Letter to a Loved One

I awoke think­ing about you this morn­ing. I was touched by your shar­ing yes­ter­day and found myself with so many things in my heart to say…. But, at that moment I did not find the right way to speak these thoughts. Per­haps it was not time.

This morn­ing, how­ever, I awoke with you fresh on my mind and felt a strong desire to share with you.

So I decided to write my thoughts here and offer them to you … to read or not, as you please. My desire is to share with you some of what has brought me inner peace with the idea that per­haps they might serve you in a sim­i­lar way. I know that my way may not speak to you nec­es­sar­ily and there­fore these things may not be mean­ing­ful to you … nonethe­less I feel prompted .…

Per­haps the first great relief came for me when I learned what an incred­i­ble story maker my ego is! And then I dis­cov­ered that ego feeds on the resis­tance that gets cre­ated when I believe the stress­ful sto­ries it tells. (Resis­tance is any sort of neg­a­tive feel­ing or reac­tion such as anx­i­ety, sad­ness, resent­ment, etc that robs me of peace.)

I always think of the nurs­ery rhyme…

“Peter, Peter Pump­kin Eater had a wife and couldn’t keep her — so he put her in a pump­kin shell and there he kept her very well.”.

This, to me, is a great descrip­tion of our rela­tion­ship with ego. Ego is Peter Pump­kin Eater … that mas­cu­line function/ego intel­lect that is con­stantly try­ing to imprison the fem­i­nine aspect of self or Divine Essence. The only way he can “keep her(me)” is by con­vinc­ing her(me) of the story (rep­re­sented in the rhyme by the pump­kin shell) that he tells her is the truth about who she is. Ego has a def­i­n­i­tion of self that is very lim­it­ing. For instance, the “pump­kin” story told me unre­lent­ingly by ego went some­thing like this; “I am Lynne, daugh­ter of an alco­holic. I am self­ish and uncar­ing and totally unlov­able … the world is an unhappy place and I have to take what­ever I can wher­ever I can get it in order to survive…etc etc”

As long as ego could keep me con­vinced that I was indeed this lim­ited def­i­n­i­tion of self it could “keep me very well”, which means it rules. In this way, ego keeps me sep­a­rated from my true nature which is Pure Essence, High Fre­quency PEACE.

On the coat­tails of that real­iza­tion, came the under­stand­ing that there are two basic fre­quen­cies that the emo­tional body gen­er­ates; high fre­quency and low. High fre­quency con­sists of feel­ings such as love, peace, accep­tance, har­mony. It is our thoughts that gen­er­ate fre­quency. If our thoughts are of a high fre­quency we will expe­ri­ence feel­ings on the same fre­quency — feel­ings that align us with Source. I real­ized that only High fre­quency feel­ings can bring me into align­ment with Source because Source con­sists of of only the High­est Fre­quency. There­fore when I am res­onat­ing at a low fre­quency (angst, resent­ment, pain, depres­sion or any neg­a­tive state) I can­not con­nect with Source sim­ply because I am out of vibra­tional range of that fre­quency. We are vibrat­ing on dif­fer­ent wave lengths, so to speak. When I’m in low fre­quency, in order to align and con­nect with Source I must find a way to “up” my frequency.

It didn’t take me long to see how com­mit­ted ego is in keep­ing me sep­a­rated from Source by con­stantly run­ning a low fre­quency story! These low fre­quency sto­ries always cre­ate noth­ing but suf­fer­ing and unhap­pi­ness. As a mat­ter of fact, I have real­ized that any­time I am suf­fer­ing it’s because I am invest­ing belief in a low fre­quency story.

