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Stepping Out
Last updated on: November 15, 2013 at 12:56 pm by David Matthew Brown
Stepping Out 2013-11-15T12:56:32-07:00 David Matthew Brown
Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.
Stepping out
By David Matthew Brown
As we move inward, and explore what we are, we begin to see that authentic love is not what we thought it was. We told ourselves that love was an idea, a concept of utopia, but come to discover that love is much more then a limited vision. We thought if we loved enough, followed the rule of being good children, we would be given a golden ticket in the afterlife, yet that is not the case. We were told that love is a door mat, that love turns its head, that love puts its head in the sand to the corrupt, but again on deeper exploration of the inner world we discover the Truth. The same Truth Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King and Jesus and Buddha uncovered. That love meets every circumstance from vulnerability. Vulnerability is not a door mat, does not have motives, in fact vulnerability is so open that it knows there is the possibility of criticism, being wounded, hurt, but that there is also the possibility of change, deeper connection, and open communication, and new beginnings.
Stepping out in love is a process, but that process is the revolution that each of us is on. Fear, hate, and violence are learned and so love must be relearned. As we have learned from many teacher’s and mystic’s before us. So when we discover the inner world, we discover our fear, our hate, and our violence for ourselves. It shocks us. So we learn to move with it, forgive, and begin to retrain ourselves to love.
Love is natural. It is in our very nature to love one another. But we must first meet our defenses. Those places within us that are busy protecting old wounds, hurts, disappointments, and experience them all over again. But the experience now is much different then how we used to be, our experience becomes an embrace of them. Which opens the door way to compassion. We begin to see how those wounds were our identities, our stories, and how they shaped our lives. So as we embrace them, we embrace ourselves, we embrace love. And now loves heals us. We begin to see that love has no reason to run from anything, that the actual running was really not wanting to embrace the wounds, hurts, and disappointments. Because we felt at those times that they were to big, that they were bigger than us, yet on further review, we see that our perception was skewed.
That when we see ourselves as love, that love is bigger then the hurts, wounds, and disappointments, and that by embracing them and accepting them fully as they are, they were leading us back to love. To help us realize that we are love and life is love. And so we begin to see ourselves one step at a time as love, till we solely identify ourselves as love itself. This process is slow sometimes, and other times very fast. But it is a process to help us gain confidence in love and lose our confidence in fear. As we shift into love, we know that any given moment we will meet the situation or circumstance right where it is. So we no longer need to defend, protect our hurts, wounds, and disappointments.
We stand in vulnerability knowing that yes we may experience hurt, wounds, or disappointments, but now we know we are love, and as love we are much bigger than our hurts, wounds, and disappointments. Step into love and then step out!
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