Facing my MISTAKES.

Facing my mistakes

Let me quote Wayne Dyer, in his role in the film The Shift:

I’ve found that every spiritual advance I’ve made was preceded by some sort of a fall—in fact, it’s almost a universal law that a fall of some kind precedes a major shift.

And he adds so poignantly:

A fall can be an embarrassing event that reveals the exaggerated influence of ego has been allowed to play in one’s life.

Awareness: Guilt can make me feel inferior. Many times people have tried to manipulate me by putting me in the position of being wrong. My parents, sisters, teachers, and ex partners did that. I admit I attracted those types of relationships. I now want to explain to my grown up children that “my negative emotional patterns learnt in my childhood, has nothing to do with them and their inner worth.” It’s important how they see themselves in a positive light.

 I also realize I don’t want to live under a “cloud” of guilt with my grown-up children or with my ex-partner. If I allow guilt to control my life, I deny myself love and stay stuck, so I admit my true mistakes and honestly say, “I’m sorry,” from my heart. I now want to forgive myself and learn to be honest, open, and receptive to all love that life has to offer.

The true benefits of parting with love and forgiveness are that we will both take our capacity to love into the future, appreciating each other and ourselves from a place of expansion and unconditional love. We have so many possibilities with increased awareness and consciousness to attract what we truly want and need. We will also attract positive relationships that are honest and open. We are honoring our past love and taking good memories into the future, where we both have integrity. I want to stay friends with my ex-partner and will be there if she needs me. I see our parting as life giving us an opportunity to grow.

Choosing not to buy into fear!

Have you ever been at a place where you make out in your head that you’re bad and your shame permeates everything you see and feel and you’re losing every close relationship and everybody’s respect? Well those are victim thoughts, and victims seek to be rescued, and then they seek to blame. This is such a waste of energy! I know I need to take full responsibility for my mistakes and the hurt those mistakes have caused. However, if I put myself on the cross (or let others do it), I will not learn to heal and be self-actualized with self-compassion. I also know this is time for deep learning. I learn to be assertive and not to be bullied by others or myself. (I suggest further reading: Guiding Principles for Life Beyond Victim Consciousness by Lynne Forrest with Eileen Meagher.)

Leaving a relationship after twenty-seven years causes hurt, pain, regret, and anger. Yet with continual willpower to forgive and let go with love, huge growth, I believe, can take place—even on the subtle cellular level. When I leave people, I often say, “Take good risks.” So many of us say, “Take care.” Well, I am doing my best to put those thoughts together. I need to “take good risks” in writing this book with deep discerning wisdom. I don’t see that I am washing my “dirty laundry” in public. I see as I move forward with a positive intention that you and I can learn, and we can create a true healing on many levels. Initially, I did not welcome this inner journey. Now I welcome the inspiration of my inner calling that believes both of us, my partner and I, will grow in wisdom, trust and expand with creativity and kindness.

American spiritual teacher Vernon Howard wrote, “Disillusionment with yourself must precede enlightenment.”

I do not want to excuse myself, yet I want to make sense to myself about how I have got myself into this situation. So many people learn to lie to themselves and their loved ones. Even people who appear to have the moral high ground do this. Is lying endemic to get on and have your needs met? No!

So many of us hold secrets in our family lives and our public lives that can literally kill us; it certainly kills love. Men in highly powerful positions in politics and business have learned to lie and cover up until money markets crash and scandals of fraud are exposed. I have just come from a chance meeting with a very voluble Englishman whom I met while I was relaxing in a coffee bar here in Crete. He realized I was English. (I was wearing a green hat!) After ten minutes of talking, this man looked frightened when I asked: “What was your work before retiring?” It was just an innocent question… a common way we men talk about work! His nervous answer came;

“I used to teach Swiss bankers English in Berne.” he replied, looking over his shoulder as though really frightened. Then, in a soft tone he whispered, “I have never met such a bunch of morally corrupt people in all my life. I even got told off for introducing good ethics in my English class! All they are interested in is their rich cars and houses!” He left nervously, cycling fast down the high street, as though he was going to be assassinated!

