The Solution

I am that I am!

Master Anna, of Magical Service.

Welcome back, dear friends, to our discussion of love and shame and magic. Oh, we'll get to that part [the magic].

Oh, so much shame! So much shame you carry, going way back to the very beginning of your journey.

You could say that this is the part that no one ever anticipated. You never dreamed that when you dove into yourself, into your imagination, into your experiences, that you would take on so much shame from those experiences. That is why, for some of you, some of us, we've been here on Earth for well over a thousand lifetimes, trying to find our way through that shame.

This shame is the thing that brought creation to a standstill, before Earth was even thought of.

This shame is what caused the battles and the struggles and all of the drama, the painful drama.

Oh, and you see, because of what we are doing here, because of what many of us have been involved in for quite a while now, the energies are moving again in all of creation and the battles are coming to an end, slowly. Oh, those will continue for a time, because it takes time in your human experience for new consciousness to permeate society. But it is coming. It is already here!

And yes, those who come after you, those angels who have not been to Earth yet, who are watching you, they are going to have a much easier time here because of what you have done. They won't have to fumble their way through the shame.

Oh, they can dive into it to have the experience. But they will be able to get back out very quickly, whereas you had to go through lifetimes and lifetimes and lifetimes and lifetimes and lifetimes of shame and pain to find your way back out. And you are still feeling the residue of it.

Mmm...

Yes, the new ones will have a very different experience, and that is why Earth is such a popular place among the angels. They are all watching because this, up until now, has been the only place where you could find your way through the shame, and come back to yourself and to your wholeness.

It is said that other places are being developed—other worlds, you could say—based on the pattern of Earth. Other places, because there are a lot of angels out there who want to go beyond their shame, but there is not room for them all on Earth. So other places are being built—some have been already built—where angels can go and understand their shame, and discover the new love that will free them from their shame.

And dear friend, that changes everything! That changes everything, in all of creation!

That is why the energies are beginning to move again. It is because of what you have done here on Earth, what we have done.

Mmm...

So many of you have struggled because you were coming to this awareness of yourself and you wanted to share it, but humanity wasn't ready yet. But now it is. Oh, not all of humanity, but a huge wave of human angels are waking up, because of what you have put into consciousness.

Oh, you don't have to even say the words to them, although many of them will be looking for the words to validate what they are feeling. But because of what you have put into consciousness, they are waking up and coming home to themselves. And bringing their shame home to themselves, and with it, gaining the wisdom and the experience of all of their existence and bringing it all back in together.

Ahh...

Today we are going beyond where the Ascended Masters have been. They are eagerly following us, because even they have not understood this thing about shame.

How many times have you been to a workshop about abundance, or manifesting, or whatever, and come away feeling more ashamed? Feeling like you are just not good enough at thinking the right thoughts, or doing the right things, or making the right choices, or whatever, that would set you free?

Hmm...

Well, it is because no one has really addressed the shame yet. No one really understood its depth and how it affects you.

Oh yes, you can choose to let all of those issues go. You can choose it in your mind all you want. You can beg for it. You can plead with yourself. You can demand. You can say, “No more!” all you want, and it's not going to change until you address the shame. And that is not a simple choice.

It begins with a simple choice, a simple choice that you have to reaffirm in almost every moment of your life! It takes commitment and dedication, but you are going to discover that it is worth it.

So, what is the solution?

Oh, you can feel into that shame all you want. You can remember more and more of it, and you are doing that already. You can say, “No more shame! I'm done with that!” and it is still going to be there. It is still going to drag you down.

Each one of you have made progress, because this is really your soul's job. But as the human, you need to understand what is happening. You need to allow it to happen, and even your soul is learning, with you, what it takes.

So, what is the solution?

Well, it sounds way too simple. And indeed, it has been said that it is the hardest thing any human or angel will ever do. But it is called loving yourself.

Because, you see, that is the problem. All those parts of you—call them aspects, call them whatever you want. All those aspects of you that lived through experiences that were difficult, that couldn't find the solution in those experiences... Experiences where you went a little crazy and you hurt other people, because the only way you could find to cope with your shame was to throw shame on others. And sometimes that meant physically hurting them, or even killing them, because somehow it seemed like that would make you feel better.

It never did, at least not for more than a few moments, but it was the only way you could find to cope with your own shame. To try to put it off onto others. To blame others for it. And in return they blamed you and piled more shame onto you, and it was a downward cycle that took you into the very depths of the darkness.

And there were all these parts of you that you didn't know what to do with. They felt like such failures. You were so ashamed of them, and you pushed them away into the darkness. And your soul said, “Okay, I will hold those for you. I will hold those until the time comes when we understand what to do with them.”

You see, you couldn't get rid of those parts, because they are you. They are part of you, and you are indestructible. You cannot not exist. It is simply not a possibility, and we know that now.

