TITLE: Seeing Life Through Spiritual Lenses
BLURB: In today’s show, Carole
(with Jane’s encouragement) will be talking about using your Designing Sacred
Space Journal/workbook to focus on, grow & develop 4 basic spiritual
qualities. This focused way of looking
at your daily happenings, possibilities and choices, is a powerful tool to use
as we begin discerning what aspects of our lives need to be amplified, which
ones need to be blessed and discarded, which divine actualities are to be grown
toward, as we step farther and farther into an ever-more sacred life. So, find a quiet time, a setting that is
conducive to a “time out for a Time IN”, have your Sacred Space Notebook and
materials at hand, and join us as we explore some new ways to approach inner
and outer world design.
TODAY’S CONTENT:
Today begins another unfolding of our Carole & Jane TalkRadioBlog show
we have named: Designing Sacred Space. With
Jane’s ongoing encouragement & side-line cheers of “YOU CAN DO IT!” I will
begin offering shows based on my own inner work and the exercises &
understandings I use as I work with others.
Today’s adventure into Designing
Sacred Space, is entitled: Seeing Your Life through Spiritual
Lenses …
For the last few months, I have been using a particular spiritual focus in
my own journaling and as I work with others… it is a focus that is proving to
be profoundly insight-filled and formative, as far as making choices and taking
actions based on looking at things through the lenses of the 4 spiritual
qualities we are going to talk about today.
As these qualities become more and more a part of discerning various
aspects of our lives, we have found them amazingly em-Powering to work with,
and we hope you will find them powerfully helpful in your life, too.
These qualities are mentioned in the Baha’i Writings as 4 qualities the
Beloved loves to see within us and are as follows:
1) enthusiasm and courage
2) a face wreathed in
smiles and a radiant countenance
3) that they see with
their own eyes and not through the eyes of another
4) the ability to carry a
task, once begun, through to completion
TODAY’S PRACTICE EXERCISE:
In order to be able to en-Joy the following experience, please find a
quiet time, a setting that is conducive to a “time out for a Time IN”, and have
your portable workshop of materials handy.
NOW, breathe deeply & let’s have some fun J
Today, you will need 4 of your blank notebook pages.
1) Begin by putting one
of the 4 qualities at the top of each page.
2) We are just going to
work with the first quality page today, but will be making the same basic “outline
drawing” for each of the other 3 quality worksheets;
3) We will begin with the
first Quality’s page: Enthusiasm and
Courage
4) Draw a balloon circle
toward the top of your page (just leave room for smaller balloons around it,
which we will add as we work on this exercise)
5) FIRST, think of something
wonderful you would like to do, have always had a deep down yearning to do or
try or become (do not kill the fun with any “yes, buts”..)… Something you would
LOVE to bring into being in your life..
FOR THIS FIRST LITTLE EXPERIMENT TODAY, (I might suggest
you start with something tangible to put in your BIG VISION balloon: such as Learning to sew,
or de-cluttering your desk, or finally sending that graduation present you got
for your nephew 4 yrs. ago…).
6) Put that heart-wish in
your balloon
7) Now, begin to make
little square boxes at the bottom of your page & inside each of these,
write in all the “yes buts” you feel would/ could / have kept you from
accomplishing your dream.. These are the cement blocks that are keeping your
BIG VISION Balloon tethered & dead in the air actually
8) As these cement blocks
take shape & gather meaning, you are going to begin to see each block as
simply something you can break into little pieces of DOABLE efforts. Each little piece is going to become a little
“floating balloon idea” that begins to float up and away from the concrete,
until that “yes but” no longer has any substance.. can no longer keep you tied
down down down.
9) Since our Heading for
this Page is: Enthusiasm and Courage,
break every “yes but” tiny piece into smaller & smaller pieces, until all
of a sudden, you say; “I CAN DO THAT!” and feel a sense of eagerness. Even the tiniest piece may take courage, but
at some point, the courage required is not going to paralyze you.
Does this “visual” of taking baby steps toward a
larger Vision make sense to you? Does it
sound like something you would like to try?
(I might suggest you start with something tangible as your first
workbook BIG VISION balloon: such as Learning to sew, or de-cluttering your
desk, or finally sending that graduation present you got for your nephew 4 yrs.
ago…). Hopefully, you, as I did, find
that even the smallest act, using courage and eagerness, is fabulously
empowering, as if you are a LIE-DEFYING ACTION HERO in your own life!
You are making your own picture of the old
adage: “How do you eat an elephant?...
one bite at a time J” And let me tell
you, once you start floating up those little “OH, YES I CAN!” balloons, you
will get more and more excited about living life without elephants squishing
you to death!
Just keep saying to yourself: “Make a beginning and all will come
right. Intention brings
attainment.” Quoted from the Baha’i
Writings
Now I want to tell you a story about an amazing
example of how “one step at a time” can take you on a journey beyond imagining,
it can become so far reaching. Years
ago, I had a young, pre-teen boy in a class I was teaching at a summer
school. The boy was very troubled and so
angry that he was always on the edge of doing something seriously damaging to
himself or another student. One day, I
asked him what was really going on inside of him & he said that his
grandmother (who raised him) had just died and he was so angry he didn’t know
how to handle his feelings. I asked him
what he needed & he said, “Somebody to be sort of a mother sometimes”. From then on, we formed a friendship when we
would see each other at school.
Years later, I met a woman in her late 30s, who
came over to me & said that she was this young boy’s birth mother. She said that when she was 14, she was raped
and had given birth to him. Her own
mother & dad raised him & she simply lost her way. She had gotten into
drugs and ended up living on the streets for a few years. However, within the last few years, she had
married a good person, found out that she was pregnant and decided that she
wanted to give birth to a healthy baby from a place of her own wellness & to
do that she would have to immediately straighten up her own life.
The only thing she could think of “to get her life ‘right’”
was to stay “right” in everything she did.
She said that when she walked to the bus to go to work each morning, she
would walk on the right side of the sidewalk; then sit on the “right side” of
the bus; walk into the factory & stay to the right side of the hallways as
she went into work, etc. She said that
her continual behavior, allowed her, 3 yrs. earlier, to give birth to her
wonderful little girl, and that, not only that, she was now in college,
majoring in music so that she could someday work with young girls as lost as
she had been…. Young girls who could experience the music still alive inside of
themselves, discover the ability to make & be “in harmony” and follow the
sanity of a musical score, as a way to begin to rediscover themselves, still alive,
able to be part of something wonderful with other people. I LOVE this story of one woman “making a
beginning and having everything come right…. That her intention had truly
become attainment”
So, I am now hoping that you have drawn &
gotten a glimmer of how this process of Letting Spirit decorate your sky with
balloons, big ones and little ones, & that you will find this “busting-up-concrete-blocks
and making-balloons-out-of-the-pieces” process is also powerful for all of the
other Quality building pages. In the
next few shows, we will take each quality and expand on examples and
en-Couragements about how using these qualities to change your life, as they
have made enormous differences in the lives of others.
In closing, again, let me list these amazingly
potent & powerfully impacting attributes which will bless all of us, as we
grow within them. May we
1) Feel enthusiastic and
courageous
2) Have our faces
wreathed in smiles and a radiance about our countenances
3) See with our own eyes
and not through the eyes of another
4) Develop the ability to
carry a task, once begun, through to completion
Blessings and ONLY-LOVE,
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