By Tracy Webster
For the longest time, I wanted to follow the words “I AM” with a defining description: I am a mom, I am a wife, I am female, I am Tracy. The two little words never seemed to stand alone or make a complete sentence. I understood the concept that I AM is all that is required, but it was lost in translation somewhere along the path to embodiment.
It was with groundbreaking awareness recently when I recognized I no longer needed to tag anything onto I AM to complete the sentence or to complete me. This shift brought with it an amazing sense of peace, connection, and wholeness. I uncovered the exact powerful lesson that facilitated this growth. It freed me like no other lesson I have learnt before. I say this ‘tongue in cheek’ because each lesson has seemed like none before it, they all seem to gain in intensity and feelings of euphoria that increase exponentially, but to date, this lesson has taken me to a place none have before. Learning this lesson has resulted in me feeling like I have arrived in Heaven. I imagine Heaven must feel like a never-ending feeling of peace, joy, and gratitude. That is what I have found – an amazing feeling of peace and love that extends to everything and everyone.
I must, therefore, share the story with you of how I came to this understanding. If I can perhaps illuminate it for you, maybe I can highlight what you’re searching for, because how can you find something if you don’t know that it exists or what it looks like?
I am writing this as inconspicuously and in general terms as possible. My intention is not to highlight whom this story includes but the lesson it helped me learn. I am compelled to say thank you for the enormous gratitude I feel for having learned this lesson. If I can share this experience of gratitude, I can make my gratitude grow along with yours. That’s how this reality works, this energetic realm: share to get more! So, I want to share what I now fully understand so that you can too know that it exists and have the chance of uncovering it for yourself.
I wrote in my book, We’re Learning to Fly about “this”. This much love, this much appreciation, this much joy, this much anticipation for the future, this much peace, and it never ceases to amaze me how much better “this” always feels with each lesson learned. I was navigating a momentous family occasion. One that can be experienced through much stress and pressure or in an opposite manner, through joy and excitement. My initial reaction to hearing the news was one of caution and concern, but quickly realized this approach did not serve me and I adjusted my sails for a different approach.
Other family members were unable to do the same and continued to experience stress and concern. Their approach was to try change the situation to a viewpoint that fit their perspective. They believed they knew what was RIGHT and moved heaven and earth to make the situation fit their RIGHT perspective. It became quite charged and difficult for me to navigate. In my attempt to keep with a loving approach I had to find a better way to look at their opposing perspective without having it bring me to the same state of stress. After all, our lives are a reflection of what we choose to see, and I needed to see this in a different light.
I could see their perspective wasn’t serving them as they were caught up in much worry and fear for the future. Any Law of Attraction facilitator will know that what you focus on, grows. Your emotions are a guide to your focus and when you feel stressed, worried and out of sorts your focus is not serving you in creating an outcome you want. An incorrect focus only creates what you are trying to avoid – that which you don’t want! To feel better, and thereby manifest what you want, you need to find a different perspective. Change your mind and your world changes – not so? That’s manifestation 101!
Anything I tried to do to help the situation seemed only to pour gasoline on an already raging fire, so I declared to find another way. I was determined to keep a loving and joyful perspective. This is what I discovered and as a result how I learned this lesson:
- We are all one
- We are all one with the Universe / God.
Steve (my better half – the one responsible for often translating my crazy into words) explained that this process of growth feels like your mind is being turned inside out – as in ‘mind blown’, but then you reach a point where you need to turn it inside out one final time again to complete the process. All lessons leading up to this one felt like they had turned my mind inside out, but this time, I felt my mind was put back together and made whole, leaving me with complete clarity and peace.
I had been exposed to this fact of Oneness many times before, but like I AM couldn’t fully grasp it and therefore embody it. As ONE entity, which I know is quite difficult to comprehend and make sense of, there is no separation or differences. You must have heard before that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, and what we have come here to experience is separation. As our spiritual selves, we cannot comprehend separation as it doesn’t exist in Oneness.
How do we experience separation then?
With everything you place after the words I AM!
Gender, name, title, vocation, identity, occupation, language, race, age, schooling, neighborhood, class, and any other classification you can think of, separates us into you and me and from our Oneness.
I began analyzing what Oneness is then, and as with every lesson I’ve learned to date, when you ask the question, the Universe responds as if by magic and relevant information seems to pop up as if out of nowhere! I practice A Course In Miracles (ACIM) – a course that includes a workbook containing 365 lessons. Designed to be completed, one a day, over a year. It is fascinating when one notices the synchronicities that are at play in our lives, and it was totally uncanny how the ACIM lessons seemed to link up with the life lesson I was learning.
