The other day I came across this quote from Kevin Ngo and it fit perfectly with the theme for this month. Occasionally we all need a word of encouragement or a reminder that we are worth the investment. That includes me. If, as don Miguel Ruiz suggests we do the best we can in all things, then that is our best. We each have the potential to do our best and to know that we can manifest the life we are trying to create. It is important that we always remember to stay focused on the vision we have for the life we are seeking to manifest. If we work on this vision a little bit every day, then we will achieve it. When we stop taking those daily actions in our lives, we inadvertently or unconsciously create the life we do not want. So stay encouraged and create a circle of support, as encouragement is important for all.
Read moreBreath light into your dark side
Recently, a friend shared a song called Secrets with me. It is sung by Mary Lambert. She begins the song by acknowledging some of her secrets, some of what some might call her dark side. The parts of ourselves that we do not always want to like or own. As Lambert says,
“They tell us from the time we're young
To hide the things that we don't like about ourselves
Inside ourselves”
We are all aware of our dark side. We know when we have had dark thoughts, dark actions, or dark behaviors. I can remember in my own life thoughts, actions, and behaviors that I am not proud of. Like Lambert sings, I was taught to hide those secrets inside myself.” Hiding our secrets, our shadows, our dark aspects only strengthens the power of the darkness in our life.
Read moreUse it!
In this month’s newsletter, I gave us a few things about self-worth to consider. I asked us to think about whether we knew God loved us just as we are. I suggested we think about whether we see life challenges as confining or empowering. I encouraged us to remember to periodically empty out the emotional, mental, and spiritual clutter and keep ourselves from becoming a “dumpster.” Finally, I challenged us to remember that we are of value to ourselves, others, and our community.
Sometimes it may feel like your life is not where you would like it to be. Most of us, myself included, have those moments. It is then I remember the words of Ram Dass who said, “Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it!” Life is a veritable toolbox to help you achieve whatever you desire to achieve in your life. Use it!
Read moreSit, Meditate, and Trust
A few days ago, I read this quote by Sylvia Bookstein, which read, “Don’t just do something. Sit there.” I had spent some time thinking about what this means to me personally, but this morning as I was thinking more about trust, I began to think about how it is one’s meditation practice, which awakens our ability to trust in the knowledge that all the wisdom and compassion we need in life is already within us. When I take the time to sit there and spend time with me, then I become more aware of all of who I am, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I get to sit with my passions, my aggression, my wisdom, and my ignorance. I remember Pema Chodron talking once about a form of meditation, which meant tranquility insight. It was through this approach to meditation, which one was able to get to know each other. We gain peace and trust with and within ourselves when we get to know all of ourselves.
Read moreTrust Me
When I was intentionally beginning my personal healing work, the writer my therapist was using and encouraging all clients to read was the work of John Bradshaw, author of Home Coming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child. This book discusses how the process of healing your wounded inner child is one of grief, and it involves these six steps. The first of these six steps is trust.
The person we most need to trust in our lives is ourselves. In order for us to begin our own healing process (emotionally, mentally, physically, or spiritually); we must begin by trusting ourselves. For many people, our wounded inner child is in hiding. That wounded part does not trust others and to some extent does not even trust the older version of who we are. To keep themselves safe, they learned to hide until they could find someone who would be a supportive and non-shaming ally.
Read moreThe One You Feed
There is an old Cherokee tale that I share quite frequently, normally when I am talking with someone about choices and energy. However, the other day I came to realize it was about learning to trust the voice of the Divine within. The story goes like this for those who have not heard it yet.
One evening, an elderly
Cherokee brave told his
grandson about a battle that
goes on inside people.
Trust the process
Long before I was ever exposed to the book of Galatians in the New Testament, I had heard the saying “you reap what you sow.” I have come to understand that there is a truth behind this saying. Recently, someone shared with me that it was important for people to tell their torch song, that woe is me song, that somebody done me wrong song. I told them that the only thing that needed to happen with the torch song is that it needed to be torched. See when we sow our torch song and focus on all that we think is wrong with our lives, what we reap are more things that are wrong with our life.
Conversely, when we focus on the positives and the blessings in our lives, then we reap more of those in life. One of the things I have learned is that we really do reap what we sow. If I am going to sing any song, it is going to be my praise song, my what I have overcome, what I have to be grateful for, how blessed I am song. What I have come to realize in my life is that it is this positive energy, attitude, and momentum, which carries me through.
