Dare to Be Yourself

 

Last Sunday I shared the idea from Unity Minister Frank Giudici that “all problems and challenges stem from this one basic problem, the inability to love ourselves totally and unconditionally.”

From a spiritual standpoint, we might ask, why is it so difficult to love ourselves? If we know that the Truth of who we are, is an expression of Divine Intelligence, a perfect idea in Divine Mind, then why in the world is it so hard to love ourselves? 

The short answer lies in the word, world. 
We are spiritual beings contained for this time in a physical body, in order to navigate the physical world. As such, we have been conditioned by the world, in various ways. 

Very little of our conditioning centers on our true innate value and worth. Nor does it tend to support the plethora of ways that we might express ourselves, if we were not conditioned otherwise. And, the more that our identity varies from the agreed upon social norms that inform our conditioning, the more destructive that conditioning tends to be on our overall sense of well-being and wholeness. 

I recently came across the following quote from the Medieval Mystic, Hildegard of Bingen:

"We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.

Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.”

Mystics are famous for being ahead of their times, but if this was coming to her in the 1100’s… well, it does make it easier to understand how we find ourselves where we are today!

 Her invitation to “take back our own listening, to use our voice, to see our own light” stood out to me.  

In order to change what thus far has been a fairly destructive course of humanity, we must learn how to reconnect with own light in a way that grounds us in the fullness of who we are, despite our conditioning. Ultimately,it is our light can save us from the darkness resulting within us from that conditioning.  Maybe part of what we are being called to do is to take back our own listening and use our voices in ways that truly reflect our own light, instead of using them to perpetuate the harms of our individual and collective conditioning. 

Hildegard’s words also made me think about how so many of us may have unknowingly been silencing our own voices and weakening our ability to really listen to anything that does not mimic our own beliefs (which also tend to reflect our conditioning). 

Many of us had been defaulting to certain news channels, political party heads, religious leaders, social media threads, even science to seemingly think and speak on our behalf.

I wonder if some of the unraveling that we are now experiencing is the result of our waking up to how this has played out in our lives, in our country, and in our world.

For me, part of ‘the terror’ that Hildegard speaks of, is the recognition that I had given away my listening and my voice in the first place. It takes more courage than ever to think and speak for yourself in a world that conditions us toward ‘group think’. The volume has been cranked up so high with those messages that if we stay tuned in, we quite literally can't even hear our own thoughts or voice.

 Everywhere we look these days seems to contain an ivation for be  courageuous. 

Consider the origin of the word courage, corage, from cuer, meaning “heart”.

To be courageous ultimately means to live from our heart.  Our heart, being the dwelling place of our spirit, is not susceptible to the corruption or the conditioning of the world. This is how we can be “in the world but not of it,” as Jesus taught. 

In our heart, we find the courage to co-create a world free from the painful limitations passed along by the conditioning of a world, that has been, as Hildegard said, ‘interpreted for us by others.”

I can’t help but think of how this applies to the LGBTQ+ community, as we celebrate Pride weekend here in Denver.  I see more clearly now what deep courage it has taken for this community to "dare to declare who they are" in such a world. 

That courage is a powerful demonstration that supports all of us in being who we truly are, despite our conditioning or the interpretations of others. 

May we all feel empowered to interpret the world for ourselves, guided by our courageous hearts in order feel more at home in this world. 

This feels to me like one way that we can experience "Heaven on Earth."

Join us on Sunday at 10am for more on this idea.

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash