How to Reclaim Freedom & Authentic Power

You are a spiritual being. Your true nature is a spiritual being embodied for a temporary adventure, as a human being, here at ‘Earth School’. School is the key word here. We don't come here to be perfect. We are perfect and whole, the Spiritual Being we really are, is perfect and full. 

Note- this was extracted from Daniela’s live introduction to Sacred Sunday a few weeks ago. This free weekly online event has been running for 7 years now. Read more about Sacred Sunday here.

And we're here on an adventure, a journey, to heal, to evolve, to grow. So that we can live as the embodied awareness of our true nature. What we really are part of our journey here is coming home to what we really are, to no longer identifying with ourselves as the small self, the little us that's playing the character, that's, that's going about our journey. That's not what we are. 

What we really are is this perfect, whole Divine being packed into this little vehicle, cruising along in our life, experiencing the entire range and spectrum of our lives. Everything from the joys, to the terrors, and all of the in-between. 

Over the course of our life adventure, we develop some strategies. We develop strategies that are designed to protect us from the five core soul wounds which all of us receive, and all of us bestow: Abandonment, rejection, betrayal, injustice, humiliation. We all experienced these, and there is one you probably could hear or feel in your body like, ‘Oh, that's my Boomer’. And that one seems to be the one that keeps showing up. 

Well, we receive, and we offer them, and the times that we offer them, over the course of the journey of reconciling and remembering what we really are, will start to see more and more how there's an innocence to that, how each one of us is actually doing the very best that we can. 

Maya Angelou said it so beautifully. ‘When we know better, we do better’.

However, sometimes we know better and don't do better. Because we are so used to our survival strategies. 

Read on below the video or watch on our YouTube channel (15 minutes)

My name is Daniela. I'm one of the cofounders of Yoga Farm Ithaca, and a founder and educator with Inspired Living. I've had the great joy and the great honor of leading Sacred Sunday healing guided meditations now for about seven years. They began in a cold room, over a garage in the middle of winter. Growing out of a personal practice of mine - a forgiveness process, I was shown in a series of dreams, exactly how this wanted to be shared with others. And so Sacred Sunday was born. 

And it began at I think it was 8am on Sunday mornings. And people came out and we moved through the sequence of four meditations. And it was really potent. There's a common thread that weaves through each of us. And that's a yearning. 

It's an aspiration. It's longing to feel free of unnecessary suffering. Every single one of us, I think, could say, ‘Yes, I would really, personally love to feel and be, and live freer and freer, from unnecessary suffering’. 

Well, what happens when the space widens in our lives, between moments of suffering? Well, we get to experience ourselves as the embodied expression of enjoyment. We get to feel fulfillment, connection within ourselves, in our relations and in relationship to the world around us as we perceive it. We cultivate the courage to develop further and express ourselves as this embodied bundle of unique talents and gifts, and to have the courage and the joy to share them out in the world. 

What's interesting about the experience of enjoyment is that the more we enjoy, the more we yearn to share. It just goes hand in hand. So when you say ‘yes’ to your uniqueness, and you allow yourself to cultivate that which keeps calling to you, even if others say things like, ‘now, how practical is that’? How are you going to make a living from that? 

It takes a stamina to stay the course. It really does. It seems so simple. And yet, there's, there's so much ‘shoulding’ in the world, so many people in our lives will share their opinions of what it is you are choosing what path you are choosing, and the mind takes this in and it chews on it. 

And the mind does only two things, it thinks and doubts. 

So sometimes we can talk ourselves right out of following what we enjoy, and choosing the path that we believe is comfortable, safe and secure. Now, sometimes we cultivate really amazing and unique talents and gifts, that doesn't automatically mean ‘Hey, quit your day job tomorrow’. Sometimes what we value is the stability. 

The knowing I will receive these earnings and this affords me to make sure I have food and and insurance and all the things for my children. So I can choose this 100% because it affords me the space to cultivate my unique talents and gifts to allow that transition to naturally happen. 

Sometimes we're in a position where we can shift tracks overnight. So, this is a personal knowing for each of us. My point in saying this is that we are here to express ourselves as the unique joy that each one of us is. 

