SPIRITUAL GROWTH...FREEDOM FROM SELF

Fear comes in many guises...as a judgmental mind for instance. Nothing agitates our thoughts more quickly, more deeply than sitting in judgment...especially when we are justified (and who has ever sat in judgment knowing it was not justified?).

Those of us who seek to calm our agitated thoughts by sending them outward start out believing we're doing good in that we don't send them toward their real target. We just give them to someone else about the target. It's a real bummer when we learn that is just picking up mud and slinging it in our own face. For they will return to us...like a faithful dog gone bad they will return and bite us in the bum.

I have come to understand that our worst fears are our best friends. Nothing makes us dig deeper than fear for a spiritual solution...sometimes known as "foxhole prayers," but we've got to start somewhere. If we are willing, that start will lead us to the realization that the only lasting solution is a spiritual one...and we cannot self-will it. I am learning, slowly, that that which we seek we already have. I now have freedom from fear...or, more truthfully, freedom from fear of fear.

Fear will come...sometimes unexpectedly and for no instantly known reason. However, fear usually arrives attached to a want...a want we're afraid God either isn't aware of or is aware of and doesn't want for us. We'll do ourselves a favor if we learn to pray and really mean, "Thy will, not mine, be done." Then we can think of our worst-case scenario (i.e., we don't get our want), and we find our head and heart open...non-resistant...to whatever God wills.

It's a fairly simple process on paper. Doing it is a whole 'nother picture, but do it we must if freedom from self is our goal. And that's the whole of still more spiritual growth...freedom from self.

Thank you.

REMEMBER TO THANK HIM

So I'm into my yoga this morning and I hear myself setting good old Gertrude straight...who I sense is having a problem with me. (For no good reason, what did I ever do to her?, get over yourself, Gertrude.)

I then remember that I have a couple others in mind from whom I'm getting negative vibes. The good news is I have been consciously practicing the Sermon (agree with your adversary quickly) on those two. And my doing has been remarkably on target. I have not been as nasty as I wanted to be in any instance and have gone out of my way to do for them...to do very little, but at least I'm heading in the right direction.

The fact is that our thoughts can be fairly drag-foot when it comes to changing from irritation to love...from resistance to non-resistance. But there it is. That's the key...our thoughts. When our thoughts get too agitated, we need to practice the discipline of turning immediately to something else. Anything else, but most helpfully to something of beauty...mental pictures, poems, a loved one, whatever.

It does not matter if our agitated thoughts are directed outward at another or inward at ourselves...they are fear, that is all. Since fear is part of the human condition, we won't let it go completely, but we can consider it our invitation to God to get cracking...to do his thing. Remembering to thank him for relieving us of the bondage of self.

Most important is the realization that if we still felt agitated, it's not God failing, it's us hanging on...to our human condition rather than our spiritual condition. The choice is ours.

Thank you.

OUR GOLDEN RISK

I awoke this morning with the thought, "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth," and I understood that is why "thank you" is the only prayer we will ever need (not want, but need).

The Beatitudes in their entirety are simply a set of paradoxes that introduce the Sermon on the Mount, an entirely paradoxical sermon if ever there was one.

In essence, when the Sermon says that you have been told, etc., etc., etc., but I say unto you, etc. etc. etc., what we get to understand is that what our reasoning mind once advocated is the opposite of God's perfect will. [Ye have heard that it hath been said An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. -- Matthew 5:38-39]

"Resist not evil," "turn the other cheek." Our reasoning mind would never arrive at either of those as a good idea. But God did...God does and forever shall.

The hardest thing we're ever going to be asked to do is to change our mind...according to me. The awakening is in the realization that that does not mean only to change our mind from either/or, black/white thinking for that is just staying at the reasoning mind level. No. We are asked to let go of our ego-victory senses...our I-am-right-and-you-are-wrong does not exist in God's world. (It does, however, in the material world, and if we're ever going to cease fighting everything and everybody, we're going to have to give that up, too...and first.)

