The Bridge of Consciousness

Love Is Awake + The Power to Choose Joy

by Story Waters Introduction to Articles
Love Is Awake a written, rather than spoken, message / channel and was the first thing that I wrote after completing my first book, The Messiah Seed. Though I experience profound floods of inspiration whilst deep in writing, it still had not occurred to me that I could experience those revelatory moments while speaking in front of an audience public speaking was a very real fear I had back at this time. The realization to spontaneously speak what I felt inside would not come until several months later when I spoke The Embodiment of Freedom in my first public channel in Santa Fe (July 2005). Love Is Awake is therefore the last piece of writing I produced when I believed that writing would be my primary form of communication. Along with its companion piece, The Power to Choose Joy (included here), these early texts show how central the realization of love and self-empowerment are as key messages throughout all my work, as love is the ultimate energy that can bridge any two states of consciousness. With love, Story

Resource LoveIsAwake.pdf
To gain the most from this article please read it from a place of feeling and stillness, allowing for multiple meanings to arise from each sentence. This article is made available through Pay What Your Heart Chooses. Please make a contribution at Limitlessness.com in return from what you receive in reading this article. Join the Freedom Circle for the latest materials in return for a monthly contribution. Download more materials and join the newsletter at : limitlessness.com

Want more? Join the Freedom Circle for advanced monthly live video broadcasts with mp3 copy. Errors? If you find any typos in this document please email them to Support@StoryWaters.org listing this as doc version 3/10/12 www.limitlessness.com Story Waters Page 1

Limitlessness.com Love Is Awake

The Bridge of Consciousness

Love Is Awake
by Story Waters, Mar 2005

Introduction
You are awakening in this very moment. You chose to be here at this time in your history to experience what you are calling awakening. Know that you not only chose to be here at this time, but that you are the creator of this time, and you created Now to be the time of awakening. And now you are here, living in your creation, at the time of awakening, and even though you may not as yet have let the feeling into your heart, I tell you that this is the beginning of the time for which you have strived. You are here, in the Now, and you are awakening. It is the time for celebration. The celebration starts now and will live on eternally in the joys of being that have birthed from your journey. What has been achieved is real. It has touched All That Is. The very nature of being is expanded, all life is enhanced, and it is your collective energy that has made it so. Through you, the love that has always been, that from which all life births, has awoken in a new way. And so I call this energy, this expansion of being that has birthed from your heart, the Love That Is Awake. It is the very energy of what you call awakening and it is experienced as the opening of the heart to universal, unconditional, awakened love. And now, just as you have always had unlimited access to the love of God, you also all have unlimited access to the Love That Is Awake; for it is yours. It is of your creation. It is that which has birthed from the beingness of your world. The fruits of your labor are now available to you within the reality from which you birthed them. Awaken to the love that you have awakened. That is to say, be the Love That Is Awake, embody the Love That Is Awake. Awaken. Awaken to the love that you are. You are an expression of All That Is (the Tao / God / Life). You chose to come to a reality where, when you enter, you forget that you are All That Is. This forgetting is what allows the complete freedom of will that you wish to experience. By connecting to your spirit, the limitless part of you that continues to exist outside of physical reality, you are now coming to remember that you are God, experiencing itself in a unique chosen individuated way. This process of remembering (awakening to) what you are, not only re-connects you to All That You Are, but has also awoken All That Is to experience itself in a new and freeing way. This is to say that through your collective beingness on Earth you have enhanced the beingness of God and you, as a living selfaware expression of God, now have access to that expanded state of being. It is a state of being that allows you to experience and ground your infinite godhood, your limitlessness, within physical reality. It is to awaken the loving energy of the God that you are into your Now. You
Limitlessness.com Love Is Awake Page 2

have always been All That Is, and now you can experience that godhood in the wakefulness of your life. You are awakening the love that you are. It is time to experience, be, and express the Love That Is Awake, for that is what you are.

