Tag: CSLT-Faces

Greetings Beloveds!

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It is my hope that you and your families are in excellent health and finding more excuses for love and joy in life.

I am trusting that everyone will be forgiving of this mass communication, and hopefully pass onto others our brief update. Needless to say, it has taken me a while to be able to form the ideas of what this crazy experience has been like for us here in Abu Dhabi. A lot of processing going on. lol

It is hard to believe that I have nearly completed my 2-year teaching contract here. Prayer is an incredibly powerful tool, but one could have never expected it to be answered in the way it was–Wow! Not only has this opportunity provided for us financially, allowing Ryan the chance to work on his degree as well as availing us to travel to places that we NEVER would have thought that we’d visit, but it has been such incredible spiritual fodder. Living in a Muslim country has been such a tremendous experience for us, and we are ever so grateful for being able to experience Islam first hand. Prior to moving here, we, like many folks, thought that the Middle East was a place full of angry Muslims who were trying to impose their radical beliefs on others–I mean, that’s what the media tells us, night after night, right?? — everyone is Taliban and women are silenced and imprisoned by Islam. Whoa, so NOT true!! As Donald has said on more than one occasion, the news reports on the “exception” and not the “rule”. I don’t think I could possibly articulate the Peace and Love that I experience here, as people are so friendly, so hospitable, and so respectful. They don’t gossip, but laugh at their petty complaints and shrink from confrontation. It’s almost the complete opposite of the Western paradigm, which has probably been the hardest part of coping with this culture here–accepting that I have a lot of areas to improve on. lol Naturally, living in this environment has impacted my consciousness greatly, and I often wonder in awe what prayer I made to create this wonderful experience.

I just want to share a couple of Arabic words that are sprinkled into nearly every sentence here, and are so attuned with New Thought/SOM teachings, that have had a profound impact on me.

  • In’shallah: directly translated, it means “God willing”. It is almost synonymous with the word, YES, and it implies a promise, a trusting, a knowing that something is going to happen. Whenever something in the future is described, “In’shallah” ends the sentence. When someone asks you to do something, this is your response. Even though this expression seems commonplace, I don’t know if I can really articulate what a powerful word this is. It has personally reminded me that every intention is prayer that Spirit is eager to manifest; and it is not an “if….” but a matter of “when…” So I love hearing that “God is willing” to do something for me when I make a request.
  • Alhumdiallah: This means, “Give thanks to God”, and is the response you give when someone asks you ” How are you? — How’s it going?”– Whoa! — isn’t that interesting? I love when someone asks me this question, because it gives me a moment to pause and feel grateful for this body and this life that I have. I think, “Yea, thanks to God, I am here, having this breath and sharing this moment with you. Pretty cool.”
  • Asamalakum: This is what you say when you want to say “hi” to someone, and it means “The Peace of Allah Be Upon You”. How cool is that? I remember when I went to Catholic mass, the part of the service where everyone shakes hands and says “Peace” to each other used to be my favorite time. But now I get to do it ALL the time! It is wonderful to be in the awareness that you are offering Peace to people you meet, recognizing that the Spirit of Life is “upon them”. I think this is my absolute favorite Arabic expression because of this.

As you might imagine, we are in no hurry to leave the “sandbox”, our amusing term for the UAE. We are content to stay at least another year, or at least until Ryan completes his degree–In’shallah! lol However, we hope to see many of you when we come to visit this summer in August. We may only be able to come to one Sunday service because of our schedule, but we feel hopeful that we might be able to meet up some other time to officially catch up. Know in the meanwhile that you are always in our prayers and thoughts, and that we love you very much.

May you continue to enjoy your journey into your Divine enfoldment, as I know you are a blessing and a joy to this world. We look forward to seeing you soon!

— Judy Imamudeen

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

Where I Look From Determines What I See

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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

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

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?