Love Yourself Unconditionally with Noemi Grace

 

 

Listen to the podcast here:

 

Highlights:

01:09 “Use Me to Heal the World”
08:16 Sleep-Walking Through Life
16:09 Expect and Be Awakened
27:06 Suppress Ego and Live in Love
35:09 The Seed of God’s Love inside
38:40 Intimate Dialogue with God
42:13 Self-Acceptance & Self-Love vs Self-Judgment
46:23 Love Your Imperfections

Resources:

Intimate Dialogue With God: The Miraculous Power of Unconditional Self-Love by Noemi Grace

 

Love yourself the way you were created to love. Don’t let ego or judgment cloud your heart. Join @myexpectation and Noemi Grace as they explore how to #loveyourselfunconditionally #self-acceptance #expectations #heal #imperfections #egoless… Click To Tweet

 

Quotes:

“There’s always a time when I think when we are challenged with these life events, that we either have the choice to ignore them, or listen to what God is telling us.” –Art Costello

“We do have free will, we do have the power of choice. But a lot of time we’re so occupied with everything in our lives and doing everything we’re doing and living on autopilot.” –Noemi Grace

“We have free will, but we live our lives as if we don’t we live our lives as if we don’t have choice.” –Noemi Grace

“When you learn to manage your expectations, with it comes a freedom that is undeniably beautiful.” –Art Costello

“I don’t think there’s anything more important than being able to love yourself. Because you can’t give love if you can’t love yourself.” –Art Costello

“There’s a fine balance and living. But when it’s in your core, you’re a loving person.” –Art Costello

“We have no connection with God if we are living just unconsciously and making choices impulsively or reactively. We’re not going to feel the ability to be able to live from self-love.” -Noemi Grace

“We are all gifted if we let our gifts come out with people living in this space of fear.” –Art Costello

“Self-acceptance is a miracle; it opens up a panorama of new possibilities you cannot have seen before.” -Noemi Grace

“Self-expression dense grows over time, we have to mature, we have to percolate and have this mindset of learning… But when we try to hurry it along, we lose sight of that.” –Art Costello

 

Transcription:

 

Art Costello: Welcome to the Shower Epiphanies Podcast. Today my guest is Noemi Grace, and I love that name. It just says a whole lot about this young lady. She is the author of a book called, An Intimate Dialogue with God, which really, really is a great book and I’m gonna encourage everybody to pick it up, and read it because there are so many gems in this book. I can’t tell you, it’s gonna be in a series and I can’t wait to read the other part of the series, but it’s about the miraculous power of unconditional love, which any of you that know me, that is near and dear to my heart. So without further ado, Noemi, welcome to the show. It’s an honor to have you here. I can’t wait to hear your story. Can you tell us a little bit about you, and how it all came about?

Noemi Grace: Sure, oh, Art, I’m so thrilled to be here. I am just delighted to have this conversation with you, especially having heard about your story, and seeing how much that has formed the foundation and basis of your whole life, and everything, you’ve been through so many things. And for me, I grew up, actually I was born in New York City and was there until I just couldn’t be there anymore. And I moved to California, and I was there until I couldn’t be there anymore. I’ve been in the Boston area for a while, 30 years.–

Art Costello: Why Boston?

Noemi Grace: –So I was in a software, computer software, and so Boston has a lot of startup companies in the software field and all that. It was the Silicon Valley of the east of time. And so in New York City, I grew up and I had, my father worked in the World Trade Center for many years, and I had been on top of the World Trade Center. I had been all over New York City and my father was also a minister, but he was a banker during the week, and he was a minister during the weekend. So I got all kinds of exposure to finances and God, mostly God, the little smattering of finances. And when the terrorist attack came on 9/11, I was in a train station near Boston trying to get home, and I was absolutely terrified. I could just feel my heart pounding out of my chest. And I just took one look at the platform. It was really crowded. Train was not coming and it was eerily silent. And this is a train station that’s usually quite loud. And the only thing you could hear was the occasional sob coming from someone, you know, cause the planes had it initiated in Boston. And of course New York City is not that far from Boston. So that day something happened to me and I can’t explain it, but I started to feel the fear, not just of myself, but of the other people on the platform. And it was just absolutely overwhelming and consuming, and I didn’t know what to do with it. And somehow, probably because of my foundation in childhood, I started to pray this prayer. At that time, I described myself as spiritually adrift, just kind of whatever, you know, not really connected in any way consciously to the divine. And I prayed this prayer: “Use me for the healing of the world.” And I said it out loud on the platform, which surprised me. And then I felt just a tiny bit better. So I then started to internalize that like a mantra, use me for the healing of the world, use me for the healing of the world. And I just kept speaking: “Use me, use me, use me.” And it took a very long time for the train to come and for me to get home. And then I went for a hike, because I was still somewhat unsettled and nature grounds me, God’s creation does ground me. So I went out there and I was just taking this hike for another couple of hours, use me for the healing of the world. So it was over five hours. This was the only thing occupying my mind except for the fear that would come in, which is not something I had ever experienced before my mind. And you know, the default is always full of something, and–

