March 22, 2007

• The importance of self-love

• Fear precedes anger

God, who is the beginner, the creator, and the comforter of all, is of course with each of you. Your souls are open to God’s presence, to that comfort, to that love and to the light. Being aware of God in itself brings power and warmth to your own lives. This is not just a kind of “feel good” momentary joy or temporary peace. It is an awareness that penetrates deep within and provides each of you with a greater sense of spiritual connectedness to each other, to your guides, to God.

We wish to speak with greater clarity about the connectedness that unites you with other human beings. You live in a great community, a community of countless individuals scattered throughout the world. Although your experiences are personal, although your concerns may be personal, your fears and hopes may be personal, there is really nothing that removes you from the common experience of all human beings. Your surroundings may be different, your immediate concerns may be different, but all that is really essential to human life is in common with all human life. What is most meaningful in life is most meaningful to all human beings.

Every human being seeks acceptance. For some, this acceptance is defined through its expression from others. For others, this acceptance is expressed towards oneself. Whether seeking love from others or love from oneself, it is the need to be loved that is the central experience that is sought by all.

An individual may appear to seek great success in the world of business. That drive may appear to be most dominant, but if you ask why the necessity for such success, individuals so motivated must ultimately acknowledge that it is by such success that they believe they will find self-love, self-respect and the love and respect of others beyond the self. That seeming passion for success is merely a means of achieving the love which is felt to be lacking. Those who seek influence and power politically, personally, socially, artistically, academically, are defining a resolution of self- love within the clothes of such authority or influence. All that you do can be distilled down to the need of being loved by you or others. This need for acceptance, this need to be valued, finds its expression of fulfillment in many quarters.

So our view of human relationships speaks to the central issue of what gives many human beings their sense of value, worth, respect. The pursuit of love is ultimately a selfish pursuit, selfish in a positive way, for it is the acknowledgment of the need for self-love before any love can be presented to another.

Life in this perspective really begins with you. It is the love you receive that empowers you to be loving. It is the compassion you receive that provides the capacity for compassion. It is an acknowledgment of one’s own value that provides the impetus for acknowledging another, for if you do not love yourself, if you do not value yourself, if you do not know from your own experience what it means to receive compassionate love, you are then fully unable to be the giver. If the battery is not reinforced, recharged, it provides no energy beyond itself that is of benefit to others.

The question of interpersonal relationships is really a question of self-love first. If you are angry with yourself and feel you have let yourself down, you do not have the courage to support another. The question of the place of anger in your personal relationships is an important one, for much of the anger that is expressed comes from the other side of that question, namely the value of fear or its presence. Anger always comes from fear.

If you are angry about a situation, there is fear that you will be impacted more personally by whatever it is that brings you to anger. There is a fear of losing something or someone. There is a fear of losing face. There is a fear of losing position within a group of others. There is a fear that maybe, just maybe, you might be wrong. There is a fear that what angers you might threaten those whom you love or with whom you associate. There is always a fear of loss as it relates to anger. If someone commits an act toward which you feel anger, you will also identify somewhere a fear accompanying that anger. You do not experience fear unattached from an awareness of consequences. Fear is always self-reflected. It is a description of where you are at a given moment with given circumstances. The same circumstances in another moment might elicit no fear.

How often you observe discussions that have included moments of anger and that do not involve you personally, and you may experience a lack of anger for there is a lack of fear. You have nothing to lose…you are an observer of something else. If you hold principles to be true and the holding of those principles is important to you, any challenge to what you hold to be important can become the subject of fear and, as a result, the subject of anger.

Fear, its direction pointed within, is so central to your relationships with others. If there is no fear between you and another, there is no reason for anger. When you find yourselves in disagreement, you can disagree without anger and that is a disagreement without fear. But bring in the fear, and you will observe the anger.

There is, of course, a place in your lives for honest disagreement, a place with the need to challenge, to question, to obstruct if necessary. In your attempt to contribute to what is done or what is avoided, if you are able to diffuse the fear, then your responses can be constructive, maybe not in agreement, but nevertheless constructive.

There are no two individuals who know each other well and have not felt anger. Sometimes that anger is expressed or felt through jealousy. Sometimes your response can be violent, but in all cases there is nevertheless a fear. If you experience jealousy, aren’t you also expressing a fear that somehow you will not receive in like kind what you believe you are due? If you are jealous of a man’s home, you are also fearful that somehow you are not worthy or capable of achieving what must be achieved to have what another has. If there were no fear, you would observe the subject of your jealousy and merely observe that someone has something that you don’t, and that’s okay.

Each of you must feel the expression of anger to be necessary at some point in your exchanges with others. Anger is a very natural response, but you must try to recognize what it is that actually creates those destructive moods, for they are destructive to you if not to another. The feeling of anger is normal. You are asked to live as human beings live. That means experiencing fear or anger and all that comes from them. You cannot shy away from these elements of life. They are what they are in order for you to become what you can become. When you experience anger, allow that experience to belong. It is not something to be totally ignored. You must learn to recognize the value in anger, for you grow as you deal with that. If you identify the anger as fear-based, you must identify why the fear and what is the fear of, and whether that fear can be used as a positive influence rather than a destructive one.

Each of you has lost people who are important in your lives—colleagues, friends and family. It is so common to experience those losses accompanied by anger. When you experience a loss like that, you fear the unknown, you fear what comes next, you fear your own inadequacies without the presence of another. We recommend to you most strongly that when you experience anger, immediately pull back a moment and ask yourself what you fear. Be honest with the answer. No one need know that answer but you. Identifying that, you will be in a much better position to proceed constructively, beneficially despite the presence of what it is that creates that fear.

We, your guides, are a part of your lives because we wish to help eliminate fear in life. You may be afraid of death, of illness, of pain. You may be afraid of your relationships with others, a fear grown out of insecurity, a fear of what another might think. But if you connect your thoughts to your guides, to your current understanding of the nature of God, your fears will be greatly reduced and you will see your lives moving forward with a greater sense of rightness, a greater sense that you are accompanied by your guides, you’re accompanied by God.

We do lift you into our loving presence. We lift your spirits with hope. We eliminate fear with love. When there is all love, no place for fear exists. When you are filled with love, there is no reason for anger. Allow yourselves to listen to each other. Allow yourselves to listen to yourselves. Allow yourselves the joy of self-love. Allow yourselves the gift of being loved and the grace of being loving.

Each of you gathered at this moment feels God’s loving hand upon your lives. Sometimes it is intense; at other times, most subtle. But when you open your lives without fear to the light that surrounds you, you will be filled with an illumination of love, of warmth, of peace. Be comforted by the peace that comes from a lack of fear. Be strengthened by your love of self and be motivated to provide selfless love to others that they may in turn experience a life filled with love and empty of fear.

You are in the light. Travel wisely with vision, with peace and faith.

Amen.