“Let me listen to me and not to them.”

-- Gertrude Stein

‘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?”

I did not get to explore and discover my own inner dimensions and my natural abilities. I spent a good portion of my life comparing myself with those starlets on the movie screen. I felt ugly by comparison and saw myself as being undesirable and unwanted.

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. 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.

~ Gertrude Halpern

“There is nothing so healing in all the world as real presence. Our real presence can feed the ache for God in others.”

-- MacRina Wiederkehr

Read Gemma’s full story here.