soulful impact / CLG

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.

Contraction follows expansion, and expansion follows contraction. Just as the day knows when to surrender to the night and the spring knows when to take over from the winter, our bodies, minds and souls can guide us home to the deep alignment, wholeness and beauty that we already are. Our task is to simply get ourselves out of the way.

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

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

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.

The trouble is that ego-based motivation also creates a sort of toxic, fear-based sludge. We might achieve our goals, but sooner or later it costs us in some other way.

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.

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.

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