Love heals

I believe that love heals our hearts and that if we can just breathe ourselves open and find the courage to shift the emotional gap within our Being from anger, hurt or fear to love, everything changes. Anger, hurt and fear create closure, separation and suffering. Love offers spaciousness, unity-consciousness and healing.

Marianne Williamson speaks about this shift as "inviting the possibility of a miracle" into a difficult situation. I love this perspective because if we can just open to the possibility of something different and wonderful happening, we've created a gateway - a space - into which Spirit can enter. And when Spirit is invited into a situation, healing happens.

Our hearts are delicate creatures but our Egos are even more sensitive! By "Ego" I mean the part of us that identifies itself with the stories of our lives about who we are. We all have them - stories about who we are based on our experiences - and we believe them. The experiences we have in life turn into stories that become our personal "mental filters" or eye glasses for how we see the world. Through the lens of these filters or glasses, we only see or attend to the things that support the stories we believe about ourselves, and we tend to negate or overlook the things that contradict these stories.

Different spiritual perspectives and teachings say that there are three main filters we generate from the stories of our lives growing up: Victim, Persecutor and Rescuer. Once we find the particular filter that we believe fits us the best, we turn the fodder of our lives into a casting mold for it. You may be able to recognize which one you identify with the most by reviewing the noteworthy events in your life and seeing which filter you were looking through at the time.

Once we identify our main filter we can consciously widen our perceptions and perspective to include information beyond its borders, beyond the boundary of this (filtered) identity lens. This widening of our view is what allows a shift to happen within the scope of our reality because by widening our view, we begin to see things that we hadn't considered before. We begin to question the stories of our minds, and our faith and identity in those stories begin to crumble. As these old identity structures crumble, we create the spaciousness to start anew, from a new point of reference, maybe even one of love if we choose it.

Ultimately we can all identify with each of those filters. The question is: What choices will you make today to change your filter from Victim/Persecutor/Rescuer to Love? Just try it for one day, and see what happens!