Author: CSLT-Faces

Breakthrough!

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Today I sat quietly, closed my eyes and ventured into a bold inward quest to understand why I hadn’t been able to manifest my goals. As the process evolved, it became obvious; I was responsible. I guess I’d always known that, but hadn’t wanted to deal with it!

Under a microscope, I saw evidence of a substantial build-up of resentment in my life. Beginning in childhood, and continuing throughout my life, I had accumulated quite a load of anger and hurt feelings. I tried to forget them, but truthfully, they were old familiar “companions”. I hadn’t figured out how to let them go, forgive and move on. I felt “entitled” to feel “wronged” by those mean-spirited people and regretful events that had impacted my life so negatively. I hadn’t seen it as any of MY doing; I had been the victim, here!

Oops! Had I thought of myself as a victim? That would mean I had no control over what happened to me. That really touched a nerve! If I am responsible in my life, what was I thinking – giving someone or anything power over me? I started getting angry again, only NOW I was mad at MYSELF!! (I had to take a few deep breaths to calm down.) If I am undermining my own progress of manifesting, because of resentments I can’t forget, how do I wipe the slate clean and move on?

Carrying around all those resentments tainted every new relationship or situation. I also saw that it hadn’t just been anger I’d been carrying around; I’d also been harboring FEAR that I could potentially fall prey to some of those old familiar scenarios in my life again in a present day experience. Because of this, I’d been denying myself the simple privilege of enjoying the “now” – a new, previously unknown, unblemished moment in time.

I’d always believed myself to be intelligent and evolving spiritually, but I hadn’t been very happy or content. So, obviously, I needed to make better CHOICES. First, I made the choice to forgive myself, because I realized I couldn’t imagine continuing in life without forgiveness for the many blunders I’d caused, all on my own, in my life. Next, I chose to forgive everyone else whoever hurt me, knowing I couldn’t ask anyone else to be infallible when I’m so obviously imperfect. Thirdly, I chose to change the classification of “Resentments” to “Lessons Learned”. New slogan: Better choices yield better results. This stuff works! I felt so much lighter already!

At the end of this inward quest, I felt so liberated and free! As I opened my eyes, I understood that what had blocked my manifestation had been my death-grip on my old RESENTMENTS! Forgiveness took them away in a flash! Amazing! What a productive use of my time!

– Serina French

Janelle

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by Carolyn Crawford

The first time I met Janelle she was kicking in the door of her beat up old car which wouldn’t start. She was all of 19 years old and fresh out of prison. I suggested if she wanted to sell the car she should keep it in the best shape possible. She agreed and let go of her anger for a moment.

We became fast friends or perhaps a better description would have been big sister, little sister. She couldn’t hold a job because of her anger. Her mother was a weak woman, an alcoholic and incapable of being any help. Janelle was a reformed tweeker. Drugs had been the only way she could get along with herself. I helped her get a new car and an apartment on her own. I got her work training as a ballroom dance teacher and she was brilliant. She learned patterns easily but when it came time to work with new students, her immaturity got her fired. She didn’t have the language skills or the patience. She opted to become a stripper which of course led to bad company and drugs again. So she decided to move to Texas to live with her fundamental religionist father who had strict rules which she couldn’t follow- not surprising. She ran away, ending up with a boyfriend in Florida and got pregnant.

She returned to Tucson to have the baby and gave it up for adoption as she couldn’t take care of herself- let alone a child. She now ekes out a living doing office work for my ex-husband. She is however growing up. Her spirit has been crushed but a new love is reviving her. We talk now and then. I give her books to read slowly leading her to a new thought perspective.

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are the tasting the taste this minute of eternity
We are the pain and what cures the pain
We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours

– Jalaluddin Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

Janet and Jeanie

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My sister Janet died in the middle of February. On the day she died, I opened to this poem by St. John of the Cross from the book, Love Poems From God:

My soul is a candle that burned away the veil;

Only the glorious duties of light I now have.

The sufferings I knew initiated me into God.

I am a holy confessor for men.

When I see their tears running across their cheeks and falling into His hands,

What can I say to their great sorrow that I too have known.

The soul is a candle that will burn away the darkness,

Only the glorious duties of love we will have.

The sufferings I knew initiated me into God.

