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How far must we deviate from ourselves?
How long must we abandon ourselves?
Since the moment we first chose to do so.
We abandon ourselves in birth.
And if we do not rejoin ourselves over the course of our lives,
we rejoin ourselves in death.
We must die to ourselves in order to be born.
And all life is a process of being reborn to ourselves.
And what of emotion?
Emotion is the tether.
Emotion is the link that remains when all else is lost.
Emotion is the only remnant of the true self.
Which we abandoned in order to be born here.
Emotion is what leads you back to you.
All things done on this planet are done to escape emotion.
Every cigarette smoked. Every lover gained.
Every book read. Every bite eaten.
We even find our way to spirituality
because we are desperate to escape the way we feel.
But then we find that the only way to find joy, and to set ourselves free,
permanently, is to walk into the eye of the storm.
To be so ready to die as a result of our pain
that we stop running or escaping.
We stop trying to feel better.
We stop trying to change the way we feel.
And instead we walk right into the eye of the storm.
Ready for it to swallow us up.
Even daring it to.
For the first time in our lives, we do not abandon ourselves,
because for the first time we do not run from the way that we feel.
We do not try to use positive focus
to move away from ourselves.
We do not use alcohol to suppress ourselves.
We do not use a lover to protect us from ourselves.
Instead we move towards and into our feelings.
We don't ask them to change.
We don't want them to be different.
We are simply in, and of, and with them.
And because of it we are completely in, and of, and with ourselves.
And something beautiful happens.
After practicing the art of being with ourselves, again and again,
the universe reveals itself in it's entirety.
There is a hole inside all people.
A deep emptiness wanting to be filled up.
But what is that emptiness?
That emptiness is grief.
Grief is the baseline emotion for all people incarnated on this planet.
But what is it that we are all grieving?
The answer is the loss of self.
We lost ourselves in our birth into physical form.
We abandon ourselves when we separate ourselves
from that which we truly are.
>From Source.
Like a stone dropped into still water,
the ripples from that original transgression
travel outward.
After the original separation from our true selves
we relive that separation again and again.
Separation from the womb. Separation from the breast.
Separation from our parents. Separation from our friends.
Separation from lovers. Separation from our children.
And eventually separation from life itself upon our death day.
We suffer the original separation throughout the duration of our lives.
We suffer to the degree that the desire within us to be whole again
is strong enough to draw us back to ourselves.
To draw us back to Source.
Because Source and self are one in the same.
Grief is at the core of all of our lives.
All of us abandoned ourself to come here.
We broke into a billion pieces.
We call them by different names.
I am Teal. You are John.
Or Mary. Or William. Or Emily.
All pain and suffering on this planet is a ripple.
Cast off from the original stone.
A separation.
All human behavior is seen accurately through the stages of grief.
The entire emotional scale is in essence the expression of a grief process.
When we are separated from other people, and feel as if we have lost them,
as they leave us, as they die,
the grief we feel is none but a reflection
of the original loss of ourselves upon our birth.
And we will lose our loved ones as long as it takes to reunite
with ourselves again.
This grief process that is occurring within all of us
is the grief process of having lost a loved one.
Though we have all lost this loved one.
We have all lost ourselves.
We could not be born unless we did.
And so this grief is shared by us all.
We are united in this grief.
And yet we are torn apart by it.
This grief process now plays itself out upon the world.
It accounts for all of our actions as a species.
We are utterly powerless at birth.
We deny what has happened to us.
We feel utterly isolated.
We become angry because we are so scared.
We start to bargain with our parents and then we bargain with the world.
We fall into depression.
Because nothing can make the hole inside of us go away.
And one day, we either die because of it,
or we find acceptance.
To find acceptance for the separation,
and to set ourselves free from the prison of it,
we must go straight into the eye of the storm of grief.
To be reunited with ourselves we must let go.
We must let ourselves grieve.
We must let ourselves grief for the loss of ourselves.
And in every following thought, and word, and movement,
we must make a vow to never abandon ourselves again.
We must make a vow to be completely with ourselves
in each and every moment of our lives.
Without needing ourselves, or the way we feel,
to be different.
♪ (soft music) ♪
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