New Territory
By Mari Perron, First Receiver of A Course of Love

Dear Reader: Welcome to the INAUGURAL EDITION of The Embrace, an occasional newsletter featuring many voices.

A Course of Love asks us to enter new territory. The territory of conscious awareness. This territory is not only the territory of the heart, but of feelings beyond the ordinary senses. Often these feelings are spoken of as awareness. When the “territory of our conscious awareness” is spoken of within A Course of Love, this is clear. But I like to speak of these sensations—these “thoughts we don’t think”-as feeling states. I call them that because they do not fit within our usual frame of reference, or what we commonly think of as feelings. We’ve limited feelings to emotions, and this does not have to be.

Our feelings are central to our humanity, a state we are no longer asked to ignore or to shed. Central means standing within our lives as we claim all that we are.

This “claiming” shows up in all kinds of different ways. The question I ask, but realize I will not get an answer to “in words,” is about living in the world as who I am, as well as who I am asked to be. Living in the both/and world of my humanity and divinity. Living my present life and the life I’m called to. Because I know that if I don’t show up as who I am, nothing I do will have the ring of truth.

I’ve been a little bit of everything in my life; played the roles of daughter and sister, mother, single mom, wife, grandmother student, bartender, caregiver, rebel, writer, neurotic, and devout Catholic. I could go on and on. I’ve wandered about, directionless, for a long time with no feeling of the type of “home” that comes of authentic living. Finding that home, for me, came from ideas, imagination, deep soul friendships, creativity, and being the first receiver of A Course of Love. By the time ACOL came to me, I knew the glory of the home I wanted to live in, a home in which I could live my truth and bring all of myself into the expression we call being alive.

What I came to know through life experiences and this Course, is that I have always had a sense of who I am, and a sense of what I am to do with who I am, and a sense of the divine power fueling me when I am present to it-actively engaged in its contemplation (my inner life), and its enactment (my outer life). Another way to say it is being wholehearted. Being wholehearted, according to Jesus, is unifying mind and heart so that I am no longer divided against myself. That is tricky enough, but it is only the beginning. Wholeheartedness is also about all those ways I have imagined it to be and striven to be at all the stages of my life: compassionate, kind, daring, creative, and loving. Yet it is through the union of mind and heart that the potential of our passion opens to the territory of our conscious awareness, and brings all the help you and I need as sensing and feeling “human” beings, to live the uniquely divine life we’re each given to live.