The gold, however, is in our risking being lifted into the fourth dimension of reality...detached from our personal wants, fulfilled by our one, already met, need: to serve God and man.

Thank you.

SECOND-GUESSING GOD

There is so much in my life to be grateful for...so many undeserved blessings, unearned gifts...and I am grateful, unbelievably grateful. I say "unbelievably" because I know from whence I came.

There was a time if I'd been gifted with the Hope diamond, I would've complained because it was blue...in my mind I can hear me now, "Well, it doesn't even look like a diamond...everybody'll think it's just a great big sapphire." Think about that!...who complains that they've been gifted with a great big sapphire?

Without gratitude, that's where most of us live most of the time today...nit-picking our gifts. Second-guessing God.

I know, for me, gratitude is the answer...no matter the question, the problem, the oh rats, and the why me...gratitude is the answer.

I hold a couple thoughts in ready reserve today that keep me anchored to that answer: 1) Don't be as nasty as you want to be (my personal golden rule); and 2) Whatever I've got, whatever comes to me...whatever it looks like to my ego's eye...call it the good and get grateful.

Worst case scenario is I get a crock of crap so ugly even God would hold his nose. What can we do with that but laugh? And laughter is just gratitude on the hoof.

Thank you.

LAUGHTER AND LOVE

I wonder if all our woes aren't born in our resistance to all our woes.

We have heard often enough, and have come to realize, that acceptance is the answer to any and all problems...and it is wonderfully easy to see that is true when it's another person's problem. But when it's our own?

That's when we come again to the very fact that acceptance cannot be self-willed...it can't be arrived at like a decision of what shoes to wear. Acceptance begins life as a crash-and-burn proposition...we crash and burn trying to get what we want rather than accept what we've got.

This will be true until we learn to live a life of acceptance...until we learn to cease resisting our own life. That's when we're living a turned-over life...a life centered in and directed by God.

The hard lesson a-learning is we still have to do our own footwork. We still must "feel the fear and do it anyway"...we still need to move closer to that friend/foe/spouse/employer who, for no apparent reason, is being so ugly to us. Ease closer. With an attitude of gratitude (no mental eye-rolling!). With love (no "oh, puh-leeze"). With love. And laughter. Actually, we'd best start with laughter or we'll never get there.

And that's my long-sought-after answer to life itself...laughter and love.

Thank you.

THE PRAISING PRAYER

Earlier this morning I wrote three pages in my journal of nickel/dime stuff that I did less than wonderfully yesterday...that I suspect is coming down the road toward me today...that I wish I'd thought of sooner...that I wish I'd forgotten about altogether. And thanked God that he has the power to do with those as he wants me to do.

It was only after I'd written my 2-Do list for today, the last thing in my daily writings, that I remembered a few fairly minor things that I did yesterday for the benefit of other than me. I did them spontaneously with neither thought nor plan, and they were appreciated.

It's only worth noting because I wrote three pages of coulda, woulda, shoulda, and, practically as a P.S., I wrote a short sentence of I-done-good.

Just a reminder to myself that the praising prayer does not have to be for banes alone...it can also be for boons.

Thank you.

OUR CHOICE...AND OUR CROSS

More and more I am convinced that pleading prayers are just another way to block our acceptance of God's will...or just another way to follow our ego's dictates.

We become obsessed with "perfecting" our plea, making it good enough, pretty enough, pleasing enough to God that he (apparently) will go against his own good sense and grant us our wishes. Sometimes our ego even uses self-denigration...spelling out how low and unworthy we are, with undeserving at the top of the list...in hopes that this does the trick in maybe guilting God into giving over to our will.

The child's blinding flash of the obvious is still true: "God don’t need no frills and I ain’t no worm."

I am a believer in a statement I once heard (and I don't remember from whom, when or where) that God's will is what our will would be if we had all the facts. Convincing our ego that it doesn't have all the facts is our choice...and our cross.

The praising prayer that fits me, that I use in times of wonder or woe, is, "Thank you for my everything just as it is right this very minute. Amen."

Thank you.