Only His glorious cares I now have. (p. 305)

In the last days of her life, Janet was in a tremendous amount of pain as her bones disintegrated from bone cancer. With any movement, she would moan in pain. From brain cancer and the morphine, she really wasn’t able to talk much, and not like before. As I was with her, I would sometimes think, “Oh my gawd. I want to do all the inner and outer work and the healing and growing that I need to in order not to end up dying the way she is.” The beautiful thing about it was that she knew these stages were coming, and as Rumi says, she allowed herself to die before she died. She contacted everyone that she knew and cleaned up any lingering unfinished business or wounds. We didn’t have much to clean up and I always I felt so treasured. She saw the best in me, the beauty of my inner bring, and she forgave the rest or else gave it no energy. Ultimately, she did that for everyone.

I think that through this very powerful experience, Janet burned away huge amounts of karma and illusion. When I attune to her now, I see her in mists of golden and white light as she prays for her family, her loved ones, and all of humanity. She surrendered deeply to Love, dying to her old sense of separation, and she is now reborn into an awareness of what Rev. Donald said in his prayer on Sunday, “I now know that all is Love.”

With her death and transition, something new was born in me as well. It is a deep desire and commitment to love and to see the highest good in everyone; to forgive, so that I can be free to let Love Itself flow through me in the way that my sister Janet learned to do. She truly took a “Leap into Love,” surrendering everything, and as a result, experienced who she really is and Life Itself. For her modeling of that to me, I am deeply grateful. I just hope to do it without going through what she did, but instead, clean up and transform my life every time I remember to remember that it is all Love. In that way, I hope to take on “the glorious duties of Love” that St. John of the Cross wrote about in his poem. I want to do it by choice, without being faced with a terminal illness as she was.

It is not easy to even contemplate, but through her, I can experience the glorious end result. For this parting gift, I give my deepest thanks.

– Jeanie Underwood

I Am Love

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I am Love. Will you let me in?

To have me in your heart is to receive an essential element of life. Just as your lungs need air – you need Love.

I am Love and I’m not blind. I love you as you are today, unconditionally – a precious soul in a perfect life. I am God’s gift to you. Accept and trust me and allow yourself to take me in without fear that I will leave.

I make life worth living and inspire you to reach out and perpetuate the eternal connection with others so you all shine like candles in the darkness of doubt, fear, loneliness and uncertainty.

To express your unselfish best unites and transforms lack and limitation into all possibilities – ever growing, ever rising – miraculously new in every moment. This is Love.

Love is the key that opens channels blocked with resentments. It brings the fences down and opens ways to see anew without boundaries. Love grants wishes for forgiveness and makes dreams of a better tomorrow come true.

Can you stand and sing of beauty, filling empty spaces with your own vibration? This is Love.

Imagine what it would be like to see only the best in everything. Without judging, analyzing, and defining people, places, situations and things as positive and negative, simply make the decision to lift the things you do not understand about yourself and others up for the Sacred explanation, for it expresses solutions through Love.

Notice and feel the numerous moments in your day when I lift your spirits, your thoughts and your gait with kind and encouraging words and random acts you perceive as miraculous strokes of good luck.

I am Love and I am never wasted. I am never offered with limits and conditions. If care is given selfishly, I’m not there.

You cannot hear a child’s laughter without me being there. I bring the sound of angels singing to the tune of child’s prayer, for I am Love.

I reside in the unprotected layers within your heart, stirring emotions you thought were hidden under all your masks and shields. Even if you hurt, I am there.

My essence will shine brightly through your soul in every unselfish moment and tender expression of kindness. When you show Love, the angels dance to the rhythm of your heart and blessings abound.

So, Beautiful Child of God that you are, make this your quest – to express unconditional love and grant forgiveness; to live humbly with gratitude and joy in your heart; and graciously accept the gift of God’s rich blessings.

I am Love, God is Love and so are you!

– Serina French

I Want That!

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We think we know what we want. But do we, really?

Conscious wants are those things we are aware of wanting in our lives. Unconscious wants are those things that we are unaware of wanting, which can include things we say we don’t want. Unconscious wants might be old thought patterns, possibly survival patterns that may or may not serve us any more. They typically have strong emotions attached to them: fear, rage, grief, loss, anger, etc. Metaphysics teaches that a thought plus a feeling yields a demonstration, an outcome. Both the thought and the feeling can be either constructive or destructive. Thought is the filter and emotion is the mechanism that helps create the object of our focus, and both operate with the Principle (the law of choice and consequence) that’s always working.

If an unconscious want is in conflict with a conscious want, and especially if it has strong emotion attached to it, the conscious want is overridden. William James accurately observed, “The unconscious mind rules the world.” As an example, we may consciously desire to be prosperous, but if we have an unconscious belief in the need to struggle, or an unconscious want to prove our lack of deservedness, then the unconscious want neutralizes our potential and our desire for abundance.

