We are told to love ourselves and see the divine in ourselves. It is not always easy. What can we do to help us enter into really feeling the fact that we are divine?

First there is recognition of how simple this is but, how very not easy it is. This is not easy, but it is very simple. The simple fact is that the more you come to just be, the easier it is to discern how divine you truly are. This is one of the reasons that some people engage this question by using meditation techniques and some people engage this question by working to serve others. Many of your religions focus on one or the other of these two pathways. Eventually, both the path of service and the path of contemplation will lead you to experiencing yourself as one with the divine. The simple thing is, if you will just go with it, take a path and move forward with it, eventually that is the inevitable end point. It is not easy to do this because everything that has ever taught you that you are something other than divine, every harsh word, every disappointing moment, every lonely night has twisted up or created vast challenges. Each of those moments that has taught you that you are something other than divine, each of those has been excruciating. From the perspective of your soul, feeling the feeling of not being divine hurts. It breaks your heart. All of you have these wounds that you carry with you and those wounds are very distracting. These wounds look like little beliefs inside of you that say, "I’m not worthy" or "I’m not good enough" or "I’m not lovable". There are a million variations and they all come with a packet of emotion and a whole realm of societal structure and support to hold them in place. It is not easy to do this, but the path is very simple.

Some of the things that you can do to engage this experience of being the divine include exercised that are like shortcuts for this. One is, for those of you who feel an affinity for children or a love for children, to watch children and just allow yourself to feel that love for them. Go to a place and watch children playing and just let yourself smile and enjoy them. A further step from that is to imagine adults as children and let yourself feel love for them. Let yourself open some love for them that you would not have had otherwise. To imagine that an adult who is making a big mistake or being a little bit irrational or difficult in any given moment, to imagine them as their child-self makes it so much easier to forgive them for their behavior and to give them that space to make that mistake and still have some love in your heart for them. A further extension of that is to imagine yourself as a child in terms of allowing yourself to extend the same sense of forgiveness and tenderness in your heart toward yourself as you would for a child. Really, the thing that makes self-love so simple is that there is nothing you need to do to find it or created it. All you need to do is remove the parts of you that forgot about it or that resist it. When you imagine yourself as a child, you allow tenderness and self-love exists in that tenderness. It is as easy as pie. That is one exercise that can help you. Another thing the Keepers will say about self-love is that self-love is one of those kind of magical things that you do not have to get right in every moment in order to have it. First of all, you have it all of the time. It is just buried under a whole bunch of hurt and wounds, but it is always there. You are not missing it, it is just under a pile of clutter.

The second thing about that, every time you tap into self-love, even if it is just for an instance, even if it slips right out of your hands as soon as you grab it, it was still that moment makes a huge difference. It sends ripple effects through your whole life and it makes it one hundred times easier to access it the next time. This is a very nonlinear process. It works through an exponential kind of dynamic, which is one little drop of self-love, one little instant of self-love, will have an exponential affect in your life. It really builds on itself. There is a positive feedback mechanism. The more instances you can experience self-love, the more instances become available for further self-love. Knowing that can help those of you who are holding yourselves to some kind of strict discipline around this to let it go. Discipline will not serve you. Discipline does not facilitate self-love. Gentleness, forgiveness, laughter, these are the things that facilitate self-love. Even in your meditation practice if the contemplative path is one that you have chosen, if you are struggling with self-love through your contemplative path, let go of the need for discipline in the path and allow yourself to fall asleep in the middle of a meditation. As long as it is an effort to be tender, to be gentle, to be nurturing with yourself, you are moving forward on the contemplative path. There is no point to the contemplative path except to reach that point where you love everything and that includes yourself. Being hard on yourself will never move you forward on your contemplative path. Being forgiving with yourself always will.

a message from Akashic Records channeled by Jen Eramith MA
http://www.akashictransformations.com