S2 EP279 – You Are the Light

Hi everyone Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Today I want to share with you a profound understanding that I received from Dr. Erika Chopich, the co-creator of Inner Bonding.

Erika’s latest book is Real Angels Don’t Have Wings. Our friend Debra Poneman read parts of it on her YouTube show, Success Saturday. It’s so interesting that you can write something and read something and not have it go all the way in. But hearing Debra read it, sent it deeply within.

Debra read many parts of the book, but here is the part that was most important to me and also to Erika. This is from her teacher, Erika is able to hear her higher guidance very clearly, and the book is mostly written, not all of it by her higher guidance by the things that she said. The book is about readings that she did with other people, helping them to connect with their higher guidance, which she doesn’t do at this point, but she did for quite a while.

And so this is one of the things that her higher guidance said to her, “What wounds you bring from childhood can be healed. Healing does not mean praying for the light or asking the light to come to you and thereby heal your wounds. Healing takes place only by remembering that you are the light. The concept of needing the light to come to you indicates that you believe that you are sitting in the darkness. The truth that heals is in knowing you are the light.”

What does it mean that you are the light? Well, actually, this is the heart of what Inner Bonding is about. What I found over the many, many years of working with people, 56 years now, is that healing occurs when we know who we are in our soul. When we know that we are a spark of the light, that we are an individual expression of the light, the love that is God.

And when you practice Inner Bonding and you learn to access your higher guidance, that’s when you are able to access the information about who you are as a soul, because you are not your wounded self. I’ve said this so often, you are not your wounded self.

Your wounded self is what you absorbed growing up. As the wounded self, we absorbed so many false beliefs about who we are and who others are and what spirit is and what we can or can’t control. The basis of most people’s wounded self is the belief I’m not good enough or I’m not adequate, or I’m not important, something like that.

That’s what children absorb when they’re not given the love that they need, when they’re not seen and valued and connected to in a loving way. They make the assumption that the reason they’re not getting the love that everybody needs, but especially little children, the reason they’re not getting that is because there’s something wrong with them.

So very early in life, if your parents didn’t give you the love and the attention and seeing you and mirroring you, mirroring your essence, not what they say is wrong with you, but what’s beautiful about you, then you likely have no idea who you are in your true soul essence. And you might think that you are your wounded self.

And the wounded self might be saying, “You’re not enough, you’re not good enough, you’re inadequate.” But the wounded self doesn’t know anything about the soul, which we call the inner child, the part of us that communicates through feelings and through intuition, through words. The wounded self actually doesn’t know anything about this part, it thinks it’s who you are.

And so when it’s saying you’re not good enough, it’s actually talking about itself and it’s not good enough. It’s a fabrication. Spirit created our soul as a beautiful individual spark of the divine. Again, you are the light – that is who you are.

But the wounded self doesn’t know this because when we were not seen, when we were not mirrored growing up, when we were not connected to with love, our soul kind of went underground for safety to preserve who we really are. The soul did not get hurt as we were growing up, it just went underground.

We developed the wounded self and that part of us thinks that’s who we are. And the wounded self is many ages – it can be from pre-birth all the way through early adulthood, depending upon when you absorb a false belief or when you turn to some addiction, like if you started smoking at 15, then it’s likely when you smoke it’s a 15-year-old adolescent.

Or when you started to look at pornography maybe when you were 12, then when you’re doing that, it’s a 12-year-old wounded self that’s operating out of that addiction. And so when we were not loved and mirrored, we developed many ways of avoiding the pain of that with our various addictions. And so if you want to heal those addictions, that means that you need to do the work of learning to define your own soul, learning to define your own essence.

Now, the essence has some common qualities. It is love, it is peace, it is joy, but it also has individual qualities, your individual gifts, your particular way that you love, your particular laughter, your way that you express joy and other gifts regarding what you offer the planet. The essence is capable of empathy and compassion.

But if the wounded self has taken over so much, then you’re not going to be feeling your empathy and compassion either toward yourself or toward others. And that’s often called narcissism, the inability to feel empathy for others.

That’s one of the hallmarks of narcissism. And of course, I’ve also talked about sociopathy, where people are actually born without the ability to have empathy, without the ability to love, without a conscience. And according to the research, about 4% of the population are sociopaths, They can do anything and not feel bad about it.

They can kill people, hurt people do all kinds of awful things to other people without any remorse. Whereas a narcissist does have a conscience and will have remorse if they hurt people, but they just don’t have empathy because very early in life they put away that essence, that part of them that can have true empathy and are operating out of their wounded selves.

And there’s two kinds of empathy which can be confusing, there’s intellectual empathy and many, many narcissists are capable of intellectual empathy. They’ll say, “Oh, I’m so sorry that happened to you.” But true empathy is emotional empathy where you feel the other person’s feelings. And when you feel the other person’s feelings, then it’s very hard to do hurtful things to other people.

