Love After Love
The time will come
when with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile to the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
~Derick Walcott
Book O’ the Week
A Journal to Help You Become Who You Really Are (Spiral-bound)
By Kathy and Amy Elden
Soul Catcher is a guided journal. Through a series of questions, charts and guided artwork you will be able to identify and work through the things that make you feel worried, frightened, angry, sad or happy. It will assist in hearing the wisdom of your inner voice, and will support you as you define your own true purpose, and begin to live your life on purpose.
We are giving it our highest recommendation.
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Dear Hearts,
We do a process in our Heal Your Life workshops which we call mirror work. In this exercise people are asked to sit and look into the mirror, not at the “mask” in the mirror, but to look deeply into their own eyes in an effort to discover the “stranger” (Inner child, true self, shadow self,etc) beneath the surface image. The statement we ask for them to offer this lost or rejected self behind the eyes in the mirror is simply, “I love you”. As simple as this process sounds it can be extremely difficult the first few times you try to do it.
What I love about Derek Walcott’s poem above is that it speaks to this process in a very profound way. In the first stanza he says, “The day will come when with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door in your own mirror.” We often see this occur when we are facilitating mirror work during the training. People are emotionally taken when they look in to the mirror and finally see, “the stranger” who was their self. Walcott is suggesting that this is a time for celebration, complete with wine and bread in honor of this wondrous reunion! The gift offered during this festive reunion is the peeling of your image from the mirror which allows you to “give back your heart to the stranger who has loved you all your life.”
The image we see in the mirror isn’t really our true self. The image we see in the mirror is our idealized self, the one we want the world to see. This is the image we think we need to present to the world in order to be successful, in order to find love, in order to be appreciated, in order to be approved of, in order to be respected, etc. Our true self, the one that has loved us all our lives, even while we have been ignoring it for the idealized self, also wants to be accepted, also wants to be approved, also wants to be loved, etc. This chance meeting of our idealized self and our true self is cause for great celebration! It is the birthday of our integrated self. It marks the first day that we can actually move out into the world fully human, complete with all of our shame, guilt, scars, broken hearts, rejections, etc.— all the stuff that we have been hiding from the world for so many years. This is our first day of true freedom.
We are suggesting that you take some time this week to peel your image from the mirror, sit and feast on your life.
May your life be a festive celebration of your whole self.
Love and blessings,
Rick and Patricia
Namaste
Lifetime On-line Learning Center
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