Art Costello: There’s always a time when I think, when we are challenged with these life events, that we either have the choice to ignore, or listen to what God is telling us, happened to me at nine as you know, and when we were open to this immense power that God drives us through listening and conversing with him, and listening to our gut, and what he is telling us through our body, and through our surroundings and everything. It’s very transformational and really, I think if people could tap into those things in, what’s ironic about it, it takes events that are so powerful in our lives to drive us to that point where we open up to the power of God. To God to open up to us, and I wish we could do it without it, and maybe there’s a lot of people that can, in my journey in life, I have found out, have been in Vietnam and seeing people, men at their moments of death, and then they open up because they realize what’s happening to them, and they open up. I wished that we could do that on a more cerebral level every day instead of having to work, wait for these tragic events to happen to us, because we’d have a lot more people that would believe in God in the way that God intends us to believe in him.

“There's always a time when I think when we are challenged with these life events, that we either have the choice to ignore them, or listen to what God is telling us.” –Art Costello Click To Tweet

Noemi Grace: Yeah, I don’t know if it’s human nature, or just where we are in our growth as humanity. But yeah, difficult events, challenging events. Traumas impact us in a way that other things don’t. And we do have free will. We do have the power of choice, but a lot of time we’re so occupied with everything in our lives, and doing everything we’re doing, and living on autopilot. Shortly before the 9/11 incident, I took this workshop, this actually, it was a woman’s workshop led by a man, which to me seems kind of oxymoron but it was a relationship worked out, and it was good to hear the man’s perspective, cause I had never done that before, but all of a sudden it was, these light went off. It was like the light bulb. And I realized I’ve been sleepwalking through life, was 38 years old and I was sleepwalking through life. And I was like, wow, unbelievable. I’m not awake, I’m not alive, I’m just going through half asleep and not present. And so we come present and if we desire that connection, because the divine is always there. And I like to use the word divine for God. That’s just–.

“We do have free will, we do have the power of choice. But a lot of time we're so occupied with everything in our lives and doing everything we're doing and living on autopilot.” –Noemi Grace Click To Tweet

Art Costello: Ehmm.

Noemi Grace: –there have been times, I had went through phases where it was spirit and then it was, it was God and that was spirit. And now it’s the divine (laughs)

Art Costello: –Universe, I mean this (laughs).

Noemi Grace: –universe, oh, that was the universe phase two, so now it’s my favorite. It’s the favorite word right now. And in my series of books, maybe it’ll change to the universe or something else, but you know, it’s so, the divine is always available, always present, always accessible. But we don’t know how because we’ve forgotten. And so, to learn that we can access the divine at any point, we don’t have to wait for that terrible moment. The tragic moment, or the moment of despair when we just feel so hopeless in life. You know, we can wake up and say, today I wanna connect with God and we can say, God help me, you know?

Art Costello: Why don’t you think people do that more often? Why do you think they wait, just human nature to wait until we’re challenged?

Noemi Grace: I said, I think we are sleepwalking through life. We’re not, you know, there is a spiritual process of awakening and until we just learn how to do things a certain way, we learned what we should be aspiring for, and we learn what our values are. We’ve been socialized, we’ve been taught these things and we just, those are our rules for our lives. So we start to live these rules, and one of the rules that we’re not taught is, God’s here. God’s available at any point, you can say: “Hi God, how are you?” And I wake up in the morning and I say: “Good morning, divine.” You know (laughs), and it’s something we haven’t been taught. I think that if we could start to teach young people, we can start to teach children this, and it would be so powerful because we don’t have to go to church to talked God. I mean there’s plenty of blessings, and going to church if that resonates with you. You know, you don’t have to though. You can access God at any time, and we just have to remember and want that, desire that, and realize, wow, I can talk to God, or I can listen to God, or I can even feel the presence of God. Maybe I don’t know how to hear God’s speaking, but I can feel God’s presence.

Art Costello: Sometimes I think church gets in the way of speaking to God, because there’s so many other messages that come out of church events, and church services and everything else, you know, they’re not gonna love me for this one (laughs). You know, sometimes, sometimes casters have agendas, and that agenda is not really in alignment with what God has implant because, I think there is a distinct difference between church, and believing in the divine, and believing in God and all that. And I think sometimes it gets in the way. I know when I was young, I was raised Catholic, and I was so turned off by the constant beating of money, money, money about giving, giving, giving, and we had so little to give. I almost felt guilty because we couldn’t give like, we saw other people giving and all that, you know? So you know, there’s a lot of things that enter into that. But anyway, I wanna know the rest of your journey.

