"You wander from room to room
Hunting for the diamond necklace
That is already around your neck!"

-- Jelaluddin Rumi

Hi everyone,

I've been getting glimmers of insights lately that my ongoing quest for empowerment is completely off the mark. So my heart quickened with these words from Catherine Ingram*:

"The greatest [spiritual myth] is that there's some reason for a search. Because nothing is lost, the greatest joke of the whole spiritual journey. There's no reason for a search at all. As Poonjaji said, 'Call off the search.' When I met Poonjaji, all searching fell away. The seeking absolutely stopped. It's not as if I landed in some kind of perfection or enlightenment, not at all. It's that the folly of trying to change this--working on the 'me' project, trying to purify my mind, trying to realize something, having a spiritual perspective--all of that fell away into this great appreciation for my life, my conditioned mind, my reality exactly as it is.

"When you see you don't have to mess with the program at all, when you let it be exactly as it is, and you realize you're able to suffer when it happens, grieve when it happens, and laugh joyously when it happens--all of it coming and going in this great expanse of existence--then you really are home free. You don't need any stories or denial of what you are. You don't have to have a buffer or strategy of beliefs between you and reality."

What do you think? Is there something we can do to open to this depth of self-acceptance? Or is an experience like Catherine's a gift of grace? Share your perspectives with the 'women at heart' community.

~ Patrice

"The problem with 'enlightenment' isn't due to the difficulty of achieving some lofty but elusive spiritual goal. The seeming difficulty lies only in the fact that we've been taught that we're unenlightened, unworthy, and unlovable. ...

"You can't not have enlightenment, but you can claim to not have it. And you can live a belief that you're unenlightened, even while striving to 'attain' enlightenment. Stop claiming unenlightenment, and simply begin accepting who you truly are, instead of accepting who you aren't, and then live who you are. Nothing is required to attain enlightenment; it is simply a matter of being who you've always been. And you do that by giving yourself permission to be and to live the truth that is already within you."

-- Charles David Heineke

*Catherine Ingram interviewed by Rita Marie Robinson in her book, 'Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Wisdom.'