Just Be With Me

At that moment, as I allowed myself to absorb the truth of this message, staying fully present with Love right there with me, I felt the lens of my vision begin to shift. It was as though a picture of that holy instant was illuminated with a filter that brought it all to life…to love.

Suddenly, I was no longer seeing a world created by the ego. I realized I was seeing Truth.

And that truth was Pure Love.

It was coming from within me; something my thinking mind had never before conceived.

If you are anything like me, you may gravitate, feel a compulsion even, to try to think your way into experiencing the presence of Love. Ironically, no matter how hard I try to think my way through to Love’s presence, it never works. It is only when my mind is still, that I am able to see what Love would illuminate for me. And I find I need to go there, to the silence, again and again, in order to break through the denial created by the ego so that I may fully receive what Love Itself wants me to know.

But how do we get to the silence, many may wonder. How do we get to the place where our minds are still and our hearts are open to receive the gift of realizing Love’s presence, so that we can just BE with Love Itself? For many, a quiet mind and open heart may feel as natural as breathing. But if you have been raised in any type of dysfunction or experienced the trauma of an unhealthy relationship or have any unresolved grief, then finding that quiet place and open heart may feel elusive and for some almost impossible.

You see, the weight of unresolved grief and self-judgment weighs heavy on the chest like a thick coat of armor blocking and defending the heart from letting in the gift of Love’s presence. No amount of willpower or positive thinking will clear away the debris that guards a wounded heart.

For the body remembers and carries it’s wounds no matter how hard we try to remind ourselves that the past is unreal and this is all just a crazy dream of separation.

I know this to be true because I’ve tried it time and time again.

In my experience, there is only one gateway to free the heart from its bondage of carried trauma and grief. And that gateway is reached by entering the pain, feeling the depth of it, and bringing all of it to Love’s embrace. Like a child who has skinned his knee and needs to simply sit and cry in his mother’s loving arms, we too need to let ourselves simply bring our pain into Love’s embrace. We need to let our tears fall into Love and simply let ourselves be held. For it is within this very act of release and trust, that we allow the armor to dissolve like mists of dew warmed in the early morning sun. And soon we feel our newly freed hearts begin to soften and open to receive the comfort Love would have for us.

The grief of painful feeling memories stays lodged within the body until we are willing and ready to bring it all into Love’s presence. I had a powerful opportunity to bring another layer of grief and toxic messaging into Love’s embrace only shortly after I received Love’s message to just ‘be with Me’.

You see, my now adult boys were preparing for a vacation to spend a week away with their father, from whom I was divorced when they were only 4 and 6 years old. A series of events which essentially left me feeling robbed of time with them, suddenly sent me into the depths of intense pain and grief. At some point I realized my reaction didn’t exactly feel proportional to the circumstances.

As I lay in my bed feeling overwhelmed with emotion, I allowed myself to notice the feeling memories that were arising.

Suddenly I found myself back in time, sitting in church with my two little boys by my side. It was then I was told that their dad would be exercising his right to take my sweet boys on a two week trip directly following our service.

As the memory and the feeling of that moment came flooding back, tears and sobs came uncontrollably from within. I allowed myself to lean into the grief and pleaded to Love Itself for help. Placing my hands on my heart, the sobs slowly settled as Love reminded me I was safe and whole and my boys were too.

The awareness that I was amid healing from loss almost 21 years ago helped me to witness the process with love and gentleness for myself. Nonetheless, the week they were gone was difficult for me, as feeling memories arose at random.

As the week passed and Friday night came, I knew their week with their dad would be wrapping up. They would be heading back to their far away cities the next morning. I had made my peace and accepted that our home would likely not be enroute upon their return trip.

It was largely out of my mind, when my oldest called to let me know they were coming home a day early. Might I be able to pick them up, spend the day with them, and then drive them to the airport for their flight home?

With the grief having mostly passed, I found a new layer of old toxic messages surfacing, despite my gratefulness that we would have some time together after all. Still, this time it was defensiveness and anger toward their father, who now, having had his time, would happily default to letting me chauffeur the 4 hours of driving to get them where they needed to be.

Moreover, driving to his house to pick them up, brought up a barrage of ego defense mechanisms from 20 years of feeling like I could never live up to his own ego’s standards of perfection, wealth, and image.

The ego rampage started as I cleaned the house prior to the drive and continued to escalate like a locomotive picking up steam for the 30-minute car drive to his perfectly groomed home. This time, however, I was at least watching the ego…noting the insanity and recognizing I was being led into a maze of illusion and suffering of my own making.

This time I asked Love for help and was met with a still soft voice that repeated gently, “let go, let go, let go, let go.” My breathing slowed and gradually a space began to clear. I felt myself sink beneath the toxic messages to an awareness of stillness and peace. I began to remember who I was.

And soon I again heard a voice,

“You not only forgot who you were. You forgot who he is too.”

Love Itself was right, of course. For sure I had forgotten my own truth. But I hadn’t yet considered that I forgot his truth as well. For my ex-husband’s light had been buried beneath his own ego messages of false worth. It brought peace to my heart to remember the light that he is as well, buried beneath it all.

As Love says in Choose Only Love, “You will perceive your brothers and sisters as children who play the game of life in their own way, many of them without realizing their oneness with God.”

Yes, I remembered, he too is playing the game of life, still unaware of his truth in union with God. As a matter of fact, from that perspective, we are not that different from one another. All of us are subject to the ego’s lies that our worth is dependent upon external circumstances. We are all so easily fooled into perceiving our worth in different lights…different forms of illusion.

Jesus in ACIM states, “Your worth is beyond perception because it is beyond doubt. Do not perceive yourself in different lights. Know yourself in the One Light where the miracle that is you is perfectly clear.” Love Itself had helped me to unhook from the ego lies by simply repeating, “let go, let go, let go, let go.”

I could finally rest from the ego onslaught.

This morning I sat writing to Love Itself and reflected on all I’ve learned in this challenging week. I noticed the many ways my ego had harpooned me into thinking my worth/my truth was earned through so many illusions and so many of them rooted very deeply in the past. I even laughed for a moment as I remembered that my boys were not willing to cooperate in the illusion that my worth came from them.

For that matter, my ex-husband was just as much a great teacher in helping me remember who I am. For the first time in my life, I began to see him as the gift giver he was.

I sat in the stillness, allowing myself to again ‘just be with Love.’ And this time Love’s message brought even more clarity: