If by chance no one has told you that they love you today, I would be honored to be the first to say, I love you today! I love you because you are and have been so willing to grow. And my how you have grown! You've grown from struggling to searching. From trying to do to learning how to do. You've grown from fear to having faith, to demonstrating your courage. You have grown in many ways, consistently demonstrating your willingness and courage to take the next step -- the step toward the profound and divine wisdom buried within yourself. The step toward knowing more about yourself. This is exactly why I love you -- you are so profoundly divine.
Growth is a very profound experience. It can be beautiful and ugly, empowering and confining, thought-provoking and mind-boggling, pleasant and unpleasant, all at the same time. Just when you think you've got it, life seems to say, "Well, now take this!" And you do. Then, the minute you are ready to throw your hands up, give up or beat up on yourself for doing the same thing in the same way and ending up in the same place again, you realize you haven't done so badly after all. You know you have grown when you can meet a challenge, an obstacle or a difficulty without totally losing it. Somehow, someway in the growth process, you have come upon the understanding that the more you grow, the more you know, the more you are encouraged to grow and know.
There is more of you waiting to unfold. There is more about the world you desire to understand. There are more people coming into your life, and you are gaining more knowledge about yourself through your experiences with them. There is so much more, so much new information coming your way that you are continually being reminded that you owe it to yourself to do all you can to prepare yourself to receive these new insights. There is also so much more wealth, well-being, peace and joy waiting for you, and, because I love you, I want the very best for you. Offering you this book is a demonstration of my support as you prepare for the work and blessings that are to come.
I want to tell you a story. You know I always have to tell at least one story, and this is it. In preparing for an upcoming event, I gave my team what I thought was a simple assignment. You see, you cannot teach what you have not experienced. I asked each person, each potential teacher, to write a five-hundred-word description of themselves, using the first person, in the present tense. I had faith that these powerful and loving individuals, with whom I have worked for over seven years, would take the task in stride. What we learned in the process was profoundly healing for us all.
As we sat to review each response, my team members shared with me the overwhelming feelings, even fears, they had experienced while completing the assignment. I know from experience that examining yourself, what you do and how you feel, can be one of the most challenging and frightening things you will ever face in life. To then share that information with others is the stuff that fried brain matter is made of. Yet my team members understood that the journey into self-acceptance and self-love must begin with self-examination. We all also understood that until you take the journey of self-reflection, it is almost impossible to grow or learn in life.
Each response we shared that evening was deeply moving and radically honest. More important, we all heard a bit of ourselves in each response. One response stood out. It captured what we all knew but lacked the requisite courage or insight to say. I share that response with you and pray that it will prepare you, as it has prepared us, to really examine how we do, what we do.
The Landscape of Myself
As I pondered my own response to this assignment, I came to the realization that there are three very different aspects of myself that I could describe. The question then became which aspect do I describe? Which part and how much of myself do I choose to reveal? Life is so wonderful! It is always offering to us the opportunity to get it together. So I decided to come clean and, as honestly as possible, describe all three "selves" that I have now come to know. These selves make up the landscape of me that I am working to transform. That I am devoted to transforming.
The landscape of me varies in its appearance depending on who you are, where you stand in my life and how I choose to present myself. First, there is the self that usually appears in discussions like these. The self that I want others to see. This is the self of majestic mountain peaks and verdant meadows. This is the self of strength and power. This is the self of educational and career accomplishments, leadership skills and the demonstrated commitment to service. This is the public self, the one I struggle to hold on to.
Then there is the self that does not want to be revealed. It wants to hide. This is the landscape of weaknesses. There are many valleys and few peaks in this self. This self encompasses my secret thoughts and beliefs about who I am. This is the self that I do not share with others. This is the self I travel with in times of darkness, times of fear, through experiences of worthlessness and hopelessness. Yet I have come to recognize that this self guides me to the places of the truest teachings, learning and growth.
In the landscape of this self, the topography includes places like the "swamp of self-deception," overflowing with the waters of dishonesty, steaming with the fog of selfishness and reeking with the stench of egotism. Venomous snakes of procrastination, laziness and lack of self-discipline breed here freely. Quite often they threaten to eat me alive.
Nearby lies the "valley of self-doubt." This valley is littered with huge boulders of fear, formed from anxiety about failing, held in place by the pebbles of insecurity. The ground is dry and parched from long droughts of shame and guilt. Nothing grows in this valley. It is littered with weeds of limitation and lack.
The desert of anger surrounds the valley of self-doubt. It is heated by the unrelenting sun of self-hatred and resentment that give rise to the hot winds of resistance, disobedience, competitiveness and arrogance. These winds create sandstorms of jealousy, meanness and envy.
There are places in this landscape that cannot be seen by the viewer. These are the underground caverns and caves of "not good enough" and "not worthy of good" that run beneath the swamps and the valleys and the desert. These caverns underlie all of the self-destructive, nonproductive scenes. It is only recently that I discovered just how deeply these caverns and caves extend into my life. It is on this foundation I have stood most of my life. Until today!
During this process, I found it extremely interesting that while I am able to identify the weaknesses in such great detail, I am challenged in identifying the strengths. There is, however, a third realm in the landscape of self. It is not new, but it is a place I am just beginning to know and accept. This third landscape is a place of beautiful, inspiring scenery, scenes of dreams and aspirations. It feels new to me because I have wallowed in the swamp of self-deception for far too long, visited the cave of not good enough too often -- so often, in fact, that I lost sight of my right to dream dreams and aspire to the goals that I had created for myself.
I now stand boldly in this new land, dreaming joy-filled dreams and devoted to their realization. I now see lush, sunlit hillside terraces of hope; sandy white beaches of confidence; floral gardens of self-love and mountains of faith in my ability to have it all. In this new place of dreams, I am singing and dancing with delight; visiting breathtaking sites of peace, as I walk on the abundantly wealthy earth,...
Wow! eBook
