What the Hell?

Unique Perspectives: What the Hell?

By Kim Stevens

What the Hell? 

You’re going to love this… What is hell—to you? The one you feel in your body.

I’ll tell you what feels like hell to me: Knowing I am capable of something great… and not doing it. There is no worse torture. That is my personal hell.

If you saw my Conversations with God book you would either crack up or think I am completely insane. It is marked and tabbed and written on and highlighted and underlined and circled and book marked and starred… I love it.

And this morning, one passage made me almost giddy: “Hell is the opposite of joy. It is unfulfillment. It is knowing Who and What You Are, and failing to experience that. It is being less. That is hell, and there is none greater for your soul.”

Then it goes on… “You, yourself, create the experience, whenever and however you separate your Self from your own highest thought about you.”

Oof.

I’ve written before about Marianne Williamson’s famous line: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

Same truth. Different doorways.

Whenever I am being less than I truly am— it feels awful. Not holy and certainly not humble.

The book goes on to say that the soul already knows everything (which I secretly love). But that knowing is not enough. The soul wants to experience.

I can know I am generous… but unless I act generously, it’s just a concept.

I can know I am kind… but unless I offer kindness, it’s just an idea about myself.

Then comes the line that takes my breath away: “It is your soul’s only desire to turn its grandest concept about itself into its greatest experience.”

Your soul has one desire: To make your highest idea of yourself the way you actually show up in the world.

I do not have too much more to say about this except, if the greatest version of me is not the version I bring into today… It feels like hell. And I don’t know about you, but I've been there… and it’s a place I do not care to re-visit.