When you decide to open yourself to healing, the most difficult thing is the decision to act: the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life. The procedure and the process is its own reward.
To awaken from the Dream of the Womb requires that you become aware of what keeps you asleep. Even when you don’t realise it, you are constantly re enacting your dream. If you don’t know if you are awake or asleep then you cannot know when you have awakened. The awakening is the healing: it is as simple as that.
Letting go of the Dream, which has been your way of being for so long, will be very difficult indeed. waking up will be hard. To awaken and heal, you will have to always choose to do the most difficult thing. If it is very, very difficult, then you can know that you are trying to wake up.
THE PRACTICE OF SELF-FORGIVENESS - resentment into reconciliation
The Dream of the Womb is a treadmill or prison where there must never be change or growth. Self-forgiveness can change all that. The power of self-forgiveness can stop the treadmill and let you get off. It gets you from resentment to reconciliation.
Resentment
When you are lost in the Dream, you begrudge others their ability to drink the cup of life to the dregs. You feel bitter about the hurts and abuses against you in some distant past. You bear a grudge against the people who have made you feel bad about yourself - anyone will do. You take exception to any perceived attack on your self esteem. Perhaps you secretly believe that there is much to be aggrieved and angry about, but no one seems to understand. Trivial things annoy you excessively and you feel indignant about injustice. You feel jaundiced by life in general and peeved by stupid, irritating people. You feel put out about being ignored.
You would love express your resentment by being spiteful, unfriendly, ungenerous or vindictive, but perhaps you have personal standards of good behaviour so you suppress these feelings in the name of charity and forbearance. If you do not hold these rigid standards, then you probably tend to get into a rage from time to time where spite and vindictiveness surface and explode from within you. If not, then it takes very little to send you into a rage......
Whenever you are surrounded by animosity, bitterness and discontent this makes you unhappy and you resent feeling unhappy. You try to distance yourself from people of ill-will by suppressing all indignation, irritation, jealousy, malevolence and malice towards them and being “nice.’ You are often offended but say nothing and just suffer inwardly.
Reconciliation
If you can forgive yourself of the sin of simply being the person you are, then you can cease to feel resentment. You can pardon yourself for the rancour you feel when you think of your wasted life; you can remit what you owe to the people you have let down. You can acquit yourself of your imagined mistakes; clear yourself of blame; excuse your fond fantasies, for how else could you have kept alive your Dream for so long?
You can exonerate your self from self-imposed obligations. You can begin to indulge yourself and meet your emotional needs. You can feel pardoned for the things you did not do. You can excuse the way you have often taken on more than was your due. You can be spared the inner condemnation that you always feel; make allowances for the foolish things you have believed about yourself. You can overlook the minor blemishes on your character.
The reward for doing the difficult thing
Truly, the process of self-forgiveness is its own reward. As you forgive yourself, than you will be better at compassion to others. You will give in gracefully, be lenient to others when they make mistakes. You can become the forbearing person you always dreamed of being. You will be generous and understanding of yourself and others, as we all struggle on through life.
By deciding to use the power of forgiveness, you are allowing yourself to acknowledge your existing gifts. These are
- strength, potency, efficacy and stamina to get a job done;
- guts, fortitude and endurance to solve problems;
- forcefulness, assertiveness and aggression to fight wrong-doing;
- the ability to be constructive in thought and deed.
- vitality, cogency and adequacy
- The ability to take responsibility for your own life and your part in relationships.
All these gifts will be there for you when you awaken from the Dream, so start today!
This may seem like the final stage of healing, but in fact it is only the first stage in making a beginning - there is much, much more to come, but without this first stage completed, none of that can be yours.