In a state of Oneness, we have everything we could ever need or want within us. After all, if you are One with everything and everything is One with you, how could you need anything? It is a state of Wholeness. When you experience this, you begin to see everyone as you and you as everyone. You understand that your enemy is you and you are your enemy. You are your friend and your friend is you. When you see yourself in everyone, and God or the Universe in everything, you realize that the person you are judging to be rude, or wrong, or inconsiderate, or disgusting, is yourself. You are judging yourself to be rude, or wrong, or inconsiderate, or disgusting. What we see in others we see first in ourselves, which is why we recognize it, but then we project it onto another and live as if we are different to the person we are judging, always trying to place ourselves in a feeling of rightness.
The ego is driven to be right!
I began to realize the person I was trying to help, was me, and so I began to look at her (the other family member) as if she was me. I began to see how I had performed in the past, in exactly the same way she was reacting now. I could fully understand why she was reacting as she was and feel compassion for the angst and frustration I knew she must be feeling. She was doing what she thought was right. She was coming from a loving place, only her perspective was warped. Once I started to see myself in her or her in me, I began to see things about her that I enjoyed and related to. Her sense of humor, her loving attitude and her wit, and before my eyes the situation completely transformed for me.
Gone was any worry over the outcome of the situation. Gone was any concern for all involved. Gone was the need for me to protect my immediate family from such attack. Gone was my need to stand up for my character. I had a complete sense of peace that everything is good and everything will work out as it is meant to, and I no longer saw this person in any other way than with love.
From this perspective, I found the most amazing sense of gratitude when I realized that this feeling of peace and appreciation, permeated every minute of my day and continued for the days following. This proved that what I was experiencing was no longer an experience but a new state of being! I was suddenly seeing everything with love.
As with everything I wrote in my book We’re Learning to Fly, I felt or experienced it first and then had to find the words to describe what had taken effect. I was determined to explain this new state of being so I could make sure, if I lost it, I could recapture it, and to ensure I could teach it so that I could learn it more for myself. I am certain this is what we are here to achieve. To overcome our sense of separation and understand that it is simply an experience and we are still who we really are – spiritual beings having a human experience. This never changes – we never change who we are, no matter what it appears when we see with our human eyes. To see ourselves for who we really are, we need to develop Cosmic Vision. We need to see with our Soul which is One with all and the Universe or God or whatever you call that Higher Force you know exists.
As human beings, when we are faced with a dilemma, (and by dilemma, I mean an experience you don’t quite yet have a full understanding of its meaning, so you make assumptions about, to gain clarity,) we immediately hop, skip, jump and leap to the worst-case scenario. I know why we do this, it is due to our ego and our critical filter, and our natural state of being is a pessimistic one. We look for what is wrong and what can cause us pain so we can avoid it. Inherently we jump to the worst assumption and continue from there to find anything worse than the danger we have already identified. This creates a downward spiral of negative emotions trapping us in the lower vibrational, survival mode, stress inducing, energies. These energies are oppressive and have a downward effect in direct contrast to the higher vibrational energies that lift one up.
The one single difference between myself today, and me before, is that I have finally learned how to hop, skip, jump and leap to the best-case scenario and start from there to find a perspective that feels even better.
I can only do this because I have experienced how beautiful this state of grace feels. I now know that we live our lives mostly in a muted state. What we think is happiness, is only a comfort because it is known to us and not really happiness at all. Because true happiness doesn’t have an opposite. When we think we are happy, but also worried about paying the bills, the worry lowers the frequency of our happiness, leaving us only with a feeling of comfort, comfortable because we believe we know what lies ahead. This isn’t true happiness. It’s not even close. 
In my book, I discuss the one rule to playing this game called Life; which is to find the good in everything. I now know that if you are the good, there is nothing to find.
I AM
About the Author Tracy Webster
Tracy was born in Zimbabwe and moved to South Africa when she was 6 years old. She has had a varied career path, and loves reinventing herself. She has worked in car rental, vehicle finance, import/export, holistic health and nutrition, bio-energetic therapy, been a restaurant owner and an author. Most exciting to her is her current vocation in Ontology – the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being. Tracy has a strong calling to help others improve their lives and find lasting happiness. She has been together with Steve for more than 30 years, and has two adult daughters. She is most proud of her Harley Davidson riding skills and loves being a biker chick. For more information about Tracy and her work please visit https://steveandtracywebster.com