And so, each of these parts of you is stuck out there in the darkness, where you pushed it because you didn't have any other choice. And oh, they make your life miserable sometimes, because they act out through you. They are trying so hard to find their way home.

Oh, you always had this idea that home is somewhere else, that somehow when you went into that experience, when you went through what has been called the ‘wall of fire’ and were ripped to shreds, somehow you thought you had left home. But you never did.

You are home.

And now all of these parts of you, they want to come home. And so they act out. They do everything they can to get your attention. They feed on your energy and cause you to feed on the energies of everyone around you. They are trying so hard to get home!

So, how do you let them come home?

Well, you have to stop piling more shame on them.

You have to stop judging them.

You see, judgment and shame are the same thing. Judgment is simply a way of piling on more shame. Condemnation, criticism, it's all the same. It is piling on more shame.

So, self-love begins with acceptance.

Let's talk about love a little bit. As we said before, there are so many different kinds of experiences that are called love, and most of them have little or nothing to do with real love.

There are emotions, and they can be incredible. And they can switch in a moment to being horrible.

You feel something for someone, your body floods you with chemicals, with drugs that make you feel good, and you think you are in love. Up until that person throws some shame at you, or rejects the shame you are trying to throw on them, and suddenly you have a whole different experience.

Your brain floods your body with different drugs, and you feel horrible. You feel angry. You feel resentful, and your body feels that. And then you wonder, “What happened? It was so beautiful! I was so in love!”

No, you were in shame.

You see, shame is always looking for energy to fill its own hole inside of you, to fill that hunger. All of these parts of you are so in shame, and they are so hungry! In shame they lost their connection with your source, with you. And they are so hungry to get that back, so they feed on your energy and it just makes them hungrier and hungrier.

So, someone comes along and they give you some beautiful energy, and they fill that hole for a moment. Or at least it seems like they are filling that hole. And that is such a beautiful experience! It is indeed the beginnings of what we call love, something very new in all of experience. But it is still based in shame.

It is still based on mutually filling that hunger. And it never lasts, because sooner or later that hunger, that shame, reasserts itself.

This other person has their own ideas about life. They have their own ways. And you discover you don't like some of those ways, and you try to change them by shaming them.

And yes indeed, even the least criticism is a form of shame. It is a form of putting shame on the other person, and they don't like that so they throw shame back at you. And the next thing you know, you have a fight. And if that is all your love is based on, it doesn't last very long. It turns into pain, and then hate, and you blow apart and wonder what happened.

Then you blame the other because they were so bad, or so strange, or whatever, and they blame you. It's just more shame. More and more shame.

Mmm...

But indeed, there was a spark of something there. Because when you met that person, when you began to fall in love, you saw yourself in them.

For indeed, everything in your experience is part of you. You create these avatars of others so that you can have a shared experience, but the part that you perceive is still you. A part of you.

So you look in their eyes, you feel those good feelings, and they pour energy into your hunger. And you pour yours back into their hunger.

You see yourself, and for a moment you feel love for yourself, and oh, that changes things! That brings on these incredible feelings of love!

Up until you start to see the other side of them, and you start blaming them because those feelings are fading away. For they cannot last when they are based in the shame.

And then... Oh, as the anger and the hate come up—you are really just hating yourself—you try to punish them. Whether physically, or just verbally and emotionally, you try to punish them. And now we understand that you are just punishing yourself, and that precious spark of love just dissolves away and turns into more shame.

Hmm...

Oh, John has been through some relationships like that. He has been through some beautiful relationships where there was quite a bit of true love, love that wasn't always based in shame. Because together, John and I, his soul, have been learning about this new love for a while now.

The love with his first wife, years ago, oh, it was so beautiful. It wasn't based on shame. It wasn't even based so much on physical attraction. It was based on something much deeper.

John knew he was looking for somebody else, and yet he felt this deep love, and he knew that the loving thing for himself at that time was to dive into it.

They had already become good friends, and as they both began to open to this love he told her, “I know this isn't forever, because I have this intense feeling of someone that I'm looking for. But she's not here right now, and if you are willing to be with me during this time, because of what we share, because of what we are learning together (which was all about self-love, even though they didn't understand that yet), if you can be with me knowing it's not permanent, knowing it's not forever, then let's be together and let's share what we can.”

And it was a beautiful, beautiful relationship! Until a point came where John had to move on, not because anything was wrong, but because he knew he had his own journey to take and that it was time.

And so, when they got married their only promise to each other was, “I will do my best to be present with you, to love you. And when the time comes that we need to go our separate ways, I will help you pack your bags. And I will honor you.”

And dear friends, that is love. That is true love.

True love is not that mushy feeling that you get when you are ‘in love’ with someone. That is beautiful, but it is not true love.

