Janet and Jeanie

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

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

Where I Look From Determines What I See

Say what?

When riding to a work site with a colleague, he was bemoaning how nothing was working the way he wanted it to and how unfair life was. It was his favorite litany, his well-worn groove, describing how he experienced his life. The next thing I knew, a sparrow fatally dive-bombed itself into the windshield of our rental car. Startling to say the least, it reinforced my colleague’s perception about everything wrong in his life.

While stopped at a red light today, I saw a single dandelion growing in a sidewalk crack. It was perfectly formed, tall and proud. Glorious. It brought to mind an incident with the homeowners association (HOA) where I used to live. Texas was having a drought then too; we were on water restrictions.

One November day, I got a nasty-gram from the HOA about the weeds in my front flowerbed. I looked. It did need weeding, so I did. In December I got another nastier nasty-gram on the same topic. That letter I ignored, because I had weeded and thought it looked pretty good for a flowerbed in winter. In January, I got a very irate nasty-gram which said that they were going to send someone out to weed my flowerbeds, and send me the bill, because obviously I was ignoring them.

So I went outside and looked again, determined to see what they saw. Eventually it hit me. They weren’t recognizing my flowers as flowers because they were different than everyone else’s flowers. What I was recognizing as native plants, they saw only as nasty weeds. I went inside crafted a letter, letting them know I wasn’t ignoring them, I had in fact weeded in November upon receipt of their first letter. I also explained that I had worked with a horticulturist who specialized in native plants that could prosper in the absence of supplemental irrigation, since we had been limited in our water usage for a while. I offered to have this horticulturist speak with them about plantings that would be better for the environment, if they were interested. The silence deafened.

I also recognize the truth of this viewpoint when it comes to interpersonal situations. If I believe someone is basically on my side, then I am more likely to take any apparently challenging comments as useful and if I believe someone does not have my best interest at heart, I am much more likely to take it badly. Its just human nature, and at the same time, its a decision over which I have huge choice about.

As Master Teacher Jesus said, and Holmes so often quoted, “it is done unto you as you believe”. It is this perspective that I strive to look from and my belief about the world and how it works that determines what I see in my world.

Is this true for you, too?

– Janis

I Want That!

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

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?

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

Peanut Butter Sandwiches

(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?

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