Noemi Grace: Yeah, yeah. Well I’ll just comment on that, that I agree. Judgment is so ingrained in our society. That’s why lawyers get paid the same as like brain surgeons, you know? (laughs) I mean, you know judgment, we need that. We feel judged, we feel vindicated, whatever it is. I’m not saying lawyers are bad. I have a business for my business, you know, but it’s so ingrained that judgment, and so we then, one have been taught that God is judging us–

Art Costello: Ehmm.

Noemi Grace: –which is actually not true.

Art Costello: –I agree.

Noemi Grace: –Experience at all. And only when I expected God to judge me, then I felt like God was judging me. But now that I don’t expect that, now that I know that God is love, which is what the Bible says, God is Love, God is light. There’s no judgment in any of that. So yeah, we’ve been taught that we’re not good enough, that we’re not worthy, that you know, all of these things and he created us.

Art Costello: You just hit on one of my words, expect.–

Noemi Grace: Ehmm.

Art Costello: –Because our expectations are what, God planted that seed of expectation in us. And when we live to the expectations of others versus the expectation that we set, God gave us free will, because we are able to make the choices of how we want to live our life, and how we expect to live our life is how it will unfold, when we believe in him, and we trust in him, and we know that everything will always work out his accord.

Noemi Grace: Yeah. And freewill is a whole other subject (laughs). My story in terms of, you know, one of the things that God has told me is that we have free will, but we live our lives as if we don’t. We live our lives as if we don’t have a choice. The power of choice. We continue to make the same choices over and over again, so leave a bad relationship, bad in whatever way, want another relationship and then find the same things play in you in the relationship. Even though you picked somebody who was complete opposite of the last person, and we actually wind up choosing very unconsciously the same kind of choices over and over again. And so we don’t live as if we have free will.

“We have free will, but we live our lives as if we don't we live our lives as if we don't have choice.” –Noemi Grace Click To Tweet

Art Costello: You know why that is though? Because we don’t live to our core expectations. We live to be expectations of others. That is what causes that.–

Noemi Grace: Absolutely.

Art Costello: –And some people, when I teach people to manage their expectations, we go through the whole thing about living to your expectations and not the expectations of others, it is so freeing. I can tell you I have lived the best life to all the trials and tribulations, because at nine years old I learned to trust in God, and I turned it all over to him, and I have done everything I’ve ever wanted to do. And if I was to go tomorrow, I can tell you I am dying a happy man. And when I stand in front of the good Lord and he does judge me, if that time, whether he sends me wherever he sends me, I know that it will be out of happiness, that I have done everything to what I know in my core was the right thing to do. And I’ve made some big mistakes. Don’t think I haven’t made any mistakes cause I’ve made some big booboos. But I tell you, I always take full responsibility for my mistakes, and I realize that they are meant to teach us something. And that’s why God, let’s though, and people always say: “Why did God let that happen?” Well, it was sent. Even the loss of my wife in 2006 to ovarian cancer taught me some of the most massive lessons in my life. I’m now 72 and living proof that it all always works out. It always works out and I’m just blessed for every day that I have, so I’ve gone off on a tangent again (laughs).

Noemi Grace: Oh, wonderful, it’s all wonderful. It’s a great conversation in your expectations there. To live a great life is, you know when you’ve completed this lifetime, to be at peace, and to be at peace every day, and so you have a set of expectations for yourself that really allow you to live a liberated life, or not be sleepwalking through life, not being unconsciously making the same choices over and over again. That’s really powerful.

Art Costello: When you learn to manage your expectations with it comes a freedom that is undeniably beautiful–

“When you learn to manage your expectations, with it comes a freedom that is undeniably beautiful.” –Art Costello Click To Tweet

Noemi Grace: Hmm.

Art Costello: –because you become at peace with yourself. You take responsibility for your actions. It creates a lot of really, really powerful things in your life when you learn to live to your expectations and not the expectations of others. I mean we have all kinds of expectations every day. I mean there’s societal, there’s marital, there’s governmental. I mean there’s, everything we do is based on an expectation. I always challenge people, what do we do that is not based on an expectation. And I have some had brilliant minds that I have challenged with that. And when they think about it, they will tell me, you are right. There is not one thing that we do not do things unless it is predicated with an expectation. It is pre determined through the expectations that we have.

Noemi Grace: Oh, absolutely. I mean, talk about being creatures of habit. It’s creatures of expectation too, it’s all default. It’s all unconscious, autopilot living and so to awaken. And so for me, I am in this process of awakening as your life has been a life of awakening. You know, after I prayed that prayer on 9/11, years went by and I was actually, when I was in that train station in Boston on 9/11, I was there completing my master’s degree in a university near Boston to become a psychotherapist, and before that I had been a software engineer. And so this is a whole different page of life, you know? And it was amazing because I just went in dove into being a therapist, the whole new thing and kind of forgot about this wonderful prayer. I prayed that it became like a mantra, became away from me on 9/11 just to survive, but I really meant it. I realized there’s so much problems here and I figured, hey, I’m gonna be a therapist soon, so maybe I have some skills now and maybe God can use me, but I want it to be of service, which was not my usual Emo, you know? I was kind of into my own, not the kind of person that volunteered a lot or did anything like that.