The Love that is Awake

At the heart of awakening is love, the Love That Is Awake. To experience this universal, unconditional, unrestrained, awakened love is to feel a living energy whose only volition is to empower you to be All That You Are. It is felt as a gentle uplifting motion towards complete freedom of being, moving with you to best support you in whatever you choose to do. It is the realization of your limitlessness made manifest in the unfolding of your journey to where you want to be. This feeling, this joy, is what you are. It is the energy beneath all of your layers of definition, your cloaks, your disguises. Underneath your fascinating stories, your linear time, and your physicality, is the freedom of what you are, your limitless being, your Godhood, the Love That Is Awake. To experience this love is to realize that there is nothing that you need to do except let go and enjoy the journey that awakened love carries you on. It unleashes the knowing that life is awake to All That You Are and will take you to where you want to be. Love That Is Awake will empower you to be whatever you want to be. It is the solution to any problem, the key to any cage, the fuel to any engine. It is that which utterly and sublimely affirms and accepts your being. It is to know that you are God. To know you are God is to know you are love. To know you are love is to be awake to love. It is to be awakened love, Love That Is Awake. To be awake is to live in the conscious realization that this Love That Is Awake is not separate from you in any way. It is not a destination to which you must travel. It is not a secret that you must discover. It is not a reward that you must earn. There is no must. The Love That Is Awake is you; it is life, the seed of your very beingness, the limitless energy field from which you create your reality in each and every moment. Being awake is a complete opening of the self to All That Is. You are love. You are awakening. You are awakening to what love is. The love that you are is awakening to itself within your beingness. You are awakening to the realization that All That You Are is love and now your love is awake. You are a unique, self-aware, self-determining expression of the Love That Is Awake. To touch this state of beingness is to experience the unity of all life. You are it and it is you. You are one. You are the Love That Is Awake. The love that you are is awake and is calling to you from within your heart. The calling that you feel is you calling you. What you are awakening to is your Self. To be awake is to consciously experience your connection to All That Is. You are connected to All That Is through the experience of the Love That Is Awake. To experience it is to be it. To be it is to be All That You Are. Realize that all things are one thing, and this one thing is infinitely expressing, infinitely exploring, and infinitely loving itself. In this is the realization of the sheer perfection of the orchestration of life.
Limitlessness.com Love Is Awake Page 3

In the experience of the universal love is the experience of the wakefulness of that love. This wakefulness is experienced in many ways usually including feelings of unity, complete selfvalidation, appreciation for the perfection of life, seeing through the illusion of separation, total acceptance of everything, the release of duality, and, of course, love. In this state people who still conceive of God as being external often experience themselves, their very beingness, as the love of their God. To experience your Self as the love of God is to experience the origin of what you are without cloaking it in the differentiation of matter and judgment. From this explosion of experience, that reveals the illusion of separation, comes many startling insights. Concepts such as right and wrong, linear time, and the separation of Self and other fall away. In the absence of division, in the absence of any of the ideas with which you limit your being, is the realization that everything that you are is exactly what you are choosing it to be. It is to realize the Self as being that which chooses the state of being that you experience as your reality. Love That Is Awake is love that knows that it chooses itself. You are the choice. The Love That Is Awake is the energy that manifests your choice into the experience of what you are. You are That Which Chooses. The wakefulness of the love that you are is a reflection of how consciously you are choosing your reality. You are the Love That Is Awake choosing. Choose to awaken your love into the conscious reality that you know as your Self. Be All That You Are. To love your Self is a choice, a choice that only you can make. Make the choice to awaken the love that you are. To awaken is to realize that all realities are a choice, and you are the creator of that choice. Choose to love your Self. Awaken your love by choosing with love.

Know your Self

You are not a part of God, not a sub-set. You are all that God is, and you, as God, are expressing yourself as you. You are choosing, from an infinite array of choices, what it is that you want to be in every moment, and currently you are choosing to experience an incarnate life and that includes every aspect of it. You are God choosing to be you. The Love That Is Awake is your connection point to your being in limitlessness, your soul if you prefer. The choice to experience, and therefore be, awakened love is the choice to experience All That You Are. To be the Love That Is Awake is to experience your Self directly without camouflage, without distortion. It is therefore the choice to truly know your Self. One definition for awakening can therefore be said to be coming to know your Self and for all beings this is to say, coming to know that you are love, you are awake, and you are God. You are the Love That Is Awake. To know that you are love, to know that you are God, is to come to know your Self; for what you are is love, is God. This is so important and so elusively simple that it bears re-stating. If you want to awaken, if you want to experience what it is to experience your beingness as being God,
Limitlessness.com Love Is Awake Page 4

