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Lesson 3: Step Two of Inner Bonding
Choose the intent to learn to love yourself and others. Making this choice opens your heart, allows Divine Love in and moves you into your loving Adult. Use any meditation or spiritual practice -or anything else- that helps you surrender and opens your heart to a compassionate intent tol earn about how you might be causing your feelings.
Once you are aware of your painful feelings and you consciously want responsibility for them, you can choose to learn what you may be thinking or doing to cause them. Knowing this will enable you to make new choices that will be more loving to yourself. It is choosing the intent to learn to love that releases your individual will and allows Spirit into your heart so that you operate as a loving Adult. You cannot learn unless you are a curious, compassionate loving Adult, and you cannot be a loving Adult unless you surrender to higher guidance. Surrendering your individual will, letting go of control over the outcome of things, and inviting the presence of Divine Love into your heart are the results of moving into a true intent to learn with your spiritual guidance about loving your Inner Child.
Lots of people are uncomfortable with the word .surrender,. so let.s talk about what surrender is - and what it isn.t. Surrender is not an act of acquiescence, but an invitation to your Higher Power to use your beingas vessel of love, compassion and truth. Surrender does not mean thatyou give up the things that are important to you. It does not mean that you have no personal goals and just wait to see what God does with you. Nor does it mean relinquishing your free will or giving up your .normal. life for a more ascetic life.
Surrender means that you relinquish the controlling thoughts from your programmed mindand let Spirit take over so that you, as a loving Adult, can embrace your wounded self rather than be your wounded self. It means opening your body, mind, heart and soul to the presence and action of your spiritual guidance. Surrender means letting go of attachment to the outcome and opening to an exciting journey of discovery.
The idea of choosing to learn to love sounds simple, yet doing it is not always easy. In order to let Divine Love into your heart, your desire to learn to love must be stronger than your desire to protect your selfagainst the pain of rejection, engulfment, helplessness, loneliness or whatever else you fear. You must decide that loving is more important to you than anything else, even being controlled, hurt or manipulated by others.
Even when you say you want to surrender control and let go of attachment to outcomes, blame, anger and misery can get in your way. When you feel victimized, you may be unwilling to open your being to Spirit and learn about yourself because you do not believe that you are the one causing your pain. As long as your focusis on blaming your past, others or God, you have no power to do anything about your pain. As we saw in Step One, although your childhood experiences may have caused you much pain and created your false beliefs and resulting behavior, those beliefs and behavior are now yours. Your thoughts that come from your beliefs - not the past -are what cause your current pain.
If You are Closed, How to get Open: Bridges to Learning
When you are stuck in the anger, blame, depression or numbness of your wounded self, you need to find a bridge that will take you into a state of openness to learning. Bridges are things you can do to open you rheart. Of the many bridges you can use, prayer, especially a prayer of gratitude, is probably the most powerful bridge. Prayer can take many forms, such as dialogue, meditation, recitation or song. The choice is up to you. Some people have found that repeating a simple prayer of gratitude throughout the day helps them stay open to learning.
Generosityis another bridge to opening the heart. Many of us focus on how we canget what we want or avoid getting hurt. But one of the quickest ways of moving out of a closed heart and into openness is to ask your guidance: .What can I give to myself and others?. The moment you sincerely ask this question - with no attachment to its outcome - your heart will open and Divine Love will rush in, just as air rushes into your lungsthe moment you take a breath. This happens because the very nature ofGod.s love is abundant, unconditional and always here for you when you ask for help.
Everything changes when you decide to go through life thinking about how and what you can give instead of how to get what you want or avoid the things you fear. For example, if you aregoing to a party where you don.t know anyone, you can create a lot anxiety for yourself by worrying, .How can I get people to like me? Howcan I avoid being alone?. However, if you walk in thinking, .What can I give? I can give people my smile, my interest, my acceptance and mysense of humor,. you will feel great. The moment you decide to give, your heart opens and Spirit fills you with love and peace. How can we know this is true? Many of us fear that nothing will happen if we open - that a Higher Power will not show up for us. The problem is that the wounded self does not believe that anything in the unseen spiritual realm is here for us and believes that if we let go of trying to have control over getting what we want, we will just end up feeling very alone. Our fears of being rejected and feeling alone, of being controlled by a Higher Power, or even of dying from being alone and helpless (feelings that come from infancy) may be so strong that we areunwilling to open our hearts to see if a Higher Power is really herefor us. Until you are willing to take a .leap of faith. and open your heart through the intent to learn, you will not know God.
If you are too stuck in your woundedness to pray from your heart, or you don't believe in prayer, then you need to try other bridges that can open your heart to learning about love. These include:
- Listening to music
- Taking a walk
- Being in nature
- Talking with a friend
- Reading spiritual literature
- Journaling
- Drawing or doing other artwork like sculpture or collage
- Dancing
- Attending Twelve Step or other support group meetings
- Playing with a child or a pet
- Being held by a loving person
- Letting yourself cry
- Releasing your anger alone by yelling and pounding into a pillow.
f you decide to further pursue learning about Inner Bonding, you canlearn a powerful three-step anger process for releasing and learning from your anger, a process that allows you to release your anger without dumping it on others.
Exploring Your Good, Compelling Reasons
There is another essential aspect of the intent to learn: you must believe that there are good, compelling reasons for your present feelings and behavior. These reasons are your fears and the false beliefs that create them. Understanding that you have good reasons for your feelings and behavior is the opposite of being judgmental. It is being compassionate. Your Inner Child will not open to you if you are shaming and judgmental of his or her feelings or behavior. And if your Inner Child doesn.t open to you, you will not be able to learn what youare doing or thinking that is causing your pain.
There are times when we have to make judgments about things, but there is a big difference between judgment intended to discern what is in your highest good and judgment intended to condemn. If you approach anactual child and ask, .What are you feeling?. in a condemning tone, the child will not feel safe in giving you an honest answer. If you ask that question in a compassionate tone, the child will probably tell you. The same is true of your Inner Child. Compassion is the natural result of understanding that you and others have good reasons for your feelings and behavior. You cannot be judgmental and compassionate at the same time. Accepting that you and others always have good reasons for your feelings and behavior will move you out of judgment and intothe open heart of compassion.
A true intent to learn is not focused on an outcome - such as getting rid of the pain or changing yourself so you can find a mate. The only outcome we are looking forwhen we are in a true intent to learn is to become a more loving human being. If you have any goal other than that, you will not be in a true intent to learn. Being in a true intent to learn means we want to learnto be loving, period!
If you choose to pursue learning more about Inner Bonding, you will learn much that will help you maintain a consistent intent to learn within and with others. |
