Forgiveness: Your Gift of Love to Yourself

CHAPTER 1

WHO AM I?

My name is Nicolette Lodge, which means victorious place of refuge or place where you can rent a room. But has my surname always been Lodge? No. That is my married name. I was born Nicolette Harman, which means victorious warrior. So if I am now a victorious place of refuge, what happened to the victorious warrior? If I am my name, then which name am I? Am I Nicolette Lodge and if so, what happened to Nicolette Harman? Isn’t a name just a name? It’s not really who I am.

Am I male or female? Well, when I look at my genitals I am definitely in a female body this lifetime, but I am sure I have been male and female many times across my lifetimes. Aside from my sexual organs, there isn’t anything that makes me more feminine than my husband or the guy next door. When I close my eyes and feel who I am with the eyes of my heart, I can’t feel my gender.

What about my skin colour? Does that tell you who I am? Am I white, brown or black? I seem to be an orangey, beige kind of colour. Actually, come to think of it, I have never met a white- or blackskinned person. I’d like to meet one someday.

When I close my eyes, I can’t feel the colour of my skin. In fact, when I imagine a colour for myself, I feel a strong resonance with the colour green. I visualise myself as a plant with gorgeous green shoots and vines and roots that extend outwards and connect me to all of nature and Earth.

My skin colour is not who I am.

Oh yes, what do I do? Maybe that’s who I am.

Well, let me think … uhmmmm … I am a mother of two sons, I am a wife and a homemaker, ooooh … and I am an author and inspirational speaker and a freelance personal trainer, but I was first a classical ballet dancer and then a model, then a photographer and audio-visual producer, then later when I had my kids, I became an aerobics instructor and television commercial actress … oh, and I nearly forgot, I used to be in sales in the corporate world and now I am home manager and cook and gardener, seamstress and sometimes, in the bedroom, a slut. My husband likes that role the best, ha ha …

So, am I a victorious orange/beige, female, mother, model, actress, cook, homemaker, photographer, personal trainer, dancer, author, speaker, slut or a place of refuge?

Oh my gosh! Who am I?

If you are what you do, and you don’t, then you aren’t.

– Dr Wayne Dyer

What do I do when I’m not doing all that stuff? Maybe that’ll tell you who I am. Well, when I’m not ferrying kids around, I like to read and garden or sew. Sometimes I like to bead. I love walking, swimming and mountain biking. I enjoy waterskiing and wake-skating with my boys, but I’ve given up offroad motor biking because I don’t want to risk damaging my prosthetic hip.

Even though I’m fairly adventurous, outdoorsy, sporty and creative, that isn’t who I am.

Am I the job that I do? Oh, here’s some food for thought from Dr Wayne Dyer, If you are what you do, and you don’t, then you aren’t. So I can’t be my job or the many roles that I play.

Where am I from? That might tell you who I am.

I was born in South Africa, so I’m South African, in Cape Town in fact, so then I must be Capetonian. I came to Johannesburg for a friend’s wedding in my 20s and never went home, so now I must be a Joburger.

Am I Capetonian, a Joburger, a South African or African, or even broader than that, an Earthling or Cosmic being? Oh my gosh! I’m from everywhere. Where I come from and where I live don’t define who I am.

What do I believe in? Maybe that will give us a clue about who I am.

Let’s think this one through. I was christened in the Anglican church, went to Hebrew nursery school because my mom said it was the best school, but I really think she wanted to defy her father because he was anti-semitic. All my friends were Jewish and I thought I needed to go to synagogue on Fridays just like they did. I thought I was Jewish. I wanted to be Jewish like all my friends. My first real boyfriend was Jewish. So maybe I’m Jewish.

I did, however, take communion in the Methodist church, become born again at the Rhema Bible Church, which is charismatic, and then got married in the Church of England. After having kids, however, I discovered that neither my kids nor my husband enjoyed having to do penance in church on Sundays, so I gave that all up. Spending time alone with myself, I came to the conclusion that it really doesn’t matter if you go to church or not, or what religion you choose. You can still communicate with God. It’s the same God, no matter what you decide to call Him/Her/It/Them. It makes no difference whether I am in a church or in nature, I can commune with God.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel the need to pray to or worship God. I just converse with Him/Her or myself. Well, it kind of feels the same. I can’t really differentiate between God and myself. It feels like I am talking to my intuition. My mom taught me to listen to my gut or intuition. She said I’d always know to do the right thing if I followed that little inner voice. Well, that got me thinking. Isn’t that the same message I heard in church years later, advising me to listen to the voice of God or the Holy Spirit, which always resonates from a place somewhere near your solar plexus?

