Loving All That We Are

My dear ones,

As hard as a life of virtue can be in some ways, it is worth every hardship.

Virtue is honesty. Merit is clarity. You don't use anyone and you don't lie to anyone, least of all to yourself.

You are true to yourself.

All the guilty ones you keep locked up inside, you have sentenced every one of them to life in prison without pardon. And here are the prisoners' names: the things you did, the abuse of people and animals, the manipulations and the lies, your ‘debts’ to others and theirs to you, what was done to you, what was taken from you, the traumas that are long past and that you insist on keeping alive.

For all of these, you have built prison cells within your own body and flesh. They are all seeds of sickness, suffering, and pain. In the end, you are at the mercy of your angry, imprisoned creations, burdened with the baggage of the past. They won't embrace you; they will make you suffer. You're probably shuddering and feeling a little more guilty now, perhaps even rushing to secure every lock so that, heaven forbid, they don't escape…

Why would they make you suffer?

Because they don't know how to express self-love through forgiveness and pardon. They only know what you know...

And what do you know? Habits and hormones. The chemistry of guilt, molecules of criticism and self-loathing.

The day we unlock every door and surrender to life here and now is also the day we can breathe and see what we truly are with crystal clarity. We forgive ourselves as we let go of those who owe us and those who have wronged us.

We forgive because we have decided to stop suffering, to end the era of the victim, to dismantle the altar of the devil living in us and stop worshipping it.

When we forgive, we allow the past to rest in its grave instead of consuming the precious moments we have here and now: our very lives. When we choose life now, the gift of life begs us, with every breath, to make this moment sacred and become someone new. It whispers to us to be reborn as an innocent child in a way no one ever “allowed” us.

And how could anyone else ever allow us something like that when they are running a prison of guilt themselves?

Forgiving isn't about giving yourself a hug. It is simply letting go of a worldview that makes the past sacred, seeing this innocent moment only through the lens of yesterday's suffering and tainting it.

To forgive yourself is to love all that you are.

When you love yourself, you no longer set conditions for forgiveness. Self-love is the unconditional acceptance of all your thoughts and feelings, whatever they may be.

All your thoughts, without exceptions or special cases.

This is the true freedom of the individual who loves himself as the totality of all life, and understands with every fiber of his soul that he is not just another person in the world, but a whole world in a person, in which he is priest and Levite: he is divine.

(From the book “The New Kingdom”)

May we all find forgiveness and pardon,

Ran

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