The universality of shame and hurt

Shame is universal

We all feel shame - you are not unique. We all feel guilt. We all are lost in our own fantasies of separation.


Suffering is universal. Suffering is human, the experience of humanity. But  suffering is the gateway to the open heart - to the realisation that we ALL suffer, and are one in our suffering - and so suffering becomes the path to true compassion: for others, for oneself, and for all beings. It is the compassion of the open heart: of unconditional love - the love that recognises that all our suffering has one root cause: our false belief that we are separated from that which we love - that we are not where we should be - that we are not who we are meant to be... 


All that pain, all that suffering has one source: it is the self-creating suffering of the ego-self, so desperate to feel and believe it’s own uniqueness and independent power, that it denies and turns away from the all embracing universality of experience, shuts itself off from the infinite sea of being, and locks itself away into the dark and cold-steeled prison of the closed and shame-filled heart...


But we have a choice, in each and every moment. We can choose to perpetuate our fantasy of separation, the pain of our individuality and uniqueness - or we can soften and open the heart: To choose love, and BE love.


And yes, it’s painful - but it’s a good pain, and a pain that will heal, because it’s the pain we all share. It’s the pain that the Midnight Gospel spoke about in facing his mother’s death (and our own mortality) - it’s the pain of the Sacred Heart, the Suffering God in the Holocaust, and the infinite transforming compassion of the Bodhisattvas. 


And it’s here, in the personal hurt and realisation of hust how hard we - I - have hurt myself in the self-perpetrating masochism of mistrust, doubt and fear.


But there is one great cure: 


CHOOSE LOVE.


Always, and in all ways.


CHOOSE LOVE.



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