Read moreTrust and Faith
After having spent a month reading about, reflecting on, and thinking about faith, I realized how natural it was to transition to trust. Trust is the belief in that in which we have faith. It is the ability to believe in what we know in the core of our beings to be true. We have faith in that which we trust. Simultaneously, we trust that which we have faith in, that which we know to be true at the core of our being.
Some people struggle to trust things that raise their consciousness and/or vibrational level. We sometimes wonder what we are sensing is really happening, or are we simply making this up because it feels good. So how do we trust that which can help us to grow and evolve in our connection to the Ultimate.
Read moreLet’s Dance!
Faith, for some, is about the relationship they have with their Higher Power. Faith is about one’s level of awareness and attunement to the presence of the Higher Power in our everyday lives. So deepening one’s faith is like developing any relationship. That deep knowledge of what the Divine can do in and through our lives develops over time. It is about our constant interaction with our spiritual partner. Through our interactions we
Practicing faith, then, is like developing any relationship. You have to give it time and attention. We have opportunities to interact with the Divine in every aspect of our lives and with all of our senses.
Read moreThe Brace for your Brokenness
Recently, I shared with someone that every step I take is in faith. They did not fully understand what I meant. Sometimes we hear people talk about walking in faith. For me, it is not just a spiritual faith walk, but also a physical faith walk. On October 15 2007, as I was opening my office door at the church I was pastoring at, I felt a pain shoot down my right leg, followed almost immediately by numbness and a sense of shock. I also found myself going why now God as within minutes, a special guest and his entourage arrived and I was bracing myself to figure out what was going on, how I was going to lead worship, and how I was going to manage to look like a calm, cool, collected leader in the midst of this storm that was suddenly and unexpectedly raging in my life. The words which kept floating through my spirit were peace, be still. Peace, be still. Through the grace of God and the support of my wife and good friends, my car and I got home safely.
Read moreWalk in the dark
When I was pastoring, the song we processed into every Sunday was “Walk in the Light.” We never sang the whole song, nor do I think anybody knew the whole song, but they liked the rhythm and the notion of walking in the light. For a number of reasons, I have been thinking about this song quite a bit lately. It dawned on me the other day that walking in the light is fairly easy. When the lights are on, we can see details about our surroundings and others that we cannot see when the light is off. When we are walking in the light, we can see the path before us. We can see obstacles in our way. We can see the wide diversity of colors that surround us. We can see things and then associate the scents we are experiencing with them. We can see the signals that the weather is changing in the sky. We can see the clouds forming shapes. We can see flowers blooming, plants breaking through the soil, animals of all kinds feeding themselves and looking for food. We can see the plants and trees responding to the changes in the atmosphere. There is so much we can see when we walk in the light.
Read moreWhat do you know?
I started this discussion in the cover letter for the August newsletter. Just about every religious tradition in the world, whether they call themselves a denomination or a movement, has something one is to believe if one is to be a part of that tradition. It may be a part of their principles, creeds, sacred writing, or even spoken about as a “what we believe” statement. Each is clear on what it is they believe. A belief is the acceptance that a statement or body of writing is true or that something exists. It does not necessarily mean that you know it is true or that something exists, rather that you are choosing to accept that it is true.
Beliefs are ideas.
Read moreAre you throwing your life away?
This morning I stumbled across a quote from the writing of C. JoyBell C., which seemed to echo one of the things we talked about at Love and Inspiration yesterday morning. She wrote, “You can be the most beautiful person in the world and everybody sees light and rainbows when they look at you, but if you yourself don't know it, all of that doesn't even matter. Every second that you spend on doubting your worth, every moment that you use to criticize yourself; is a second of your life wasted, is a moment of your life thrown away. It's not like you have forever, so don't waste any of your seconds, don't throw even one of your moments away.”
It seems that doubting one’s self is something many of us have mastered. We no longer need to practice doubting or criticizing ourselves; we have practiced it for so long, that we have mastered it.
Read moreSilent Understanding
Currently, I am teaching a five week summer intensive on Queer Theory and one of my students told me that until she took this course she thought she understood everything and know she feels as if she understands nothing and is not even sure she understands herself at present. My response was, “I am so happy for you.” Understanding something often times means that you have to open yourself up to new understandings and release old ones. Today, I want to share a piece I read recently about understanding Zen. It resonated with my spirit and reinforced for me the teaching of don Miguel Ruiz who helped me understanding that it is what it is, nothing more, nothing less. We make things something because of the meaning and value we attach to it and the perspective we attach to it. We spoke about this at our last Love and Inspiration on Skype gathering. Energy is energy. It does not become something positive or negative until we attach a meaning to it. You may resonate or not with the story below about understanding Zen, but that will depend on you and the meanings you attach to it.
