I trust the answers I find within me.
I know that the presence of love is real.
Saint Teresa is a call for the importance of the interior life. She knew intimately about the spiritual wealth we all possess and have access to if we’re willing to go inward. She not only emphasized the need to meditate and to pray in order to reach that innermost castle where the soul waits for us, but she also instructed the sisters of her convent on how to discern the presence of the soul, or of a saint or of a holy person that is giving us wisdom from within us.
She had a bookmark that supposedly read, “If you have God, you will want for nothing. God alone suffices.” This synthesizes the wisdom of her experience. Nothing less than divine love will satiate a seeker, especially once you have met with it from within.
She urges us to meditate, to pray, to go inward and meet with the presence of the soul. And then she asks for us to believe that is is real, and that the answer we find are real. She asks us to move that inner truth out into the world with confidence and conviction.
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I recognize suffering in order to release it.
Curiosity breeds compassion.
Quan Yin is about the deep medicine that comes simply from being willing to bear witness to someone else’s pain. To really listen we have to move from the ego to the soul so that the story we are listening to doesn’t become about us, or trigger us. This also applies to the moments when we are listening to the story we tell ourselves about who we are. We are often far harsher and less forgiving to ourselves than we would ever be to someone else. Quan Yin suggests that we listen simply with curiosity.
Curiosity allows us to detach from needing to take the suffering of someone we love personally. Curiosity is a door that leads to compassion. It frees us from feeling as though we have to react to what we hear or defend and explain our part in their suffering. We can just perceive the pain that they are in. Or we can finally hear our own cries of despair and not seek to judge or justify them. We can just be present to what needs to be heard.
Quan Yin is the powerful energy of giving witness to our own or to someone else’s suffering. Often, just a calm, abiding presence of compassion is all that is needed to transform that suffering into clear light.
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Love is divine, and I am nothing except love.
There’s nothing more powerful than remembering that we are love. And there’s nothing and no one outside of us that is needed in order to realize this. It’s between our experience of the divine and our own soul. We can let go of what we think we need to prove or who we think we need to be in order to receive love because we remember that we are love. Then we can stand in that truth, even through flames.
Marguerite is a courageous truth teller. And the truth of her experience is that love alone can free us. Not the love of another might give us, not the love of family or of friends. All of this is powerful and significant. But the true source of love is for us in the fact that we are a soul, and that the soul is in unions with the divine.
She reminds us when we’ve forgotten that love is the essence of who we are. And that true love is found within. Marguerite says, “Love has no beginning, no end, and no limit, and I am nothing except Love.” This is the time to own and to know this truth more fully. It is the most profound and radical act we can ever take: knowing the love we already are.
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