True love is when you can look in the eyes of someone that you are so in love with and say, I will release you if that is what you need, if that is what you want. I will release you with honor and respect and even joy. I might cry a lot too, but I will release you with joy if that is what you need for your journey, if that is what you choose for your path.

That, dear friends, is love.

How many relationships have you had where you could say that was true?

Not many.

Oh, John had other relationships after that, and each one was a big step in his journey. Each one was so beautiful in so many ways, and some of them were quite painful. Because, though John and I have learned so much about self-love, we still didn't fully understand.

John and Romana have been friends for eons and eons, and they had an agreement that, if everything worked out, they would come together in this lifetime. And almost as soon as she was born, when he was around ten years old, he could feel her. He could see her face, and he spent the rest of his life searching.

Well, not the rest of his life, but most of his life—searching, scanning for that face. Everywhere he went he was scanning for that face. Longing for her, and for that relationship.

It was a beautiful setup. It was a deliberate setup, in a way, for it was the thing that kept John present on the planet for this lifetime.

He didn't actually need to be here. I had already come right to the doorway into my own enlightenment, my own realization, and I could have stepped through in that lifetime. But I saw what was coming and I said, “Let's do one more!” And so we incarnated as John.

Oh, I had already realized myself, in a way. But I knew there was more, and I knew that this was the perfect time, so I came in as John.

And, well, we could have left at any time and been finished, had our full realization and moved on to our next adventure, but we chose to be here. And part of the setup to keep John here was this feeling of this other that he was searching for, this soulmate.

And no, we are not what people call twin flames [or twin halves of one soul]. That doesn't really exist. We are just souls who have been friends for a long, long time and have done a lot of things together in a lot of different ways.

You are whole and complete. You do not have an ‘other half’ or a ‘twin flame’ out there somewhere. You are whole, and now it is time to realize that.

Mmm...

John began to realize that. There were times he wanted to leave, and we never actually expected to be here this long. But that longing was so strong, that knowing, and John said, “I really want to find her!” So that helped to keep him here as he went through his journey of truly learning to love himself.

And, after several beautiful relationships—some of which were very painful, but mostly were beautiful—after several of those and a lot of years, and a lot of learning about himself, he began to feel the love for himself. He began to honor himself instead of constantly criticizing himself.

One day he realized how much he criticized himself, how much he shamed himself. He realized that if he talked to any of his friends the way he talked to himself they wouldn't be his friends anymore, because he was brutal with himself. Always shaming himself for not getting something right, or for saying the wrong words to somebody, or for whatever he did that felt like a failure. He was constantly belittling himself, calling himself ‘stupid’ and ‘dumb’ and all these things.

You know what we are talking about, because you all have been there. Constantly judging and shaming yourself.

John was raised in this very religious environment, with people who believed that Jesus was coming any day, and if you weren't good enough when he came you would be lost. You would be burned in hell. And John looked at himself and said, “There is no way! I don't know how to be good enough. I don't know how to make God happy with me.”

So on this day John realized how much he was shaming himself and he said, “No more! No more shame on me!” And he made a choice, and a commitment to himself, to be aware of his inner self-talk and to honor himself, instead of shaming himself.

Around that time he went to a retreat put on by this men's group, The Mankind Project. He went to their New Warrior Training, and it's really what that training was all about. It was about how to come back into honor with yourself. They didn't quite know that then. It wasn't real clear, but it changed John's life.

At one point, there was this process they did. They did a lot of processing then. It's not necessary now, but there was this process they did where they set up a gauntlet, and a man had to choose someone to stand at the other end of the gauntlet and represent something he wanted. And then the man had to push and fight his way through that gauntlet of men, and finally get to the end. It was a way of showing his commitment to himself.

Well, John had a few ideas about what he wanted, but nothing was real clear. He picked this old, white-haired gentleman to stand at the end of the line for him. He didn't know this man, but he could feel the wisdom there. And so he pushed his way through the gauntlet, not even sure what this man was representing for him. He pushed and pushed and finally came out the other end and looked in the man's eyes.

[John chokes up with emotion]

Ah yes, this is still very emotional for John to talk about. And that is okay. It's good to feel.

So John looked in this old man's eyes, and suddenly he found himself looking in the eyes of God. And God was smiling.

In that moment John knew that this was the point of the whole weekend for him, and of his whole journey up to that point. He had been so, so longing for God's approval!

Now, he understood that God isn't really an old man in the sky, and he was beginning to understand that God is himself and that there is no God ‘out there.’

And you could say that in that moment he discovered self-love. He began to smile at himself.

Later in the workshop, the men were asked to come up with an affirmation that was important to them in their lives. And John's affirmation was, I am okay.

As a man among men, I am okay!

And that is still John's core affirmation of himself.

