"It is necessary to own and honor the child who we were in order to Love the person we are. And the only way to do that is to own that child's experiences, honor that child's feelings, and release the emotional grief energy that we are still carrying around." * "A "state of Grace" is the condition of being Loved unconditionally by our Creator without having to earn that Love.  We are Loved unconditionally by the Great Spirit.  What we need to do is to learn to accept that state of Grace.

The way we do that is to change the attitudes and beliefs within us that tell us that we are not Lovable.  And we cannot do that without going through the black hole.  The black hole that we need to surrender to traveling through is the black hole of our grief.  The journey within - through our feelings - is the journey to knowing that we are Loved, that we are Lovable."

The healing process is an inside job.

The relationship I need to heal is between me and me.  Everything in my lesson plan / life experience is there for me to learn from so that I can heal my relationship with me. All the people who play a significant role in my life are teachers reflecting back to me some aspect of my relationship with my self - with my humanity, with my emotions, with my sexuality, with whatever - that needs healing. Through healing my relationship with me I am owning and honoring my connection to everything.

There is nothing wrong with who we are - it is our relationship to our self that is so messed up.  We are all Spiritual Beings having a human experience.  We all have Divine worth as children of The Source.  We are all perfect parts of The Source.  In our relationship with ourselves on this level we need to learn to open up to receiving the Love that is our True state of being - that is why we are here.  To heal so that we can reconnect with Love.

I am going to have to put off talking about the details of energetic clarity in relationship and "how to differentiate between looking outside for the source and combining our energy with some outside influence to help us access the Source within" until my next column (this one is getting too long) in order to to make one point very clearly here.  It was impossible for me to start to get clear energetically in my relationships with others and life until I started to have boundaries that told me where I ended and other people began.  As long as I believed that I was responsible for other people's feelings and behavior I could not start seeing myself clearly.  As long as I was looking to other people for the juice / energy / power to feel OK about myself, I was set up to be a victim and recreate the old patterns.

This is The big paradigm shift.  Shifting our intellectual paradigm - our attitudes, definitions, and beliefs - is necessary in order to raise our consciousness and open up to consciously accessing the Transcendent vibrational energy of Love, Light, Joy, and Truth.  I had to stop looking outside for the answers and start accessing the Truth within.  Only when I started to open up to the idea that perhaps, maybe, I was Lovable and worthy in a way that was not dependent on outside or external conditions, could I start to let go of defining myself in reaction to other people and other peoples belief systems.

In order to get clear on how to connect to others in a healthy way we must first realize and define how we are separate from others.  On the level of our physical being, our ego-self, we are separate and need to own that before we can open up to consciously experiencing how we are connected to everyone and everything.  We need to see our relationship with ourselves clearly in order to see our relationships to others clearly.

One of the things that I had to get clear on in order to start learning who I am was selfishness.  I had been taught that it was bad to be selfish and that I should do things for others.  I learned to steal energy from others through what I was telling myself were unselfish acts.  I was just being a "nice guy" and did not expect anything in return - Bull.  I always had expectations - I just was not being honest with myself about them - because I had been trained and conditioned in childhood to be dishonest with myself emotionally and intellectually.

I had to come to a realization that there is no such thing as an unselfish act.  If I rescue a stranger from a burning car wreck, it does not have anything to do with the stranger - it has to do with my relationship with myself.  I believe that every thing a human being does has a pay off - and it was a very important part of my growth process to start looking for those pay offs.  I had to learn to get honest with myself and stop buying into the illusion that anything I did was for some one else.  I had to stop looking outside for the energy boost I got from doing something nice so that I could own that the energy boost came internally.

The power / energy / juice that we need comes from within - not from outside.  People, places, and things can sometimes help us to access the power that is within us - but they are not the source of that power.  The source is within!

It has always come from within - we were just trained to look outside for it because of the reversity of the planets energy field of emotional consciousness has caused human beings to do human backwards.  Codependence is a disease of reversed focus - looking externally for that which is available within us.

"Codependence is also a disease of reversed focus - it is about focusing outside of ourselves for self-definition and self-worth.  That sets us up to be a victim.  We have worth because we are Spiritual Beings not because of how much money or success we have - or how we look or how smart we are.  When self-worth is determined by looking our-side it means we have to look down on someone else to feel good about ourselves - this is the cause of bigotry, racism, class structure, and Jerry Springer.