WHOA Babies are sound bites I have read or heard that make me stop and pay close attention. Sometimes they make me say "WHOA Baby!!!"
I recently got turned onto a new author whose work has given me a few WHOA Babies along the way. Her name is Sera Beak.
Sera Beak is a Harvard-trained scholar of comparative world religions who spent years traveling the world studying spirituality with Sufi dervishes, Tibetan monks, Croatian mystics, shamans, and more. She is the author of "The Red Book: A Deliciouosly Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark," and "Red Hot and Holy." www.serabeak.com
She writes:
"Simply put, the Gnostic gospels are a collection of remarkable teachings that were written by Jesus' disciples but viewed as dangerous and heretical by the early (second century C.E.) church fathers and therefore banned from the official Christian canon. In fact, the whole spiritual tradition that rose up around these teachings, called Gnosticism, from the Greek word gnosis, meaning "inner knowing" and "self-knowledge," was outlawed by the early church; the church leaders even went to far as to attempt to destroy the gospels… No one knew what became of them until 1945, when they were found buried in a clay pot in the desert near the town of Nag Hammadi in Egypt.
Strict religious dogmas was to the Gnostics what a bicycle is to a fish: a useless unidirectional contraption. For them, ongoing divine revelation was what it was all about. If you were a Gnostic, you accessed this type of sacred revelation not by going outside, not by listening solely to others or by reading theology or by being dictated to but by looking inside and finding your deep inner self, your "self of your self," which was often referred to as a divine seed or a divine spark and which was believed to be the same substance as God. This experience of one's divine spark was a human being's truest reality, and it was cause for celebration by humans and the divine. You know, Jesus always said the kindgom of God is within you, so-maybe he was more of a Gnostic than the church fathers led us to believe.
…it's the sort of idea that would have completely upstaged and upended the early Church; after all, who would need a dogmatic religious father figure if people realized they already had the divine within and required not stern intermediaries (though compassionate guidance and support is always helpful) to to access it? They could find out what God was, just by checking in. Carl Jung believed that "one of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people from a direct experience of God.."
This is a WHOA Baby to me because my work helps people rediscover their inner knowing and truest reality, especially around sensuality, sexuality and beauty. To understand how these thought patterns of resistance to our inner knowing came from is fascinating. It goes a lonnnnnngggg way back that we were encouraged to trust others before we trust ourselves. Today, we are being called to dissolve the resistance to our inner truth.
It is time to restructure and reorganize our beliefs based on our inner reality. What does this mean? It means paying close attention when your life is out of flow and balance. That is a signal that you are telling lies to yourself, maybe something like "It's okay that I fake orgasms, he has no idea." Your inner truth is there to be honored or ignored. We get to choose.
This does not mean to become an island, and only talk to yourself from here forward. What we need from others is to empower us to go inside and then hold the space for us. You may find darkness, but I promise if you stay with it, you will find inner light and juiciness too.
Don't be afraid of your magnificence!
