Feeling Beloved on the Earth
A Barbara Brennan School of Healing faculty member sent me to Pathwork while I was on a retreat with her in August 2000. In a recent reflection paper I wrote I described part of this experience as follows….
Before leaving the retreat his retreat director told Gary about a story that she thought he would like. There is a young man talking to an old man, and he asks the old man, “And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.” The director confessed that she did not remember the author (it turned out to be Raymond Carver) nor did she know why she was led to send Gary off with this message. But Gary’s next ten years were in fact a diligent search for this experience, the experience “to feel himself beloved on the earth.”
So this is the story of how this notion of “feeling myself beloved on the earth” came into my life and grounded my Pathwork and spiritual journey forever…
Yet in the beginning I forgot. While these words hung with me for my first six months of the Sevenoaks Pathwork Transformation Program (I entered in October of 2000, only two months after my directed retreat in August where I was told these words), by June of 2001 I had forgotten them. Then one morning sitting at breakfast at Sevenoaks a Pathwork Helper came up to me excitedly. He had walked to the river that morning and while returning a voice came to him telling him to tell me that “Gary, you are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”
I was shocked. These of course are the words that “came down from heaven” during the baptism of Jesus (Matthew 3:17 or Mark 1:11). A couple of years later I shared with this Pathwork helper how much his sharing meant to me. He had no recall. How interesting. What is this all about? Raised conservative Lutheran it would have been blasphemy to apply these words to myself. Yet today? More possible. It is no wonder that the first words of nearly every Pathwork lecture, some form of, “Blessings, my dearly beloved friends,” are so meaningful to me and ground me to this belovedness.
It is indeed true that we are beloved. I can remember this intellectually most of the time. The key to life is to come to feel our belovedness from within our core. May it be so for you. May it be so for me.
With love, Gary