You are Love

Overview of This Book             The aim of this book is to help assist you in beginning or growing your understanding of your true nature and interconnectedness with everything and everyone around you. My hope is that after reading this book you will have a deeper understanding of the way we are all one. There is a universal energy that flows and makes up absolutely everything, and also manifests into infinite forms. That energy that is in you, is also in me. We are all connected. Understanding this brings about a deeper level of joy, empathy, harmony, happiness, peace and love in our lives. This positive shift flows over and positively impacts everything we do. Chapter 1 Shifting Your Perspective   “The difference of enlightenment is just one perspective shift.”   Shift Your Perspective: By Being Thankful I’m thankful for everything, including the so-called good and bad, because it has all served a purpose. When we allow it or can detach enough, everything can be used for our growth and expansion. The more you expand and grow, the better you feel and the better life can be. Growth can be painful but, in the long-term, we always feel best when we grow, learn and expand. Life becomes lighter, more loving, kinder, and more peaceful, and you begin to see yourself in everyone and everything. Some of the major events of my life that pushed me towards understanding and change were difficult family struggles, family addiction, challenges with eating disorders, various experiences I’ve had with sexual harassment, very abusive relationships, and even two men trying to take me at one point when I worked in East Africa twenty years ago. Furthermore, I’ve had multiple life-threatening asthma attacks where I almost died, and had severe life-threatening allergic reactions where I had to be hospitalized because I was unable to breathe. In addition to this, I was very ill with typhoid fever when I worked in Tanzania. I came close to dying from this because I was incorrectly diagnosed and treated; the illness lasted three to four weeks. I had malaria when I worked in Ghana. I’ve had to be treated for tuberculosis I probably got in Russia and also survived dengue fever from Costa Rica. I’ve also now had COVID-19 numerous times and one of them was definitely a life-threatening experience. The many years of work I’ve done as a mental health therapist and social worker in the United States and abroad with victims and survivors of violence, poverty, horrific trauma, human trafficking, torture, and rape have also left an impression on me about suffering and the different types of suffering that individuals experience. When I worked with survivors of violence, I was followed, stalked, and harassed by traffickers and perpetrators of violence who were hurting my clients. The pain I saw and experienced collectively from these situations led me to think the world is not about making us happy, or following a formula for success. There’s something much deeper going on. I was recently reminded of the television show The Good Place, in which all of the characters have passed away and they are in a fake heaven. I realized that a lot of the pain of that situation came from them not understanding the nature of their reality clearly. When they realized they were in a type of hell (the fake heaven), suddenly all of the challenges they experienced were a lot more manageable and less upsetting. In a similar fashion, when we can look around and understand that suffering is a natural part of life and it is the reality of this world, it is less of a shock every time challenges happen. Like the show The Good Place, the characters realized that the suffering was a normal part of their reality because they were in a fake heaven. I also learned this when I worked in rape crisis counselling in Pinellas County, Florida and with survivors of violence and trafficking for many years. Many of the people I worked with struggled greatly with what we saw on a daily basis and there was a high turnover rate. Something I realized at one point was to stop reacting to every incident of abuse, rape, and violence that a client reported. I and others I worked with would feel upset by the things we heard and saw because we felt the world should not be this way. We felt that every abuse was wrong and the world was supposed to be better; we felt abuse was abnormal. It was like encountering something every day, all day, that you felt shouldn’t be happening. When I realized the tragic reality that there is a certain normalcy to violence and abuse, and it is highly prevalent in many forms everywhere, this shifted everything for me. Instead of feeling upset every time by different situations I felt shouldn’t be happening, I realized, no, this is the reality of the world we live in. It is a world full of many types of abuse, and oftentimes from the people closest to you. According to some Buddhist traditions, this is the realm or world of 10,000 sorrows and 10,000 joys. This means that, like the TV show The Good Place, no matter what we do, there is always going to be something painful that happens. It’s just part of the reality of this world. We can work to decrease suffering and pain but there will always be some degree of it no matter how small because of the illusion of the reality of this world. The more we buy into following a formula for success or happiness, or follow society’s rules and look outside ourselves for measurements of well-being and success, the more disconnected we become from the truth of who we are. … When I learned to reframe pain and suffering as my friend, here to teach me something so I could grow to be a better version of myself and not feel like a victim, everything changed.