Loving our ugly internal stepchildren

I chanced upon an online video the other day about helping the ego to surrender. Less than 5 minutes, yet such a profound message: make friends with this part of yourself, recognize that it is the judgment piece and it will begin to surrender.

What an intriguing idea: love the segments of yourself you thought were unlovable; the dark parts, the ones we hide, yet can be controlling. The ones that lurk below the surface and have power because they live under the cover of darkness. Bring them to light, acknowledge them and love them into surrender. Love every bit of your being, not just the good, easy fragments.

I am concurrently reading If Grace is True by Quaker Philip Gulley. He grew up believing God was as mercurial as our humanness to be kind one minute and damaging the next. He realized he was shaping God in his image, not the converse. He has also come to the sense that God is love. He explains that the stories of a violent, vindictive Old-Testament God were early interpretations of God without benefit of knowledge contained in the New Testament, before there ever was Jesus to teach us otherwise.

Above all, what Gulley has learned from experience and Scripture is love God and your neighbor as yourself. Above all, LOVE.

Love God. Love yourself. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love your enemy.

Love every bit of all being, not just the good and easy parts.

I know that is a universal message and yet my understanding comes through my Christian upbringing.

I feel like up 'til now, I’ve know about three-quarters of that message and missed the love-even-your-hidden-and-not-so-great-traits segment.

That means not just tolerating, accepting and acknowledging, but loving. Even the fibromyalgia or that blasted judgment meter that follows me. I am an INFJ on the Meyers-Briggs profile and have always detested that J, which I mostly used on myself but also set pretty high standards for others. It is who I am, however. I have begun to own that, but now I have to love that into surrender. Same with my ego.

If I think of those as children (ok, maybe ugly stepchildren), I have to love even them. When that revelation hit me last night going to bed and this morning in the pool, I felt a tingling of energy in places I know have been blocked. That was love’s energy shining in those dark, untouched, unwanted and, until now, unloved places.


• What about me do I find hard to love?
• If I have accepted and acknowledged those pieces, can I take the next step toward loving them?
• If I truly love myself, what possibilities does that open in my life?
• What obstacles can be cleared with that unconditional love?


that inner critic,
internal voice
always pecking
away

should not be
silenced as I
have
erroneously
believed

it should
simply
be loved
for what it
is, its intention
to protect,
its propensity
to judge

it should simply
be loved
into surrender

nothing more,
nothing less

just loved


If you want the link to the talk about ego:
http://www.leonardjacobson.com/blog/347/egos-surrender