then come to know your Self as you are in the Now. There is nothing no thing that you need to learn. There are no physical actions that you must take. There is no book you must read, no teacher you must meet. THERE IS NOTHING YOU NEED BECOME. You do not become God by realizing that you are God. You are God now whether you consciously realize it or not, so there is nothing to do to become God. You are God. What is being spoken of here is remembering that you are. To make the choice to remember that you are All That Is is to make the choice to see your Self clearly, that is to say without the learning which told you that you are limited, which told you that you are less than. To come to awaken, to come to know that you are God, is to come to know your Self. Your Self is who you are in the Now, and that includes everything that you are, including what you believe are your imperfections. Most feel that awakening involves becoming something. This is a statement of not being awake. To believe that awakening involves becoming something that you currently are not is to be in denial that you are God. You do not become God by having abundance, by having a degree, by having a job you enjoy, by having children, or by being in a loving relationship. You cannot become God. How can you become something that you already are? Everything in your life is an expression of your Godhood. All that you perceive as not being Godly is a part of your power that you are rejecting. The reason you reject it points to the part of your Self that you are rejecting. So awakening is not becoming God, it is remembering that you are God. This is an important distinction as it removes all external criteria. All that is left is your own internal state of knowing what it is you are. There is nothing that needs to happen externally for you to awaken. If you are locked in a prison cell you need not be freed to know you are God. If you feel trapped in an abusive marriage you need not obtain a divorce to know you are the Love That Is Awake. If you are starving you do not need food to know that you are All That Is. So if nothing external needs to happen for you to awaken, then what is it that you need do? The answer is: know your Self, know what you are, know your beingness. But how do you do this? The answer is: however you choose. There are an infinite number of paths to knowing your Self, to living your passion. Some may find the realization of their godhood in being a parent or a teacher; others may awaken through meditation or prayer; some through sky-diving or surfing; some through a partnership, whether it be with another person, an animal, nature, or an ideology; others through a religion, a cult, or a drug. Any and every vessel of experience has the potential to unfold your wakefulness. Any and every experience does unfold your wakefulness. You are awakening, right now. For many however it is still not felt. You think, how can I be God when I still hate? Realize you are God experiencing what it is to hate. How can I be God when I still fear? Realize you are God experiencing what fear feels like. How can I be God when I am unhappy? Realize you are God experiencing your sadness. To realize something is to be open to it changing you. This is a form of vulnerability made possible through developing an inner trust in the unfolding of your beingness, an inner trust in your Self. You are the unfolding of your beingness.
Limitlessness.com Love Is Awake

Page 5

To awaken is to realize that, whatever it is you are experiencing, you are God choosing that experience and, what is more, a totally meaningful reason exists from which you are constantly making the choice to experience the reality that you are experiencing. No exceptions. Whatever suffering you are choosing in your life, you are choosing it with good reason, and upon awakening you will know and agree with that reason, for it is you that is choosing it. This gives us a clearer picture of what it is to know your Self and therefore what it is to awaken. To awaken is to know that it is you that is choosing your reality. To know that it is you that chooses your reality is to know why you are making the choices that you are making. To know why you are making those choices is to see that your reality is exactly the way it is so that it may best lead you to awaken to the fact that you are God. Now, in the moment of this realization, that you are choosing both all the joys and all the suffering in your life, you will discover the power of your choice, the power of a total freewill, the power of your godhood. To awaken, to remember who you are, is to step into your power. It is to become awake at the level from which you choose your reality. It is to awaken to the realization that what has fueled all your choices has been Gods love for you, your love for your Self, and that you are now awake to that love. In this moment you are experiencing the Love That Is Awake.

Re-Choosing
There is little doubt that in this moment of awakening you will re-choose many aspects of your life. To realize that suffering is a choice is to choose to let go of suffering and know that it will be so. To realize that joy is a choice is to choose to live in joy: this is manifest as seeing with clarity what it is that truly brings you joy which is often discovered to be a pleasure that you deemed not impressive enough. This re-choosing is your being consciously exercising its limitlessness and is as it should be. However, please understand that, though you will make changes to your life when you awaken, that this does not imply in any way that what you were previously choosing was anything less totally and utterly perfect. How could it not be so? It was from this state that you awoke, and to awaken is glorious. Many have a concept of an ideal Self; what it is that they would like to be. To awaken is to realize that what you are Now is, in this moment, your ideal Self. Whatever imperfections you have are perfect, and though, upon awakening, you may transform your reality into something closer to your dream of an ideal Self, this does not change the fact that you already were ideal. So the gap between who you perceive your Self to be in the Now and your perceived ideal Self is a measure of your lack of acceptance and love for your being. You will always have the power to change and transform your Self, but know that the greatest powers of transformation are wielded by those whom wholly, completely, and utterly love and accept their own being as it is. The route to becoming anything lies in first accepting what you are in the Now.
Limitlessness.com Love Is Awake Page 6