I’d always know to do the right thing if I followed that little inner voice.

Am I a Christian, Buddhist, Jew, Hindu? We weren’t born Christian, Buddhist or Jewish. We were born into Christian, Buddhist or Jewish families where we were conditioned into these beliefs by our upbringing.

So the question remains … WHO AM I?

I can’t be a sister, daughter, mother, wife, orange-skinned, freelance everything, nature-loving Jewish, Christian, South African, Capetonian, victorious, Joburger, place of refuge. That’s too complicated.

I remember one of my mom’s favourite stories.

My mom, dad and I were sitting in their bed having a snuggle-in, probably on a Saturday morning. I was two years old and my Mom asked me, So, Nicolette, are you Daddy’s girl or Mommy’s girl? I pondered for a few moments and then replied, I love me Mommy and I love me Daddy, but I me own.

How often do we try to feel our identity through others? We have to choose sides. You have to be Mommy’s girl or Daddy’s girl. You have to choose.

Do I fit into a category that defines who I am? No, I am just me. As we’ve discussed, there is no single category that defines me.

It’s funny how we always feel the need to give everyone and everything a label. Isn’t it just our ego’s way of trying to create a belief of who we are around the concept of what we do, who we associate with, what colour skin we have, which corner of the Earth we happened to be born in and which religion we have chosen to follow?

I know it makes us feel more important and needed when we do a job that is revered and respected by others, but that doesn’t make us any more special than Janet or Joe.

If you think you’re special, then you have just made everyone else on the planet un-special. There are no special people! We are all the same.

– Dr Wayne Dyer

Wayne Dyer says: If you think you’re special, then you have just made everyone else on the planet un-special. There are no special people! We are all the same.

I am not

my mother’s child or my father’s child

my husband’s wife or my children’s mother

my mother’s daughter

my name

my gender

my race

my religion

my nationality

my job.

So here I stand, stripped of sexuality, race, religion, nationality and job status. I can even take off all my clothes. My clothes don’t define who I am. They change every day.

So what is left? What is the essence of who I am?

How about my history – the journey through life that has brought me to this place at this time? Maybe that’s who I am?

Let’s think about this. All the major events in my life have been transferred into a collection of photo albums. When I look back and analyse them, I seem to have continually changed and evolved, but none of those recollections are who I am right now. Besides, I can’t be the person I was in the past. I have to be who I am right now. So I can’t be my history.

I have feelings; feelings of love and hate. When I think about the time I went snow skiing with friends, I feel exuberant joy. When I think about the affairs I had early on in my marriage, I feel guilty and ashamed. When I reminisce about my first boyfriend who was later killed in a hit-and-run, I feel sad.

Do these feelings define who I am? The feelings change, depending what I am thinking about. I can go through a whole range of emotions right now by changing what I think about. So my mind’s activity causes different feelings to manifest. Then I can’t be my feelings – so maybe I am my mind?

OK, let me close my eyes, sit quietly and observe my breathing. I become conscious that I am observing the ebb and flow of my life force. If only for a few short seconds, I am able to stop my mind’s activity. My mind keeps popping thoughts back into my head, but I can choose to ignore them and focus on my breathing instead. I am able to contain and discipline my mind and be its observer, so I am greater than my mind. I am the witness to my feelings, but I am not my feelings. I am the observer of my mind; therefore I am not my mind.

My ego tells me that I am clever and powerful, but aren’t these just thoughts? And again, isn’t this just my mind being allowed to roam without discipline? By associating myself with my thoughts, I am allowing my ego to trick me into believing that this is who I am. If I were an Olympic gold medallist, I might feel proud and special. I might even believe that this defines who I am. This little trick my ego plays on me makes me scared of losing my title – if I fall off the pedestal, what then? Who will I be then?

Ego will keep us trapped in this cycle of craving more, of never being satisfied with what we have and being who we are right now. We somehow need people to see us for our mistaken identity, because we are not really good enough, whoever it is that we are.

Our egos can keep us entangled in the emotions we evoke by reliving the past or by hankering after the promise of what we’ll be someday in the future. But ego cannot operate in the present.

To ask myself who I am, I need to be in the present, so I cannot be my ego. I am none of the material things I see with my physical eyes, therefore I need to close my eyes and feel and experience that which I am.