Thinking about unconscious wants in the same way we think about conscious wants may seem confusing at first. Consider, “Nothing is hidden that will not be revealed,” from the Bible. An unconscious defamatory want can be viewed as something that wants to be recognized and healed because it is inconsistent with the Truth. Therefore, it reveals itself in order to be recognized and healed. If we add to this, the quote from Job, “What I fear the most is upon me.”, we have another piece of the puzzle. Taken together, we have some clues about the power of unconscious wants.

If we start by viewing experiences and conditions in Life as only feedback, feedback about our thoughts and nothing more, then we can take the emotional intensity out of them. We can choose to look at our experiences simply as information instead of making negative conclusions about ourselves. Our tendency to conclude that our experience is right/wrong, good/bad, etc., or to conclude that we are right/wrong, good/bad, etc., does not really help us. When we pretend that a condition is more than just feedback, we tend to forget that we always have choice, and that we can change our thinking, which is the real cause of the condition in the first place. Our outcomes are nothing more than our own thoughts manifested; however, because of our tendency to judge them, we experience victimhood, suffering, etc. From this shifted viewpoint of “It’s only feedback,” we can look at our experiences as nothing more than feedback and not empower this other stuff.

We are always at choice, have always been at choice and the Law always says “Yes”. Can you recognize and empower what you really want? Obviously, the answer is “Yes” again. So the next question becomes, “Will you?”

If It Ever Works, It Always Works

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Dr. Ernest Holmes wrote, “If Principle ever works, It always works.” In plain language, Principle is the law of cause and effect, choice and consequence. If we really want what we say we want in Life, our part is to keep our minds focused on what we want, rather than on what we don’t want. This is not always easy and sometimes it seems virtually impossible.

The world clamors for attention, distracting us from the Truth and from our real desires. However, the secret to peace of mind, health, emotional balance and all the good in life is to keep our minds focused on these things, rather than their opposites. This way, Principle can work for us for these positive supporting ideas instead of for us for something else.

The swamp opossum Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Jesus said, “Our only enemies are in our own households,” (i.e. in our own minds). If we can see these so called enemies as nothing more than misjudgments or misperceptions, then we can choose again and experience a different outcome. We can embrace beauty, magnificence, power, intelligence, joy, and discover our desired Life in all Its glory.

I heard a song a long time ago. “Nothing is too wonderful to happen, nothing is too good to be true, nothing is too good to last forever, everything is possible to God, through me and you.”

Open your hands, heart and mind and accept more than you ever thought possible. If Principle ever works, It always works, and It’s working right now in you, and it is capable of fulfilling your greatest dreams if, when and as you choose It.

Do You ‘Know’ This?

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God Expression
Free Will
Choice
No Accidents
No Blame
No Sin
No Sinners
No Victims.

I claim the door open to remembering who we are, why we chose this Spiritual Center philosophy, what we believe as a philosophy, living from love, and remembering we all agreed to play for what ever it was we agreed to give or receive, and to be made aware of to grow.

Knowing love surrounding and embracing all and everyone, I declare peace, ease, reflection, and acceptance for what each individual brings to the table. Releasing into Universal Mind/Subjective Mind, in the big picture all is already good.

And so it is.

– Lynne Heygster, Practitioner

Is it Really Intuition -vs- Reasoning?

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There was a post on Yahoo News (from LiveScience.com) this week called “Belief in God Boils Down to a Gut Feeling” by Stephanie Pappas. She reported on a study that suggested a link between thinking styles and the likelihood that someone would believe in a benevolent deity. The study authors noted that those who operated on intuition were more likely to believe than those who operated more on a reasoning or reflective basis.

From the on-line article: “The researchers plan to investigate how genes and education influence thinking styles, but they’re quick to note that neither intuition nor reflection is inherently superior. ‘It’s not that one way is better than the other,’ study researcher David Rand of Harvard said in a statement. ‘Intuitions are important and reflection is important, and you want some balance of the two. Where you are on that spectrum affects how you come out in terms of belief in God.’ The research was published Sept. 19 online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.”

