Early this morning, I was feeling mopey as I looked out the windows at my dear gardens, so wet and full of slugs that a duck might find happiness almost anywhere in them. I was trying to accept that a May spent looking out the window at one deluge falling after another really could be the divine plan.

As I sat there, the phone rang. It was a beloved friend calling to tell me of a difficult encounter in which the man that she loves spoke to her from his personality and disavowed the love between them completely.

As I came into the office to start my day, I found an e-mail from a courageous soul who had been through the worst experience of rape I could possibly imagine. This and my phone call certainly put my concerns about my soggy garden in perspective.

This e-mail also made me think again of what I had said on the phone to my friend with the broken open heart. As we talked, I had tried to separate out my personality’s reaction from anything the divine within me wanted to share.

My friend shares a work space with the man in question. She was due back to work this morning with the conversation of last night a fresh wound. It was difficult for her to consider going back into their shared space. The perspective I was asked to offer her was that responding with retreat was to honor the personality of this man as real, while only divinity is real.

In returning to the space, anchored in her own connection to God and carrying on as best she can in the truth of her own experience of life, she does the most life affirming and powerful thing possible, she inhabits the life God has given her and the truth as she knows it without apology.

His personality had demanded that if she did show up, she needed to put a smile on. In such a remark, I saw his wounds from someone demanding that of him. What the divine encouraged of her, if she decided to return, was to KEEP IT REAL and be who she was. The divine said, “In the courage to be real comes healing”.

It takes so much strength not to respond to someone’s personality with our own personality reaction. I was grateful to be reminded by the divine why it was such a service to our souls to take this scary path of choosing to live our truths in the face of a personality rant.

As I considered the precious soul who went through the trauma of the devastating rape experience, I felt the power and courage in her choices to get up each day, take care of herself in every way she can, acknowledge her sorrows as real, and keep on going until she finds the bead on a new life which integrates all the feelings and experiences she contains.

To give up and see herself as worthless is to responded to the rapist’s personality as if it is a true reflection of her value. Instead, she has chosen a path of love.

But it is so much easier to write this than to do as this soul has done. She has responded to this trauma with acts of self love each and every day since the rape. I bow to this soul and the other soul who returned to work today, both of them choosing to anchor in the divine truth of their infinite value in the face of confused souls yelling a different message.

This person who had been raped did not indicate to me that others in her life wanted her to clean up her feelings and get on with it. But it’s been my experience that personalities often want us to clean up our feelings before it is possible to do that. That is really what the man said when he asked for a smiley face this morning; Sweep your pain under the rug because my personality doesn’t want to know about it.

What this kind of personality motivated clean up leaves us with is an unintegrated life in which our bodies are crying out from the unacknowledged pain they are holding, our minds can go into crazy heart numbing talks like the talking to my friend experienced last night from the man in her life. And our hearts? They can lie unrecognized within us even as they hold the most profound comfort, truth, and healing.

Bravo for these two souls who went to their hearts, stayed in their bodies, chose to be real, and trusted in their own light and its infinite value. What a shining example to us all.