Tremen­dous relief came when I real­ized that I do not have to believe the thoughts that make up these sto­ries. I have come to see that thoughts, much like germs, are ram­pant in the atmos­phere. And like germs, whether or not you are “infected” depends upon the strength of your immune sys­tem. If your immu­nity is com­pro­mised then you are sus­cep­ti­ble to the germs that abound. Sim­i­larly, if you are in a weak­ened state from years of believ­ing low fre­quency sto­ries then you are prone to be “infected” by the stress­ful thoughts that con­stantly run through the mind. “There are no new stress­ful thoughts” (a Byron Katie state­ment), which means that every stress pro­duc­ing thought we’ve ever had has been thought mil­lions of times. Whether or not we BELIEVE these thoughts, how­ever, is up to us! WOW… that was great news to me, because it meant that, although I could not choose my thoughts… they come and go… I COULD begin to choose whether or not to “marry them” by believ­ing in them! Thoughts are not the prob­lem, I real­ized, unless I believe them. That’s because once I believe what I’m think­ing I start REACTING as if they are true. For instance, when I believe the thought, “I am self­ish and unable to truly care”, I start act­ing in ways that end up prov­ing to me that it’s true. When I believe the thought it gen­er­ates low fre­quency feel­ings so that I feel bad and so then I start with­draw­ing etc, etc .. so that my behav­ior ends up totally ver­i­fy­ing the thought! This is the way it works … not occa­sion­ally, but every sin­gle time!

Don’t take my word for these ideas, I cer­tainly didn’t! Try them on for your­self! I have proven through my own life expe­ri­ence that this is the way of it.

I have fur­ther learned that God is only present in this moment. Here and NOW can be the only abid­ing place for Source sim­ply because no other place exists! There is no other Real­ity … past and future are sim­ply imag­i­nary con­cepts that exist only in the mind. They are the domain of ego.

I have noticed that every time I am any­where but in this moment it’s sim­ply because ego has abducted me, through some low fre­quency story, into the regrets of the past or the angst of the future, nei­ther of which truly exist! The other place that ego likes to “keep” us is in that totally fab­ri­cated place I like to call “Shouldville”. Shouldville is where I am any­time I am resist­ing the way things are. “This, or that should not be” or “That should be dif­fer­ent!” is a way of fight­ing with Real­ity. And, as Byron Katie says, “I have never fought with Real­ity and won!” A ques­tion that Byron Katie asks often is; “How do we know it’s the way it should be? Because it’s the way it is!” God and Real­ity are one and the same! There­fore any­time I am “should­ing” life, I am bat­tling God.

Life is the way it is. If I want peace, I accept Real­ity. I don’t mean set­tle for it! I can see the way some­thing is and decide to be proac­tive towards change. That’s not a prob­lem. But what is this moment is what it is. My job is to accept what is this moment. Along with that aware­ness, that “what is” is just “what is” … comes the fur­ther oppor­tu­nity to trust that the “what is” is as it is because that is exactly what it NEEDS to be! I do not have to under­stand why things are what they are and it’s not my busi­ness to demand that things be dif­fer­ent (like that works any­way!). And, well frankly, the way things are is not my busi­ness any­way. My only con­cern is my busi­ness. Any­time I am in God’s (or any­one elses) busi­ness, I gen­er­ate suffering.

One of the things I began prac­tic­ing (again learned from Byron Katie) when I catch myself resist­ing Real­ity is to turn the should around by ask­ing myself, “What are three real rea­sons why this thing should be exactly the way it is.” For exam­ple, let’s say I’m telling myself that my hus­band shouldn’t be so con­trol­ling … how can I turn that around? What are three real rea­sons why he “should be” con­trol­ling? Here’s what I might come up with: He should be con­trol­ling because his attempts to con­trol give me a chance to see my own con­trol­ling nature (based on the under­stand­ing that any­thing I’m resist­ing out there is a reflec­tion of my own inner state). Another rea­son? Because there may be some­thing I need to hear in his con­trol­ling words because its hap­pen­ing in my Real­ity (and I don’t believe in acci­dents or mis­takes, mean­ing there is not a sin­gle thing that hap­pens that is not a teach­ing oppor­tu­nity for me) and, one more? Because my resis­tance to him gives me a chance to bet­ter love and under­stand myself … again, because what­ever I see out there is a reflec­tion of my own inner state.

