Today, know there is a way forward toward your deepest hopes and callings. No person or institution can block you. You can't block you, either. Love, Spirit is more powerful than any obstacles. Know this for yourself. Know this for all the people all over the world who feel trapped. Feel this divine power and truth pulsing throughout the world.
In the book of Revelation, God says, "I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it."
Today, know there is a way forward toward your deepest hopes and callings. No person or institution can block you. You can't block you, either. Love, Spirit is more powerful than any obstacles. Know this for yourself. Know this for all the people all over the world who feel trapped. Feel this divine power and truth pulsing throughout the world.
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Today, don't try so hard. Know that sometimes striving is just a way to manage our fear of the unknown and try to maintain some degree of control. Today, know Love as present, holding you, speaking words-beyond-language. Know that Love is speaking to those around you just the way they can feel and understand.
Our challenges are not our fault. We are shaped by the beliefs our culture, our upbringing, our wiring. Self-blame, guilt, and self-punishment only serve to entrench us further in our areas of ignorance or self-sabotage. We are, however, responsible. Once we see the ways we may be harming ourselves or others, we must act in accordance with our highest values. When we fail, we forgive ourselves, knowing the challenges are difficult, and begin again. And again.
Our culture has done much damage by separating thinking and feeling. Those who value thinking see feeling as a distraction and an indulgence, governed by drama and irrationality. Those who value feeling see thinking as cold, calculating, and distancing from life and intuition. We divide genders into thinking and feeling, ascribing thinking to men and feeling to women. We divide social class, giving the formally educated groups thinking and the less educated feeling. We divide ethnic groups into thinkers and feelers.
In reality, both thinking and feeling are gifts and divine tools. Dividing them, and seeing them as originating inside ourselves, limits and warps them. See thinking and feeling as part of the Divine Knowing. Feel Spirit present in them. Listen with humility for what they might teach you. The book Healing Words by physician Larry Dossey emphasizes that prayer doesn't just occur in our conscious mind. We also pray with what he calls the unconscious mind - which he does not define, as Freud does, as a place of primitive and selfish desires, but instead as the mind-in-us which is beyond language, which holds our truest longings, which has more wisdom than the conscious awareness of our busy brains. This kind of prayer is natural, non-effortful, and doesn't try to impose particular outcomes. Trust this prayer and ask to see its effects.
Larissa Snorek, in her editorial "Not My Job" in this month's edition of the Christian Science Journal, helps us sort out what is our responsibility and what is not.
“It is not my job to … worry, ruminate, overanalyze, control the result, or feel in charge of someone else’s success (or failure)." She says our job is to "respond wisely, listen, trust, be patient, and feel confident of present good as a foundation for future good.” “It’s not our job to use prayer to plan, plot, problem solve, figure out, or make something happen. It is our job . . . to feel the presence of spiritual good, right where we are." "It is our job to accept being loved without measure by the one God who is infinite Love and who continually reveals that we are infinitely loved." “It is not our job to try to make others feel this love, to fix them, or to control how they think about us.” “It’s not our job to bring something into being that isn’t already there. It’s our job to see what God has already created and is revealing to us.” “It’s not our job to wonder about the future—or to ruminate about the past. It is our job to accept the magnitude of divine goodness occurring right in this moment.” Today, know that your prayers are not just for yourself, but for others, too. Whatever insight you have for yourself - about Love's love or presence, about Mind's power and activity, about your spiritual freedom or worth, is true for everyone. That does not mean we neglect ourselves in an exhausting attempt to see other people's needs and meet them all. It does mean knowing that we are all of equal value, and Love is providing to each of us now what me most need. We don't need to know anything about other people's circumstances to support Love loving them. There is nothing hidden that Love cannot find or touch.
Let go of thinking of yourself as a center of the universe - and of seeing yourself as an only marginally-skilled caretaker of that self. God has a different sense of geometry and sees each one of us as a center at the same time. The book The Worry Cure says that a key element in anxiety is the fear of emotions. We worry - and stay up in our heads and have racing minds - instead of feeling.
Today, trust that you have the strength and capacity to experience your feelings. Feelings have something important to teach us. Today, trust that other people have the capacity to hold their own feelings, too, so you don't need to feel such fear speaking your truth. (They will feel your trust in them and that will help them trust themselves.) Know that you have the strength and capacity to handle other people's feelings thrown back at you - so (with a few exceptions) you don't need to avoid healthy disagreements or important, emotionally charged conversations. This can be difficult if we were raised in families in which our caretaker's emotions were volatile, out of proportion, unpredictable, and we were children without much power. We may have developed some coping skills - avoidance, people pleasing - that served us well at the time, but are not serving us in our present day relationships. In the book Healing Words, physician Larry Dossey reminds me that Love/Spirit/God is not confined or limited by time. God is much larger than our perception of a human timeline. Therefore, "Prayer effects are not confined to the present or future; they may also effect past events even though they seem to have already taken place - 'time-displaced prayer.'"
Your prayers to understand, to feel, the nature of Reality and Love transform the past and the future, as well as the present. Most of us go to school in a system in which we are regularly graded. Many get jobs in which we are evaluated. Our human minds tend to rank and compare - constantly evaluating where we are in comparison to others: wealth, appearance, achievements, talents, etc. Those of us who are committed to personal growth often keep track of our progress, in some way grading ourselves on our successes and failures.
God, however, is not grading us. Love is loving us. Mind is knowing us. God is delighting in us. That doesn't mean that evaluation tools can't be useful in supporting self-awareness and growth, but they are only a tool - not a way to live - and never measure our fundamental worth and value. |
AuthorTarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm and numerous essays. You may read more of her work at tarnwilson.com. Archives
September 2020
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