And along the way, there will be barriers to that, there will be circumstances in life, things will happen to us, we will be the the vehicle through which happenings occur. You are or the hero or the heroine of your journey in the movie of your life. 

When we can meet our minds when we can meet our life story with tremendous tenderness, compassion, presence, understanding and awareness. Now we can start to be more open to welcoming love, welcoming grace, welcoming that which we don't have any control over to enter us where it already abides. 

And to start to help clear these away. Each one of us is a series of different layers that overlap and intertwine. We're not just a body, we're not just a mind, not just a heart. There's much more to the individual. 

Healing, which is one of the four intentions of Sacred Sunday, is the process. 

Now Healing is for everyone. It's not just for people that have had like really hard things happen. Everybody has had hard things happen. Healing is the process that we engage in, so that we can return to the embodied experience of our wholeness. 

Several of these meditations are designed for our healing, for reconciliation, for forgiveness, and for the ability to integrate this into our into ourselves so that we can then move forward in our day in each scene of our life, anchored in the awareness of what we are, and able to pause ourselves when we start to feel those prickly sensations of agitation because those tell us pause. 

We're about to get reactive. And now we can start to skillfully work with them. 

The process of forgiveness is one of the most important practices, Carolyn Myss says it so beautifully, since  we have misunderstood forgiveness. We have attempted to think our way to to use the mental body, which is one of the layers. You could probably find something where you think, ‘I'm just going to let that go does that so and so did x, I'm just gonna let that go, I just need to let it go’. 

And we really earnestly wish to. However it comes back, that charge comes back. We cannot think our way to what I invite you instead is to hold steady and high. The thought, the yearning, the longing, I do aspire to be free to move to move and be moved internally, right, that's one of the definitions of free is to move and be moved. 

Such that I have a different experience of scenes in my life. So forgiveness is in essence, a mystical act that requires the presence of love or Grace source, consciousness of force to enter us where it already lives. 

And it moves us internally, there's a it moves us such that we experienced a paradigm shift, we're being moved from perceiving and describing something through these eyes. And now we have a new vantage point, we now can see also through the eyes of the heart, and a congruence can happen. 

This is all direct experience. We're just sitting back doing the Sacred Sunday practice. And so this is why we come back to this practice, or many of you do again and again each week, because it's different every time. 

The Sacred Sunday journeys are designed for you to have the optimal journey that is absolutely best and most perfect for you today for your own healing, your own growth, your own evolution, what I love about these practices is that you can't do them incorrectly. 

If you if you like, buckle down and try to do them harder or more seriously, they won't work, it doesn't do anything. And so in fact, I just really invite you to just allow and just, you know, relax and just let it move you. We come together to do this because it's more fun. 

And I really mean that it is more fun to do this together. Now our personal practice during the day I know and acknowledge is very precious, really Sacred, a beautiful time to connect within oneself. 

Yet coming together for these practices reminds us that we are all here as spiritual beings having a human experience. 

Each one of us is the same in that we all have wounds we all have delivered them accidentally or not even knowing it, or it happened and we don't know what to do about it. Right? 

There's there is such a sameness among us in this regard. And the more we remember our sameness in this way, the more empathy and compassion is cultivated, for some of the stuff we see happening out in the world. 

All nonsense that we see in the world stems from the very same wounds. Right, we just have great misunderstandings. And when we continue to live as our survival strategies, people can be taken advantage of, there can be injustice in the world. So it's our responsibility to first and foremost come home to ourselves, bring ourselves back into the embodied experience of you knowing what you are, beyond your personality, beyond your identity, beyond your memories and stories. 

Let us first this is what it means to ‘take the oxygen first before helping others’. You come home to your real identity. 

Because then you can walk out in the world, in the curriculum of your life with the people that you live with the people in your neighborhood, the circumstances unfolding in the world as the living embodiment of wisdom, love and power. 

Not coming from anger. 

Not coming from outrage.

Coming from a place of Lightness of Being - knowing what you are.

Grounded in your power.