I have found the most dynamic, passionate, engaging, all inclusive church at the Genesis Global Spiritual Center.  This is a Science of Mind based church steeped in Ernest Holmes and New Thought teachings, as well as ancient wisdom.  It’s brimming with God and love, foot stomping, hand clapping music and it reaches into the depths of you, culls the very best, the wholeness that you already are and always were.

The Reverend Charles Hall used to be connected with the Agape Church in Los Angeles, preaching right along side of Michael Beckwith.  We are beyond blessed to have him in our community.  If you live near enough to get there on a Sunday, you will not be disappointed.

Below are a few paraphrases from today’s service and a few comments from me.  Unless otherwise noted, they were spoken by Rev. Charles Hall.

“You are the answer to somebody’s prayer.”

This one really hit home with me today.  I have a lot more on my plate these days because I was an answering to someone’s prayer.  There have been moments where I thought I took on too much, but that little reminder today, makes every morsel of it so worth it.

“Your life is heaven having it’s way right now.”

That alone is the only daily affirmation I ever need.

“You can be on the cusp of something.  Appreciate the cusp, not the something.  Appreciate this moment now.”

“All manifestations are effect.”  Ernest Holmes

Now ponder that for a moment.  Given that all manifestations are effect, take pause the next time you or I react to something.  We are just layering more of our stuff on top of what was our stuff to begin with.  It’s futile; it’s the old childhood game of sit and spin.

“Sometimes all it takes is 20 seconds of insane courage that will change your life forever.”  that’s a paraphrase by Rev. Hall from the movie – We Bought a Zoo.

Someone is waiting for your courage, that some one is you and me.  Let’s take the leap next time we are called to do so.  You’ll know the moment has arrived, when that little niggly voice shows up that says you can’t, you better not, you’re not really capable, you shouldn’t, you couldn’t, not in a million years.  That’s why it will take “insane courage”.  You’ll have to be braver than the voices.  The voices are ancient history.  They’ve had their share of air time.  Insane courage is well beyond the confines of that old safe box.  Insane courage throws a deaf ear to the old paradigm.  Can we do it?  Hell yea, we can!  It is what we came here for, the great adventure.  Let’s go LIVE it!

The primary cause of unhappiness

is never the situation

but your thoughts about it.

~Eckhart Tolle~

I hope that quote from Eckhart Tolle brought you some relief today.  It certainly did for me.  My thoughts were: this is hard, I didn’t sign up for all of this, it’s too much of a drain on me, I don’t like this, I feel stuck.

Ultimately, stuck equals powerless to me.  Yet when I went to read some Tolle for inspiration, I spotted this quote right away as the truth in what was going on.  It’s not the situation, it’s what I am telling myself about the situation.  What I tell myself about it, is what makes it hard.

It’s not even that I want to change the story I am telling myself, I don’t want to tell any story at all about it.  The facts are – here’s the situation, the rest is extraneous mumbo jumbo that is the cause of my stress.  Not only that, I allow the Universe to act more freely on my behalf when I am not locking things in as – it’s this or it’s that.

I did a post awhile back entitled Just the Facts that addresses this very topic.  When I let go of the story I was telling myself the Universe delivered with more surprises and synchronicities then I could ever imagine.  The U loves to show off for you and me.  Question is – are we letting it or are we limiting it?  Today, right this minute, I am letting it.

Whew, that just feels so much better then the story I was locked into just a few short minutes ago!

]]> http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/2012/05/14/unhappiness/feed/ 2 Beth/Bethie rainbow-abstract http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/2012/05/10/life-never-fails/ http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/2012/05/10/life-never-fails/#comments Thu, 10 May 2012 18:11:05 +0000 heartsdeesire http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/?p=2276 ]]> This poem is a favorite of mine; I wrote it three years ago.  The first verse is the tag line you see whenever you visit Simply Blessed.  The “Beloved” I refer to here is God or Spirit, Universe, Field, Source, All That Is.

The poem illustrates a melding of two beliefs: there is no place where God is not and Abraham’s idea that you can never get it wrong.  Hence, life or love never fails — you never fail.  God is with you always no matter how exhilarated you feel or how low and un-impassioned you feel.  God is with you in both the simplicity and the complexity of your lives.  God, Spirit, the ineffable, the mysteriously indefinable, is that which courses through you continuously without end.

image locale

I have fallen between the cracks
and landed in the spaces
where love never fails

Beloved, you are my captor
and I am bound by your love

I hear you whisper softly
don’t speak. words fail here, just listen

churning on the seas of your desire
I am the rising and the falling

the beginning and the ending
the fullness and the emptiness

journey to the furthest point of your yearning
I am the anguish and the exaltation

I am the grain of sand awakening the pearl

I am the morsel you are tasting
be it bitter or sweet

quench your deepest thirst here
where you think I’m not

I Am.

©heartsdeesire

Whatever the present moment contains,

accept it as if you had chosen it.

~ Eckhart Tolle ~

Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.

How do you know this is the experience you need?

Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.

