Your life is not about you

My dear friends...

Last week in this space I said that there is a reason that taking the focus off of myself and placing on others has worked so effectively in changing my life, and I promised that I would continue that discussion this week.

The reason is that there's no such thing as "other" people. Everyone else is me. We are all one.

Separation is an illusion. No one is separate from anyone else. Therefore, what I do for you I do for me, and what I fail to do for you, I fail to do for me. What I give to you I give to me, and what I fail to give to you, I fail to give to me. What goes around comes around.

As noted above, you may not always receive it in return from the exact person you gave it to, but in the overall scheme of things Life will bring to you--sometimes from totally unexpected sources--what you bring to it.

As soon as I turned my life outward--worrying very little about how a thing affected me, or how my life was going, or what I imagined that I needed, but focusing outward instead, looking to see if there was some place or some way in which I could offer my gifts to bring help or joy to others--I found a pathway to real happiness and genuine inner peace.

That wonderful spiritual teacher of mine, the minister named Terry Cole-Whittaker, once asked a room full of people, in which I was seated: "What would you do if you felt that you were through with you? What if you were finished, and God told you there was nothing more you had to do to make yourself better, or more perfect? What if God said you are fine just the way you are, that you are perfect in God's eyes just the way you are showing up right now. Then what would you do? What would you work on? What would you tell yourself you had to 'fix' over there, or heal about yourself, or accomplish in order to feel 'whole'?

"What if you didn't have to go to one more workshop, attend one more seminar, hear one more sermon, or read one more book? What if God said, 'You're done! You've got it.' Now what will you do? If you had nothing you needed to do to 'fix' yourself, if someone told you that your life is perfect just the way it is, what would you do then?"

Well, Terry said, you might just decide to reach out and see what you could do to help others realize the same thing about themselves. And in that moment your whole experience of yourself would shift.

It is clear to me upon reflection that Terry understood, at a very deep level, what God said to me several years later in those six words...

YOUR LIFE IS NOT ABOUT YOU

Powerful, powerful words. Life changing words. And when I embraced those words, and all they brought when put into action, I had given myself the Holy Experience as it relates to my larger life in the world.

How?

I will answer that question next week.

With Hugs & Pure Love, 

Read this week's Letter to Neale here

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Read a message from one of the prisoners impacted by our Prison Outreach HERE