Can we make a difference by being more open and truthful? Yes. If we are prepared to have courage, then we can inspire others to have courage to share their vulnerabilities. Which reminds me of the next story:

Starfish on the Beach

While walking along the beach one day, a young man noticed thousands of starfish had been washed up by the tide. The tide was going out, and the starfish were stranded. There was no way that they could get back to the water, and within an hour or so they would be dead.

In the distance, he noticed an elderly woman, who was picking up the starfish from the beach and throwing them back into the sea. He approached her and asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’m throwing these star fish back to the sea.”

“But why are you bothering? There are thousands of them, and what you are doing won’t make any difference,” said the young man.

“It will make a difference to this one,” said the lady as she hurled another starfish into the receding tide.

In my opinion, yes, we can learn to lie and die inside. Maybe there are millions of lies held on the beach of life, yet this lady’s example is worth following. I want to own my unfolding truth and throw myself back into the sea of life and live and become open and receptive to a vast pipeline of new possibilities. I want to teach people—especially men who are willing—to love who they are and not control or be controlled by fear and all its accompanying emotional patterns.

Dive 2 DARE TO BE YOU!

Dive 2

Dare to be me: Warrior Love

As I sit looking down the mountain and at the deep blue sky I ask myself:

Do I really want to change and grow, or am I too fearful of what I may find? The answer comes:

Dare to be you; not what you think others may want you to be!

This is where a retreat into your wisdom and love can begin. This book is from my heart—nonacademic and written in simple language. It is about what I have learned to love, especially the power within, which watches my negative self-destructive thoughts and behavior, and feeds my intuition positively. It invited me to “come out” to Crete (before I leave this training ground called Earth!). So here goes. Hold onto our magical carpet and fly with me!

Don’t die wondering—life is a series of lessons

What if you and I left this life knowing who we are and that we are full of love, kindness, and creativity? What a wonderful thought! Imagine … no bitterness no regrets. No unnecessary disease. We learn to open our inner power to see life as constant learning and a loving place to be.

I know I am not perfect, and I have made mistakes. The mistakes attract tough experiences, yet I see everything as lessons that teach me about authentic compassion and self-compassion. This, in turn, carves out my unique path towards consciousness and transformation.

Now imagine being at our own funeral

I ask myself: “How will I be remembered and spoken about at my funeral?” I immediately think that joy and inner peace would radiate to all who spoke about me at my funeral. Yes, there may be some people who might say, “What a lovely rogue he was,” yet it would be said with love for my imperfections. Because I allowed myself to love myself from a place of authenticity, I may have been hurt. I may have transferred my pain onto others, risking the path of loving and being loved! I may have hidden parts of my life from those close to me, and I might take this with me to my maker! Some people may stay silent for fear of offending my name and others may gossip their opinions. Yet no matter, I would have lived with love in my heart.

Well, I make a clear choice to share those hidden thoughts with you in this book. I ask you to go deep into resonating with your own life as I unravel mine. I sense, then, that the hidden forces, faculties and talents, become alive as I discover myself in being truthful, without fear of criticism, gossip, shame, or blame.

Risk loving you

Now, to risk loving means loving my more permanent self enough to be truly human and at times become excruciatingly vulnerable and intimate with the images that the mirror of life reflects back to me. Yet I do so with self-compassion. I know I risk everything I have ever helped to create back home by being truthful. I am not writing this book to hurt anyone. I am writing it to, just maybe, help you, the reader, be more open to change and go within to experience with me some realization of:

Who am I?

What do I need to learn?

What have I deep inside to give?

What is my real purpose in this life?

Often I hear from people what they don’t want; yet not what they love with passion, the latter I believe, can expand our capacity for unconditional love. This is probably the only capacity we take to our next life in spirit. That may be a little advanced for you to comprehend at this stage; indeed, when I first heard this I said, “Get real. Life is tough. It’s not about learning unconditional love!”

Yes, that was my first reaction to being asked to love me, a man! All I know is that, when someone suggested, “You can learn to love you just as you are,” I scoffed so hard I choked. My resistance was so full of cynicism. I thought I was a hardened, “street wise” man with life’s knocks to prove it! I loathed being open, and I had no real emotional language or intelligence. I was a “man!” Ah! What a limiting belief! Ring any bells, men?