And so the soul essence does have that empathy, and that’s one of the reasons it’s so important to be doing the work of unearthing your soul, of getting to know who you are in your soul, that you are the light, that you are a spark of the divine, that you are a part of the whole.

And as I’ve said so often, knowing this is vital in our society, if you see your own essence, your own true soul, if you are able to mirror that throughout a day, if you reach a place where you no longer need others’ approval or others’ validation to know that you are a beautiful expression of the divine, when you know that, then you know that others are also the light.

I know from my own experience that I grew up feeling like I was bad. It was really something wrong with me because my parents never reflected who I am in my soul, it was only what was wrong with me, and they really did not spend much loving time, one-on-one, loving time with me, which children need to feel like they’re important to their parents. So I didn’t feel important to my parents.

And so when we grow up with that, we need others’ validation, we need others’ approval, and as I’ve said many times, I spent so many years trying to get others’ approval. The thing that I love now as a result of my Inner Bonding practice is that I never even think about what people think of me now, it doesn’t even occur to me because at some point in my Inner Bonding process, as I learn to connect to my higher guidance, as I learned to define my own beautiful soul and see the beautiful soul of others, I took back the authority of anybody else to define me.

I realized that the only authority there is, is my higher guidance. And so I gave authority to guidance, only to my higher guidance, not to other people. And so once you take authority away from others, then you no longer are trying to have control over getting their love or their approval or their validation.

You get to be who you are, you get to evolve into being more and more loving and to expressing the individual gifts that you were given. 

I grew up in a family that I’ve said before they were atheists, and so I was this little spiritual kid, but it went underground.

And I wasn’t able to retrieve that aspect of myself until I met Erika because she, as I said at the beginning, was able to see the guidance and she helped me learn to see my guidance, which is now how I do my work, I just listen to my guidance, I listen to other people’s guidance, It comes through me as I work, and I’m hearing it all day long and I’m so grateful because actually I think everybody is capable of this.

With enough practice, with enough Inner Bonding work to unearth your essence, to open to learning about love, to learn, to connect with your higher guidance, then you’ll find yourself naturally hearing your guidance throughout the day.

As I’ve often said, I ask throughout the day, “What’s loving to me now? What’s in my highest good now?” And I get the guidance over and over again. My guidance is supporting me in being in my highest good, and I’m just so incredibly grateful that I learned to do this. I’m so incredibly grateful that Inner Bonding brought this to me and Erika, and that I know I’m not alone, I’m never alone.

I always have that guidance with me helping me to be all that I can be and to know that I can always reach for what’s in my highest good. But the problem is that most people don’t know who they are in their soul, so they think they’re their wounded self, and then they think that other people are their wounded selves. If you don’t know you’re the light, then you don’t know they’re the light.

And that’s where all the racism and sexism that I’ve talked about comes in because if you think you’re your wounded self, then you think you’re not good enough and then you’re threatened by other people. The wounded self always thinks about right or wrong or good or bad, or one up or one down and needs to put other people one down because they’re not seeing the soul within the person.

If you were to do the work of seeing your own soul, of really knowing who you are, that you are the light with your individual gifts, if you were to do the work of knowing that, you would look at people totally differently, you would see the light in them regardless of what they look like, regardless of their belief system, regardless of their politics, regardless of anything external, regardless of who they are in their wounded self, you would be able to see their essence.

And this is what can change our planet when you know are the light, then everyone is the light. Animals are the light, plants are the light, our planet is the light that we are all individual expressions of the light and the love that is the divine.

Now, imagine what would happen on our planet if everyone knew that they are the light, if everyone knew that they and everyone else was part of the divine, imagine the oneness we would feel with people, with animals, with plants, with the planet, with everything. We would have a very deep sense of oneness. And from that experience, we could not do harm.

When you know you are the light, you cannot do harm. And I hope you can see that this is deeply, deeply life-changing, that when you do the work of healing the false beliefs of the wounded self about who you are and who others are and what you have to control and how you have to not be controlled, and who’s going to do this for you because the wounded self believes that there’s somebody out there like a guru, somebody out there who can tell you what to do, who can do it for you.

All the people who follow a cult leader are people who don’t know who they are. They think they’re their wounded self, and that this person is this enlightened being who can make them feel safe and give them what they need and what they want and deal with society in a way that the cult leader thinks it needs to be dealt with.

You would not be vulnerable to somebody who tells you who you are and what’s wrong with you and what you have to do to be like them and to serve them and to do what they want, you would not be vulnerable to a cult if you knew who you are.

And so cult leaders are successful because there are so many people who grew up not knowing that they are the light, not knowing their divine beings. Now, Inner Bonding is an amazing process for discovering your true soul self, for discovering that you are the light with all your individual ways of expressing your light and your love.

Because what Inner Bonding does is something very, very different than what so many other modalities do. Many modalities will help you avoid your feelings, I just read an article about what to do with anxiety, all the things to do to get rid of anxiety.

Well, in Inner Bonding, that’s not what we do. We move toward the feelings, we recognize that that feeling is your inner child, letting you know that your wounded self is in charge, creating anxiety, telling you something that makes you feel anxious.

