Befriend Yourself

You can nurture a healthy friendship with yourself. It’s a sure way to build inner security, inner trust. Listening within ourselves with an attitude of friendship is an essential spiritual practice.Two others are key to true security - gratitude and forgiveness.

Gratitude has been mentioned by enlightened masters of all the world’s wisdom traditions as the royal road or fast track to an inner sense of security. Be grateful for every single thing you can think of, many times a day. Make a game of it.

Feeling bored sometime? Make a list, mental or written, of all the things you are grateful for at that moment. It's a fine way to pass the time while waiting in line, for example. When we express genuine gratitude to another person, we build a sense of two-way trust. It is the same inside us as it is between us.

As for forgiveness for ourselves and for others, it is never about forgetting damage we have suffered. We take care not to move toward more of that. It is not about condoning.

It is only about dropping the righteousness we may feel, the victim or aggrieved stance. We stop manufacturing emotional heat about the event or the person. We forgive ourselves for the part we have played in the situation, we bless the other participants and we move on. We acknowledge that each element of the event and each person is God participating in the playing out of life. There is nothing but God, anywhere. That includes you and me. Humans blend transient, mortal life with eternal, immortal life. So, allow the Divine in you to forgive the human imperfection in you and in all others. It's the healthy thing to do.

What we do not forgive we waste our energy carting around; at the same time, we school ourselves to be on guard against that same judgment being leveled at ourselves. Criticism of others is a sure sign of self-judgment, of keeping ourselves walking on eggshells – in other words, self-fear. This is stress. 
What we think about others is we think about ourselves too. What a sad thing for God to do to Itself.

We can befriend ourselves and feel much more secure with ourselves, in the world and with God.

It’s a lifelong process of learning to love and trust – an essential foundation for expanded awareness of God within, speaking as intuition.

Spirit, as you, deserves no less.