If you do not love your Self as a slave then you will not be able to love your Self as a King. If you do not love your Self when you are poor, then you will not love your Self when you are rich. To awaken you cannot escape having to love and accept your Self. You can convince your Self that any number of external factors are the cause of your lack of experiencing your Godhood, but those external factors are merely symbols of how you are internally experiencing your own beingness. So what is being said, is that though you may upon awakening change many aspects of your reality, you will also realize that your current reality, your Now, is perfect. This gives a great insight, a great tool, into the process of awakening. As what it says is that anything that you experience in your reality as being wrong, a mistake, imperfect, less than, or something that you would not choose for your Self, is a manifestation of a way in which you are in denial of your godhood. Anything that you do not accept about your reality is a part of your godhood your power that you are choosing to separate your Self from. Why would you choose not to experience all your power? The answer is fear. Fear is your denial of a part of the love that you are. Fear is your rejection of your own limitlessness, usually out of the refusal to believe that you are infinite, out of a lack of Self-worth. All fear is therefore a signpost to your awakening. It is a signal as to where you are rejecting a part of your power. Follow and face your fears to reclaim the power that you have given away. Awaken your wholeness. To awaken is to know your Self. To know your Self is to see your Self clearly. To see your Self clearly is to see your Self without fear. To see your Self without fear is to see yourself with love for love is All That Is (even when it is disguised as fear). To see your Self with love is to be love, for to love your Self is to love and be loved simultaneously. To consciously be love is to be love that is awake. It is to awaken your love. It is to be God. To be God is to know that you are the Love That Is Awake. It is a circle of affirmation that can only be broken by not accepting its message of love, and that means not accepting your Self. Know that you are a message of the love of the God that you are. You are a messenger. You are an angel. To be awake is therefore to know your Self and to truly know your Self is to love your Self. To love your Self is to accept your Self. It is to completely accept what you are, all that you have been, and all that you will be. To completely accept what you are is to completely accept that you have chosen, with love, every aspect of your reality. Your reality is an expression of your being, it is a part of your beingness, and you cannot reject it whilst being accepting of your Self. Your reality is a direct reflection of you and is, as such, a tool with which you can see how you truly feel about your Self. How you feel about your reality is how you feel about your Self. If you do not love your reality then you do not love your Self. The more you love your reality the more awake to your godhood you are; the more awake your love is. Be awake to make the choice to love your life. Awaken your love for life. The route to God is not through a rejection of your Self or your world. It is not in sacrifice or deprivation. It is not in shame, fear, or guilt. It is in the complete love and acceptance of All That
Limitlessness.com Love Is Awake

Page 7

Is and you are an expression of All That Is. To come to love your Self is to come to love everything. It is to directly experience your unity with all life.

Loving Everything
Coming to love your Self is, simply put, coming to love. With how you experience the world being a reflection of your own being, coming to love your Self is coming to love the world and all it contains. To know your Self as love is to know all as love. It is to realize that all are of unified origin. All are of the love of All That Is. All are of what you are. All others are equal expressions of the God that you are. To come fully to love is therefore to love everything that is manifest in your world. To realize what this means is to see with clarity what love is. Universal awakened love does not mean that you must choose as that which you love chooses. It does not even mean that you must associate with what you are loving. It is not about any form of romantic love, which often includes both conditions and attachments. Let us look at war as an example. To love everything is to love war. If you hate war then you are hating a part of your Self, for do not doubt that you have had many lives and have participated in war, in killing, in violation. The part of you that did this is still a part of you. It cannot, nor should not, be removed. It is a part of All That You Are. When you have participated in war you did it with great wisdom. You waged war to experience something that you wanted to experience. It was perfect that you killed who you killed when you killed them, and it was perfect when you experienced being killed. You are God experiencing the unique experience of being human, and a part of life is death. Through experiencing death you have affirmed your realization of the choice for life. This does not mean that in the Now you should wage war. You can choose not to war now but still honor the part of you that did wage war. You can choose peace for your Self in the Now and still honor those that still want to experience war just as you once did. Just as you had your perfect reason back then, so those that war now have their perfect reasons. Honor your choices by honoring theirs. It can be seen here that awakened love is not necessarily even about liking something; it is about honoring its right to exist and express itself as it chooses. Awakened love is about giving complete unconditional allowance. You personally may choose not to do something. But when you do not honor the rights of others to do it you step on your own right to exercise your will freely, and that is to say you limit your being. To attempt to limit the freedom of another is to limit your own Self, for to attempt to limit is to state a belief in limitation. You will then live inside of that belief which will manifest as your own freedom being restricted. This is the basis of what has been called Karma, which literally means action. There is no system of retribution for your actions. There is no God that says what you do to others will be done to you. What karma means is that your actions, your choices, create the reality you live in. You will live within what you have chosen. If you believe in using violence,
Limitlessness.com Love Is Awake Page 8

