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Happiness from Love

6/29/2017

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The most important part of the rest that works is trusting and settling in with Our Creator's Love. I just finished a book that has some great insights on how to do that - Live Your Happy by Maria Felipe. It’s an excellent, short introduction to the main ideas of A Course in Miracles. 
 
When I say “Our Creator,” I mean the God within us, between us and beyond us - the Creative Spirit Behind and Within all of Life who is always loving us. God is Love, and as such is a noun and a verb. The Great I AM is a Mysterious State of Being and a Holy, Healing movement of Spirit - something we can intuit and feel. Until we learn to listen and feel for the Holy Spirit part of God, we don’t tend to experience much of what we find ourselves having to call divine. But as we experience and settle in with God, the ego's fears get blown away, we start lovingly accepting all of who and what we are, and we are better able to create our lives out of love. That always feels better than any other approach. I use the process of the rest that works to do that.  The first step is trusting the goodness of God – the Great I AM in Whom we are – Whose most fundamental nature is love. Working that faith muscle enables us to trust loving and living from our hearts. Miraculous things follow from there.
 
A Course in Miracles sums our challenge up by saying:
"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it" (ACIM, Ch. 6, Section IV). 
While true, that is easier said than done.

Maria Felipe helps us remove the barriers with insights like:
  • "Littleness is the self you have identified with since you thought you separated from God - that is, the constant awareness of love" (p. 94)
  • "God is simply the capacity for perfect love that is always within us. Forgetting God means forgetting who we really are." (p. 13)
  • "When we forget that we are one with God - which means a state of inner security, stability, and happiness that far surpasses feeling special - then we won't be able to feel love within, and we'll settle for the ego's substitutes instead" (p 44).
  •  "I am not just my feelings and I do not have to be controlled by them. I have the choice to “rest in God” instead, an internal state that guarantees happiness . . . This state is what I call a true love affair with everyone and everything. In this condition, you recognize that giving and receiving are one. You extend love rather than trying to get it” (p. 48).    

Keeping our hearts in the love of God is kind of like keeping our feet in a river. When they come out, we can mentally take steps to get them back in – the River of Life is always undergirding our existence either way. The key is to let go of the kind of personal judgments that might keep us from loving ourselves or others. Being in love is the key. It’s not about being “in love” with the “right” person or even people. It’s about staying spiritually open to the Love that gives Life - the love at the heart of who we are. We can feel it in things like the graceful rhythms of our breath and heartbeat. By practicing ways of feeling for the love that gives life and moving with it, we can be at home anywhere because we are at home with ourselves and life itself. And it's important not to worry when we feel lost, The Great I AM and Holy Spirit recognize that we all get lost much if not most of the time. We aren't judged for it. We are simply beckoned home. “Salvation” is coming back into the Love of God and moving with it. That’s the secret to feeling alive wherever we are.

The good news is that our ever-present desire to be in love comes from God and is of God. It is the internal well-spring Jesus spoke that leads to eternal life - a fulfilling life forever. Another way Maria points to this is in saying: “What helps banish fear is the willingness to remember that we are in the mind of God” - technically, we're already home, it is more a matter of waking up and living awake. As we tap into that truth, we place our hand onto a valve that unleashes miracles, first from within as it changes our mind and how we see things.

Maria covers a lot of deep territory. She sometimes writes things a little too simply for me, probably to keep things brief (The Manual on A Course on Miracles is 1333 pages). Because of that, I sometimes found myself having imaginary dialogues with her, clarifying this or that. But that’s okay. This book presents a great opportunity to think through some big things along with some tools that can genuinely improve how we are engaging our lives. That’s a pretty good accomplishment for any book, let alone a short one like this (118 pages). I heartily recommend it. If you're interested, you can find it at www.newworldlibrary.com/BooksProducts/ProductDetails/tabid/64/SKU/84533/Default.aspx#.WVZ4EohuJPY.

More power to you in your adventure with God – in us, between us and beyond us.  Thanks for journeying together!

Blessings,
Scott
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Following the Way

6/14/2017

1 Comment

 
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Okay, so I got a little blinky at then end after being kinda preachy (sorry, occupational hazard from the past ). I hope it still encourages you in living from your heart.

More power to you in your adventure with God - within us, between us and beyond us.

Thanks and blessings,
Scott
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Following The Unforced Rhythms of Grace

6/14/2017

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This was such a fun way to start the day! (Sorry about my cheesy commentary. She was just so sweet). I summarize my thinking about it in the next blog, but the main thing is to feel for the love and grace at the heart of who we are. It's kind of like a deer within. Often, we have to come to rest with a sense of trust in the goodness of our hearts to even perceive it. If we're putting other objectives first, like getting somewhere fast, we can miss it.

The movements of love in us feel a lot like moving water or energy. Settling down into our heartfelt desire to love and be love puts us in touch with love like we might put our foot in an internal river. That's why Jesus called it a well-spring. It is an active, creative feeling rather a destructive thought.

​As we feel for love, we can stay in love or get back to loving as we do other things. This approach, this way of living, fills that empty place in us that has been carved by living out of too much fear and anxiety. It replaces a shallow, scared way of living with one that runs much deeper and feels a lot better. That's what the rest that works is all about.

More power to you in your Adventure with God (Love). Thanks for journeying together!

Blessings,
Scott

(P.S. Make sure and go to my next blog because the next video was shortly after following the deer and expands on this one. Thanks!)
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Loving Life From Your Place in the Web

6/10/2017

1 Comment

 
The context for the following little synchronicity is that I just finished making a Genogram yesterday. (It's like drawing out your family tree but with a feel for the emotional energy in relationships with friends and social organizations as well as family). I included images for The Divine in mine. It was a very helpful exercise. Then today, I get up after prayer time, go outside with a cup of coffee and here's this wonderful little web . . .
More power to you in filling your spot in ways that honor you and the Web!

Thanks for journeying together!

Blessings,
​Scott
1 Comment

Love's Strength

6/1/2017

3 Comments

 
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​The rest that works helps us with the hard things of life. It helps us settle down deeper than our fear when we feel the vulnerabilities of loving. As we settle in with love, we rediscover it's strength. We find ways to work creatively for the good without moving in ways we cannot respect.

There is strength in saying "Yes" to the love yearning for expression from inside you - for yourself, for others, for our planet, and for Life itself. Keep saying "Yes" no matter what anybody else does. By doing so, you tap into the well-spring Jesus and so many spiritual teachers have identified. You tap into the Creative Forces of God and fill your place in the Web of Life in positive ways.

(Today was a sad day. If you didn't hear, Trump pulled America out of the Paris Accords, mainly citing the self-interests of America relative to other countries. If this was as hard a day for you as it was for me, remember: Presidents come and go. Short-sighted, selfish perspectives come and go. The Great I AM and Mother Nature will not. Let's keep doing our best to love and live in alignment with what honors Life.  Trust The Divine to ultimately work things toward good as we strive to fulfill our part).

Hang in there.

Blessings,
Scott 

​
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