So now on day one of a thirty-day quest in Crete, I start this book sitting in an isolated villa, high above a town in the southern part of the island, with the morning sun warming my typing fingers. Outside, Konstantina, my landlady, is gardening with her beloved longhaired black collie dog, ReBell! The villa took ten years to complete… that’s Greek time… slowly, slowly! In Greek, ciga ciga!’

First Morning

At home in the UK, I begin the day by sending, a text—a positive affirmation each day—to a hundred people or more. It’s a lovely action that inspires me. Now being abroad, I give a positive affirmation to myself from Louise Hay’s pack of Wisdom Cards. The card says, “I can heal myself on all levels!” And on the reverse side it says: “Healing means to make whole and to accept all parts of myself, not just parts I like, but all of me.” How appropriate. And then I open her book, You Can Heal Your Life to a random page and read: “My life doesn’t work.” I am reminded how I used to wake up saying, “My body, finances, and relationships don’t work!”

Now I have manifested a beautiful villa with a magnificent view of a winding snake-like road between sun-scorched mountains and the sea. I can hear goats—their bells are ringing. And I can hear dogs barking. The most precious gift is time to think and write this book, away from all family and friends. It is my retreat to all my earthly senses and with the unseen inspiration calling me and guiding me. Let me dive in the deep end. As Dr. Deborah Anapol wrote, “Love is its own law.”

I accept love is a mystery and most people want love.

Here is what I have learned over years as I have grown to like and gradually love me and life, that I call warrior love.

·      I have confidence in my ability to communicate to a whole range of people. They often share their secrets and their willingness (and resistance) to love themselves.

·      I am learning to be giver as well as a receiver of love, with a high degree of compassion and self-compassion.

·      I do my best not to judge or gossip. The effect of gossip is so destructive; when I see myself do it, I do my best to stop.

·      I am a person learning to have pleasure, including sex, without shame.

·      I am allowing others to love me in deep platonic friendships. This was one of the most difficult changes, because I never thought or felt loveable.

·      I am learning to take back my power to earn good money doing work I love. I realize now how important this is toward building self-esteem, self-worth, and self-love.

·      I am learning to say positive affirmations in the mirror about my mind and body and soul, including my sexuality. I love playing audio principles of success daily, especially when I find myself reverting to old negative habits.

·      I am learning to follow my intuition by meditating.

·      I am willing to learn from teachers who cross my path.

·      I am learning to turn my negative beliefs into positive affirmations: An example:
“I am open and receptive to all good!”
“I am safe.”
“I release the need to be right.”
“I am at peace. I love and approve of myself.”

·      I am learning, gradually, to let people know who is behind the masked, hurt adult and releasing the “genius” child. I believe this genius is in all of us—when we choose to love ourselves by developing a nurturing inner parent! A parent that loves us, even when we make mistakes—especially while we learn. This makes warrior love a reality.

·      I am willing to let go with love, relationships that constantly criticize and try to control me through guilt. I ask myself: What in me attracted this experience? I take responsibility to do some work to change and heal me.

·      I am learning gradually to tell the truth by courageously owning my story.

·      I realize that, as I learn to love myself, I can forgive myself, especially when I take responsibility for my mistakes.

·      When I look into a real mirror or a metaphorical mirror that reflects what I have attracted to me in experiences, I can now learn patience and believe myself when I say, “I love you, Roger, even when you make mistakes.” I am learning to be patient—not an easy family pattern to change. So often I have wanted to jump a whole series of lessons, because my ego wanted everything now without doing the work.

·      Most importantly, I ask people I have hurt to forgive me, and I ask this with authenticity.

·      I am learning that, when I invite the source of love to help me, even the toughest experiences are transformed into healing.

·      I am learning to handle anger, jealousy, guilt, shame, and grief, and see each of these emotional states as an opportunity to learn.

·      I am learning the difference between man-made laws of love and natural laws of love.

·      I see more clearly that to have a real relationship with another, I need a shared life purpose and similar spiritual values.

·      I am learning what I need in a relationship. This is an emotional resonance of appreciation for self and each other based on being true to self and the other person. Then criticism is so rare, and each day can be full of love and happiness.

·      If the relationship is built just on sexual attraction, and an unwillingness to truly love one’s true self, then the relationship with self and anyone else is a co-creation of unhappiness.