Art Costello: I think it’s amazing how bad happens, because I think I’ve seen it over and over again. When people are traumatized by events. Imagine, I mean remember back to 9/11, and after 9/11 how many people became involved in service, and a lot of pettiness that we have in this world went away, particularly in the United States, but worldwide, it had a worldwide effect. When people saw those towers go down in that moment, the world literally changed. And out of that came a lot of great things or really, really when you think about that, you know, and how it changed so many attitudes, and people became more aware of what was important and what was not important. And the pettiness went away, and it took us almost 10 years to get back to this pettiness. It is so ridiculous that it’s–

Noemi Grace: Yes, unfortunately, probably pettier now than ever.

Art Costello: –I agree.

Noemi Grace: –Some will choose to not go there, and so one day it was March 3rd, 2012, I’ll never forget this, I was on the elliptical, I kind of have it off to the side of my living room, and I put on this affirmation CD that’s just pumping out. You can do it, you can do it go girl, go girl, you’re unstoppable, I’m stoppable, you know

Art Costello: –(laughs).

Noemi Grace: –pumping, pumping, and then the CD was actually a CD. I used to have a CD player back then stopped, and there was silence and then at that same volume I heard: “Loves the fabric of freedom. Forgiveness, paves the way to freedom. You will know when you were free, when there’s nothing left to forgive because you see through the eyes of love.” And that absolutely blew me away. I got off elliptical as quick as I could, wrote it down and said: “God is speaking to me (laughs).”.

Art Costello: –(laughs).

Noemi Grace: –My mind can’t invent this, I was like, wow, God is speaking to me, this is awesome. And what am I supposed to do with this? Like fabric of freedom and eyes of love. These are things I had never thought of before. And I wrote it down and yet again, a few more years went by and I would think about that every once in a while. And I was like, oh, you know, and every once in a while I would have noticed that the divine was speaking through me. Sometimes in working with my clients, all this wisdom would come through and I would be like, I would open my mouth and something wise would come out and I’d be, I’d be surprised by it myself, you know, just like, wow, that’s pretty cool. And so wisdom started to percolate and almost three years later on January 1st, 2015, I just pulled out a fresh journal and I said: “I am fed up with my life, this year I will learn to embrace what is, and reclaim my joy because I am tired of living in anxiety.” And I put that down there, and I meant it with every cell of my being. And then the next day, I started to hear all of these messages, started with two questions. What do you see? What do I see when I look at this from love? And what do I choose if I choose from love? And to apply those questions to myself, and to my life, and my choices, the people in my life, I’m looking from love. Okay, what do I see, looks so different from love? I can see, okay, yeah, maybe I did screw up, but you know, it wasn’t malicious. It was, you know, I was unconscious, or I was reactive. You know, I reacted and I said something that I regretted, and having developing, starting to develop self compassion, and it’s just a big thing. Cause we’re not taught that, we’re not taught to. I had obviously as a therapist, hopefully have some compassion, right? So I have compassion for other people, but my own passion for myself was a bit lacking. And so developing that, and yeah, and just learning to appreciate myself and the more I do the more I appreciate other people.

Art Costello: Divine love is unconditional.–

Noemi Grace: Yes.

Art Costello: –Divine love is unconditional. And when you learn it and trust it, it’s on the part of the transformation that we go through on what we, what really begins to move us in a deep, deep, deep level in our soul and our heart. You know, I’ve learned over the years, and it took me a long time to learn it, that once you learn how, you know, I kind of look at it like learning to love from God’s perspective, because you know, God loves unconditionally and it opens you up to being able to love unconditionally. I find so much to love about people. I mean, I always joke around just saying, I fall in love probably about 20 or 30 times a day because I see, I see the things that, I mean, it can be from a brand new puppy, or to a beautiful smile on a person, or their eyes, or something like that. I just fall in love with these things about, I just see love, you know? I just see the goodness in things and it really does change your life.–

Noemi Grace: No, absolutely.

Art Costello: –Really, it does.

Noemi Grace: –Yeah, and so I started to have this ongoing dialogue with the divine, about the miraculous power of unconditional self love. But this is not the self load that we have, that we think we have. It is divine love is self love, to learn to love myself, for us to love ourselves with God’s love, which means God is love. So we are always able to love ourselves if we use God’s love, if we disappoint ourselves, the ego finds it hard to be loving towards ourselves. But when we can tap into the stillness, and feel, and receive God’s love, then we can have that love in our hearts and have it just kind of expand out of us, and we can love ourselves with that whole love. And then we can share that love with other people.

Art Costello: Ehmm.

Noemi Grace: –Allows us to love ourselves. No matter how we show up, you know, it’s like today I’m proud of myself, you know? Ooh, I did a good job, or I forgot to do something really important. What was, oh my goodness, what’s wrong with me? No, I still couldn’t love myself.

