About Us
Benita A. Esposito’s Story and Teaching Points
Like many women, I grew up believing that my happiness depended on creating external experiences such as a happy marriage, a successful career, a beautiful home and just the right material possessions. Although I have been successful in business, I have experienced my share of life’s hard knocks. Several romantic relationships have begun and ended, each leaving me with special gifts, but also a lot of pain. That pain has been my biggest catalyst for doing my inner healing. For 2 decades I suffered with anxiety, periodic depression, chronic fatigue and constant pain. I now realize that much of that was rooted in the haunting need to be perfect. I now know that real happiness does not come from looking for external validation.
I began to cultivate inner peace through my own body-based psycho-spiritual healing practices, studying how to consciously create my ideal life, and deepening my intimate relationship with God. My emotional wounds have healed to a large extent, although there is always more work to do. All this suffering and the lessons I have learned from it keep me humble and able to empathize with other’s pain.
I want to share with you some of my most important insights after doing 40 years of rigorous personal and spiritual growth work.
In the early days, I searched for the right psychological and spiritual techniques to get rid of my emotional and physical pain and dysfunctional patterns. I studied and participated in all kinds of therapies. I had 2 beautiful relationships with masters of psychology and spirituality, and those relationships changed my life forever. Countless other teachers and counselors contributed to my growth. While there were some amazing transformations and one gigantic experience of enlightenment, I still got my feelings hurt. I still got angry. I still felt insecure at times. It was so frustrating.
Teaching Point
As long as you believe that you must be healed and perfect to be a good enough person, it won’t work. It’s not important to get rid of all the wounds, and heal all your family of origin issues. You will never be able to develop enough perfection to consider yourself loveable most of the time.
Here’s what I’ve found works. When you shift your paradigm to wanting to know all of your self and to be intimate with all parts of your self, the good, the bad and the ugly, then you experience inner peace. You can then be present with the entirety of who you are. You experience the whole range of your emotions and remove the judgment that some emotions are good and some are bad. You learn that you can contain your emotional experiences and not act on them in unhealthy ways. You learn how to process difficult emotions in ways that are safe for you and safe for others. This is called shadow work.
As you learn to skillfully move into the eye of the storm, you pass through all the turbulence of fear and doubt and shame and anger and rage and profound grief. You promise yourself that your highest intention is to stay present with yourself every step of the way. You learn how to ground yourself in your body and breathe deeply. You refuse to abandon your self any longer. You choose to develop a tenaciously intimate relationship with your self. You call home all your lost parts and love them, just as you would love a troubled child. You love the child but you don’t condone hurtful acting-out behavior.
When the heart of the emotion is experienced in the presence of profound love, the holding patterns shift. No longer held hostage to compensating strategies, the real Authentic Self emerges, transparent, vulnerable, real and available, sometimes for the very first time. Then you in your conscious adult self can truly connect with the heart of the inner child. All of this is you. It’s all your experience. It’s all your movie. But now you can be objective about it, and at the same time, you are connected on a deep heart level. You’ll feel the Holy Spirit flooding you with love and it will settle deep into your bones and tissues because there’s finally a place for it to land: inside your body, inside your heart, inside your mind, inside your soul. This is what we call “coming home.” This is the hero’s journey. Your emotions and your whole body will relax and unwind. Your reactive emotions will shift from a stormy ocean to gentle waves caressing the shore.
After your cathartic experience, you will experience profound understanding that no one needs to explain.
From this place of unconditional love, you understand your defense strategies through and through. Insights flood your mind, and compassion takes up residency in your whole being. The reactive patterns lose their hold in running the show because they no longer operate at an unconscious level. You have real choice for the first time to be different, to be who you really are, versus all your past programming. The belief that you have to be perfect or to please others in order to be loved vanishes. Your need to rebel, distance or push against others melts. Your eyes soften and your heart opens. Pain vanishes.
You understand that all human beings go through similar struggles and that we are all in the same boat. Some of us realize our predicament and some of us don’t. The ones who don’t will continue to be like a puppet whose strings are pulled by an invisible puppeteer. While they long for true freedom and love, and they may think that they have it, time and time again they will get pulled into the quick sand of reactive emotion and behaviors. Relationships will be injured. Successful careers will be based on manipulation and control. Slow drivers will be yelled at. Bodies will suffer from all the energy held hostage from denied insecurity until the time comes when they choose to develop the skill and courage to love them selves and speak their truth from vulnerability and transparency.
Teaching Point
The shame you once carried for being less than perfect can be transformed. You can learn to let your walls down in safe places, with safe people. You can trot out your most Authentic Self into the light of day and see who she is. Sometimes she’s pretty, sometimes she’s ugly. Sometimes she is a wise old crone and sometimes an impish child. Sometimes a funny monkey swinging from trees, and sometimes the most somber recluse you could ever imagine, sitting high on top of a mountain all alone happily basking in the solitude of her own company, intimately communing with the heart of the most Holy.
Why do I serve you and other clients?
Because I have been through many episodes of the heroes journey, because I have been wounded by my own self-judgments, because I have been hurt countless times by others, because I have done so much of my own healing work, because I love myself and because I long to see all people awaken on this planet and manifest heaven on earth. This is why I serve you. This is why I am passionate about helping every marriage be a scared garden where individuals can heal, remember who they are, and take their rightful place as fully functioning creative, interdependent citizens on the planet.
I am a psychotherapist, a coach, a spiritual guide, a healer, a visionary, a poet, an educator, a writer, and an intuitive empath. Come to me when you want to look beyond the surface of your world, pull back the covers, dust off the furniture, do a little spring cleaning or tear the house down and rebuild it.
True transformation and blossoming of the human spirit is being called for now more than ever before. You can be a part of the transformation on the planet. Your marriage, your family, and your friends can be a part of the transformation on the planet. World peace starts at home. You will reap the rewards. The world will reap the rewards. And God is smiling with us all the time.
“When people are doing God’s thing, they have freedom—they can laugh at themselves, they can take humiliation and non-success because their own reputation is not at stake. The mature believer will probably look more like a holy fool than a do-gooder or a “saint.” ~ Richard Rohr. Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 11
Click here to read Benita’s prose related to this topic.
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