then you will live within a personal world that is reflective of violence. This is not as a punishment; it is simply you living within the reflection of your own beingness, the good news being that by choosing joy so will you come to live in a world that reflects that joy to you. Another way of phrasing this is that you are the creator, the architect, of your own being. Your actions, your choices, are the blueprints of that reality. As you implement choices so your reality changes. The implementation of choice is the tool of creation and it is a tool that makes you a unique expression of God. Your freewill is what defines you, or more accurately, your freewill is the tool with which you define your Self. Know that your will is yours alone to do with as you please. It is a God given right, and you are the God who gave it to you. You define your Self by choosing. You define your reality by choosing your Self. Your reality is a direct reflection of your choices. By changing your choices so you change your reality. To change your choices you must know that it is you that originally chose what it is that you wish to change. To know why you chose something is to appreciate the choice you made that brought it into being. To appreciate the choice is to understand it and that means to love and accept it; the conclusion being that to change an aspect of your reality you must first come to love and accept it. You cannot be freed from a pain that you do not allow your Self to feel within your being. You cannot change what you do not accept that you originated. This realization reflects back to the idea that to awaken is not to become something other than what you are but is to remember all that you already are. To awaken you must love your Self as you are Now. Many people simply keep on transmuting what they hate. One war (internally or externally) may end but it will keep on reappearing in different forms until it is integrated. To be integrated it must be accepted. This is in the same way that you cannot escape what you reject about your Self. For example, you may not like the anger you often feel at a friend. One seeming solution would be to end the friendship, but this would then cause the manifestation of that side of you to reappear in another form. Whatever is on the plate of your life is there to be dealt with, so, though it is valid to change its form if you choose, know that you will eventually deal with it in one form or another. You cannot escape your Self. You can become anything but you cannot escape that your external reality will always reflect your internal reality. To become anything externally you must become it internally. To discover the choice for joy choose to be joyful as you are in the Now, perceived warts and all.

No Hierarchy
You are God. All are God. To love your Self can therefore be seen as universally loving everyone. There is no hierarchy in Unity. To love everyone is to see that though they may be making choices that you are not (such as going to war), they are God Selves just as you are and their choices are as valid as your own. They are you in a different situation, in a different belief system, in a different personal reality, and within their own context their right of choice is as inviolate
Limitlessness.com Love Is Awake Page 9

and wise as your own. You cannot know better than they what is right for them. To love your Self is to honor their choice as you would like your own to be honored. They are God. You are God. Within this context of acknowledging the origin of all as being of the One, the concepts of hierarchy and spiritual competition are redundant. To want to fix or save others is either a way to avoid looking at your Self or, more typically, is working on your own issues in the externalized form of another. There is nothing wrong with this, but the buffer of the externalization means you are working in a less direct manner and this can bring out separation through a perspective of superiority / inferiority. To believe that you are superior to another is to deny your shared Godhood. If what you feel as awakening is making you perceive your Self to be more and more superior then I suggest that what you are in fact doing is creating a barrier between your Self and the part of your Self that you are rejecting as being inferior. Look at the labels you are using to segregate other Selves from your Self and you will discover how it is you that feels inferior. Superiority is always a mask for a feeling of inferiority, an excuse to be distanced. Awakening to your Self your Godhood, your power is to step into the Unity of life and this is to be intimately embraced by the experience of love. Remember that what makes your beingness unique is your choices. Though you are all one, though you are all God, you are unique in your beingness through the choices you have made. You will naturally look at others and have a preference to associate with people who make choices that resonate with your own. There is nothing wrong with preference. Having a desire for certain things over others is a part of all beingness in a physically expressed (differentiated) reality. Realize however that you can have a preference for one thing over another without labeling your choice as being superior, and the choices of others who choose differently as inferior. That is not preference, it is separatism. Competition, the questing for superiority, flows from a lack of Self-worth (inferiority) and a fear of intimacy. The desire to show others that you are better is the desire to show your Self that you are worthy because you do not feel worthy and, though winning the competition may provide temporary relief to the painful feeling of inadequacy, it will not end it. To try and gain feelings of Self-worth through competition can become an addiction, because as feelings of Self-worth become associated only with winning in competition the quality of life becomes dependent on the outcome of seemingly external uncontrollable events. Having external events govern how you feel about your Self is a common condition in your reality. To have your happiness be dependent on what is happening outside of you is to be at the mercy of power that you have externalized. In this state life often feels to be a rather scary rollercoaster ride as you have essentially externalized your controls. In this condition you have literally given away (temporarily) your ability to consciously choose your reality. To regain that control is to step into your power and that means facing the fear or vulnerability that caused you
Limitlessness.com Love Is Awake