·      I am willing to live on my own and be happy rather than accommodate fear, guilt, shame, and resentment from another.

And now, I dive into that part of me that wants to stay secret!

How to let go without making me wrong or me right

Now my aim is to manage the change and transition with my primary partner with deep gratitude, love, and integrity. Some of those changes are personal to us. Simply, we have changed, and we need to go our different ways and do what our spiritual paths guide us to be. Like many partners, we gradually learned to take each other for granted. We did things often separately; we lost the zest for being together. Our hobbies were so different. What we agree on, however, is that we want the best for each other. If I am in a prison of self-righteousness and the other is wrong, then it’s still a prison! I want to be human not right!

For years I have loved and sat listening to my partner, and she has done the same for me. We always gave the gift of deep listening to each other. We have talked at length in the later years about our relationship and whether to “open” our marriage to others, which I later suggest can be such a gift of love to similar-minded partners. The problem is, when we have been conditioned to monogamy, then being open can be so hard, because thoughts of guilt, fear, and criticism, can erase love of self and our own self-compassion. I loved faithfully as a monogamous man, until some years ago. And somewhere, I chose not to tell my primary partner that my capacity for love was expanding in a way that was new and not fully understood by me. As I write this book, I still love her deeply. Yet our energy vibrations are so different, and our way of understanding marriage has changed.

Constant self-criticism, I believe, kills love

I saw constant signs of my partner not loving and accepting how beautiful she is, and her self-criticism hurt me so much. No matter how much I appreciated and loved her, I came to feel that the blame she accepted of herself was my fault. What I experienced was growing anger inside her, especially when her mother died.

Insight: When you have experienced anger and criticism for, and from, a parent that is unresolved, you may bring this emotional pattern into intimate relationships. I did blame my parents, and I take responsibility that this negative emotional pattern developed beliefs and emotions that I allowed to control me. I now choose to forgive my mother and father and not stay in blame. I cannot change anyone else, especially my partner. I need to change and be a person congruent to my beliefs. Hopefully, I am choosing to love, be loving and loveable. Constant criticism in any guise creates a vibration that brings ill health and constant resistance to loving self.

The mirrors

I consistently do a lot of mirror work, seeing what in me made my partner so critical of herself and, at times, of me. Now I accept that my love was not honest and good enough. I was not impeccable with my word. Sometimes I certainly took things personally, and I did not always do my best. And I made the assumption that I could go elsewhere to meet some of my needs.

So now I recognize that there is a beginning, middle, and an end in our intimate relationship. I recognize that people come into our lives for a time and then leave at the right time. It has taken us, as happens with so many couples, a personal crisis to separate. We agreed for most of our relationship to be monogamous. Then as both of our needs changed we grew apart and we met our needs in different ways. My partner clearly wants now to stay monogamous. I choose differently. I want to be open to whatever happens that is wholesome and does not make me wrong or my partner wrong. That would come from such unresolved pain and limiting beliefs. This is work in progress. I want to be gentle as I learn from our parting. I don’t want to stay in the role of guilty person. Love for me cannot be turned on as a reward. It cannot be turned off as a punishment.

I would choose to live on my own and be happy rather than stay in a relationship where we both feel wrong

This is one great benefit of living by myself in a retreat and seeing the negative emotional patterns more clearly. It’s painful to admit this, and yet so freeing. I just picked up The Seven Natural Laws of Love by Dr. Deborah Anapol and read: “You are the source of love. You! Not your husband or your wife, not your lover, not your parents, nor your guru... love is within each of us and radiates outwards.”  Over the years of struggling with where and what is love? I realize it’s an inside job! that can be a truly worthwhile journey.

A lighter story! (But let me be clear—I am now not looking for the perfect woman).

A Sufi Story

Nasrudin met an old friend whom he had not seen for twenty years. They sat together in the cafe and talked over old times.

“Did you ever get married, Nasrudin?” asked the friend.

“No, I’m afraid I didn’t.”

“Why not? I’ve been married many years, and I’ve never regretted it.”

“Well,” said Nasrudin, “I was always looking for the perfect woman. I wanted my wife to be beautiful, intelligent, and sensible.”

“And you never found her?”

