’Tis the season—and in that spirit I want to share ideas that have the potential to bring greater significance to the holiday and your lives. They are ideas I cherish, and offer a peek into my personal aspirations. They continue to unfold and touch my life with love, peace, and joy, which is what I wish for you most of all, dear reader.

The babe born in the manger gifted us a message of hope. Through His inspired words, and more importantly, by example, He showed us who we are, the meaning and purpose of our lives, and what it takes to achieve the freedom He promised.

Christ is the love lying dormant in our hearts.

We tend to have no room for this love, or, like Herod, we fear it until we give it life by seeking and revering it as the wise men did.

Where do we start? How do we integrate what Jesus taught into our day-to-day lives? How do we take His words from the page, thoughts He places in our minds, and feelings He arouses in our hearts to inspire a way of life? How do we turn all that is offered into a living, breathing practice? I’ve found the best place to begin—and requires my continuous focus—is relationships.

The quality of my life has improved in direct proportion to the quality of my relationships.

A Course in Miracles places great emphasis on healing our relationships. This doesn’t simply refer to relationships between people. It refers to everything we perceive as separate from us: God, our divine self, and all living creatures. A relationship is defined as “connection,” and healing is “to make whole, unified, complete.” What we think of as unrelated, different, opposite, less or greater than, are functions of our belief in individual pieces. This belief separates, and our task is to unify our connections with these perceived “pieces”. What we consider to be many is, in truth, part of a coherent and complex unity.

The first and foremost relationship is with yourself. Yet many of us don’t take the time to know who we really are. I’m not talking about the self image we painstakingly crafted. I mean who we are at a soul level, the inner voice that prompts us. The one we don’t take seriously. The one we dismiss all too easily. The one we, frankly, simply don’t believe.

Luckily for us there is a model with a proven pathway for discovering who we really are, for remembering and unifying our connection with the oneness of which we are a part.  Jesus, whose birth many celebrate this holiday season, is the Master Teacher. He taught and demonstrated the only way to connect with God, our divine self, and our brother, is through love.

Jesus harmonizes humanity with God. He is a perfect representation of God in human form and God’s perfect idea of humanity (“This is my Son in Whom I am well pleased.”) Jesus, as the Christ, manifested the Father’s love in man. He personifies pure and perfect love in expression. What better way to illustrate the true relationship between God and humanity?

The good news, the hope Jesus’ message brings, is that whatever He did, we can do, too, and in fact is the true purpose of our lives. Yes…but how? It’s an inside job. Know thyself. Our willingness to acknowledge and to embrace the idea that we’re more than what meets the eye, more than what our senses witness to, is an essential first step. This is how we begin the process of healing the relationship with our divine self and claim our identity as a son of God, a divine being in human clothing.

Jesus harmonized the relationship of the Father with the Son, and before we can connect similarly, we must harmonize the relationship of our divine nature with our human nature; the spiritual with our physical. We can no longer deny or give it short shrift if we are to experience the love and peace Jesus promised. Through vigilance and discipline we learn to train our human self—our personality—to “lay down its life” in service to our divine self. If our soul is the kingdom we rule then it’s our responsibility to clarify roles: The personal serves the impersonal.

Jesus is the pioneer of divine humanity. Consciously human and consciously divine, he wasn’t confused about his mission. He brought the love of God, through his physical form, into the world and gave it in service to others. This is how he healed the relationship—unified the connection—to all living things, the true sons of God. This is our potential. This is what we are here to learn. This is how we bring heaven to earth.

All the perceived pieces – God, self, others beautifully connected and unified into a cohesive oneness through love. This is the meaning of healing our relationships. What a gift! What a vision! What a model to emulate! It is the good news of the season and cause for celebration. A child was born, a light of love in the darkness, to return us to ourselves, to each other, to God, and to the heaven we never truly left.

“The sign of Christmas is a star,

a light in the darkness.

See it not outside yourself,

but shining in the Heaven within,

and accept it as the sign

the time of Christ has come.”

A Course in Miracles