Art Costello: Yup, it’s important. I don’t think there’s anything more important than being able to love yourself, because you can’t give love if you can’t love yourself. And you know, it just, it gets tainted when we start letting all these outside forces control us. You know, we lose sight of the fact that where there’s a beautiful loving souls that have the ability to love and–

“I don't think there's anything more important than being able to love yourself. Because you can't give love if you can't love yourself.” –Art Costello Click To Tweet

Noemi Grace: Yeah.

Art Costello: –we just gotta let it all go. None of it matters. None of it really matters when you get right down to it. What we do and how we act, and how we act towards others and ourselves is really the ultimate responsibility that we have as human beings to be these kind, loving people. And I don’t mean, you know, that we don’t have rules and regulations, and all those things because we have to live with them somewhat of a structure. If you live totally unstructured, it doesn’t work either. So there’s a fine balance in nd living.

“There's a fine balance and living. But when it’s in your core, you're a loving person.” –Art Costello Click To Tweet

Noemi Grace: –Hmm.

Art Costello: –But when, when at your core, you’re a loving person. Let me ask you a question.

Noemi Grace: –Sure.

Art Costello: –Do you think that even the evilest, of evilest of men can love?

Noemi Grace: Yes, but as long as you’re being evil, whatever that is, I don’t offer a definition of that. But as long as you’re being non loving, as long as you’re steeped in non love, your behavior, your actions, your thoughts, everything within you is gonna be oozing. The non-love and oozing judgment, and blame, and things that are against other people. So yes, I mean, God is love.–

Art Costello: Ehmm.

Noemi Grace: –Remember, you know the story, you know in the Bible it talks about Jesus on the cross and the two thieves are nailed up on the process next to him, and Jesus saying: “I’ll see you in paradise. I’ll see you on the other side.” Because you know, “God loves you too.” And so yeah, we can all learn to love, but if we do it from our ego, which is where we learned to live, if we do it from this unconscious place called ego that keeps repeating the same patterns, the same expectations, living by the same expectations, and we’re gonna be very conditional and limited in our ability to love if we’re kind of in darkness, okay. But yes, God can reach anyone. No one is too far gone for God. But whether, you know, God doesn’t just snatch us out of the darkness, we have to choose to walk out of that darkness, hand in hand with God.

Art Costello: Yeah, you know, I guess sometimes I just kind of wonder about, you know, during rehabilitation and stuff y’all can people be rehabilitated and I believe that they can. I think it takes a lot of work, and I think it takes a really huge shift in self awareness, mindfulness, emotional intelligence. There’s just so many factors in it, and we don’t address them in how we rehabilitate people. You know, we think that you train them to get a job, and they can make money and all that if that’s going to rehabilitate somebody. And it’s really the furthest thing from the truth.–

Noemi Grace: Of course.

Art Costello: –But anyway, I don’t wanna get off on a tangent (laughs).

Noemi Grace: Probably not, you know, we all can wherever we are. So if anyone’s listening and you’re feeling really judgmental toward yourself or going, yeah, maybe you love yourself, but you know, you don’t know me. If you were me, you couldn’t love yourself, or I don’t feel worthy of love, or I don’t feel good enough. Well I’d been there, and yeah, you can learn to love yourself because we’re all God’s children. We’ve been created from a source, which is love. And so inside of us is divine love, and it’s a seed inside of us and we’ve got to nurture that seed. We have no connection with God. If we are living just unconsciously, and making choices impulsively or reactively, we’re not going to feel the ability to be able to live from self love. But it is there, the seed.

“We have no connection with God if we are living just unconsciously and making choices impulsively or reactively. We’re not going to feel the ability to be able to live from self-love.” -Noemi Grace Click To Tweet

Art Costello: I think one of the things that you brought up about it was, I think that we need to drop our egos. We need to suppress the ego and let go, and live in love. You know, live with a perspective of seeing goodness, being gracious, being kind, being caring.

Noemi Grace: Yeah. It struck me in a way that I thought, hmm, what you said, we need to suppress the ego. And so you know, that to me sounds like a fight. Like a battle. Okay. Ego, get down, stay down, Ego, you know? And so instead of that, we can choose, are we coming from ego? Or am I coming from love? Am I coming from divine love? And my calling from unconditional love is my perspective. That which, what do I see when I look at this for my ego? Or what do I see when I look at it from love? And so I spent a lot of years trying to fight the ego, trying to say, okay, you know, I should be less egoic. Let me, you know, I’ve been doing spiritual work. Now I should somehow, ego needs to be more check. And trying to squash it down and push it down. It’s kinda like trying to push the ball down under the water and then he expected to stay there. As soon as you move, your hands pops back up and you know, beach ball. And so it’s not a battle that we need to do. It’s just changing our source, changing from where we’re coming from. And we can ask God for help at any time. So we don’t know how to love ourselves. Ask God to help you and things start happening in your life. Like if that becomes important to you, I want to learn how to love myself, God helped me. Things will start happening in your life that you did not have to do anything like this. Prayer that came to me, or you know when I heard the divine on the elliptical, things will start happening in your life that you’re not creating, that your ego is not able to create. And so asking for that help, having the willingness, the desire to love yourself. You know, we don’t fight the ego, you’re not going to win. The Ego’s been fighting all your life.