“I thought I had, when I was twenty. Her name was Ablah. She was beautiful, just the kind of woman I like, but I’m afraid she wasn’t very intelligent, and her language was atrocious! I was embarrassed to be with her! She certainly wasn’t the perfect woman.”

“Was she your girlfriend?”

“No. When I was twenty-five I met a woman called Bahira. She was good looking and intelligent, but she wasn’t very sensible. She spent all my money on frivolous things, and she couldn’t even boil an egg! She wasn’t the perfect woman either.”

“Were there anymore?”

“Only one. At thirty I met Haddiyah, and she was truly a gift from God! She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, and the most intelligent. What’s more she was prudent and sensible, a good cook, and a brilliant conversationalist.”

“She sounds like the perfect woman you were looking for!”

“She was the perfect woman I was looking for.”

“Then why didn’t you marry her?”

“Unfortunately, she was looking for the perfect man!”

Insight: I admit I was, in the past, looking for the perfect woman to marry and be monogamous for life; I thought the “perfect woman” would make up for my deficiencies and make me happy! I wanted to be the dominant male and have no competitors from other males. Oh what limiting beliefs! I needed to do a whole lot of work on my father-son emotional sexual patterns. I’ll talk about this later.

DIVE 1 from warrior love

Dive 1

Choices

My waking thought: It is safe for me to grow, even when life requires tough choices.

Let me ask you, the reader: Who would be fearful, critical, or jealous of you if you changed by loving yourself and then, shining that love and the powerful miracle within you to create a whole new way of being and living? One consequence of your changing could be attracting new intimate relationships into your life, new ways of being creative, new ways of living with the earth. A whole new vista of life could open up.

Who would not want you to change and grow into a powerful person in your own right? Would it be your partner, your children, or people who think they know you?

Raising awareness and consciousness through therapy or self-help groups or books, or teachers who cross your path may bring the realization that your life needs to change. Often self-made confusion through feeling fear can mask the true change that is happening. Lots of inner excuses tell us not to change: “don’t rock the boat.” There is one part in us—the “old us”—that wants everything to stay the same. However, our deeper desire is to become true to the person that is deeply buried under this fear. There is, I believe, a time to rebirth the miracle we were born with. This can happen when we nearly die or experience a crisis or catastrophe such as a partner leaving. I think we re-connect consciously with the heart energy of love. We can call this power Divine Mind, Universal Mind, God, Goddess, or Higher Self. We do come back to our spiritual home of being truly spirit having a temporary human physical body.

Deep change

This deeper change I now face. I have come to encounter, digest, and assimilate the challenge of my second wife and I going our separate ways and doing this with as much kindness, wisdom, love, forgiveness, and truth as we can. I love her, yet our ways of seeing and experiencing love and reality are not compatible.

In my first marriage, I found it so hard to believe I could change and grow. I am not blaming my partner. I was frightened of what others might say. I left after twelve years of not being myself. You see, I never knew who I was. I just reacted to survive. I did the best I knew how with the awareness I had then. Fear paralyzed me to the point that I blamed parents, sisters, schools, church, and most of all myself!

As my arrested inner child dictated, all I knew was, I must never tell the truth. People will hurt me and make me feel stupid. The man I was then was confused, had no real self-knowledge, and was filled with such hurt. I was on the “inner telephone,” as one of my teachers put it, so I never really listened or learned how to live with authentic, responsible, personal power. My chatterbox was full of self-doubt.

Sound familiar to you? I thought, everybody else must change before I can be free to make new choices. I became the classic victim, and of course, my main thought was: There is no money to be free!

I thought of all the reasons why I could not change. The word can’t was in the forefront of my mind. Now can remains after removing the apostrophe and the t. I had no faith or trust that anything “out there” or within me existed that would assist me in making a positive change. I became a taker, a victim, and my own worst judge. I bored everyone with my hard-luck story and felt sorry for myself.

Being responsible with compassion and self-compassion

This book is written in contrition, not shame. I know I am not a bad man. I take full responsibility for the poor choices I made in the latter years of our marriage.