And so in Inner Bonding, we move toward the feeling. We make a decision that we want to learn about what the feeling is telling us, not just get rid of it. You get rid of it, you’re not going to get the information that the feeling is trying to tell you.

And so when you move towards your feeling and you embrace the feeling with a desire to learn about it, and you open to your higher guidance to help you be what we call an Inner Bonding, the loving adult, which is who we are when we’re open to learning and connected with our higher guidance.

When you do that in steps one and two and three in Inner Bonding or one and two, when you open to learning and connect with your guidance and then go into step three, which is exploring, what are you telling yourself?

How are you treating yourself? What are you doing? What are you trying to control or avoid or protect against? By telling yourself something or treating yourself in some way that’s causing the anxiety or the depression or the guilt or the shame or the anger or the aloneness or the emptiness or the rage or the jealousy?

These feelings are coming from things that you’re doing from your wounded self, things you’re telling yourself, ways you’re treating yourself from your wounded self. Now, you can try and get rid of the feeling with various techniques or tools, and you can do that temporarily, but it doesn’t heal the false belief, the many false beliefs, the layers of false beliefs that are coming from the wounded self.

Whereas when you practice Inner Bonding and you actually do the steps and you go down into the exploration and you become aware of the false beliefs such as, I’m not good enough, major false belief, “Oh, if only I do everything right, I can control how people feel about me and how they feel about me defines my worth.” These are very deep false beliefs in most people.

Well, if you just get rid of the feelings, then it’s going to happen over and over. You’re just going to have to get rid of them over and over, turn to various addictions to get rid of them over and over, to avoid them over and over. Whereas if you do Inner Bonding, then you’re going to become aware of these false beliefs. And when you do, then in step four of Inner Bonding, you open to learning with your higher guidance and you’re asking, “What’s true?”

Is it true, for example, that I’m not good enough? Well, that’s impossible because your soul is a spark of the divine, which is perfect. And so it’s not possible for you not to be good enough. And so when the wounded self says, I’m not good enough, or you’re not good enough, then that’s a lie. And lies cause painful feelings such as anxiety or depression or guilt or shame.

And those feelings are letting you know that the wounded self is telling you a lie or treating you in some very unloving way. And so you’re asking your guidance, what is the truth? And your guidance will say, “Well, of course, you’re a spark of the divine, you are the light, you’re perfect. Your wounded self isn’t perfect; your wounded self is filled with false beliefs which need to be healed but you are your soul. You are your true soul essence, and you are perfect.”

And you might be asking guidance, “Well, if I do everything right and I’m perfect, then can I control how people feel about me?” And your guidance would say, “Well, first of all, nobody controls how you feel about them and so of course you can’t control how they feel about you, and whatever you think is perfect has nothing to do with what somebody else thinks and you’re already perfect in your soul essence, you have nothing to prove, and it’s not up to other people to validate you. It’s up to you to see who you are and to learn to treat yourself as a cherished being.”

And then we go to our guidance the second question we ask our guidance is, “What’s loving to me? What’s in my highest good? What does my inner child, my soul need from me in order to feel safe, in order to feel seen, in order to feel loved and valued?”

And then you listen, and your guidance might say, “Just get a doll or stuffed animal and hold that inner child. You didn’t get enough holding, you didn’t get comfort, you didn’t get seen as a child, and now it’s up to you to learn to be that loving mom and dad and give that to your little girl or your little boy.”

Or the guidance might say something else, might say, “Speak your truth to somebody, speak up for yourself in some way, feed yourself better, get some exercise.” There may be all kinds of things that your guidance tells you. And then the next step is, you do it! You take the loving action that you’re guided to take.

Now, you can do the first four steps, but if you don’t take loving action, nothing’s going to change. A loving adult takes the action that you’re guided to take. And then in step six, you go back in and see how you feel, and if you’ve taken a loving action, you will feel relief. That anxiety or depression or guilt or shame or anger will be gone because you have given yourself what you need.

You are becoming the loving mom and dad that your inner child has always needed. Now, those people that grow up with parents who are very loving to them, who see them, who mirror them, they don’t have nearly the work to do that I’ve had to do and that my clients have to do who weren’t seen, who were left to cry as infants as I was. That’s very, very scary for an infant, it’s life and death scary.

And many people were left to cry and many people’s needs were not attended to, many people were not seen and were not valued, and so what Inner Bonding does is develop that loving adult so that you can now do this for yourself, and the more you do it, the more you develop the new neural pathways in your higher brain for the loving adult.

So I hope all of you learn and practice Inner Bonding, which is why I invite you to join me for my bimonthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at innerbondinghub.com/membership. And why I invite you to learn to connect with your spiritual guidance with my 30 day video home study course, Unlocking Your Inner Wisdom, and you can learn so much about loving yourself and creating loving relationships from all of our books and courses, and from our website at innerbonding.com.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.

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