Story of Unconditional Love and Forgiveness

It was too much to ask, especially of my intellect, which bitterly distrusted anything that wasn't analytical, devoid of emotion or feeling. From somewhere, a part of me argued fiercely that this entire experience was just an illusion, unreal. That small scared part of me contended that the light and acceptance I saw and felt were just silly wishful thinking, like the very notion of a Creator. Surely that light and feeling of acceptance would vanish beyond all recall as soon as I returned to so-called reality. This part of me resisted the experience and would not allow me, at that time, to claim either the light or the love as my own.

The debate between the part of me that rejoiced at the light of God’s love and the part of me that rejected it heightened in intensity. Silent tears changed to loud, gut-wrenching sobs that surged up from my innermost being. For at a level far deeper than the intellect, beyond that small scared part of me, I craved the light and the love. My intellect may have dismissed the possibility of love and of God, but my heart and soul most emphatically had not. Their earnest desire was to bask in that light and acceptance and somehow to bring both back into my life to help me learn how truly to love myself, however flawed.

After a time, my inner debate subsided; my crying slowed. When I sat up, I felt relieved and somehow lighter, as though an immense emotional and spiritual weight had lifted off of me. I was also utterly dumbfounded by what I had just gone through. Although this experience had been highly emotionally charged, it had not been painful. Painless emotion was an alien concept to me up to this point in my life. My childhood and early adult years had been littered with emotional bombs that were constantly blowing up in my face.

As just one example, it seemed that no matter where I went, there was always at least one person who instantly detested me and, much worse, was highly vocal about it. In the two grade schools I attended, in high school and even in college, I vividly recall classmates who attacked me relentlessly for no reason that I could ever figure out. Sometimes I became so upset about the words and behavior that I asked them directly for a reason, but never could get an answer that made sense to me. I took their nasty teasing and name-calling way too seriously because I secretly feared that what they said about me was true. The humiliation and rejection were devastating.

Even more painful and stressful were my experiences with men. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine, when I made my determination about my inability to love, every relationship with a male that I became involved with was a fiasco in one way or another. As Shakespeare’s Othello mused, I loved “not wisely but too well.” Time after time, with different men in the different cities where I moved to pursue my career in journalism, I never seemed capable of building an emotionally satisfying or lasting relationship.

I didn’t know it, but I was what is now labeled codependent, willing to rush in and give ninety-five percent, leaving the other party with little to contribute to the relationship and, therefore, feeling unequal and uncomfortable in it. I also did not recognize how my own deep emotional neediness--that aching, empty, yearning, weeping place within me--made it much too scary for anyone to establish an intimate, committed relationship with me. As a result of a lot of pain, I had learned to pay as little attention as possible to my emotions, mistakenly believing that they were the cause of my pain and my troubled relationships.

During the days immediately following that impromptu session on the dock, however, I became aware of additional feelings of wellbeing. They were a very subtle healing transformation, running below my surface consciousness like a swift, strong, inexorable ocean current. It was my heart and soul, working overtime, subconsciously and unconsciously urging me not to pass up this chance to bring that love and light into my life. My guides later informed me that they also were doing their best to assist this decision process.

A few days afterward, when I next saw Jana for a class, I made a decision to find out what was keeping me from claiming the light and the love for my own. Even with that sneak preview on the dock, I had no real idea of what I had just committed myself to doing. I did vaguely perceive that it was the single most important step I had ever taken in my entire life. In that I was not mistaken.