Inner Bonding and Divine Connection
All of us would love to know for certain that we are on this planet for some purpose. That we are not here simply to suffer—to feel empty and alone, anxious, or depressed—but rather to joyfully go through life with inner peace and creatively manifest our passion and purpose.
What would you give to know that
- You are here for a reason,
- You are never alone,
- You are always being guided in your highest good,
- You can learn to access this guidance moment by moment, and
- Your connection will give you the ability to joyfully manifest your passion and purpose?
As a young woman, I would have given anything to know that these were even possibilities for me. I was stuck with false beliefs that I had absorbed growing up: beliefs about who we are, about what we can and can’t control, about what life here is really about, and about what the Divine is or is not. This kept me feeling limited and stuck, suffering from anxiety, depression, emptiness, and aloneness. I was disconnected from myself, from my feelings, and from the love and wisdom of spiritual guidance.
I was a sensitive, empathic, and compassionate child, and it took me many years to understand that neither of my parents was remotely capable of any sensitivity, empathy, or compassion. They were often in pain, and being sensitive to others’ feelings, I learned to absorb their pain and do everything I could to take it away. I became addicted to taking care of them, and because they would be angry if I was in pain, I learned to completely ignore my own feelings.
By the time I was in my late teens, I was miserable. I had a strong sense that there was something missing in my life, but I had no idea what it was. There had to be more to life than the constant anxiety, aloneness, and insecurity I felt. I went into psychoanalysis for four and a half years, four days a week. I learned everything about my past and why I felt miserable, but not what to do about it. My analyst dismissed me when I was twenty-three, saying, “You’re analyzed.” Believing that this meant I was healthy, and believing that getting married and having children would bring me the peace, security, and self-worth I wanted, I got married. When this didn’t bring me the relief I sought, I tried many different therapists and different kinds of therapies to heal my anxiety. None of them worked for me.
After my third child was born, I started to have brief experiences of something that lifted my anxiety, something that felt oddly familiar. That’s when I remembered that, as a young child, I had a deep knowing that I was not my body and that there was something more to life than what it presented on the surface.
That’s when I started on my spiritual search—a search to connect with a source of spiritual love, comfort, and wisdom. I had read enough about spirituality to know that this was likely a path I needed to learn more about. I acquired a guru and joined a meditation group. Again, I had momentary experiences of inner peace and joy from what I now knew was a spiritual connection, but I had no idea how to have this experience whenever I wanted it. It felt like it would just happen to me, like I didn’t have any say about it. And fleeting connection wasn’t enough for me. In fact, each time I felt it, I wasn’t really sure it had happened. Was I just making it up, because I wanted it so much?
I wanted to be able to choose this experience, and I wanted to know for sure that I’m never alone—that spiritual help is always here for me. But how to know it? How to feel it? How to access it? Momentary experiences of Spirit didn’t resolve my anxiety and feeling of being so alone, so I was deeply motivated to learn how to do this.
At-Will Connection
I spent many years trying to achieve at-will Divine connection. For me, at will means that I can have this connection anytime I want it, even all the time, if that’s what I want. I didn’t want to feel that Spirit was choosing me at random and that I just had to wait for this loving energy to come to me. I wanted to discover how to access this incredible wisdom, peace, joy, and unending source of energy at any moment.
I became a psychotherapist, but after practicing traditional psychotherapy for seventeen years, I wasn’t happy with the results. Through all the different forms of therapy I’d had, through my spiritual search and work with clients, I had come to know that no true healing occurs without a spiritual connection. But I still didn’t know how to have this at will or how to help my clients have this. It was at that time that I started to pray for a teacher to come into my life who understood spiritual connection, and that’s when I met Dr. Erika Chopich, who later became the co-creator of Inner Bonding with me—and my best friend. Erika had half of what would be the Inner Bonding process, and I had the other half, so of course we had to meet! Soon after we met, Spirit guided us to creating the Inner Bonding process, which has now been evolving for thirty-four years.
The Insights of Inner Bonding
For me and many of my clients, our unique gifts and deeper sense of purpose were buried under fears and false beliefs that we developed as we were growing up. We lost contact with the individual blueprint we each have regarding how to joyfully express our purpose on the planet. Perhaps you feel the same way. Because of my disconnection, I had to relearn that my purpose on the planet is to evolve in my ability to love and to creatively manifest the gifts I have been given. I did this by connecting with my inner and higher guidance. As I did, I also discovered that this is the purpose for all of us.
Through the Inner Bonding process, you can regain this deeper knowing and become able to creatively express your unique gifts. Finding inner peace, safety, and self-worth comes from an internal shift in beliefs and in how we treat ourselves—rather than from external validation. When we have no way to heal the beliefs that limit us and cut us off from our Divine guidance, the peace and joy of life elude us. It’s these false beliefs that then fuel our self-rejecting and self-abandoning behaviors, which are the underlying causes of our suffering. I know from personal experience what it’s like to live disconnected from myself and my spiritual guidance, as well as what it’s like to live with it. For me, this has been the difference between suffering and joy.
There is no one “right” form of Divine guidance. We have many names for our spiritual source of love and wisdom: God, Goddess, Spirit, higher power, the Lord, beloved, Jehovah, Yahweh, Holy Spirit, nature, the light, the source, universal intelligence, universal life force, the all, the creator, Jesus, Buddha, Allah, guardian angel, and inner or outer wise-self or higher-self. So use the words that work for you and connect through a form that resonates.
Excerpted with permission from The Inner Bonding Workbook, © 2019 by Margaret Paul.
Margaret Paul, PhD, is a best-selling author and cocreator of the powerful Inner Bonding® self-healing process. She has counseled individuals and couples since 1973.
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