Healing the Broken

When I look back on my journey I am amazed at the inner transformation that has taken place.  Prior to reading A Course in Miracles, I saw the world through a prism of separation.  I was isolated in myself, disconnected from the oneness that we all share.  I was also extremely identified with the physical world, and though I sought to connect to the subtle world, I was blocked.

When I was growing up, I unconsciously guarded myself against situations that called for compassion.  I felt safe (and separated) in the cocoon of love that I felt and experienced through my rock solid relationships with family and friends.   Suffering scared me.  And fortunately, because I grew up in the western world, physical suffering wasn’t readily prevalent.  Emotion suffering was, though.  I grew up in what I considered a very functional home environment so when I learned of those who did not, instead of reaching for compassion, I sought safety through separation.  I bounced off their energy field, never venturing to enter it.  I was scared of those who my ego deemed “emotionally damaged”.  Instead of seeing opportunities for healing in their future, my ego saw “damaged goods”.  My ego saw them as emotionally stuck because of the choices in thoughts and attitudes that they had chosen to invest in.  In aligning with my ego’s thoughts, I unknowingly kept them (and myself) bound and imprisoned by my limited perception, regarding what was possible in terms of emotional healing.

This came about because of my full faith in separation (fear).  Without an understanding of compassion, I feared witnessing pain.  Without a belief in the capacity for someone to change, I feared witnessing and engaging with someone who I saw as choosing to be a victim.  I didn’t respect the choice to be a victim, nor did I understand it, so, of course, I couldn’t have compassion for it.  For these reasons, I consciously separated myself from those who were choosing a path of victimhood.

What I have since come to see is that our role is not to respect or disrespect someone’s choices.  Our role is not to invest in the individual choices that someone makes, whether those choices are in the direction of light or darkness.  Our role is to love like the sun shines—impartially.  Our role is to direct love to darkness just as easily as we direct it to light.  Our role is to recognize that this is not an individual journey, and that instead, it is a collective journey, where we each have a role, in the expression of love, to fulfill in the divinely orchestrated plan that is at work.  In healing ourselves by reconnecting to love, our role becomes one of healing the broken by helping to restore them to love.

In lacking a spiritual connection, I didn’t understand compassion, forgiveness, and love as forms of emotional and spiritual healing.  Instead, I was bound to separateness, concerned with alleviating my own fear, by seeking to protect myself against witnessing and engaging with emotional and physical suffering.  By seeking refuge in this manner, I unknowingly closed myself from God’s ability to work through me to heal the broken.  The entire problem lies in this spiritual disconnect.  Though I may not have been suffering through victimhood, I was suffering through fear.  Both result from beliefs in separateness and both can be restored through a spiritual connection to God/love.

In reading and committing myself to the principles of A Course in Miracles, I have been restored to love.  My faith in separation has been replaced with a faith in oneness.  My faith in fear has been replaced with a faith in love.  Regardless of whether or not we our conscious to where we place our faith, we have placed it somewhere.  Most people think that faith is solely a spiritual term, but lacking a faith in love/oneness simply means that you have chosen a faith in fear/separation.  We are positioned to help heal others when we have consciously chosen to place our faith in love/oneness.

In the past, I was blind to the potential impact that each of us can have on one another.  I did not know how to heal the broken, nor was I looking to do so, but I do now.  Similar to the flight instructions about putting an oxygen mask on ourselves before helping others to their oxygen mask, we must first begin our own process of restoring ourselves to love so that we can help others do the same.  We don’t have to be fully restored to love to begin helping others; we just need to be moving in that direction.  Our restoration process actually begins to increase exponentially as we begin to serve as instruments of healing for others.

Forgiveness is the greatest example of how to be restored to love in a moment-to-moment basis.  The need for forgiveness is derived from projecting a false perception onto someone else.  Our attack thoughts come from our ego, which is our false self.  When we project our attack thoughts onto someone else, we pin them down through a false perception that needs to be forgiven in order to return to love.  For instance, in the examples I referenced from my childhood, I felt lucky (a form of separateness) for having been born into such a loving family and to have had such loving friends.  When my lucky circumstances were set against someone who hadn’t experienced unconditional love, I experienced an unconscious guilt (form of fear) that I projected by seeing the other person’s circumstances as threatening to the one I was experiencing.  To protect my experience, I pushed theirs away by separating me from them.  This was all an illusion projected at the level of ego.  Forgiveness allows us to see the truth behind the illusion.  By forgiving my past perception of seeing someone else’s circumstances as threatening to my own, I moved out of ego, which is where my guilt and fear was stemming from, and into spirit, where I am eternally connected to God/love.  I moved out of an illusion of separateness into the truth of oneness, where a role in the expression of love became visible.  In no longer being threatened by the circumstances of others, I allow love to pass through me and enter their experience.

Also, in seeing my experience with the unconditional love that my family and friends provided as a divine gift (instead of a form of separation), I see how I can share that gift with others as a source of healing.  Our divine gifts are meant to be shared, not hoarded.  I was able to see this when I connected to love, but when I was disconnected from love, I sought to hoard the love I experienced by closing myself off from extending it to those who could benefit from it.

When we open to being used an instrument of divine love, we allow ourselves to be moved in the manner in which we are supposed to.  We surrender to being guided by an intelligence far greater than our own.  Maybe we are moved to specifically say or do something or maybe we are just meant to hold an energy of love.  That is all to be determined by something far greater than ourselves.  We just need to open to being used in this capacity, listen for guidance, and move in accordance with that guidance.

As always, the journey continues….

With love,

Shanna

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