Everything I write here is from the book, so I just won't use quotations.
Staying loyal to your journey means you never abandon yourself by compromising your integrity or discounting your intuition or the signals that come from your body--the knot in the gut, emotional detachment, or loss of energy that signals something is amiss. You learn to realize when you "hit your edges"--when you feel backed up against a wall, scared to see what you see, know what you know, or feel what you feel. When people hit an edge they usually run away by going numb, distracting themselves, changing the subject, counter-attacking, overindulging in food or drink, or blaming.
To be loyal to your journey is to care for yourself and remember that at your center, you are a luminous essence capable of compassion and love. Buddhists use many images to describe our inner perfection: the sun behind the clouds, a pot of gold underneath the ground, a jewel that is buried in mud beside the road. Using the jewel image, we can remember that the precious stone is beautiful, radiant, and shining, but unless someone digs it up and washes off the mud, it cannot shine or be appreciated. Most of us have coverings over the jewel that is within us--the false beliefs and masks that block our connection to our perfect essence.
As we are conditioned, programmed, and taught how to look, how to be, how to behave, how to act, how to imagine, how to feel and how to think, our essence becomes submerged between all the "I-dentities" we take on. We learn to please Mom, smile for company, get good grades and make endless adaptations to be noticed and loved. Eventually we lose contact with our essence and even come to fear it. According to Wolinsky, an I-dentity, if it enters this emptiness...imagines annihilation, nonexistence, or death. This inner emptiness is the inner Essence which we all seek and which contains essential qualities like love, peace, power, invulnerablity, and so on, and which is intrinsic to the nature of Essence.
If we're disconnected from the music of our essence, and attempt to find happiness through another's song, there will be dependency and a relationship without harmony.
The spiritual path is a process of unmasking ourselves rather than changing or repairing ourselves. Our task is to crack through and soften the layers upon layers of personas and masks we have donned to protect us from the false core beliefs that cover our hurts, losses, and loneliness.
We start by being aware of our masks, curious about their purpose, amused by their cleverness, yet always remembering that masks are simply that--they can't love. We can remove these coverings in a thousand ways: We might quietly say to our beloved, "I'm feeling afraid, can we sit together in this fear" Most of all we need to recognize our fear as ours, and not attribute them to the weather, the stars, or another person.
Finally, if you want love and friendship, if you want to know beauty, you must walk the path undisguised.
That's a lot for one chapter huh? I couldn't help but share it all with you guys. These are the ideas that stood out to me the most and I guess I've been praying about them a bit myself.
I hope you enjoyed this chapter.
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