INSIGHTS
DECEMBER 2015

Dear Friend: 

As we near the close of this year, I'm given that I need to talk with you about the importance of love, which by now I think you realize is also the purpose of our lives. During the holiday season, everyone talks of love. We hear it in the music, we read it in Christmas greeting cards, and from each other. (They're even talking about the importance of love in the news these days!)

When I speak of love, I'm not talking about romance, although romance is really a beautiful and important experience in our lives. I'm not talking about need, although need is a very powerful motivator, and it is true that often when we humans need someone, we misinterpret that need for love. So when the need is filled, we no longer feel the sensation that we thought was love and believe that it somehow died.

True love doesn't flow from one heart to another. It flows from one Soul to another. I think the truest and deepest love I ever felt in my life was when I held my newly born children in my arms and looked into their eyes and knew them, and found myself in one case sobbing deeply and promising that this time it would be better.

Love does not come out of want or need. Love comes from the simple act of being truthful and open and willing to be emotionally naked with each other, because it's impossible for us to truly love something or someone whom we don't know - someone who is hiding behind a facade of what they think we want them to be. Unfortunately we've been taught that "good manners" require that we behave in certain ways and that we don't reveal certain thoughts, feelings and experiences to others. So we hide a great part of what is the most important to us from the world.

But if you want to see real love happen, just be in a room where two or more people are together, baring their souls, letting who they are in the deepest parts of themselves be witnessed. That has happened often in an intensive experiential process that Ava, Marty and I used to teach together that we called The Reyna Experience. I won't go into that now, but I will talk about it in greater depth at another time, but suffice it to say that during that experience, people's lives were changed, and they were able to feel and know real love - often for the first time in their lives. As they peeled away their layers of self defense, the beauty of them began to glow, and love filled the room. It was most surprising to many of the attendees that the part of the person they loved the most, that beauty that shone through with the revealing of the truth of themselves, was what that person thought was the ugliest part of themselves. And so they kept it hidden, many for most or all of their lives. You see, one thing I have learned in this now rather long life that I've experienced is that it is impossible to truly experience love without also truly being honest with each other.

In this time, with these powerful, powerful intensifications that are forcing people to reveal themselves, that are forcing repressed anger and grief and shame to surge to the surface so forcibly that we have no ability to hold it back, we really need to realize that this is a good thing! it's really a good thing when we allow all of that emotional toxicity to spew out of us. It's cleansing. It may not change what we want to change in another person or in the world, but it changes us. It cleans us and it heals us.

We struggle so hard to hold all of that pain inside. We think it's not "pretty" or "nice" to be angry. Anger is a motivating emotion - it forces necessary change. It tells us that something is wrong and must be changed. If we don't release emotional pain, it becomes physical pain and then we do become physically ill. And there is nothing at all ugly or inappropriate about speaking our truth as long as in speaking our truth, we aren't judging, condemning, or blaming another - we're simply saying how we feel. It's appropriate to say, "When you did or said _____, I felt ______." However, in the expression of our anger, it's so important that we claim our own emotion and that we realize every other person is acting however they think they must act in order to get through whatever their life is bringing to them. They very seldom are thinking of us - they are almost always thinking of how they feel and how the situation (whatever it is) is affecting them, just as we are usually only aware of how we are feeling and how we are allowing ourselves to be affected by whatever they are doing or saying.

Once we realize that another person is not usually trying to hurt us (there is such a thing as an attack; however, that happens much less often than we tend to believe), then it becomes absolutely necessary for us to realize that they aren't doing anything to us - they are simply being whatever they are feeling, and we are reacting to however they are being.

You see, what I'm telling you is that our reactions, our attitudes and our beliefs are choices that we make. Even the emotion that is now surging up uncontrollably from deep within us due to these universal and personal intensifications are the result of choices that we have made. We need to realize that there was one or possibly many points in time where we made the clear choice to accept that behavior or those words, often pretending they didn't happen or weren't said. We chose not to speak our truth in order to keep the peace, or because we needed to be seen as "good" or "nice".

You see, we're all trying to hide so much about ourselves, and we all think we're being very successful at doing so by putting on our happy voices and our sweet smiles and pretending that this world doesn't hurt, but it does hurt, and I am here and have lived this long to have had enough experiences to be able to tell you that it is the experiences that hurt the most that teach us the most and that ultimately bring us into the place where we can experience the greatest joy.

This month of December is one in which I am strongly urging you to speak your truth in love, not blaming nor condemning but simply saying, "This is how I feel." I also am urging you very strongly that when another person begins to erupt with pain, which may be experienced as rage-filled blame or condemnation, we just need to do everything we can to stand back and let them get it out of themselves. When that kind of intense emotion has been held in for a long time, it comes out very dark and very magnified, often not even looking anything like the truth as others see it. But for the person who is speaking those words and who is feeling that pain that looks like rage, that is their absolute truth, and we're not going to talk them out of it. It's the absolute truth because it hurts so damned bad.

But once we've said our truths and maybe cried our tears, and especially if we've had the person with us who was allowing us to express that pain and not telling us that we are wrong or that we shouldn't feel that way or that "it's not nice to say such things" or that our pain is offending them, if we have a person with us who can just be present with us and caring that we are hurting so badly and speaking to our pain instead of reacting to the words that come out in rage, all of the darkness dissipates. All of the pain subsides, and love shines through. If we can do that for each other in this time, and in these coming times (the times aren't going to get any less intensified - they'll continue to become more so, and people are going to be feeling more and more of this), then we will be able to float atop these waves of intensity and be joyful.

We have the task now to ask Spirit to be with us so that when another person erupts in pain, we can care about their pain rather than react to their anger, and so that when we erupt with pain, we can speak the truth of our pain without blaming or condemning. When we can do that, others don't mind being with us. They feel compassion for us. But the moment we begin to blame or judge or condemn, others will walk away from us.

We never actually are able to run away from karma. It goes with us wherever we go - it's a part of us. So if we walk away from the person that we are blaming for our pain, it doesn't matter where we go in the world - there'll be another person exactly like them, wearing another face and acting so compassionate, just like the person we're running away from did when we first met them and they were showing us their facade so that we might love them and this "new" person will help us to complete our lessons. Karma must be met, and in this time, truth must be revealed so that the Love within us can glow.

I don't really want to talk a lot about December or even that much about the near future - it's more of the same: increase in violence, increase in terrorist activities, mobs rising up in reaction to perceived injustice or because of religious hatred, the breaking down of world economies.....Russia, China and Korea vying to become more powerful. If we look at the world out there and all that's happening, it's easy to get pretty scared or depressed. But if we live in our hearts and in our truths and share WHO WE ARE with others, this time can be actually quite wonderful, because everything - and I mean everything - is intensified. And so as we're having intensifications of anger and violence, we're also experiencing intensification of love, compassion, caring and the need to be close to each other.

We need to know that we have people in our lives that we can absolutely be emotionally naked with, and that they will love us and we will love them for the beauty of the nakedness, with all its wrinkles and warts. Because it's real - and REAL is the most important thing right now. And our task here is to clear our own darkness so that our light can shine through so that we can be the Avatars of this time, bringing people through the darkness with the glow of our love.

Have a wonderful holiday season....      

And…      

Stay Focused on the Light....            

Dixie Yeterian