I realize I have taken from those I love by keeping secrets and by lying about my need for an intimacy that my partner could not give me. I believe she has changed, and now I cannot give her what she truly needs. The person I have become is not perfect, and, thank you, reader, I hope you are not. Perfectionism is a killer; it hides who we are. That’s not an excuse. I risk feeling shame at present, and I wake in the middle of the night feeling desolate and imagining people gossiping about my choices and behaviors. Yet I am learning to have what research professor Dr. Brené Brown calls, “self-compassion” to “develop shame resilience.” Not listening and recognizing the need for change can be so painful if, like me, you have learned to lie for fear of losing love or because you feel unlovable.

Wanting others to change rather than changing yourself

One truth I realize I wanted my partner to change to how I wanted her to be. I felt I would be happy then. But I cannot change anyone, only myself. I know this in theory, yet I denied my power and responsibility to come out and say, “I am changing. It’s time to be honest about who I am and what I need.”

One big lesson I learned is that, when I choose to stay silent and not say what I need in a relationship, I hurt my partner as well as myself. I know now I cannot earn anyone’s approval by hiding behind the deception of getting my needs met elsewhere. And I am not going to beat myself up for changing as a human being.

However, I could have listened to my inner power, which so often prompted me to be truthful. But I was too afraid of the consequences. I thought that by being honest, I would hurt those I loved. This circular thinking deepened my confusion. So, reader, listen carefully to what is changing within you. Remember that the longer you delay being honest, the more hurt will come to you. So many of us—men especially—isolate ourselves, pretending to be okay while running scared inside. We compartmentalize our secret lives. Eventually these secrets unfold, often prompted by crisis, and then we are encouraged to be truthful in every area of life, past and present. Well, my partner choosing to leave me is my prompt.

The fear of lack and not deserving

While I was growing up, I never felt there was enough money, and this linked indelibly in my consciousness to the lack of love in my original family. As a result, I gave up my power to earn my own money when I married and, most importantly, my ability to charge a fair price for doing what I was clever at, which was working with people as a therapist, counselor, and group leader. I loved my work and did it with as much patience and love as I could muster. Yet I felt somewhere I was not worthy.

This became a large area of resentment for me and for my partner. I relied on another person, my wife’s kind father, to provide financially for my family and me. This does not bring self-respect.

Taking back my power

I truly want to take responsibility with heartfelt forgiveness and love for what has happened. An old proverb says, “You get what you think about whether you want it or not.” So I watch carefully what I think and say. And moreover, I watch what I put into my mind daily. What do you think and say about your life moment-to-moment, day in day out? Are you critical with your mind to your wonderful body? Well, read this story:

The Stag at the Pool

A thirsty stag went to get a drink from a pool. Having satisfied his thirst, he lingered for a moment, looking at his reflection in the water. What fine antlers I have, he thought. They spread out so wide and look so strong that I’m sure all the other creatures envy me. Then he noticed how thin and weak his legs looked. If only my legs were as impressive as my antlers, I’d be a very beautiful beast indeed!

As he was thinking these things, a lion spotted him and began to give chase. The stag took off and easily outpaced the lion in the clearing, but as soon as the stag entered a wood, his antlers caught in the branches of some trees. Try as he might, he couldn’t disentangle himself. In fact, the more he struggled, the more trapped he became. Soon the lion caught up with him and attacked him. With his dying breath the stag said, “Oh how mistaken I was! I despised my legs which were keeping me from death, and I boasted about my antlers which have been my ruin.”

Insight: Sometimes we could benefit from choosing to value what we value least. What aspects of life do we take for granted—despise even—yet would cause us to feel impoverished if we were denied them? Perhaps it is finding love within ourselves and then realizing we are truly lovable. As A Course in Miracles puts it succinctly: “Identify with love, and you are safe. Identify with love, and you are home. Identify with love and find yourself.

A secret: We become what we think about! So I choose warrior love and one aspect of warrior love is self-compassion.

Love holds no grievances!

A Course in Miracles says in Lesson 68, “Love holds no grievances.” And adds: “To hold grievance is to let the ego rule your mind.” Later:

“Perhaps you do not yet fully realize just what holding grievances does to your mind. It seems to split you off from your source and make you unlike him.”

And later “When I let all my grievances go I know I am perfectly safe.”

I love letting go grievances yet they can come back to haunt me and I have further work to do!

