Explore Radical Self-Love

Sonya Renee Taylor uses the word radical with intention as she explores the concept of radical self-love. She explores what this means to her in the June 2021 issue of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine.

How do we conquer the incessant barrage of shame, discrimination and body terrorism enacted again us every day? Radical self-love.

How do we enact political, economic and social reforms in the way we deal with our bodies, our minds, our day-to-day lives? Radical self-love.

Taylor advocates that radical self-love “is indeed our inherent natural state — but systems around us have distanced us from that knowing.” She explains that her work in the world of radical self-love “is to move the world closer to a self-love that is fundamental, a powerful force for social, political and economic change — and a way of living clearly inherent in all that we think, say and do.”

Clearly, self-love is the cornerstone of our relationship with ourselves. “While not completely unrelated to self-esteem or self-confidence,” Taylor says, “radical self-love is it own entity, a lush and verdant island offering safe harbor for self-esteem and self-confidence.

“Unfortunately,” she adds, “those two ships often choose to wander aimlessly adrift at sea, relying on willpower or ego to drive them, and in the absence of those motors are left hopelessly pursuing the fraught mirage of someday.”

If we understand that the original of our relationship to ourselves is self-love, then we also must understand — believe — that we came to this planet as love.

Activate the Power of Mindfulness

“Everything can begin with you. You are the foundation of any change that will happen in your society.” — Thich Nhất Hạnh

How can we handle feelings of dread, loneliness and anger within us and around us? Is there such a thing as getting back to normal in this uncertain, complex time?

Wake Up International (https://wkup.org/) wants us all to come together to build a more compassionate future. They offer a young adult retreat to activate the inner power of mindfulness, concentration and insight. The goal is to help us learn how to transform difficulties into energy sources and gain courage for the great regeneration ahead.

This retreat, taking place online May 26-30, 2021, will include guided meditations, dharma talks by senior teachers, workshops, sharing groups and more.

To register for American time zones: https://deerparkmonastery.org/join-a-retreat/. To register for European and African time zones: https://plumvillage.org/retreats/info/wakeupearth/.

The Power of the I Am Presence

By Ernest Holmes

As we start with the pain, the fear, the disappointment, the disillusionment of human life, and in our imagination gradually rise above it in our mental world to that place where the eye views the world as “one vast plane and one boundless reach of sky,” where we see that God is all, over all, in all and through all, have we not more to give, then, when we make a statement that that is the kind of life this man’s life is? We have added to that statement a consciousness of the meaning and an embodiment of the Power that projects that statement into living visibility.

Here is the marvelous thing, the subtle thing, the miracle-working, wonderful thing in our science: The practitioner does all this in the mind of the practitioner, no matter where the patient may be. He does all of this in his own mind and thought and imagination, feeling that the power of the Divine is flowing through him.

So we must go up consciously into this mountain place and here we speak the healing word. Then we forget it, go about our business every day. We need not retire from life. Every person may heal spiritually whose mind conceives that he can. That is the power of the I Am in us, but it is like electricity — it is; we must use it.

And there may come a place in consciousness where the visible and the invisible are so wed in that indissoluble unity of God and man that the healing is instantaneous. Even that will not be a miracle; it will be even more divinely natural.

— Excerpted from the January 1939 Science of Mind magazine article, “The Power of the I Am Presence,” by Ernest Holmes.