Page 10

to externalize the power in the first place. At the heart of pain is always a vulnerability that you have not yet allowed your Self to fully process, as it was deemed at the time to be too much to handle. To allow the pain to then be expressed is for you to show it the Love That Is Awake. It is a re-integration of All That You Are. Do not fear letting go of this pain. It will empower you, not hurt you. As you take the power you externalized back into your Self, so you will let go of the fear it manifested and your being will be freer, for all cages are unresolved fear. Do not fear your power. You will use it wisely. To stand in your power is to re-integrate all the power that you have externalized. A person stood in their power has no need of competition to bolster themselves. Freed from the cage of competition they are then free to choose their reality according to their joy rather than out of the expression of insecurity (competition). Until you leave competition is it difficult to see just how many of your choices it determines and how few of those choices have any correlation to living your joy. To step out from competition is to step into co-creation. Many fear leaving competition as they believe that without its sense of motivation they will have no spark for life. This is simply because they do not yet know what they are stepping into. The power of co-creation to manifest your choices is far greater than that of competition. To work collectively with others of shared intent is to wield the energy of the Love That Is Awake. You are all co-creators, and now as you move into the realization of your Godhood you move into the power to create whatever you desire. You are the Love That Is Awake and it is up to you how you choose to express your energy. There is no right or wrong in this. There is no best path. There is no secret. You are here as creators. You are the creator of your life. If there is any judgment in how you live your life, it will only ever come from your Self. Create a life such that when you leave physicality you will look back at your life and be joyful of it. Create the experience of joy by choosing what your heart finds joyful. There is only one time you can do this and that is in the Now. Love is awake

Limitlessness.com Love Is Awake

Page 11

The Bridge of Consciousness

The Power to Choose Joy
by Story Waters, 2005

Stand in Your Power

To come to your power to choose joy is to realize that you are the determinant of your being. Taking ownership of your state of being is coming to stand in your own power. This is referring to inner power; external power being an illusion. To come to stand in your power is to take back, into your Self, any power that you have externalized. Your innate power is not a reward to be earned; to experience it you simply need to stop giving it away through having limited beliefs about who and what you are. When you do not stand in your power, that part which you are denying is projected outwards and is then perceived as being external. This is what creates the illusion that there are forces outside of your Self which have the power to control your choices - your choices being the mechanism through which you shape your reality. To see your Self as not being accountable for your state of being is to live within a belief in external forces that have control over you. This can be manifest in such forms as a controlling person, governmental laws, or a lack of abundance; basically symbols of perceived limitation. This births the ability to blame. To blame is an attempt to hold this externalized aspect of your power responsible for your state of being, instead of being fully responsible for your Self. Re-assimilating this externalized power is a part of the journey to being All That You Are. To take back that power is to come to the realization that all power over your being is yours alone. It is to realize, within your Self, the absolute power of choice over your being. To experience your power of choice is to realize that you are the one that possesses the power to choose joy for your Self. When you realize joy as being a choice you will realize that all states, including suffering, must equally be a choice. Through this you will see that to take responsibility for your own suffering is to empower your Self to be able to choose joy. A part of the journey to joy is therefore to take ownership and responsibility for your own suffering. To do this release all sense of 'blaming others'. Realize that this will be a gradually unfolding process.

Releasing the Idea of Mistakes

With the taking of responsibility for your suffering comes the realization that it is not a mistake to suffer. This does not mean that you 'like' suffering. It is the realization that not only did you not do anything 'wrong' to suffer, but that you chose your suffering with a purpose. This is the release of the idea that you can make mistakes. The reason I use the word 'mistake' is that though
Limitlessness.com The Power to Choose Joy Page 12

you may have released the idea that you did not do anything 'morally wrong', many people still feel that if they are suffering then they must have made mistakes in their choices. The idea being that a mistake must have been made that has caused the state of suffering. This allows for an interesting example of the rippling effect of beliefs. If you believe that to suffer is a mistake then you believe in the existence of mistakes. If you believe in mistakes then you live in a world where your power of choice, instead of being a moment of empowerment, is a moment when you can fall. This is to live in a reality where there is jeopardy, and that is to live in a world where you do not feel safe. To not feel safe is to be living in fear. To live in fear is to be suffering. The conclusion being that if you judge suffering to be a mistake then you will live within that judgment and that is to be in suffering. That which you judge, you end up holding to you. There is no concept of the traditional view of karma here, simply the living out of your beliefs. Karma actually means 'your action'; meaning how you choose shapes your future. To live in joy, accept that suffering is not a mistake. This is the letting go of the cross of suffering and it is a cross that humanity has been carrying for a long, long time. To see suffering as a mistake is to dis-acknowledge states of being that you chose, with infinite wisdom, to be. Realize that you do not need to see suffering as a mistake in order to stop choosing it. You do not need to 'reject' that which you no longer wish to choose. Simply stop choosing it. The suggestion being, that only when we stop judging suffering to be a mistake, can we finally release it from our lives. Your power to choose joy is the power of choice. It is your free will, the point from which you create your reality. Realize the ways in which you may fear the full realization that you create your own reality. Fear of this realization is why many give away their power of choice. Though it may seem strange, the fundamental fear in this reality is the fear of our own power; and that is the realization that we are limitless. We fear the realization of Self as God.

