Living as if the God in All Life Mattered

By Amy Pierce, MA

The deepest healing takes place within the heart, and thus in the context of one’s spirit and soul, more than within one’s mind.

In the fullness of time, most of us hope to be able to look back on our lives and say that we have lived them with a genuine experience of meaning, purpose, connection, and service. How many of us can say that we are indeed creating such a life right now? If you can, then I imagine you experience the humbling satisfaction that comes through knowing that you are serving Life Itself through the personal life you live.

It took me nearly five decades to return to the embodiment of my innate Wholeness and thus be able to choose to live a life in service to others and to the One, the All of All, which some call God, Brahman, Tao, Allah… In so doing, meaning, purpose, and connection have been created through what I call “Doing the Oneness,” which to me simply means, as Machaelle Small Wright says, that I “choose to live as if the God in all life mattered.” If we all lived this way, hearts would heal, wars would end in an instant, children would no longer be abused, and all of the negative “isms” would disappear from our lives. Our beloved Earth, too, would thrive.

As the means of offering greater possibility for healing to the world, in 2002 I chose to create a practice called Authentic Self Spiritual Counseling. In 2004, I received a Master’s degree in Applied Healing Arts. The same year, I was ordained as a Minister in Integrative Healing. Through what is now Authentic Self Spiritual Counseling Ministries, I offer others the opportunity to create lives of deeper meaning, greater purpose, and expanding service to the Oneness we all are. I do this work within the truth that we are whole beings – nothing about us is broken or in need of fixing. And, at any given time, each of us can find that we have some “worthy work” to do if we wish to create greater possibility and less suffering for both our personal life and for the lives of those we care about.

As one of my graduate school professors taught, “Healing may be personal, but it’s never private.” Because of Oneness (the interconnected web of Life, of Being), when I as an individual heal into greater possibility for my life, then I also create it for those around me, for this common life we all share. In truth, our personal healing literally lifts the world!

What do I mean when I use the word “healing”? With its roots in the word “holy,” you might imagine that I’m speaking about a sacred act. You would be correct; I do see healing as a sacred act. It is only in coming to the awareness of our Wholeness, or Holiness, that we are likely to decide to take complete responsibility for our creations, meaning our beliefs, thoughts, and actions. As a way into such responsibility, we must ask ourselves at any given moment, “Is what I’m doing, thinking, believing, a story big enough to live in?” If not, if it is a too-small story come from fear, selfishness, criticism, harmful words or deeds, then it can’t help but lead to painful outcomes for both oneself and those around us.

How, then, do we heal into not only the possibility, but the capacity, to change those too-small stories to stories big enough to live in? Ultimately, it comes from realizing that we must stop believing what I call “The World’s Great Lie” (the smallest of all our small stories): “I am not worthy,” which is supported by the too-little tales, “I’m not good enough” and “I’m not lovable enough.”

The deepest healing takes place within the heart, and thus in the context of one’s spirit and soul, more than within one’s mind. We must decide to make use of the mind, which likes to be the “little dictator,” as the magnificent partner it can be in service to the Heart, which is the home of the Soul. We do that by creating a safe enough place wherein we can then look with love and compassion at what I call the Holdings of the Heart, which include the pain, wounds, fears, and other distresses we have been carrying, many of them for a long time. As we make room to experience our own compassion for ourselves, and thus ultimately learn to love ourselves as sparks of the Divine in form, and we couple this with changes in thought, belief, and behavior, we return to our innate Wholeness. From such a large story, our life (little “l” life) becomes Life (capital “L” Life), and our comprehension of Life’s meaning, our purpose, and the Oneness we all are expands to a welcoming state of being. We then become a healing presence in the world, one to whom others are drawn.

Perhaps the best way to conclude is by sharing the last sentence of what has just surfaced in my mind, Marianne Williamson’s oft-quoted statement from A Return to Love, p. 109, what most of us call “Our Deepest Fear.”

As we let our own light shine,

we give other people permission to do the same;

as we’re liberated from our own fear,

our presence automatically liberates others.

When you are ready, I invite you to begin looking at the stories you are in the habit of telling and checking them against the stories that, in your heart of hearts, you’d most like to tell. With the reminder of the truth — that you are already whole and nothing is broken or in need of fixing – then that “worthy work” we must take responsibility for doing can be embraced and moved through, can find room in your mind and heart. The outcome, then, is not only that you become more authentic as your personality self, but that you are genuinely living from Authentic Self, the Highest Self, of which your personality self is but a single aspect. To live from Authentic Self is the story big enough to live in; from this realm, we cannot help but live as if the God in all life mattered.

Amy Pierce, MA, is an ordained Minister in Integrative Healing living and working in North Carolina’s Triangle area, serving clients both locally and at a distance as a Spiritual Counselor and teacher of Consciousness Evolution. She is also a musician, singer-songwriter, artist, and writer who is preparing to publish two books, Seven Steps to Embody Authentic Self, the Universal Child of Consciousness, and Conversations About Authentic Self (from her interactive teaching series of the same name). If you are interested in this series and in her work, visit www.authenticself.us. You can also subscribe to her blog at www.inspiritualwonder.us.
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