Last night, I had a strange dream.
I was in a room.
Not a very large one.
Suddenly, three couples entered.
They were dancing...
The room became crowded. There was movement everywhere... bodies spinning, music... colors, faces...
I was dancing too - or at least I thought I was - and yet, at the same time, I felt like an observer of the whole scene.
As though one part of me was inside it, while another part stood quietly apart, watching...
And suddenly, the music stopped.
Everyone disappeared.
Perhaps it had lasted no more than a few seconds, and yet I had the feeling that this scene carried a message far greater than such a brief moment could possibly contain...
And then a Voice asked me:
“What do you remember?
What did you notice?”
As if I had suddenly been called on to answer, I immediately began replaying the scene in my mind...
The people.
Their movements.
The atmosphere.
The colors.
The music...
I really tried, but I could remember only fragments. Most of it had already slipped away...
Instinctively, I tried to gather as much information as I could, searching my memory for details.
And then the Voice said:
“You focused on their eyes.
You managed to look every one of them in the eyes.
That was how you tried to recognize them and remember them.
You didn’t notice that one of the women had no arms...
only empty sleeves.
You didn’t notice that another woman was wearing torn, partially ruined clothes.
Your eyes instinctively searched for theirs.
Because it is through the eyes that the deepest connection with another human being is born.
Everything else is secondary.”
Then the Voice replayed the scene for me.
But this time... in slow motion.
And there she was.
I saw her............
One of the women had no arms.
There were only empty sleeves made of stiff chiffon... vividly swirling in the dance and yet... hanging loose where her forearms and hands should have been. The sleeves ended in emptiness.
Another woman looked as though she had been through some kind of struggle. Her clothes really were crumpled, torn and disheveled...
Such obvious details.
And yet I had completely failed to notice them.
Because when everything was happening so quickly - when the room was crowded, people were moving, and my mind was instinctively trying to absorb as much meaningful information as possible...
...I searched for their gaze.
I looked into their eyes.
Not at what they were missing.
Not at what was broken.
Not at what they were wearing.
Not at what might have happened to them.
I looked into their eyes.
As if my eyes remembered that beneath “all the noise around us” there is the Essence of a Human Being.
In their gaze, I searched for a trace of their Energy.
The memory of what they had lived through.
The imprint of their story...
And then something happened that I still find difficult to put into words.
It felt as though the entire Dream quietly turned around...
And now it was looking at me.
In some telepathic way, the Voice drew my attention to my own eyes.
And suddenly, I was overwhelmed with emotion.......
I didn’t even try to hold back the tears.
As though, in that single moment -perhaps only for that one moment - I finally understood it myself.
That mysterious, silent voice from another dimension said to me:
“Hey.
You have reasons to love yourself.
Don’t be so hard on yourself.
So judgmental.
You are worthy.
You deserve love.”
And I cried.
Because somehow, through this short, strange scene, I understood something that is almost impossible to express in ordinary human words...
We can spend so much of our lives looking at everything that -in our own eyes - is “wrong” with us.
Our imperfections.
Our circumstances.
Our wounds. Our traumas. Our human physicality.
The things we wish we could change.
The ever-changing standards we are somehow expected to squeeze ourselves into...
The demands. The expectations.
Our mistakes. Our failures...
All those parts of ourselves that - in the rush and confusion of life - we judge so harshly.
And yet...
perhaps when another person truly encounters us...
they don’t see those things the way we do.
Just as I didn’t see them...
in that room filled with dancing people.
Perhaps another Human Being sees in us a person we ourselves are no longer able to see or find...
Perhaps our deepest human recognition happens somewhere else entirely.
In connection.
In the eyes.
In a gaze.
In that small, quiet space where one human being meets another before judgments, labels and definitions have time to enter...
before the masks, the pretending, the status, the categories, the appearances...
And perhaps we deserve to look at ourselves with that very same Gaze.
Not searching first for what we lack.
Not searching for what is wounded within us.
Not searching for reasons to criticize ourselves.
But looking deeply enough to recognize the Human Being who is there.
On the other side of your eyes.
What an extraordinary lesson in loving ourselves...
Words - as always - diminish the experience. They cannot fully capture what I felt in that brief dream...
But perhaps this was its message:
Stop.
Dare to look into your own eyes.
As though you were looking into the eyes of another human being.
What do you see...?
Perhaps exhaustion. Perhaps fear... Shame... Pride... Joy...
or sadness. Longing...
Look deeper.
The eyes remember what the Soul remembers, but the mind has forgotten.
Remember who You Are.
Look deeply into your own eyes and tell them:
I LOVE YOU.
As often as you can.
~ Anna
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