Opening to Spiritual Help from Jesus Christ

I am aware of my stubbornness.  “I’ll do it MY way.”  Though spiritual teachings say one cannot mature and grow without help, help from others, help from the spiritual realm, help from Jesus Christ, I see my defiance against asking for and taking in help.

Pat corrects me a bit.  “You take in help from your many counselors, your friends, from me.  Look at your relationship to the Pathwork lectures which nourish you so. To me you seem very open to asking for and receiving help.”

I pause as I see the truth in Pat’s words.  They are true, and yet only relatively so. True, I receive help, but I do so through my mental filters.  I do not blindly surrender to these sources outside of my being, taking them as absolute truth. If the truths resonate with me, enliven me, I take them in.  If not, I do not. This feels quite healthy to me.

So I see that perhaps I am more resistant to surrendering to God and, perhaps, to my own Higher Self, than I am resistant to receiving help from God, my own Higher Self, on my terms. Pat suggests I consider that I may not be open to intimacy with the Divine. I again see truth in her words.  I am resisting intimacy, love, and authentic connection with the Divine, and with others. I intend to stay separate so that I stay in control. Perhaps intimacy, that which I say I long for, terrifies me.

Pat again suggests that what might be missing is my bonding relationship with Mom. This missing of a deep bonding relationship with Mom, a Mom who celebrates us, seems to be nearly universally true, and a wound each of us wrestles with, including our moms, and our moms’ moms and on and on.  Without this bonding experience, we have only this vague longing for connection, but no real concrete experience  of connecting and bonding that can serve as a base of reference. So without this experience of intimacy, our longing for it, while our deepest longing, is too vague to motivate us to pursue it in ernest.

Returning to Jesus Christ described in a previous post, the phenomenon of being in his presence is the experience of being seen, being accepted, and being loved in ways that are vastly beyond our experiences with human parents or parent-substitutes.  In the presence of Jesus Christ one would have been empowered to see and identify with his or her own divinity and from there come to see, accept, and love all of oneself. We would come to celebrate ourselves, not in a prideful way, but in a truthful way.  And we would see others in similar ways and celebrate them as well, experiencing them in the All that we all are a part of.

But of course Jesus Christ is not here in the flesh for me to experience the Jesus Christ phenomenon.  On some level of my being, however, I Know Jesus Christ is here.  The quote from Pathwork Lecture 258 says this beautifully. The challenge I face is going from words in my head to a felt sense in my heart.

There are other resistances I face in opening to spiritual help, even from Jesus Christ.  On some level I do not believe he exists, or I believe that he is not available, or at least not available to me. My sense of unworthiness comes in.  I also do not trust his love for me, that his will is for my highest good.  I still cling to my little ego’s self-will who believes the only safe way to be is to be in control.  My pride comes in.  Would all this personal relationship with Jesus Christ make me a Christian Fundamentalist? Would it make Christian Fundamentalists right and me wrong?  My pride will not easily yield to this possibility.  Besides such “believing” would make me look stupid and immature, not individuated from my church of origin.  Also, I see my laziness. What if Jesus Christ were to ask me to do more than I am willing to do? So all this stands in the way of surrendering to Jesus Christ.

But what if Jesus Christ did not want me to surrender to him as external to me? What if from an “All is One” space where Jesus Christ and my higher self are One, the surrender he is calling for is surrender to my own higher self, my own divinity, my own ultimate true self? I still have to penetrate my wall of my defenses, but this truth of surrendering to God within, the God who is at once Jesus Christ, God, and me, helps me be more open to such a surrender.

Pathwork Lecture 56 speaks about healthy and unhealthy motives in desire. According to this lecture, a healthy desire is a desire for something for its own sake.  An unhealthy desire is a desire for the sake of something else.  For me this relates to Jesus Christ.  My desire for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is healthy when my motive is to experience all that living in such a relationship would be. My desire for a relationship with Jesus Christ would not be healthy if it were, for example, so that I would go to heaven when I die.  Or that I would be healed of physical or emotional illness. No, what I see in me right now is a desire for a relationship with Jesus Christ merely for the experience of being in his presence for its own sake. Yes, help may come out of that.  Yes, healing of my bonding deficiencies that block intimacy may come out of that.  But the real longing for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ in me right now is not to receive help or physical or emotional health but rather to fully experience life in the presence of Jesus Christ.

Let me sit with this answer.  Is it really my truth?  My whole truth?  Probably some threads of doubt are there too, but it has been helpful to see all this as a possibility for me.