You Were Born Good

This morning, my reading from The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations brought me to a thought attributed to Musonius Rufus:

“The human being is born with an inclination toward virtue.”

You were born good.

As I read those words, my mind immediately returned to my very first Process Healing session, sometime around 2016. It was an experience that fundamentally changed my understanding of who I am.

There was a story in my family that my father had originally come into the family pursuing one of my mother’s sisters. She was academically brilliant and deeply interested in her studies. My mother, more inclined toward domestic life and the household, was the woman he eventually settled with.

I heard that story from early childhood, and somehow it troubled me throughout my life.

Then there was the religious teaching that I had been “born in sin and shaped in iniquity.”

As a young person trying to understand God, that statement deeply disturbed me. It suggested that from my very beginning, something about me was wrong. That I was inherently flawed, fundamentally unworthy, perhaps even evil.

Imagine beginning life carrying that understanding of yourself.

During that first Process Healing session, something extraordinary happened.

Through imagery that I cannot adequately describe in words, I experienced what seemed to be a return to my conception.

I became aware of my parents, of their coming together in lovemaking, and of the first formation of the human self that would become me.

And then came an understanding that transformed everything.

The I AM that I AM entered that human expression and gave it life. Because I AM life.

That life multiplied within my mother’s womb throughout gestation until the child born of their union entered this world.

And in that moment of understanding, I experienced love.

Such extraordinary, overwhelming love that even today I struggle to describe it.

I understood myself as the expression of love shared in that moment of creation.

Whatever stories had surrounded my beginnings, whatever meanings I had attached to them, I was not an accident of unworthiness.

I was born of love. I was life expressing itself.

And something within me was set free.

I was free to receive love.

Free to love myself without fearing that I was being conceited.

Free to recognize goodness within myself without believing that doing so was arrogance.

I had spent so much of my life believing I needed to become worthy of what had been mine from the beginning.

And suddenly, I understood.

I had never been separated from my true identity. I had simply been unaware of it.

Today, as I reflect on Musonius Rufus’s words, I also think about my children.

I have two children, and when I remember them as newborns, I remember their purity, their completeness, their perfection in my eyes.

Then I think about the environment into which they came, and the woman I was as I raised them.

I can look back now and weep at some of my mistakes, at the ways my own conditioning, misunderstandings, and fears influenced my parenting.

I did not always know who I was. How, then, could I have consistently reflected that truth to them?

But I can also look back with compassion for that woman.

She was doing what she understood, from the consciousness available to her.

And today, I am grateful that I have come to understand more.

That first Process Healing experience was, for me, a rebirth.

Not a rebirth of the physical body, but a rebirth in consciousness.

I was born again into the awareness of my true identity.

I AM an expression of the Divine, experiencing humanity here on Earth.

And this understanding has reshaped my life.

It has enabled me to experience gratitude, contentment, and even joy through circumstances that might once have overwhelmed me.

Not because every circumstance has been easy, but because I no longer have to derive my identity from the circumstances I experience.

I am profoundly grateful for the courage to seek, to question, to examine what I had been taught, and to discover a truth that set me free.

And what a remarkable discovery it has been.

I am an amazing, phenomenal expression of life, even in this human form.

I am here to experience, to create, to love, to enjoy, and to participate in the fullness of life.

But there is something else this understanding has given me.

Compassion.

When I recognize the Divine in myself, I begin to recognize that same essence in others.

Even in those who behave without love.

Even in those whom the world may consider unlovable.

I can recognize that they, too, may be living under the influence of beliefs, conditioning, and identities that obscure their awareness of who they truly are.

I know something of that experience because I have lived it.

And so, rather than responding with hatred, I can choose compassion.

Rather than condemning, I can seek to understand.

Rather than withholding love, I can remember that love is the very essence of the life we share.

This does not mean excusing harmful behaviour. It means refusing to surrender my own awareness of love in response to it.

Love is not merely something I receive. Love is what I am here to express.

We are expressions of the One, the Creator, the Source of all life.

And today, I am grateful for this reminder.

I was born good.

I was born worthy.

I was born loved.

And I did not have to become divine. I had to awaken to the Divine already expressing itself as me.

My hope in sharing these thoughts from my heart this morning is that something within you might stir.

Perhaps you, too, have carried a story about your beginnings.

Perhaps you have believed that something about you was fundamentally wrong, that you were unworthy of love, or that you had to spend your life becoming acceptable.

What if that was never the truth of who you are?

What if beneath the conditioning, the disappointments, the mistakes, and the stories, there remains the magnificent expression of life that you have always been?

May the week ahead bring you moments of revelation.

May you become increasingly aware of the love that is already present within you.

May you recognize your worth, honour your being, and allow yourself to experience the joy of being alive.

And may you begin to see in others the same Divine essence you are discovering within yourself.

You were born good.

May you remember.