Return to the Joy Inside

Are you at ease with yourself?

Do you smile when you make a mistake?

Extend kindness to all?

Sweet!

Sounds like you’ve found a way back to your soulful self.

Or is the opposite going on within you?

Maybe your inner critics have you in a vise.

Or you’ve got a kink in your body from an old emotional wound.

You have my compassion. I’ve been there!

Last year, thankfully, there was a day that felt like I’d at last come home to myself.

I felt a true ease with who I’d become. I smiled.

I’d been on a path of self-acceptance and healing for a very long time.

This included offering myself the same kindness and care I so easily extended to others, forging a truce with my inner critics, and finding my voice.

There were sessions of body work, including massage, Pilates, and chiropractic, attempting to align and open my compressed body, the body I hadn’t felt at one with for years, the body I was newly offering care and attention to.

For years before that, I’d been disassociated from my body. Oh, my.

Would I ever abuse myself pushing to do x number of errands and carry x number of packages, all with a back aching from a car accident. Who was that woman?

She was dear me not in tune, and far from any semblance of integration.

So….there I was last August…more present in my body, feeling so many blocks were gone…after traveling through layers of healing.

Over dinner at a Chinese restaurant, I tell Ben I’m feeling called to go inward, that I plan to open my calendar for a few days.

On waking the next morning, I receive a strong intuitive knowing – to clear out all of Ben’s items, and to not see him for a while.

When I call him about this, he laughs.

Why are you laughing? I ask.

Because, sweetheart, you have been so changeable. I know this is a phase you’re going through.

Sweeping my home of his robe, slippers, coffee, and more, I build a pile by the door.

I turn on spiritual music.

I reach for spiritual books and my Angel Blessings cards.

I read…I cry in gratitude for my life…I pray…. I nap.

I am shown a film in my mind of the ways I’ve honored this life with lots of reverence, and all the times I wanted to be with God.

Wow, that’s true, I say. I’ve always cherished time communing with you. I even wanted to leave this life, which felt so challenging, and be with you.

After two days, I can’t get comfortable. I have an achy feeling I can’t shake, so I draw a bath, hoping this will help.

Before long, I’m communicating intuitively with the All, who teaches me so much about compassion, and that Separation is an Illusion.

I have compassion for the starving children in Africa, I shout!!

I have compassion for people who hate their jobs, I shout and cry!!!

There is No Separation.

I am in the Azalea, and the Azalea is in me. I am in the All, and the All is in me. I am in starving children, and the starving children are in me.

Afterwards, there is a union of my soul with the All in bed that is an experience I’m unable to put into words.

Suffice it to say, there is no separation.

As Neale Donald Walsh writes in Home with God In a Life That Never Ends —

Okay. On the journey to clarity we go. I have found myself in the woods. I have stumbled into the dark forest of my own conflicts and confusions, and I truly want now to get ‘back Home.’ But isn’t the shortest path the better path? I mean, isn’t shorter ‘better’? And what is the shortest path?

And God responds:

In order to answer this question, we have to define what we mean by ‘Home.’ What, exactly, is this ‘home’ to which people seek to return? Most people think that ‘going home’ means returning to God. But you cannot return to God, because you never left God–and your soul knows this.

YOU may not know this at a conscious level, but your souls know this.

Neale: But if my soul knows that I have no need to return to God because I never left God, then what is my soul trying to do? What is the purpose of life on earth, from the soul’s point of view?

God: I can tell you in four words.

Your soul is seeking to experience what it knows.

Your soul knows that you never left God, and it is seeking to experience that.

Life is a process by which the soul turns Knowing into Experiencing, and when what you have known and experienced becomes a felt reality, that process is complete.

Home, it turns out, is a place called Completion.

It is the Complete Awareness of Who You Really Are through the Complete Knowing and the Complete Experiencing and the Complete Feeling of that. It is the End of the Separation between You and Divinity.

This Separation is an illusion, and your soul knows this. Completion can therefore be defined as the moment when Separation ends, the moment of your reunification with Divinity.

May you listen to the voice of your soul, find ways to honor it, and heal all the separation you can to expand your joy!

P.S. I found this book to be a beautiful, powerful touchstone on many levels, and I highly recommend it. It would be especially helpful to you or someone you know who fears death. Home with God In a Life That Never Ends by Neale Donald Walsh.

This article first appeared in the Joy on Your Shoulders weekly ezine, Go In Joy! on August 23, 2012.