You Are God

You will experience joy when you free your Self from fear of your power, fear of your limitlessness. Realize the perspective from which it can be said that all fear is fear of your power. Acknowledge that there is level at which you are terrified of the complete realization that you are the architect of your being. It is the ultimate responsibility to your Self. Many people feel naked when stripped of the ability to blame, for they have come to partially define themselves through it. Beyond your fear is you in limitlessness. Without fear you are free to act, free to choose, free to create. Without fear you are free. It is to realize the limitlessness of your being. It is to step into your Godhood. Many people, predominantly through organized religion, have externalized God, and to step into their power is to internalize and be the God that they once externalized. Really God is neither external nor internal. God is everything, everywhere. God is holographic, with each aspect containing a complete imprint of the whole. God is All That Is.
Limitlessness.com The Power to Choose Joy Page 13

If you went out and asked people, Who do you think has the power to bestow joy and suffering on a person? the most common answer you would receive is God. The 'father' God of organized religion has become a symbol of how many have externalized their power. This has become so acute that some have completely rejected any notion of their divinity, instead choosing to believe of themselves as an accident of atoms that perishes at death. The middle ground being trodden by many at this time is the reclamation of All as God, divinity expressed from within. Some people fear that to realize God as being within would somehow be the loss of God when, in actuality, it is the discovery of God. There is a God and you are a living self-determining expression of it. To exercise the power to choose joy you must come to know that it is you that possesses that power. You must come to view your Self as being that which has the power to, with your free will, manifest joy in your life. This comes through both coming to not live in fear and coming to love your Self. Coming to love your Self is coming to not live in fear. You are love and the only thing that separates you from the experience of your Self as pure love is both your fear of your Self, and your attachment to the idea of exactly what love is. Love is limitlessness; the desire for all beings, including your Self, to experience complete freedom to be whatever they choose to be. To realize your Self as being an unlimited self-determining expression of God is to realize within your being the power to choose joy.

The Choice for Joy

Coming to choose joy for your Self is an ever unfolding process of coming to release your being further and further into limitlessness. Bringing joy into your life is like cultivating flowers in a garden. See the allowance of time in this idea. Realize the ways in which you can give joy to your Self. Seriously think about it. Ask your Self, What can I do that will bring joy into my life? This is, surprisingly, a question that people rarely ask themselves. Choose one of your answers and give it your energy. Know it as a seed and, as you nourish it, so it will come to blossom into joy; a flower that will then offer many more seeds, each of which carries the potential for the continual blossoming of your joy. Look at yesterday and see where you sowed seeds of joy and where you merely sowed seeds to 'not suffer'. Realize joy to be far more than 'not suffering'. Don't seek to 'not suffer'; seek to be joyful. Every day you have the choice to give joy to your Self and yet you rarely do. Somehow, in the moment, other things seem more important. You ask for a field of sun flowers to miraculously appear, but you do not plant seeds by giving your Self moments devoted to your joy. Many have forgotten how to play. Without play all the money in the world will not bring you joy. Some think to themselves that they will learn to play when they have the money to do it with. That is simply to live in delay; that is to delay abundance. It is to give away power to the idea of money. Learn to play without money, and money will come to you because it wants to be played with!
Limitlessness.com The Power to Choose Joy Page 14

Joy and Money

Now let us talk of joy and money, two things we love to mentally connect. Many of us are so caught up in our own suffering, or the suffering of others, that we make no space-time for play. We do not want to hear that love and joy are all around. We say to the Universe, Pay my bills first and then I will look for love and joy. We believe that to refuse to be joyful before the Universe gives us its riches will somehow push the Universe into giving us what we want. We fear that if we have too much fun when we are poor then the Universe will say See you didn't need any money after all! The Universe does not decide these things, we do. Money is not a reward bestowed by some external entity. The power for the choice for money is ours just as the choice for joy is ours. As long as you believe that money will make you happy, as long as you make money the determinant of your happiness, then you will not find either happiness or 'enough' money. There are many who you may perceive of as being rich, who are miserable in their chase to have even more money. They never feel that what they have is enough. The feeling of having 'enough' is feeling a state of completeness in your Self. No external condition can give this to you. When you come to joy inside of your Self then money will come to you as your personal symbol of that joy. As long as you believe that what separates you from happiness is money then money will separate you from your happiness. And that is to say you will come to live in the experience of your belief until such a time as you change that belief. Reality is a mirror of our beliefs. A feeling of lack will only ever draw lack to you. Joy is something that people tend to think will come to them through some external force, instead of believing that it is something they can create from within. There is no external force that can thrust joy upon you in this way; that would be an invalidation of free will. The power, the choice, for your joy is within you. To live in joy you must give joy to your Self. To do this you must stand in your power such as to realize that it is within your power to do this. Let us look more at the idea of how judgment of suffering can separate us from our power.

