Beloved, be good to yourself. No more are you to rant and rave to yourself about how you are not doing great or even well enough. I will not have it. If you see yourself as caught up in a vise, it is you who catches yourself in a vise. No one else is doing it to you. Beloved, it is yourself that you clamp down on.

Come now, Beloved, create new images of yourself. Open up your life. No reducing your Self-image, not even once more. No, not even once more. I won’t hear of it.

Come closer. For Our purposes, seat yourself in an apple tree on a thick limb close to the tree trunk. Lean back. Bite into the apple, yum yum, sweet and juicy. See yourself content like this. This is how to look at yourself, most especially when you feel forlorn.

First, your description of yourself in a vise isn’t a happy word picture at all. Remove that unbefitting image of yourself, not let it occur to you ever again in this century. Look, you are My Created Child. Never did I possibly create you or anyone as downtrodden. I will not have you thinking like that for even one second. I will not have it.

Come, there are better ways to think of you. What pops into My head this minute is to think of you emblazoned in the Sun, fully beloved by God. Yes, this is good – emblazoned in the Sun and fully beloved by God. There are no limits on what I can be thinking of you, come to think of it.

Or, perhaps now, you are sitting on the beach. The Sun is streaming on the sand and streaming on your cheeks. Now you are ready to go back into the ocean, an honest-to-goodness ocean such as the great poets write about. Now you jump back into the blue ocean. Now the sand on your toes becomes dry. Now you squish your toes into the wet rim of water leading to the waves themselves. To think if it – the ocean – and now you happily wade toward the midst of the ocean blue.

You walk into the waves of the ocean. You float on your back, and you think: “Yes, I lie in the arms of the ocean until I once again walk on dry land.”

The ocean and the sand and the Sun are ever eager to welcome you. Your love, their love, all love requited.

Now you think of another area of Earth where you are pleased to visit – a green field close to your heart. You lie on your back. You chew on a blade of grass. You look up at the blue sky. You are happy to look up. You are happy to chew a blade of grass, fresh-picked.

Pull out memories such as these and remind yourself of how gracious Earth life is to you.

These settings are worthy of high dreams. Feel free to revisit them. Reawakening yourself to positivity isn’t living in the past. It is waking yourself up to some of the treasures of peace you already have before you.

Surely, stories of the past may be sad stories you are to move on from. They may keep you bound where you no longer belong. Choose elevating scenes from your beginnings that give you even a little smile – an image that leads you to more fertile fields where you would like to go, maybe to a scent of hollyhocks or the moment when you first caught onto writing your name or to reading your first book and the illustrations that still swim across your eyes.