Art Costello: Let me ask you a question. Do you think that there’s people that are egoless?

Noemi Grace: You know, I think maybe, perhaps if you could be egoless if you lived in a monastery–

Art Costello: (laughs).

Noemi Grace: –but you’re not egoless, and you know, you take your car in for something because you took it in last time, and now this seems to have the same problem and they start telling you, oh no, this is a new problem. It’s gonna cost you an extra thousand dollars. And you’re like, no, you just didn’t fix my problem, or you created a new problem, if you need that ego to assert itself. So the ego has a place, and in my book it talks about the difference between the ego and the true self, the truth of who we are.

Art Costello: –Ehmm, yup.

Noemi Grace: –We our not our ego, so when we live from the truth of who we are, we then actually can, we have a little bit of control over the ego. Not by trying to control it, but by saying, thank you for sharing. You know, this thought comes in, I need to thank you for sharing. And then choosing, choosing what your heart tells you rather than the ego.

Art Costello: Do you know why I asked you that? Cause I’ve had some pretty intelligent people that are involved in psychiatry, and Freudian Philosophy and all those things. Tell me that I’m the first person they’ve ever met that is egoless.–

Noemi Grace: Hmm.

Art Costello: –I had never ever thought about it before I was told that you know, but I’ve heard it on a number of occasions, and.

Noemi Grace: –That’s wonderful. I will not claim to be egoless (laughs).

Art Costello: –I don’t claim to either, (laughs) because I think I do have an ego.

Noemi Grace: People that interact with us, they don’t know all about us. They just know where they see, but then, you may be the first person that they’ve connected with that. In that interaction, in that connection, you didn’t come from your ego. You came from your heart, you came from your essence, from the truth of who you are, and that for them was remarkable.–

Art Costello: But that’s pretty much how I operate.

Noemi Grace: –Which is beautiful, you are living the truth of who you are, and that is a remarkable place to live. There’s jewelry there.

Art Costello: Took a long time to get there.

Noemi Grace: Oh yeah, me too, you know, and I’m not always there. You know, you’re a little ahead of me on some of this, you know, so I’m not always there. And you know, I was having an interview once and somebody said to me, so: “Were you born with some kind of special gift?” And I said: “No, God talks to everybody. We’re just don’t know how to listen.”–

Art Costello: I love that, I love that because I believe that we are all gifted. We are all gifted, if we let our gifts come out with people live in this space of fear and they say, oh, what is somebody else gonna think? What is so-and-so gonna think of me? What’s my spouse gonna think of me? What’s my mom and Dad gonna think of me? If I start acting truly who I want to be instead of who they want me to be. And you know, kids, I tell them, you know what, my grandkids, I just always tell them, be yourself. Live to your expectations and not the expectations of others.

“We are all gifted if we let our gifts come out with people living in this space of fear.” –Art Costello Click To Tweet

Noemi Grace: Yeah, I mean, so, so, so true. And we have not been taught to do that. So your grandkids are really blessed to be hearing that, we’ve been taught that we’re not, we need to be a certain way. And if we don’t do those things, then we’re not good enough. We get the feedback of, hmm, no boy you did that, huh? You know, ah, there might be. It’s going to be some negative consequence now. And so the tragedy of all this is that so many of us are taught to fear ourselves in terms of looking within. We’re taught to, we don’t wanna go there.ehmm, it’s ugly staff. Oh No, no, no, it’s gonna make you feel really bad. Don’t look at yourself. You know?–

Art Costello: (laughs).

Noemi Grace: –And the more that you actually can look, dig, dig, you know, like peeling the layers of the onion, not digging to pull out all this icky stuff, but going deeper and deeper inside yourself. Because inside, way inside is the seed of God’s love. And so the more you get closer to that, the more amazing it is. And the more beauty you see, and the more you are amazed by yourself rather than the horrible things you think you’re going to see, you see something amazing.

Art Costello: Even pulling out the icky stuff has a benefit.–

Noemi Grace: Absolutely. I’m a therapist. I know (laughs).

Art Costello: –(laughs) And when you start dealing with that icky stuff, it brings you closer to being who you truly are meant to be, you know? And you’ve got to be able to do that. And you’re right, the kids are told, young adults are told not to deal with that. And then they get to be 30 something, and they’re all screwed up. And then they have to start doing it, when they could have been doing it younger. When I was nine, and in the situation I was, I had to deal with all that, because I had no one to help me through any of it. And there were so many things that went on in my life that I had to deal with that, I just dealt with it, and I dealt with it. I think it’s what paved the way for me to become who I become.

