what is my gift?

~ Leonard Cohen

Only from the careful and ongoing deconstruction of our selves can we bring anything true, honest, and helpful to the world and our fellow humans. 

Each time I judge my personality as worthless, uninteresting, friendly, kind, spiritual, smart, special, different, inherently bad or inherently good, I must try to catch myself and remember that I am not a personality. I am not what I think I am presenting to the world. In fact, my very perception of myself as a personality is taking me out of the connection I have with my real (capital) Self.

If I then shed those already threadbare layers of words I have been identifying with, discarding them glibly like a towel tossed in a laundry pile, I can come back to focus. 

The focus is not to make myself into something. That would be a fruitless endeavour. That is, again, in the realm of personality.

The focus is a quality of being. This quality of being is known in my body already. I know it as that which feels good. That which feels right. 

As I focus, I allow that quality of being to grow within me and then allow it to flow from me/through me into what I am doing. 

Therefore the focus is to know what I already am. To ground myself there.

It doesn't matter so much what action arises out of that grounding. Implicit in the action will be my unique gift.

The gift is given through me to the world as the one and only thing of value I can offer. Quite simply, I am all I have to give.

My job in life is to toss aside artifice and give the most of mySelf that I can.

That is what those lines mean to me:

From bitter searching of the heart

we rise to play a greater part.

Love,

R