~ Eckhart Tolle ~

Willing to experience aloneness,
I discover connection everywhere;
Turning to face my fear,
I meet the warrior who lives within;
Opening to my loss,
I gain the embrace of the universe;
Surrendering into emptiness,
I find fullness without end.
Each condition I flee from pursues me,
Each condition I welcome transforms me
And becomes itself transformed
Into its radiant jewel-like essence.
I bow to the one who has made it so,
Who has crafted this Master Game.
To play it is purest delight;
To honor its form–true devotion.

- Jennifer Welwood~

Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!

~ James Broughton ~

(Sermons of the Big Joy)

o, to be held captive
inside your cherry blossoms

pinned to your creamy folds

like a bumble bee chubby with pollen
too deliciously full to move

until I am drunk with your fragrance
intoxicated with wonderment

stunned with awe
speechless with amazement

and tumble out onto the splendid
soft green earth filled with the
pulsing passion of being alive

©heartsdeesire

My friend Amy shared with me paraphrases of the following teachings and I loved them so much, wanted to share with you also:

“You are not the contents of your life.”  Tolle would say.

“if you can observe it, it is not you”  Mooji would say.

“This shouldn’t be happening….is that true?”  Byron Katie would say.

“Who knows what is good or bad.”  An ancient Taoist proverb says.

I’ve chosen other quotes on my blog from Tolle, Mooji, Byron Katie, and the Taoist parable and appended them below.

Eckhart Tolle:

When you are present in this moment,
you break the continuity of your story, of past and future.

Then true intelligence arises, and also LOVE.

The only way that LOVE can come into your life is not through form,
but through the inner spaciousness that is presence.

LOVE has no form. The world can only change from within.

Mooji:

We are missing what is obvious, what is pure, what is beautiful.  But we don’t have to go so far to find this, because the truth is distance-less, it’s here.  It’s here; it’s only somehow concealed by distraction.  Our eyes move and plant themselves onto transient things.  But if the aspiration is inside a human being to grow, to find the truth, then he will find a way and the way will find him.

Byron Katie:

How do we respond to a world that seems out of control? The world
seems that way because it ‘is’ out of control—the sun rises whether
we want it to or not, the toaster breaks, someone cuts you off on
your way to work. We’ve never had control. We have the illusion of
control when things go the way we think they should, and then when
they don’t, we say we’ve lost control, and we long for some sort of
state where we imagine we’ll have control again.

But suffering isn’t a result of not having control or of things
accelerating. It is a result of arguing with reality. When we
believe our thoughts, we suffer, but when we question them, we don’t
suffer. Freedom is as simple as that. When the unquestioned mind
moves out of its arguments with reality, we move into alignment with
constant change. After all, change is happening anyway, whether we
like it or not. Everything changes, it seems. But when we’re
attached to our thoughts about what that change should be, being out
of control feels uncomfortable.

If there is, in fact, an acceleration of changes, it’s a gift. The
apparent craziness of the world, like everything else, is a gift
that we can use to set our minds free. You can’t free yourself by
finding a “timeless, changeless dimension” outside your own mind.

When you question what you believe, you eventually come to see that
you ‘are’ the timeless, changeless dimension that you’ve been
seeking. Then you may find that you don’t need to navigate a future
at all—that what appears now is all you’ve got, and even that is

always immediately gone. And when you’ve stopped doing war with
reality, you ‘are’ what changes, totally without control. That state
of constant change is creation without limits, efficient and free
and beautiful beyond description.

Insights from the parable Who Knows What’s Good What’s Bad:

This parable is such a beautiful illustration of why it’s relevant to suspend judgment, conclusions and assumptions about anything.  Judgements and the like don’t reflect the bigger picture.  We don’t always know in the heat of any moment, what is good what is bad.  What is a blessing, what is a gift, what is a challenge in the moment that provides further expansion for us later.  We don’t always know, but we can remain open.  We can lay aside the impulse to make any seeming fact mean anything.  We can trust that the nature of all things is continually unfolding – and perhaps find a lot more ease in this open and receptive place.

Click here to see the parable in its entirety.

Those of you who follow this blog, know we recently had a puppy die suddenly in our home.  There was plenty of “this shouldn’t be happening” being felt.  There was so much serendipity around this little guy and his transition.  And while I was grieving I put all my biggest worries on the back burner.  I grieved and to some extent I still do.  But meanwhile, I forgot to take those big worries off the back burner.

Another little baby came to us from a rescue group in SoCal.  That’s Abby Rose you see at the top of this post.

As my friend, Luana reminded me, Life turned left to go right.  Life is actually always turning right, it’s we who have gone left and abandoned the truth that our good is always there, sometimes as yet unseen, but it’s there.  Some times it waits for us to catch up and trust, some times you are scooped up in the arms of grace whether you’d momentarily lost your faith or not.  That’s because another word for Grace is Love, the foundation of the Universe.  I can try to buck that current that is back of all things, but not for long.  Thank God for that!

“Seven billion people on a tiny planet,
suspended in the vastness of space.
All alone.
How we make sense of that is the great mystery of our frail existence.
Maybe it’s being alone in the Universe that holds us all together,
keeps us needing one another in the smallest of ways,
creating a quantum entanglement of you, of me, of us.
And if that’s really true, then we live in a world where anything is possible.”

some of the final lines in tonight’s episode of “Touch”