Noemi Grace: –Absolutely.

Art Costello: –When I look back on it, yeah, it was painful, but boy, I’m glad I did it because it just really, really has been beautiful. You know, we haven’t talked about your book (laughs), and I want to take this last 15, 20 minutes to talk about your book, because I dogeared so many pages that we could do another three shows on just–

Noemi Grace: Okay (laughs).

Art Costello: I’m just a dog ears. We will, we will. But there’s so many things in it. Tell us about, about your book and what it can do for people.

Noemi Grace: Okay, great question. So I’ll start with what it’s done for me, in receiving these messages from God, and being open to receive those messages. I really a whole new understanding of who I am, really. I was very judgmental of myself. Again, grew up in a religious family, so received a lot of knowledge about God, but also received a lot of knowledge about judgment, and received, you know, started to internalize that, oh not good. And I got angry today. I’m not good enough. And so, I was go around helping people’s therapists, and liking myself sort of, but then not liking parts of me. And if I could have cut off parts of me, like cutting off an arm, or something like cutting the ear off, or something, I probably would have, you know, because I couldn’t accept all of me, and not that there was anything horrendous about me, but if I got upset, or I displeased somebody, or didn’t think about how my tone and it hurt somebody’s feelings, I would feel really bad about it and I would feel bad about myself. And so my book has a few different parts to it. It talks about seeing from love, learning to see yourself from love, and that changes everything. When I actually can look at myself from love, which means I can’t look myself from judgment at the same time because there is no love and judgment, and no judgment in love, and unconditional love there’s no judgment. And so that means I can embrace all of me. And so it’s allowed me to really, really, really deepen like the love, the like, the embrace that yes, I feel yes about myself. And it also talks about actually loving yourself first, which was like a big pill for me to swallow. But I finally got what that meant, cause I put everybody on the plate before me, and if I had time for me then I would do something for me. I’m a therapist, I’ve gotta take care of this than that one, the family friends need me, everybody needs me kind of thing. Oh, maybe the ego thing is so important that everyone needs it. So really starting to love yourself, like really making that a priority, that’s what that means. And then there’s a whole piece about discovering who you really are, which is so eye opening when you see who you are, you’ll be amazed because it is not who you think you are. So few of us actually know who we really are, because we’re not embracing all of us, and the pieces that we don’t like are front and center for us. And to be able to love, to be loved the wounds, to love, In the book it says: “To love those places inside you, they’re too wounded to love.” And that is so healing.

Art Costello: Yeah, I’ve got that one bookmarked (laughs).

Noemi Grace: Yeah, me too. And so I’ve been sharing the book with friends, and family, and clients, and people that I know, friends that I know and things like that. And people have told me this book has changed their lives. And people that I didn’t even know it all before the read it said: “The book has changed their life. It’s changed how they see themselves as brought compassion, and it changed their understanding of themselves. And it has brought joy to their life, and they are able to live in peace.” Because when we are rejecting ourselves, and we’re judging ourselves, there’s no peace there. And so it really has changed me completely, but not just me. It’s done that for other people. So my book, you know, the words in there, it has my story in there and my experience. Those are my words, but the rest are God’s words and they’re just so beautiful.

Art Costello: I want you to talk about chapter five.–

Noemi Grace: Ah, yeah.

Art Costello: –Self-acceptance miracle.

Noemi Grace: Oh, self-acceptance, yeah, that’s true. So I talked about the first four chapters. The fifth chapter is the self-acceptance miracle, and when we can love ourselves, then we can really accept ourselves. I was thought I was self accepting but, but there were aspects of myself that I didn’t like, that I couldn’t really wrap myself around, I couldn’t, I tried to pretend they weren’t existed but they exist and, and I had blown those things into some big image of them that aren’t even true. But when we accept ourselves, we stopped resisting ourselves. We stopped rejecting ourselves. It’s like a full body embrace, not just the body, it’s the mind, it’s the heart, it’s the soul. And then without that resistance, without the rejection of ourselves, we have the ability to now create a life we love. And so the book talks about how self acceptance is a miracle, and opens up a panorama of new possibilities you can not have seen before. And it just changes the way you see everything, and brings us into a place where there’s so much more available to us.

“Self-acceptance is a miracle; it opens up a panorama of new possibilities you cannot have seen before.” -Noemi Grace Click To Tweet

Art Costello: There’s two lines in it that I really want to focus on and I’ll read it: “Self-Acceptance grows over time.” That is such a truth and you know, we are such an impatient generation of people, and we expect everything to come all at once. Where this immediate gratification, and that is a powerful message to people, that self-acceptance grows over time. We have to mature, we have to percolate and have this mindset of learning everything that’s happening to us. It’s always about teaching us a lesson that we’re gonna use it another time in our our space, but when we try to hurry it along, we lose sight of that. The other line I wanted to talk about is actually in the next paragraph in it says: “Self love is incompatible with self judgment.” Those are two very powerful truths. If you learn nothing else today, those two things will really change your life if you can digest it and really put the meaning to it. Any thoughts?

