11. Day 18: To Know Thyself In All Your Grace

I am about to take a totally new step for me.  I have the opportunity to attend a spiritual writing conference  in Chicago next month.  It includes one of my favorite writers and is produced by a favorite publisher, Hay House.  They are sweetening the deal with an amazing opportunity for writers aspiring to be published (I have just discovered this about myself in this month of looking at success.  EEK!!  I realized I actually do want to publish my work in the form of a book or three).  In addition to learning how to submit work for publication the attendees will actually submit work for publication and three attendees will be given publishing contract.  Now I realize that there could be 1,000 writers attending but the idea that I would learn to submit my writing by actually submitting my writing really appeals to me.  It is no accident of course that I am in the middle of my month of extending love to my fear of success.  Holy moly, success is knocking at my door in the form of this opportunity and I am going to have to answer; knees trembling, brow perspiring, and heart in mouth fully acceptable because love has made it so.

I have to admit I am having a wee bit of trouble with feeling this is entirely self serving and I keep trying to come up with other reasons why it is ok for me to do this.  I didn’t like feeling this way (split and confused in my intention) so I kind of leaned into the fear (Success Principle #14, fyi, in Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles) only to discover that what my actual fear was, was feeling ostracized in some unexpected way, left out to the extreme as in ejected.  It took me some minutes to see I was actually talking about fearing rejection.  I have had so little experience with rejection that I didn’t really recognize it.  I thought the whole world loved me from a very early age.  That the world doesn’t actually love me all the time still feels untrue but obviously I experience being rejected in one form or another from time to time (we have had clients leave occasionally and there was that incident in high school where I did not win Homecoming Queen….).  But stepping into the possibility of publishing something I wrote opens me up to big time rejection.  I took it straight to Holy Spirit hoping for clarity and peace instead of the resistance of the fear of rejection.

To know thyself in all your grace, see with my eyes.

HS:  Dearest One,

You can only , really, reject your own self.  All rejection is a reaction and response to some part of your own self.  If and when you experience a rejecting/repulsing energy, just notice it.  Allow yourself to feel it; what does it taste like, feel like, look like?  What color is it?  Does it have depth or it is a feeling of prick and surface? Be with it and ask “How can I be right here and be love too?”  A quality of love will come into your awareness that you may see fully, again, love is here too. Then, together-as-one we allow, welcome, comfort, strengthen, guide and en-peace that which is.

Rejection is just another way to look at yourself.  Rejection actually allows you to see, if you are willing, how and where you can inhabit yourself more fully.  Think of rejection as a beautiful tool of awareness.  Is this really what I want?  Is this the only opinion I will hear?  Is this going to send me to my heart or into overthinking and pain?  If I choose pain now, can I choose no-pain later?  Is this the truth about me? Can anything anyone else says present me with anything I don’t already know about myself?  If so, isn’t this too, a gift?

To know thyself in all your grace and presence is the gift you keep giving to yourself in everything you do.