In the dark

Belief is what emerges when you are in the dark with no thing.

Hilarion

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Often our greatest source of spiritual growth is crisis. When we experience loss, whether of a job, a loved one, or our health, we are forced to re-evaluate what is important to us. When we have no choice but to change, we learn to do and be differently.

Our everyday lives frequently center around things. We work to earn our living expenses; we dream of the perfect home or vehicle; we plan and strategize to ensure we will have adequate money now and in the future. We feel we are solely responsible for making sure we have enough of whatever it is we value.

When we lose a prized possession or a loved one, we have a chance to take a long, hard look at what is important to us. We may even go a bit deeper to understand why the person or the thing meant so much to us. Loss teaches us about ourselves, and it helps us learn that we cannot control what we do or do not have.

Loss is one of the ways that our sharing within uses to help us understand divine interconnection. When we are pushed to our mental and emotional limits, we often reach out to the divine in desperation. This opening gives us an opportunity to understand the essential divinity of all of creation, including us.

However, there is an easier way. We can practice mentally and emotionally detaching  from things, people, and situations in conscious meditation. We can choose to simulate the freeing mindset that loss generates, to promote our own spiritual and emotional growth.

We can begin by finding a peaceful, dimly-lit setting. We can ask our sharing within for help in releasing us from our customary mindset. We can take a few deep, even breaths and sense the golden light that emerges from the splinter of divinity located within our heart center.

We can sit quietly and mentally list all the things and people we value. Then one by one, we can calmly imagine those people and things falling away from us. We can release friends, co-workers, family and loved ones. We can let go of our house, our car, our job, and our treasured possessions.

Finally, we can let go of our image of ourselves and our identity. We can sit in that space of having no thing and being no one, without expectation, and feel what it is to simply be. In that space of nothingness, we have pared down our sense of existence to that which is truly important—the divine.

We learn that even when we are and have nothing, we still are intrinsically divine. In being willing to give up all that is familiar to us and all that we prize, we gain our connection to everything and everyone. We learn to appreciate our real worth and nature.

We can bring this understanding back with us into our everyday world. We can appreciate and enjoy the wonder and beauty of all the people and things in our lives, while understanding that our own true value (and that of everything and everyone else) comes from our shared divine nature. When we know this, no thing and no person ever can be taken away from us. We are always divinely interconnected.

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Divinely unique and beautiful reader, what or whom have you lost in your life, and how have grown because of that loss? Please share…