grow closer to love, then really can we afford not to? If what we are here to be learning is these lessons then it would seem that we have our priorities way out of whack.
Another component that I feel is at play is that we are afraid to surrender to love, and loving is indeed a surrender. In our ego selves we have so much pride in our resentment, so much strength in our anger, so much power in our hatred that it feels threatening to let that go so that we can fall into surrender with our own lives. Fear also plays a roll. We have so much influence with our fury that letting it go can seem so daunting. We live in fear of no longer being seen as strong. However, when we are living in anger, hatred, fear, etc we are in no way strong. We are vulnerable in all of these things, but the ego self believes it has power here.
In the lessons of love that I have had the fortune to encounter in my own life, I have learned the strength and the true power in heart centered living. I am by no means perfect at this, I still have my flaws, but I try hard to exercise the lessons I have learned. That love in it’s purest form begins with the love of self. That from the love of self we learn how to truly love those who are in our lives. Through encountering hardships we learn that it is important and not destructive to love the most hateful figures in our lives, because we have learned that they in fact need it the most. We learn that at the core of our being lies the essence of everyone we ever meet in the course of our lives, and that in loving ourselves truly, we can also love them no matter how much their lives have hurt them. We learn our place among the human family and that we are all equals. And in the final stages we learn that we are not only one with all life on our planet through love but that we are also one with the source of all life, regardless of what name we give to it.
The key to our undoing as people on this planet is separation. We did not come here to do it alone, nor are we capable of doing so. We need the strength of our friends, family, loved ones to cheer us on and support us in pursuing the challenges of our lives. We are best served by being open to receive that support, as are those around us who need that support returned to them from time to time.
If you feel like there isn’t enough time to repair broken friendships, family bonds, and other connections then you may want to ask yourself, “is everything else that I am giving my time and energy to actually serving me?” Or are each of the things that you have used to keep yourself so busy distracting you from the importance of real deep connection with others, and is that feeling of separation growing to the point of an insurmountable void in your life? At the end of the day, all that we have is the depth of the love that we have developed in our lives. When we are on our deathbeds we’re not begging someone to play stocks for us, or to finish up that big project for our boss. No. We’re asking for our loved ones, we’re asking for one last chance to experience our human connection with others. So why wait until we are gasping for our last breath when we could do it now.
In the eyes of the universe, only love is real.
Artwork by: Christopher Foulkes c-knox@live.com
Nightwing Healing Arts 