So who am I? Who is it who resides beneath the superficial mask of physicality? I can liken it to a presence much like the sun. The sun never stops transmitting and shining. We can be oblivious to it and go shopping indoors at the mall, but outside the sun still shines. We go to work in an air-conditioned office, but outside the sun is still shining. The world rotates on its axis and day turns to night, but the sun still shines. It is always there. The clouds move in front of it obscuring it from view, but its strength and brilliance never diminish. It is a constant presence, much like us.

That me in the background of my life has been with me since my birth and is the same me that will be with me until my physical death and beyond.

That is SPIRIT!

Spirit is energy. And energy can never be destroyed. Spirit will remain when our bodies have died and decomposed. Spirit will always exist.

Therefore, that must be it!

That’s who I am.

I AM SPIRIT!

CHAPTER 2

LOVE

Pure Soul Essence

This is the place to start. Everything begins with love, endures in love and ends with love. Love is the background theme of our lives and it could well be the foreground. It is the presence we take for granted and forget to credit for our very existence. It is everything.

We come from a Source far greater than ourselves. It is rather like a very large bank. It is a bank of love, warmth and abundant energy. We have drawn a very small credit for ourselves, but the resources at the bank are endless. We can top up at any time we choose.

Everything we can see and touch, that we perceive with our physical senses, comes from this source, Love – as does everything that the physical senses cannot perceive. LOVE is our Spirit essence or God essence. It is the non-material stuff of which we are made. Love is creative, life force energy. Or you could simply say: Love is pure energy.

Love is so often compared to light because just like light, love is an energy that is in constant motion, illuminating and transforming dark places.

Let’s for the purpose of the following exercise assume that light and love are the same thing.

Liken your life on Earth to two choices: sitting in the sunshine all day, every day, or sitting in solitary confinement in a dark prison cell.

Visualise sitting in the warm sun. Now feel the warm sensations on your skin as the sun penetrates the layers of your body. Acknowledge the warmth in your bloodstream. Notice how well lubricated your joints feel and how supple and pain free your body is in the presence of heat. The warmth penetrates right through the layers of your skin to your organs.

Notice the amazing colours around you, made possible by the refraction of light into the various colours of the rainbow. Acknowledge all the amazing plant forms that the sunlight sustains, the oxygen-giving plants, the food-providing fruits and vegetables. Reflect with gratitude on all that owes its life to light.

Now visualise yourself sitting in that confined cell in the pitch dark. Visualise the creeping cold, the dank, lifeless, life-draining darkness. No colours entertain your senses. Feel how your organs have to fight to sustain some warmth, which is gradually being drained out of your every cell. Feel the pain in your limbs as they gradually stiffen up and ache with loss of warmth. Imagine the sensations in your body as you start to shiver and shake uncontrollably, longing for blankets and heat. Notice how your body starts to shut down and die because of lack; lack of sunshine, light and warmth. Nothing grows in the pitch dark. Without sunshine plants, fruits and vegetables won’t grow and without plants to create oxygen, all life on this planet would cease. How important is light? It is responsible for all life on this planet. Rather I should say, It is life.

Now jump back out of that reality and enter your nice warm body again and reflect on this fact: sunshine/light is creative energy. Dark is the absence of light and is like a vacuum, an empty receptacle waiting to be filled. In the dark everything that was created by light vaporises and dissolves, leaving an emptiness like a pregnant pause. Unless the light is restored, everything will perish. The dark is the shadow side of light and is the essence that gives substance to form.

All of life had its beginnings in the darkness. It is out of this darkness that the first thought came, which was the catalyst that initiated the flow of universal love through our veins. To breathe in Life or Creation, we first have to die, as it were, by exhaling to allow and make space for the next breath. We see this symbiosis all around us in the Universe, such as the ebb and flow of the tides, the life cycle of a caterpillar changing into a chrysalis before it emerges as a butterfly, the sun setting before it rises again, and so on.

The absence of light and life is darkness or physical death. But the two are complementary opposites. Neither can exist without the other.

Just as in the absence of light the room grows dark and cold, so do we when separated from love. When we are not in love, we are in ‘unlove’ and we begin to deteriorate and die.

We have to go within, as it were, into the darkness of our inner recesses and ingest love from our centre, our universal well of oneness. You see, we are all interconnected and share one Soul. It is called the Soul of the Universe.

