soulful impact / CLG

The more I let go of control, the more I found myself more deeply and nourishingly supported by the more-than-human-world. Even more than supported — welcomed. Beloved. Not welcomed as the smaller, constrained version of me that my ego had been trying to force into being, but welcomed as the raw, flawed, messy, confused, and so deeply human being t... See more

Our gifts have an uncanny way of inviting us to confront and lean past the edges of our comfort zone, testing and stretching our ego’s constrained ideas of who we really are.

Through the sheer bigness of your heart, you recognize that even the most repulsive parts of you still contain a sacred essence. They are redeemable, and therefore, so are you. You get to come home to the wholeness that you already are.

Unconditional joy springs forth from connection to truth and devotional attunement to life. It’s not circumstantially dependent, meaning things don’t need to be a certain way for you to feel it. It can actually be derived from opening to, experiencing and accepting great darkness — welcoming it all home into the infinite heart of your being.

Genuine awakening occurs in the delicate, dynamic and delicious balance between agency and surrender.

Based on a useful model created by spiritual teacher Michael Bernard Beckwith, there are four ways of being in the world: To Me > By Me > Through Me > As Me. I find it useful to think of these as experience states, in that we can bounce around between all four all the time.

Our egos like to separate themselves from the world by judging certain qualities, experiences or identities as “good” and others as “bad.” Then they try to control our inner experiences and outer appearances to align with those judgments. In other words, they resist the dark and bias toward the light.

I’d been diligently executing my mind’s plan for “success” and had made it to my dream graduate program and dream summer internship. Yet these shiny accolades weren’t making me feel the way I expected to feel once I reached them. The strategy of my adolescent ego wasn’t working, and as I began to face that, my life felt like it was falling apart. I... See more

Embracing your disowned parts means finding the willingness to recognize that, despite your ego’s protests, you contain the full spectrum of humanity and possibility within you. Instead of pretending that certain qualities you dislike in other people don’t also exist in you, try on the possibility that if you spot it, you got it.