Replacing Lies with Truth
 ~ Gertrude Halpern

‘Women at heart’ is an excellent vehicle for inner inspection of the lies that kept me from self realization and self expression. I was into comparison and competition and I sense that its origin began as a child when my mother said to me, “Why can’t you be more like your sister?”

Now having gone through the journey to self, a journey that never ends, I realize as an adult, what my mother meant by that, was learn from your sister who is older than you and is doing good work. Right there was the message I took as a child that I had to measure up to what is accepted and acknowledged by those outer authority figures.

I did not get to explore and discover my own inner dimensions and my natural abilities, but then again, neither did my mother. I spent a good portion of my life comparing myself with those starlets on the movie screen and then later on television. I felt ugly by comparison, carried body, figure and form worship and by comparison saw myself as being undesirable and unwanted.

No matter how much success and praise I received throughout the years, I never felt any self acceptance as I am. That self rejection was there keeping me from appreciating the unique presence of my soul and soul purpose. I felt depressed and didn’t really enjoy being here in the physical world.

As much as I tried to remodel myself, the underlying unacceptability never gave me peace or joy in what I had achieved in career, in marriage or any other endeavor.

Then I reached out for God and what I found was God lives in all of us. I had been listening to the wrong voices. I came to see that those troubling thoughts were my challenge for achieving inner peace. When that shift occurred I knew I was on the road to healing those old wounds and coming to terms with my own mental and emotional choices that were influenced by the past. I am on the path of self discovery and self recovery. I will never give myself away to anyone’s ideal of what I should be. I keep the reality of the existence of the Divine in myself.

As I free myself of the judgements of myself, I can free myself of judgment of others. I can recognize those who are listening to their mind and not their soul and see them as mirrors of where I have been. I can hold the positive focus that someday, somehow, they will come home to their own inner soul.

~ Gertrude Halpern