Let’s use an experiment to demonstrate what I am trying to explain here. Take a glass and fill it with water. When the water has settled, add a drop or two of food colouring and just sit back and observe the process. You will notice that very slowly the colour diffuses until all the water is evenly tinted. The water becomes one colour. There are no individual water molecules that stay uncoloured. The water molecules are not separate, they are all one.

We too are a microcosm of the bigger picture, the macrocosm. Everything that occurs to each one of us has an osmotic effect on the whole. Our individual souls are like water molecules, but we are all water. We are all one Soul. Our collective source is our unity.

So love is a spiritual state of being in oneness with all that we are. When we are in love we are not in resistance or denial, nor are we separate or alone. We are open to our bottomless well of goodness. We have the freedom to access our talents and raw creativity. We literally flow in an interconnected oneness with all those who are acknowledging, transmitting and channelling love from their centre.

Everything that occurs to each one of us has an osmotic effect on the whole.

Remember too, that in being one combined energy – a collective Soul, the Soul of the Universe – we are also one with those who are not accessing their Divine light. We are all interconnected. There is no ‘us’ or ‘them’. We are all water. We are all love.

Do you remember the example I used of the sun shining in the sky, on page 17? The sun doesn’t diminish in its power when Earth rotates on its axis and experiences night. When we turn our backs on love, we stop feeling its powerful life-giving effects. We then experience lack, fear, loneliness and separation, but our love is a constant, as if waiting for us to return and bask in its glorious warmth or take our next breath. When we turn our backs on love, it has no effect on the power of love. We can build as many walls and blockages as we like, but we are the only ones who suffer as we cut ourselves off from our life-blood.

Unlike the Earth that can’t choose when it faces the sun or turns its back, we have to make a conscious choice to access our love. But regardless of our choice, the love that remains within us is a constant presence, whether we allow it or deny it.

You are either allowing love and going with its universal flow, or you are resisting love, creating a blockage to the life-flow. This is like a light switch – it’s on or it’s off; there are no in-betweens. Whatever you choose, your supply from Source and your essence remain unaffected. You cannot destroy your essential presence. Remember, it is pure energy and energy can never be destroyed. You are love. You are creative energy.

We are all interconnected. There is no ‘us’ or ‘them’.

We are all water. We are all love.

Remember also, that just like the food colouring diffused itself through the entire glass of water, so too does our love have an osmotic effect on all those in our midst. Love and light will always illuminate the dark. Love always triumphs.

Love gives itself expression through our physical form, so that we can act as mirrors for love to see itself made manifest. How does love experience itself if love is love? The only way that is possible is to witness itself in human form and then experience lack of love. We can only experience what love is once we have experienced what it is not. We only know how good love feels when we experience the separation and anxiety caused by lack of love. It is only when we experience the complementary opposite that we become complete in our selfknowledge.

Let’s use our imaginations and suppose that God is Love. God is everything. How does God know what it feels like to be what God is? How does Love know it is love without experiencing love in action?

So God/Love decides to divide itself into a trillion pieces in many different forms. God creates Earth and every tangible, animate and inanimate object. God creates us in duality – we have a physical form and a spiritual form. The reason for this is that we now have tangible mirrors in each other through which we can observe ourselves through sight, touch, taste, smell and hearing plus our emotions, mind, intellect and egos.

Now suppose that God drops each one of us off on Planet Earth, equally equipped with all the navigational tools we need, with the express purpose of experiencing our innate nature and finding our way home to our Source/our oneness. How best can we achieve this? Through our interactions with the others whose paths we cross. Along the journey back to oneness, we encounter many different souls. Some will travel with us for a short time and others for a longer period of time. We exchange valuable truths through our interactions with them. We discover that when we team up with some souls our power magnifies and our goals seem easier to attain, whereas with others we feel drained and exhausted.

However, each of us will need to make our own choices and journey home on our own. It is a self-journey. Even though others will influence and support us along the way, we will need to complete the steps and accumulate life lessons by ourselves. We can help one another, but we’ll need to reach our destination alone. We’ll each get the opportunity to create situations in which we feel good and situations in which we’ll feel bad. We will learn how to manipulate our feelings by the choices we make. Our navigation tools are our emotions, which act as sensory receptors.

It really doesn’t matter how we get there or which route we take. It doesn’t matter which skills we use or which experiences we create. All paths lead back home. As long as we are connecting with love, our experiences will be comforting and the journey will accelerate. When we disconnect from love, our passage will be agonising and our journey will become laborious.