When religion has become an ideology, when men use and abuse scripture to have power over human beings, they inflict great pain by denying sensual pleasure through our animalistic bodies. I suggest, if you repress the energy of love, love will become abusive and addictive.

So I invite you to listen to your body and the wonderful animalistic virtues it has—like I did with Freddy the Dolphin.

However, we need to experience this inner body that is eternal. Your love, together with the divine love, is going to lift you up.

I am playing “Love Is Going To Lift You Up” by Bobby Womack.

This reminds me of “The Smuggler,” a story of the obvious—yet so unseen—just like how doctors or so-called experts are not prepared to see the connection between mind, body, and soul!

The Smuggler

Every day, Mustafa took his straw-laden donkey across the border. But one day, he was stopped by a customs officer, who eyed him suspiciously.

“What have you got in that straw?” he asked. “Are you carrying any contraband goods across the border? If you are, you’ll have to pay a fee.”

“Look for yourself,” replied Mustafa. “I’m hiding nothing!” The customs officer poked about and found nothing.

This went on, day after day. Sometimes he would look in the donkey’s mouth, even under the tail! Nevertheless, the customs officer vowed he would never stop searching.

This went on for ten years, and the customs officer retired. However, the ex-officer thought one day he might have been smuggling gold dust in the donkey’s fur.

One day he was walking through the market and he saw a familiar face. It was Mustafa without his donkey. “Hey you! Come here! Aren’t you are the man with the donkey laden with straw?”

“Yes I am,” replied Mustafa.

“And you were smuggling weren’t you? I am convinced you were. I searched you every day but I couldn’t find anything, because you were very crafty. But you can tell me now. Were you smuggling?”

“Yes I was!”

“I knew it! What were you smuggling?”

“Donkeys!” said Mustafa with a big smile.

What negative thoughts do we smuggle into our beautiful minds, bodies, and souls? Our bodies never lie. We, in our minds, lie to it. Then we wonder why we are full of fear and dis-ease!

My love to you!

Choosing beliefs that truly support you.

Choose beliefs that support you, including beliefs about God

Here is a very important suggestion from Louise Hay: “Get a concept of God that supports you!”

I love this thought. My religious upbringing did give me one benefit—it got me out of the house on Sundays, for peace. My parents came once to church; they thought it would be good for us children to go to church and have a religious education!

My spiritual journey has, at times, been very disciplined. And then it waned, as I felt there was always basic criticism and fear at the heart of religion. In my opinion, fear based religion develops from the reaction of souls who have not learned to love themselves! (That could start a conversation!) I could not cope with feelings of being so wrong and guilt ridden when I came out of church services.

As a counselor, I listened to so many stories of adults having been sexually or spiritually abused in so-called religious families as children. I could not match what Jesus said with what came out of the mouths of “often angry pulpit priests” (whose own childhood was very suspect) and what truly was going on in reality. The Roman Catholic Church is facing a deep truth about the celibacy of their priests leading to sexual and emotional abuse. Please hear me: I am not against religion; yet I do feel each of us is naturally highly spiritual, and we don’t need an “expert” middleman or woman. Enough said.

The Sailor and the Teacher

Ayra earned his living by taking people on short boat trips. He came from a nautical family, and although he’d never had any formal education, he had learned all about sailing from his father and grandfather.

One day a schoolteacher, who fancied a few hours at sea in order to rest from the rigors of the classroom, hired him. He’d not been on Ayra’s boat long before he asked: “What do you think the weather’s going to be like today, Ayra?”

The sailor assessed the strength of the wind, examined the sky, looked at the sea and then said, “I think we is going to have a storm.”

The teacher looked shocked. “What? Can’t you speak properly? You shouldn’t say ‘we is.’ You should say ‘we are’! Didn’t anyone teach you grammar?”

“I’m a sailor,” replied Ayra. “What do I need grammar for?”

“Because, if you don’t know grammar, half your life is wasted!” the teacher sneered, as he settled down to read his book. Within minutes, and just as Ayra had predicted, the storm clouds began to gather, and the waves became choppy. Ayra became anxious as the boat was tossed on the rough sea.

“Did you ever learn to swim?” asked Ayra.

“Why should I learn to swim? I’m a schoolteacher!”

“Well then your whole life is wasted, because this boat is going to sink any minute now!