CRI hosted a training in Everett recently, focusing on the power of self-love and acceptance. As a branch of our Course Two material- CAREER, an acronym for Celebration, Affirmation, Regulation, Expectation, Education, and Education- we focused the day on Affirmation. Teri brought in arts and crafts, scrapbook paper, and our friends came to participate in making bookmarks.
The day started with the song, "How Could Anyone".
How could anyone ever tell you
You were anything less than beautiful
How could anyone ever tell you
You were less than whole
How could anyone fail to notice
That your loving is a miracle
How deeply you're connected to my Soul
To follow, Teri read a powerful quote by Marianne Williamson:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear in that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the World.
There is nothing enlightening about shrinking
so that other people won’t feel unsure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.
As we let our own Light shine,
we consciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.
The activity was to create a personal bookmark to refer to daily, to take a quiet moment of mindfulness or meditation, and affirm the love we want to give ourselves. Teri remarks, "What I see when I use this is how starved we seem to be to personally acknowledge our greatness as human beings, and to even take the time to think about ourselves, our value, and our worth."
Our hope is that with each bookmark, we can remind ourselves of who we want to be in the world, the love we want to give ourselves, and our inherent worth. It may be as simple as authentically being- decorating your bookmark in your style, in a way that makes you happy. Or some folks wrote the above Marianne Williamson quote on their bookmarks. Ultimately, we are surrounded with messages of our lack of work, and we find it important to counter some of those with messages we want to believe.
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