At our physical death, our soul will be reunited with Source/God, regardless of the choices we made on Earth, and whether we regard them as good or bad. Earth is an opportunity to learn through our tangible experiences, and to feel and know that which we are, by experiencing everything we are not.

When you are radiating love from your centre, you will experience feelings of bliss. When you are connected to Source, you will feel strong, enlivened, empowered, fulfilled, positive and complete. If you can’t feel love it is a sure sign that you’re not allowing the love within you to flow and you are creating a self-made blockage. When you are at a place of love within, all your outer relationships will be loving relationships. Your outer world will reflect back to you what you are radiating.

When you are at a place of love within, all your outer relationships will be loving relationships.

CHAPTER 3

ROMANTIC LOVE

Fairy Stories for the Soul

Roses are red, violets are blue

I give you my heart ’cause I love you.

The love that humanity has become fixated on is romantic love. Romantic love is the advertiser’s dream. It is a huge fantasy that our egos buy into, wishing to believe in ‘happily ever afters’ and a life of being pampered and pleasured without having to do any work.

Romantic love is an attachment to things in the physical realm. High on the list are: sex, touching, being close to another human being in the flesh so to speak, whispering sweet nothings, which are empty promises, lots of praising and complimenting, the giving and getting of material gifts, staged dinners and dates, lots of kissing, and so on. Think about it. All of these things take us away from ourselves. With romantic love, we are choosing to fuse ourselves with another human being. We temporarily lose our identity and find ourselves buying into this pseudo, make-believe unreality.

You cannot find love to complete you in the form of another human being, because love is inside every one of us. You cannot find your other half, because you are already everything you need to be. You are complete. If you are buying into romantic love, then you are being fooled by your ego into believing the biggest lie. The lie is that you are alone and separate and that you need someone else to complete you. You are not separate. You are not alone. You are a handful of multidimensional light and love. You are created in Spirit/God’s likeness. You have all of God’s qualities just on a smaller scale. You are LOVE and you are connected to God’s universal love. Now I ask you: If you are love, how can you seek love from another to complete you? All you need to do is open the doors of your heart and allow the love within to immerse you and fill you up.

By loving someone conditionally because they complete you, is to set yourself up for failure. Should they no longer perform all the tasks they need to, to sustain your well-being, you will fall apart.

If you are seeking love to build you up, then you’re in ego and fear, living in your shadow side and not walking in the light. If you are looking for someone to give the responsibility of completing you, you are relinquishing yourself from your own duty to fulfil and love yourself. When you do that, you give the other person your power and the key to your happiness, and you become their prisoner. How crazy is that? This is the reason that conditional love swings to hatred so easily.

Can you see that by loving someone conditionally because they complete you, is to set yourself up for failure? Should they no longer perform all the tasks they need to, to sustain your well-being, you will fall apart. It’s not difficult to see that you would certainly feel threatened and unloved the minute they gave up this unsustainable act. This is the saddest thing that lovers do. They give the responsibility of being loved to their partner. This is the very reason lovers fight. They perceive each other as the holder of the key to each others’ happiness and self-fulfilment and they begin to feel jealous and threatened that they do not control their own happiness and love. They fight over issues of mistrust and fear, of losing something they actually willingly gave away (the ownership of their own love and self-esteem) and trying to own and protect something they never owned in the first place (their partner’s love). It is all an illusion.

The sooner you realise that you are the master of your own love and happiness, that you are one with Spirit and that you are complete, the sooner you will enter the state of loving bliss, of oneness with all of creation. You see, love is not a feeling; it is a state of being. The warm inner feeling of bliss that accompanies this state of being is often confused with ‘Love’. When your ego searches for the end result of the feeling, you miss real love, which is Spirit. You cannot have the experience of real love when you are in ego. The feeling of ‘love’ you have when you are in romantic love is a false sense of power caused by the merging of two egos. Real love is feeling contented within, not loving or hating yourself, rather, it is being in a state of empowerment as the observer of your feelings.

You are not in need of romantic love, because that is a short-lived phase of courting, which is always followed by a reality check when the pendulum swings to your shadow side, exposing your weaknesses and fears.

Romantic love is best described as vampire love because it is never satisfied, it always craves more. It is needy and controlling and requires lots of work, gifts and effort. Romantic love is the perception that you can own another person. "I will love you