Judgment of Suffering
To not see being in suffering as a mistake requires extreme non-judgmentalism of your state of being. We tend to label suffering as being 'a problem'. We see it as something that must be fixed. This is in essence a belief that we are damaged. In doing this, of all the seeds around us, we effectively choose the ugliest looking one and give it all our energy. We try to make what is (our suffering), come to not be; instead of making what is not (our joy), come to be. This is fed from the judgment of suffering. Judgment acts as an energy that binds us to our suffering in order to resolve the Self-limitation that it represents. If we truly want to let go of the concept of right and wrong then we cannot believe that it is wrong to suffer. Again, this is talking of wrong beyond the idea of just morality. I am talking of the idea that whatever choices you have made, that you perceive as having led to your suffering,
Limitlessness.com The Power to Choose Joy Page 15

were not mistakes. It is to realize that if you are suffering then that is the perfect state for you to further unfold your limitlessness. If you want to not suffer then let go of the belief that your suffering is in some way defective. If you feel that you are suffering then it is a part of you, and there is nothing either wrong or defective about you! If you are suffering, and you judge your suffering as being a mistake, then you are not loving your expression of your Self, your chosen state of being. Realize that even to judge is not 'wrong'; it is however an attempt to limit 'being'. To transform/evolve being you must allow it. Judgment is the opposite of allowance; and that is often fed from an idea of superiority of being. Hierarchy does not exist in the realization of all as One, all as God. A judgment is a belief and our reality is a mirror of our beliefs, a mirror that we live within. What you judge is held to you. What you allow flows unimpeded.

The Choice to Suffer

To say If you are suffering then you are choosing it is a hard statement to hear, but I do not wish to dress up or disguise what I am saying. Many even view this statement as being a judgment in itself, but it is only so if you apply blame to it by judging suffering to be a mistake. When seen from limitlessness, a place of universal love, what the statement is really saying is Just as you have the power to choose suffering, so you have the power to end your suffering and choose joy instead. It says that the power is with you; a statement of pure love and empowerment. The power of this statement is reflected in how easily it can be misconstrued. I am saying it to you, with love, to empower you to choose joy. If you were not ready to hear it then you would not be reading this article. Know that I am solely asking you to apply it to your Self - if you so wish. To imagine saying it to a person who is starving or living in war is a means to dismiss looking at it in your Self. When you can hear the phrase, If you are suffering then you are choosing it as purely a statement of empowerment to choose joy then you will have overcome your judgment of suffering. Use the phrase as a tool to reveal your judgments of your own being.

Summation
Though this article has focused on the power to choose joy and to some extent money, it is really about getting in contact with your power to choose/create your reality as a whole; the primary suggestion being, to take complete responsibility for your state of being, even if that includes past or present suffering. The only real way to see how this sense of self-responsibility and the power to choose are connected is in the practice of living it. To come to experience, in the moment, every aspect of your life as being something that you are choosing, though tough at times, is a corner stone of empowerment. It is to let go of any sense of being a victim. You are not a victim. You are God. You have the power to bestow joy upon your Self.
Limitlessness.com The Power to Choose Joy Page 16

This eBook has been made freely available to download and share through Storys Pay What Your Heart Chooses system. Please feel from your heart what you have received from reading this book and, in relation to your own experience of abundance and perception of value, make a choice of what you would like to exchange by making a payment (no matter how small) at Limitlessness.com. T he Pay What You Heart Chooses system heralds a time when we will have a different relationship with the ideas of money, open sharing and copyright. We hope you will embrace this new energy system and lend it your support to allow the open release of Story's complete materials. With your support many others will be able to enjoy this book as well as Storys other creations. Thank you for exchanging in return for what you have received.

More Pay What Your Heart Chooses materials available at

Limitlessness.com

Want more? Join the Freedom Circle to support Storys work and receive the latest materials. All Contents Story Waters

Limitlessness.com The Power to Choose Joy

Page 17