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“ ‘…Our deepest
fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens
us.’
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t
serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other
people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine,
as children do. We were
born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us;
it’s in everyone. And
as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence
automatically liberates others.
A miracle worker is an artist of the
soul. There’s no higher
art than living a good life.
An artist informs the world of what’s available behind the
masks we all wear.
That’s what we’re all here to do. The reason so many of us are
obsessed with becoming stars is because we’re not yet starring in
our own lives. The
cosmic spotlight isn’t pointed at you; it radiates from within you. …If we wait for the world’s
permission to shine, we will never receive it. The ego doesn’t give that
permission. Only God
does, and He has already done so. He has sent you here as His
personal representative and is asking you to channel His love into
the world. Are you
waiting for a more important job? There isn’t
one.
There is a plan for each of us, and each of
us is precious. As we
open our hearts more and more, we’re moved in the directions in
which we’re supposed to go.
Our gifts well up inside of us and extend of their own
accord. We accomplish
effortlessly. …Our
power is not rationally or willfully called forth. It’s a divine dispensation,
an act of grace.”
-Marianne Williamson, excerpt from A Return to
Love
We Are The Gift To Be
Given - by Llewellyn
Vaughan-Lee
Wait till you feel your own story like a
dream, like a possibility, and then give it to the earth as an
offering. Give your own story to the earth as an offering,
full of meaning, full of possibilities, and full of the song of the
soul, that ancient song, so ancient it was born before the beginning
and yet also knows the meaning of time. The earth has been so
much cut up that it needs again to know wholeness, to be given
wholeness as a gift. What you can offer is your own story
which is your own wholeness, the essence of your becoming, to give
that as a seed to the heart of the world. It has been given to
you and so you give it, you pass it on, your own story, the essence
of your own unfolding.
Each moment we expect something to happen and
so we do not give ourselves, not realizing that this gift is the
happening. When we give ourselves to life, life is impregnated
with the future. Life is longing to be opened, to be made
holy, to be redeemed from so much materialism. And remember
this is only the beginning, this opening to a different dimension of
being.
You have arrived. There is nowhere else
to go. You are where you ought to be. There is no future
and no past in this moment. But you make it holy through
giving yourself. Just give the seed of your own story to life;
open it with love and life will respond. Life will take your
seed and place it in the heart of the world, where it will keep
alive the fire that burns there, that burns in the heart of the
heart of the world. That is your offering. That is all
that you can ever give. Slowly the world will start to spin on
a new axis of love.
Excerpt from: The Face Before I Was Born:
A Spiritual Autobiography by Llewellyn
Vaughan-Lee, The Golden Sufi Center, 1998, pp.
184-5.
 A Set of
Inner Doors - by Mark Nepo
The stuff of our lives doesn't change.
It is we who
change in relation to it. -Molly
Vass
Whatever our gifts or wounds or life situation -- whether
we have been married several times or have never been in
love, whether we have plenty of money or are sorely in need of more
-- the core issues of our lives will not go away.
There
exists for each life on Earth a set of inner doors that no one can
go through for us. We can change jobs or lovers, travel around the
world, become a doctor or lawyer or expert mountain climber, or
nobly put our life on hold to care for an ailing mother or father,
and when we are done, though the worthy distraction could take
years, the last threshold we didn't cross within will be there
waiting. There is no substitute for genuine risk.
Stranger still
is how the very core issues we avoid return, sometimes with
different faces, but still, we are brought full circle to them,
again and again. Regardless of how we may try to skip over or
sidestep what we need to face, we humbly discover that no other
threshold is possible until we use our courage to open the door
before us. Perhaps the oldest working truth of self-discovery is
that the only way out is through. That we are returned repeatedly to
the same circumstance is not always a sign of avoidance, but can
mean our work around a certain issue is not done.
In my own life,
it is not by chance that struggling to adulthood with a domineering
and critical mother, I have been thrust again and again into
situations with dominant men and women, struggling painfully for
their approval and fearing their rejection. For years, I tried to
manage the circumstance better, which was like sanding and
varnishing the door without ever opening it. I was destined to
repeat the pain of rejection, no matter how skillfully I handled it,
until I opened the door of self-worth.
Even my calling to be a
poet became a distraction that lasted many years. Feeling rejected
and insecure at heart, I quietly made a mission of becoming a famous
writer, only to find myself one day replaying the issues of approval
and rejection a hundredfold at the mailbox, as I awaited word from
countless critical strangers known as editors. I was stunned and
relieved to finally discover myself at the same threshold of loving
myself that I had run from years before.
The thresholds go
nowhere. It is we who, in our readiness and experience, keep coming
back, because the soul knows only one way to fulfill itself, and
that is to take us to what is true.
Action
steps:
-- Meditate on an issue that keeps returning to you.
--
Relate to it as a messenger and ask the messenger what door it is
trying to open for you.
-- How will your life change if you move
through this threshold?
-- How will your life be affected if you
do not?
Excerpt from: The Book of Awakening -
Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You
Have by Mark Nepo, Conari Press,
2000. | 