“Self-expression dense grows over time, we have to mature, we have to percolate and have this mindset of learning… But when we try to hurry it along, we lose sight of that.” –Art Costello Click To Tweet

Noemi Grace: Yeah, well the self love and self judgment can’t coexist. It is so true and we are so, so habituated to judging ourselves and we don’t even know when we’re doing that. And so the more we love ourself, then actually all of those judgmental thoughts start to fade into the background, because we’re focusing on this vibration of unconditional love, which has only one source, which is divine. And so we’re focusing on divine love. We’re filling ourselves with divine love, and there’s no judgment there. So all of this, I’m not good enough, goes away without having to do 10 years of therapy. And it’s coming from a therapist here so, you know, it changes you on the inside and it changes how you see yourself, how you perceive yourself, and how you receive yourself.

Art Costello: Listening to your inner self is so important, and it’s something that we all fail to really do. Sometimes I can pick of situations that I was in, in throughout my life, where had I listened to my inner self, it would have worked out better, but I took the expectations of the outside world and listen to that versus to what I knew in my gut. We always know when our guts lie into us, or not our gut lying to us. We always know–

Noemi Grace: In our gut.

Art Costello: –in our gut, when we lie to ourselves, when you start lying to yourself, that’s how people really lose themselves because they begin to believe the lies about themselves. They don’t trust themselves and once you lose trust, that’s why it’s so important to trusting God.

Noemi Grace: Oh absolutely, absolutely so important that trust and to, you know, the lies that we believe about ourselves. A lot of them were told to us when we were very young, so we have set said lies, but then we have the other set of lies you know, where we are not exactly taking ownership, not exactly being honest with yourself about what we did, or parts of yourself because we are not ready to embrace it, we’re not in self-acceptance. And so when you can accept that, okay, imperfection, I was imperfect. Maybe I was really determined to be angry and okay, but right now I can look at that and say, I can still love myself, and I can still love the poor person on the other side of that anger.

Art Costello: Yeah, you know, my mind goes, I mean I’m spinning like a cork (laughs), and we’re starting to get close to the time and I want to give you plenty of time to be able to tell people how we can get ahold of you, what you’ve got going on.–

Noemi Grace: Thank you.

Art Costello: –What we wanna do, you know, what you wanna do, so

Noemi Grace: –Thank you, my book, An Intimate Dialogue With God, is on Amazon, it’s available there, it’s very affordable and I have also a free Ebook that contains quotes that are extrapolated from here, from the divine and that’s on my website, which is noemigrace.com, and I also have a Facebook author page, Noemi Grace Author. and I post bite size nuggets of divine wisdom there at least once a week, and they’re not in my book. They’re like new nuggets, new awareness that I’m having since I published my first book, and I have a blog as well on my website, and I’m also starting a series of workshops, and all that information is on my website. So noemigrace.com, N-O-E-M-I grace.com.

Art Costello: How about social media?

Noemi Grace: The Facebook author page? I will be creating Instagram, but I haven’t done that yet, so it’s pretty much Facebook right now. I do have a Youtube channel Noemi Grace with the red hair. I don’t do a whole lot on it, but they have some really beautiful videos on there that I have created with music and all of that.

Art Costello: Oh Great. That’s my weakness, videos.

Noemi Grace: Hmm.

Art Costello: I don’t do videos, but I guess I better start (laughs). Well it’s been a pleasure having you on and I am going to do it again. We are gonna set a time here sometime in the next couple months, and have you back on and we can continue this great conversation. It’s just been great. I’ve really enjoyed it and I hope the audience will go out and buy your book, and really look into what you’re doing because I think it’s really, really important that they do that. So with that being said, thank you for being on the show. It’s been great and I’m gonna have you back.

Noemi Grace: Thank you, Art for this dialogue and for having me back. I’m really excited to come back and have this conversation has been so uplifting for me, and I just feel so inspired and so grateful for this opportunity.

Art Costello: I’m honored, that’s right. With that being said, everybody, you know where you can get a hold of me, artcostello@expectationtherapy.com, One thing that I do have coming up that I want to plug real quick is September 12th, the online course is going to be unveiled on how to manage your expectations. It is really spectacular. We have completely rebuilt the course, and it is going to make a big difference, and again thank you for being on the show and I will have you back and thank you.

 

 

 

About Noemi Grace

The horror brought by 9/11 was incomparable and everybody still remembers it like it was yesterday. That day, Noemi Grace saw the fear from people’s faces and uttered a prayer: “Use me to heal the world.” Her prayer was answered and still being answered as she heals the world as a psychotherapist and a soul healer.

 

Connect with Noemi:

Website: http://www.noemigrace.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvUk1bPxU8EhlmzLNjl_tnQ
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/noemigraceauthor
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/noemirainbowhea/

 

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