“We are blind to this fact, that we are in possession of all
the necessary faculties that will make us happy and loving towards one another.
All the struggles that we see around us come from this ignorance… When the
cloud of ignorance disappears… we see for the first time into the nature of our
own being.” D.T.Suzuki
You
are by nature a loving, bonding being. This is how you started out. This is how
you came out of the womb, reaching for another human in order to make contact
and get your wants and needs fulfilled.
Picture
yourself hours old. You are not yet critical, self-defeating, cynical or
discouraged. You do not believe that you are unworthy of real love. You are
gazing into the eyes of your mother and father, loving what you see, and
looking at the first human you see-- bonding.
This
is who you are. It is easy to look at yourself now, years and years later, and
deny that. Even when you affirm it, the journey back to that self may seem
unlikely. You have thousands of reasons and rationalizations for not loving and
not being loved. You have scores of fears and ways you discourage yourself.
Somewhere
on your journeys things happened that told you to be wary, afraid, hurt, angry.
You formed a belief about the world and, more importantly, about yourself. The
creation of this belief about who you are is perhaps the most important thing
you have ever done in your life. Out of that belief springs your attitudes and
behaviors in your love relationships and your work.
You
have decided what you are capable of,
how much you can give, how you love someone and what you do and don’t deserve,
among other things. You have gone
through life mostly unconscious of this. You have been driven by the past,
operating with some vague notion that things could be so much better.
They
can be. First you must choose. You can decide to change your belief about
yourself. You can re-educate yourself; just as you educated yourself for all
these years that you were one person, you can learn to be the “first” person
you were—your original self.
Think
about walking into a room and seeing and hearing things that frightened you.
People criticized you. They walked away. They told you you were not good
enough. You stayed in that room. You lived there with those people.
Realize
now that all those things are not true. They were not true then and they are
not true now. Those were things that knocked you off of your loving nature,
your original core self, like being knocked down in a game of dodge ball.
Your
work now is to change your belief about yourself. Now you are a conscious,
self-responsible human being who is much more powerful than you have imagined.
It is now time to take a full assessment of who you are and what you want for
yourself and begin the deliberate process of becoming a fully loving, grateful,
graceful human being.
That’s
how you began. You can do it.
John Thomas Wood