I am okay. As a man among men, among women, as an angel among angels, as a being in all of existence, I AM OKAY!

And that, dear friend, is self-love.

And now John expands that out to all of his so-called aspects, to all these parts of himself that have been so lost in shame, and he says:

With all of this, all of me together, I am okay!

Not only am I okay, I am grand!

To have lived through all of this difficult experience, and now to bring it all home to me, I am not just okay. I am amazing!

I am incredible!

I am grand!

I am divinity itself!

And all of these were just experiences. Experiences to help me see myself, to help me finally find my way out of the shame.

So, this is where self-love begins. Looking at yourself with all of your faults and all of your foibles and all of your shames and saying, I am okay. I am beautiful. I am amazing. And I love me.

And that, dear friend, releases the shame.

That brings the shame home.

And that sets you free.

A point came in John's life where he realized one day that he was, finally, truly happy with himself. And he said to himself, “I don't think I will ever be in another serious relationship again, because this relationship with me is too precious. And I am not willing for anything to distract me from that. Or anyone.”

Well, as happens when you finally get clear about something like that, it was only a short time later that he found himself at a retreat in Greece, and there was Romana. And he knew her immediately.

It took a few days for their minds to catch up with what they were feeling inside, but John knew right away that this is who he'd been looking for. And by the end of the retreat, they both knew.

Then she went home and he spent a few days with a friend. They were communicating every day, and at some point John turned to me and said, “Dear soul, what is happening? I'm falling in love here, and it feels so right. But I don't want to lose me, or my relationship with you, my soul!”

And I said, “John, you have me now, and you can't lose me. You have yourself, and you can't lose that now. So it's time to enjoy life! It’s time to allow my love for you to be expressed through another, and to allow love in, however it comes. Because you have your love for self now, and you cannot lose that. So let it in. This is just another layer of self-love.”

So he did.

Well, they've had their minor struggles along the way. Occasional arguments, occasionally to the point where they wondered if this could actually work out and keep going. But then they came back to themselves.

At one point they had a particularly difficult argument, and John went off to their little retreat cottage in the mountains and spent a few days by himself, trying to sort himself out and figure out what was happening. And at some point I said to him, “Remember that channel you did recently? This is your creation. This is all about you.”

And he took a breath, and he came back to himself, and suddenly the details of the argument they'd been having simply weren't important anymore. He came back to himself and went home, and he asked her for a hug. Just a hug.

And in that hug it all melted away, because they had both come back to themselves.

They didn't need to feed on each other anymore. They didn't need to argue anymore, or try to get the other person to see the way they saw anymore. For you see, that is all feeding. That is all shame.

They had themselves, and so they could open their hearts once again. No need for stories, no need for explanations, just open their hearts once again.

Because when you have yourself, you can open your heart. You can open your heart to anyone, and you can feel their essence. Whether you agree with them or not, whether you like them or not, you can open your heart and you can feel them. And then you can love them.

Oh, love isn't just about romance. True love is so far beyond romance and romantic love!

You think that is the deepest experience there is. Well, wait until you really start to love yourself, and then discover what that does to the relationships in your life.

Oh, you'll still choose to distance yourself from the people who continue to try to feed on you. You don't have any need for that anymore, or any space for it in your life, so they tend to leave your life.

Sometimes, like with family, it's a little more difficult. But it's still the same thing. When you love yourself, when you can feel yourself, then you can feel them. Then you can have compassion for what they are feeling.

They are not really wanting to fight with you, or to manipulate you or control you, or whatever they are trying to do. They are just trying to fill that hole inside of themselves. So you can have compassion, AND you can be clear with them.

You can tell them to back off, or whatever is appropriate in the moment. You can set your clear boundaries, and enforce those boundaries. Because you love yourself, and that is the most important thing to you now.

And then you will find those relationships changing. Sometimes they just kind of fade away. Other times people actually change, because you have changed. Your experience of them has changed, because you are not feeding on them anymore and so they begin to see you in a different way.

Some are disappointed that they can't feed on you anymore, so they walk away. They might rage, but you have your boundaries and don't allow that into your life.

And, they are all watching you. They are all looking to you as an example, and they want to know if you are real. They want to know if this can actually happen, if a being can actually go beyond the shame. So they are watching you, and sometimes they push you, because they want to know if it is real.

And everything changes.

Mmm...

So, we'll pause here.

Take some time to let all of that in, to feel it.

Are you ready to accept yourself, and everything about you, just the way you are? Just the way it is?

Can you look at your life right now, and look at the problems and the challenges and the things that scare you and the places where you feel like you are a failure, or where you are afraid to move forward, and can you accept each of those parts of you, just the way they are?

Can you say: In all that I am, I am okay. In fact, I am better than okay!

Mmm...

Feel into that as we take a break, and we will be back.

Blessings!

And so it is.