Happiness from Love

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