This article was of interest to me personally because I have been experiencing a shift from reflective to intuitive for the past several years, and concurrent with this my belief in Spirit has moved from questioning to a sense of profound knowing.
I experienced two incidents just yesterday that confirmed the power of intuition in my life. In one case, I realized that I needed to check with my boss about the sponsorship of a community event that we had discussed several weeks ago. I had not yet acted on this thought when, a few minutes later, my boss came into my office with the executive director of the organization that is hosting the event. They had been in his office discussing the sponsorship, and then they came to tell me what had been decided. In the second case, I had been thinking that it would be nice to get together for dinner this weekend with some friends we hadn’t seen for a few weeks. A few hours later, Don called to say that these friends had contacted him about getting together, and we made plans accordingly.

by Karen Chatfield

What has your experience been?

Peanut Butter Sandwiches

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(I recently came across this story and it made me chuckle.)

At a construction site, when the lunch whistle blew, all the workers sat down together to eat. And every day Sam would open his lunch pail and start to complain. He’d cry, “Not peanut butter and jelly sandwiches again. I hate peanut butter and jelly!”

This went on day after day until one of the guys said, “Sam, if you hate peanut butter and jelly, so much why not tell your wife to make you something different?”

“What do you mean, my wife?” Sam replied. “I’m not married. I make my own sandwiches.” We all make our own sandwiches.

– By Richard Fisher

What’s on your sandwich?

Creating Faith and Possibility from Nothing

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This week during my morning quite time I have been studying faith. What is it, how does one obtain it, increase it and build a life that is reflective of it. In my study I came across this quote from Ernest Holmes in his book Science of Mind; A Philosophy, a Faith a Way of Life.

“In order to have faith we must have the conviction that all is well. In order to keep faith we must allow nothing to enter our thought which will weaken this conviction. Faith is built up from belief acceptance and trust. Whenever anything enters our thought which destroys these attitudes to that extent faith is weakened.” – Ernest Holmes

I love this quote. Let’s dissect it together to uncover what’s there.

In order to have faith we must have the conviction that all is well
To understand faith it is important that we also understand fear and its origin. To experience fear is natural. It was created for survival and to protect us from physical danger. However, fear that results from something other than being attacked by a lion or chased by natives with spears is unnatural. This unnatural form of fear is created by our imagination or the image which we hold within the nation of our mind.

What images are you holding in your mind at this very moment? Do you see images of people that love you, support your growth and encourage openness to new possibilies; of you being thankful for the endless opportunities surrounding you (that you may or may not choose to receive); of how you’ve overcome past obstacles and are now embracing a future worthy of you? OR are you holding images of painful relationships that you have not chosen to accept or forgive, or images of losing a client or a job, of running out of money and sleeping on the street, of a future where you’ve somehow ended your life unfulfilled, settling for memories about dreams of what your life could have become. What images would you like to see? What possibilities would you like to be available? You have the power to choose.

In order to keep faith we must allow nothing to enter our thought which will weaken this conviction.
Having faith is about choosing to see life purely as the symphony it is. It is about giving up the image, opinion or belief that there is something “wrong” with the world, with your life with the people around you. Having faith is finally accepting that ALL truly is well in spite of what you may see with your eyes, hear with your ears or feel as a result of holding disempowering and/or judgment-based images in your mind.

Now, the logical and/or skeptical mind may argue that there is indeed evil and danger in the world and we must protect ourselves. This thinking says that it is short sited and unsafe to live as if “all is well.”

To this thinker, I would suggest that it is short sited and unsafe to live as if “all is not well.” This form of thinking is faith in reverse (fear) and is just as powerful to create and/or destroy one’s life. While there are indeed many forms of danger in the world, danger is not somehow “bad or wrong.” It just is. When we stop seeing life for what it is–neutral yet abundantly generous, and instead choose to assess and cast unfavorable judgment on it, we levy judgment upon ourselves and erode our faith or belief in the abundance and oneness that is.

Faith is built up from belief acceptance and trust. Whenever anything enters our thought which destroys these attitudes to that extent faith is weakened.
What do you believe or hold strongly as an opinion? What is your attitude about this belief? What is your attitude because of this belief? This attitude or way of being can build or destroy your faith and ultimately your life.

How you experience the world is based on your faith. Do you accept life as it is? Do you trust that laws of nature and success will never fail? Do you trust that the laws of love and spirit will never fail? Do you trust yourself to live fully as a part of the all that is? Do you trust that the opportunities and people that are assigned to your life are all there to further your growth and encourage mastery of your thinking and emotions?

You have the power to build your faith? You are building faith at this very moment. What type of faith is it? Does it pull you toward your destiny or drag you in reverse and keeps you in the past?

Bottom line: Building faith and creating new possibility is about choice. Nothing more is required.

By: Michael Tucker

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