A Note from Neale...

My Dear Friends... 

From last week: 

So yes, be friends with your spouse. Be friends with your children. Be friends with your relatives. Be friends with your neighbors and your fellow workers and your acquaintances. And yes, even be friends with your enemies. And most of all...be friends with yourself! 

That may be the hardest thing to do of all. And so we'll take a close look at that next week. 

Okay, so now it IS "next week," and we get a chance to look at that. 

It is true that being one's own best friend can be one of the hardest things in life to do. In my own experience it involved something along the lines of a three-step process, which felt like...

1. Forgiveness
2. Acceptance 
3. Celebration

My road to self-friendship began with self-forgiveness. It proceeded to self-acceptance, and it ended with self-celebration. Self-forgiveness was, for me, the biggest challenge. 

I have done a lot of things in my life that I am not happy about. I found that I thought about these things all the time. And the more I thought about them, the worse I felt, of course. And also, the more I thought about them, the more I thought about them. Thought begets thought. Emotions give birth to more emotions of the same species. My mind was having its way with me. 

I moved into heavy guilt about a lot of my past choices and behaviors. It didn't seem to do me any good to say that "I'll never do that again." What's past is past and can't be undone. So there was nothing to BE done...except live with it. Just "life with" the guilt. 

Even if I "cleaned it up" by going to the people I felt I'd hurt and apologizing and offering to do whatever I could to make amends, I still couldn't off-load the guilt. I just couldn't forgive myself. 

Then I had my conversation with God, and everything changed. I learned, first, that I was spotless and innocent in the eyes of The Divine. God looked upon me as I would look upon a 4-year-old child. I simply didn't know what I was doing; I simply didn't understand. Even if I really did understand, I actually didn't. I mean, I understood part of it. I grasped a little bit of it. I certainly knew the difference between Right and Wrong, but I didn't understand the Whole Story. I didn't know who I was, where I was, why I was where I was, or what I was trying to do here. No one had given me the answers to life's Four Fundamental Questions. No one had even asked me the questions. I didn't even know these questions existed. 

Then, further into my conversation with God, I was told something even more shocking, more stunning to my system. "There is," God said to me, "no such thing as Right and Wrong." 

As you can imagine, this overturned my whole value system (not that I was paying much attention to it anyway...). I had to start over from scratch in viewing and evaluating the choices and behaviors of my life. 

NEXT WEEK: Part 3 - The Key to Forgiveness 

Love & Hugs,