Read more"If you can't fix it, feature it!"
This seems to be the theme for this week, “If you can’t fix it, feature it1.” I wish I could say I created that phrase, but it was given to me by a colleague of mine Rev Glenna Tillery Shepherd, pastor at Decatur UCC in Decatur, GA. It is like that old saying, we have all heard – “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” We all have things, situations, and parts of our lives that we can’t fix. It is not about what it is, but what you do with it.
This week, for me, has been filled with examples of featuring it, when you can’t fix it. For example, the other day I met an amazing person who has Tourette’s syndrome (his can’t fix it thing), however, when he is drumming he becomes asymptomatic. Therefore, he drums. He has taken what has helped him all his life and features it in every aspect of his life
Read moreUnderstanding Understanding
I have been thinking about this word for a few days now and while the academic part of my brain understands the word means to comprehend, my inner child keeps thinking about a time of sitting under my Bubby’s needlepoint. I remember it as if it was yesterday, but it was now probably 50 years ago, if not more. She was working on piece of needlepoint, sitting by her feet, and looking it up, all I could see was the underside with strings of yarn going all different places and many little knots. I remember wondering why she would want to create something so ugly, when we could be doing making something amazing like blowing bubbles that the light shone through and then floated up to heaven. Then she would have me climb up on her lap and look at her creation and it always looked so beautiful. I never saw any of the knots, strings, or anything else, which took away from its beauty. I could only see how it all came together to form one beautiful picture. It was at this young age, that my Bubby taught me that our understandings of the Ultimate Creator’s ways are not ours. The Ultimate sees things in one way and we see them in another. My Bubby taught me that we are standing under the Creator’s masterpiece and so we see things one way. However, there are moments in our life, when the Creator provides us with the opportunity to see the larger picture, just as my Bubby had helped me.
Read moreSee the Possibilities
The past few weeks, I have been reflecting quite a bit on forgiveness. In part, this came about because of a film we watched a few months ago called The Power of Forgiveness. One of the women in the film, Alexandra Asseily said in the film, “I think that if we all just remember that if we forgive ourselves, it’s a wonderful beginning to forgiveness. Because actually, if we really forgive ourselves for all the wickedness we think we have inside or all the things we think are wrong with ourselves, we would then be so much more compassionate with others. And I think probably it’s our lack of compassion with ourselves that makes us so upset with others.”
Forgiving ourselves is an opportunity to break the emotional ties to the pain and set ourselves free. It is an opportunity to release the pain, anger, and other emotions that have built up within us over time.
Read moreSet Yourself Free
If you had the opportunity to free yourself from an emotional, mental, spiritual, or physical jail would you? That may sound like a strange question, but it is one, which requires some reflection. Over the course of our lives, we experience things, which can create painful memories on various levels (emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and physically). As long as we hold on to the pain of those memories, we create an energetic tie to the moment in which they occurred or the cumulative effect of painful memories over time.
As I have shared in previous reflections, I learned of some amazing people in this world who model forgiveness and its liberating affect in their lives, while watching a documentary called The Power of Forgiveness.
Read moreA Musical Trilogy
Back in March of this year, so not so long ago, I remember reflecting on an old Beatle song, Let It Be. Yesterday, I was reminded of the importance of those words one more time. I remembered that it is what it is, nothing more or nothing less. In this month, when we are focusing on forgiveness of self and others, I found myself having to practice what I teach. I learned that someone I trusted had failed to tell me they could no longer uphold their part of an agreement. I have to admit, my first reaction was “seriously, you are just now telling me this and you have known for months.” Then the emotional work on my side began as I realized that I was sitting in judgment of this person and the situation and the Beatle song began coming back to me, just let it be.
My conversation with this person had caused me to lose balance temporarily. That did not make either of us right or wrong, it was the Ultimate Creator’s way of helping me in my own journey and maintaining awareness of what the Ultimate Creator was doing for me in that moment. So I had to let it be!
Read moreForgiveness and Justice
A few weeks ago, our movie group gathered to watch the documentary, A Power of Forgiveness. One of the scenes in the documentary that stood out for me was about a psychology professor who specialized in forgiveness, marriage, and family. Dr Everett (“Ev”) Worthington’s experience with forgiveness is not just something he writes about, but something he practices in his daily life. In the documentary, it told the story of
In the late 1990’s, on a New Year’s Eve, someone broke into his mother’s house. An attempted theft turned into a brutal murder when his mother fought back. A suspect was captured who volunteered details no one could have known who was not at the scene. However, because of “some issues with the evidence,” a jury would not indict.
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