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“People don’t understand that fear is a thing. It’s just another object in the universe that you are capable of experiencing. You can do one of two things with fear: you can recognize you have it and work to release it, or you can keep it and try to hide from it. Because people don’t deal with fear objectively, they don’t understand it. They end up keeping their fear and trying to prevent things from happening that would stimulate it. They go through life attempting to create safety and control by defining how they need life to be in order to be okay. This is how the world becomes frightening.” ~Michael A. Singer The Untethered Soul
Fear. We can either hide from it or work to release it. Sometimes, when I get brave, I turn on the news. When I do, I see a lot of fear. And I see a lot of people trying to control things. People, situations, circumstances. They do it because they don’t want to stimulate the fear. They will do anything to avoid that up to and including violence. How different would our world be if we looked at our fears instead? What if we saw our fear as, not something that will cause us harm or protect us, but as an object in the universe that we can experience and then release? So, my invitation to you is to consider the places where you get stuck, or maybe angry or frustrated, or maybe you actually feel the deeper fear, and instead of hiding from it or doing things that don’t stimulate it just stop and really turn and look. Thank those places that perhaps have kept you safe or believe they keep you safe, and then release them. Tell them they can go. You’re safe, and they aren’t necessary. I wonder how peaceful you might be, how peaceful our world might be, if we worked to release our fear rather than hide from it.
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“To love is to open. To love fully is to open wide. When we’re wide open, love rushes toward us and emanates from us. We recognize it as the essence of our existence. Naturally, without effort, the illusion of separation vanishes. We experience ourselves as part of one great whole, indistinguishable from all we survey.
Too often, however, we shrink from the experience of oneness and then get used to it. We come to mistake the lie of limitation for the boundless truth of love. We let ourselves love family, friends, and country, but stop there. We offer our love to God, but withhold it from much of divine creation. Yet none of this is irreversible. Nothing, outside of our own unwillingness, can keep us from reconnecting.” ~Raphael Cushnir Setting Your Heart on Fire We are always at a moment of choice. We always, in every situation, have some amount of power. The power to choose cannot be taken from us. Now, granted, we might not always like all our choices, but we still have the power to choose. We even have the power to choose whether we like those choices or not, when we get right down to it. We can choose love. We can choose oneness. The question is, are we willing? There is great power in willingness. There’s an openness that really doesn’t have any boundaries. Being willing to choose love and, therefore, oneness, is incredibly powerful. It’s also difficult. Everything in our culture and society here in the West tells us we are separate, and that love is weakness. But just because society says it doesn’t make it true. It’s just the opposite. And we can choose to live from that place. We can choose things like love and peace and oneness for ourselves because that is what God is, and that is never kept from us. So, my invitation to you this week is to challenge yourself to be willing. Be willing to choose love when you could choose anger. Be willing to choose oneness when you could choose division. Be willing to step outside what society says is the norm and see what happens. |
Rev. StephaniLiving by the affirmation, "Everything I want is chasing me!" Archives
July 2022
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