“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” -Carl Gustav Jung
The remedy is always inside of you. This has become a growing awareness as I have been working to articulate and grow my dreams for Good Clean Love. When I am doing my own internal work and can clearly see what I am intending and feel worthy of it, the world creates itself to the image. Conversely when the events of the world take up my attention and I perceive myself and my dreams by what is happening out there, I am lost to myself and anything can happen.
Actually, to be fair, anything can happen all the time. Living on earth includes the full spectrum of seeming opposites: happiness and sadness, winning and losing, love and hate. Being centered and clear in yourself doesn’t prevent you from experiencing both the joy and suffering that is inherent in life experience, but it does change how you experience it. Everything changes in how we learn to look and see.
Yesterday, I came home bereft and lost to myself. Happily I knew the only cure was to go inside and listen. The issues that we face inside ourselves often last for a lifetime. How we work with them, build a dialogue and leave them space to exist as they are is the game changer. Our collective brokenness is the place that holds the most power over our lives. It is simultaneously the most frightening place to engage and the place most ready to shift and transform.
Twenty minutes of peacemaking inside cannot be matched with days of planning and asserting our will over life events. Giving up the war inside is often no bigger than having the courage to listen to the small voice inside of us and shining a light on what needs to be seen. Shel Silverstein’s poem is an easy one to remember and may just wake you up if you hang it up by your mirror some morning when you most need to listen:
There Is A Voice Inside Of You
That Whispers All Day Long,
I Feel That This Is Right For Me,
I Know That This Is Wrong.
No Teacher, Preacher, Parent, Friend
Or Wise Man Can Decide
What’s Right For You-
Just Listen To
The Voice That Speaks Inside.
