by Reverend René
Last week I shared about becoming intimate with Life by allowing the landscapes of our lives to reveal themselves to us.
This week, I am curious about the inner landscape and how being present with our selves leads to intimacy with ourselves.
Each of us has a self shaped by our experiences, relationships, circumstances, successes, and disappointments. We often call this our personality or identity in the world. Yet there is also within us a deeper Self—one that was never born and can never die. It knows itself as Divine, forever at one with God, forever whole.
This deeper Self is capable of loving and embracing us exactly as we are and exactly as we are not. It can hold our perceived failures, our deepest desires, our greatest joys, and our tender wounds in the same field of compassion.
If you joined us last week, you may remember our spiritual response to fear: Stop. Drop. Roll. I have come to see that this same practice is a pathway to intimacy with our selves.
As I court my own inner landscape, I become acquainted with the parts of me I once wished to avoid or disown. In doing so, those parts become integrated, and the Divine Self is given permission to lead.
We must know ourselves in order to be true to our-Selves. Perhaps this is the deeper meaning of intimacy: Into me, I see.
I invite you to practice this week.
Stop.
Pause and breathe. Become present to yourself.
Drop.
Align with Love Consciousness. Embrace. Allow. Trust. Listen.
Roll.
Expand your idea of yourself. See with compassion, gentleness, and possibility.
This is how we court ourselves.
Not by fixing ourselves.
Not by condemning ourselves.
But by becoming curious.
By listening.
By staying present long enough for something deeper to emerge.
The wisdom is already within you.
The guidance is already within you.
The Love you seek is already within you.
Perhaps the invitation this week is simply this:
Become intimate with your own experience.
Pause before reacting.
Breathe before concluding.
Listen before judging.
And allow the Presence of Love to reveal what is seeking to emerge through you now.
You may discover that the most beautiful relationship you will ever know abides right where you are—within you, and as you.
I love you,
Reverend René