This brings me to a final peace-bringing real­iza­tion worth men­tion­ing, and that is that the Uni­verse is always and only a mir­ror. We know that when we have some­thing in our eye that we can go to a mir­ror and use it to see and address the prob­lem. In the same way, the world faith­fully and unfail­ingly mir­rors to us our inner state of con­scious­ness. What is mir­rored to us by the world around us is what­ever our inter­nal beliefs are.

This tru­ism is based on the Uni­ver­sal Law of Men­tal­ism which states that every­thing in the world is made up of men­tal energy. This under­stand­ing was derived from the idea that the whole Uni­verse and every­thing in it is all hap­pen­ing in the mind of Cre­ator. What this means is that the world as we see it is totally a men­tal reflec­tion of our own inner mind. We see what we believe.

A great exam­ple of that is some­thing that I expe­ri­enced recently. I was look­ing through some pic­tures that we had taken in Wash­ing­ton and saw one of me that my daugh­ter, Jaque­tta had taken. I imme­di­ately thought, “Yuk … this is a bad pic­ture, I look old and unat­trac­tive, etc.” and quickly flicked on past it to the next one. Then I stopped myself, real­ized what I was doing — i.e. that I was run­ning a story and forced myself to go back to that very pic­ture and sim­ply lis­ten to what I was telling myself. After lis­ten­ing to the neg­a­tive story I was detail­ing, I decided to exper­i­ment, just to see what would hap­pen if I set that story aside for a moment and allow myself to look at the pic­ture of myself with­out the old story. I was amazed! With­out my demean­ing story the pic­ture looked totally dif­fer­ent! Sud­denly I saw a woman with happy, bright eyes and a relaxed bear­ing. I saw some­one who was com­fort­able in her own skin, etc.

The point is that with­out our sto­ries we can see a totally dif­fer­ent world! Real­iz­ing this has brought me such tremen­dous relief. I have real­ized that the Uni­verse is a friendly, benev­o­lent place. What we see hap­pen­ing out there is sim­ply a reflec­tion of our own mind, and or that of the col­lec­tive mind. When I react neg­a­tively to any sin­gle thing I see out there, I know I am pro­ject­ing a piece of my own story and, using the world in the same way that I use a mir­ror, I begin to look for what in me is being brought to my aware­ness for the pur­pose of integration.

An exam­ple: I had a client recently come in inflamed about a mag­a­zine cover she had seen fea­tur­ing a white supremist. She went on and on about how white supremists should be anni­hi­lated — should not be allowed to exist. She was almost rabid in rant­i­ngs. Finally I qui­etly asked her to tell me about the supremist in her­self. “Tell me about the part of you right now that wants to destroy oth­ers.” She got sud­denly quiet … and then I saw that she got it. She real­ized that she was feel­ing the same sort of judg­ment and ani­mos­ity towards the supremist that she was blam­ing him for having!

Our reac­tions are always about our­selves. The world faith­fully mir­rors where we are as indi­vid­u­als and as a col­lec­tive. The way to change the world out there is to use what­ever we find our­selves react­ing to “out there” as the mir­ror it is to show us what in our­selves is presently attached to a low fre­quency story. I have yet to uncover a low fre­quency story in myself and find it to be true. Ego runs these low fre­quency sto­ries which rob me of peace by gen­er­at­ing the resis­tance ego needs to feed it and keep it strong in its def­i­n­i­tion of self and the world … “Peter Pump­kin Eater” trans­lated, is “Ego, Story(resistance) Eater” who runs a lim­it­ing story in order to keep itself strong and in charge.

Again, these are sim­ply some of the aware­nesses that I’ve had that have brought new under­stand­ing and inner peace. I have stopped need­ing to resist or change the world around me as I once felt oblig­ated to do. I hope they bring you relief and peace as well.

Love and Blessings,

Lynne