2016-08-18-Start with the Feeling
Lightline #493
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Start With the Feeling
o 1.2 Group: Lightline TeaM
• 2 Facilitators
o 2.1 Teacher: Mother Spirit
o 2.2 TR: JL
• 3 Session
o 3.1 Opening
o 3.2 Lesson
o 3.3 Closing
Topic: Start With the Feeling
Group: Lightline TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Mother Spirit
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Invocation: Dear Mother Spirit and Michael: Welcome, please join us. We do appreciate your company, both within us and all about us. It’s so wonderful to know we are sharing our life with the two of you, and with our mutual Grandpa–God. You have told us so many times that he has a presence within us, right along with the two of you—Michael, with your Spirit of Truth, and Mother, with your spirit and all the ways you help our own minds and spirits.
Toward that end I do have a request this evening, and that is–let me phrase it as: Turning Things Around. So often in our life we catch ourselves going in the wrong direction and getting unhealthy. Something is happening to us, but how do we turn it around? How do we turn our lives around when we do recognize that something bad is happening? We’re getting unhealthy and weaker. Maybe our relationships with other folks are going downhill. What all is involved? How do we turn our lives around? That, to me, would be a precious gift indeed–to know that one. So thank you so much. Amen.
Lesson
NEBADONIA: Good evening, my dear, dear children. This is your Mother Spirit, Nebadonia. Michael and I are indeed tickled to be with you this way and honor your request this evening. This is so much a part of our presence and concern for our children, especially with those we see going into unhealthy and destructive ways. They sometimes have such a feeling of helplessness, of being only a pawn in someone else’s game. As Shakespeare might have put it: they are only the toys in the hands of indifferent Gods, and cannot affect their own lives. So we thank you for the question of how do you turn your lives around.
Start with the feeling—the evaluation
With these feelings of helplessness, it is difficult to know what the base is from which you can start, but let us say the inner evaluation that you are unhealthy and getting weak; or that the situation around you is deteriorating terribly. This evaluation is in itself a triumph of your spirit! You may have been fighting this recognition, or stalling with something like denial. You can be so settled into a bad situation that you put it out of your mind and refuse to let it come into your consciousness.
Here we have a caution! When so many start meditating–hopefully nice and early in the morning when they’ve just gotten up and sat down to open themselves to whatever might come up–for so many folks who have been in denial about some critical part of their life—their health or maybe their relationships with another–that can be the very first thing that pops up to dog their waking hours. When the first effect of their meditating is to be made aware of this terrible situation, one of the easiest things is to stop meditating. They think, “Well, I tried meditating once, but it just didn’t work. It only made me feel terrible, so I gave it up.” Yet once you have this feeling and you give credit to it, you’ve trusted yourself enough to really admit you are becoming unhealthy, or your relationships are deteriorating. This is such a triumph of the spirit because you’ve determined within yourself that you care enough to do something about it.
The spiritual effort to really care
This can be an enormous, enormous spiritual effort–just to care!–especially in situations involving other folks like a husband or a wife, a mother or father with their children; with work or with society, the larger family all around them. It takes enormous courage to admit into oneself that something is not right here. Something is going terribly wrong, even if it has been this way for a long, long time now, right in the family with one’s husband or wife.
Inner spiritual company
To fully admit this into oneself and give it reality: this is the very first step. This is the need for meditation and self-awareness, spending some time alone with yourself and with us, and with the presence of God within you. Just that notion, just that concept of having your own inner, spiritual company, can help so much. It gives you someone to talk to, and to talk with–as you listen for an answer
Meditation is one of the greatest things you can do to turn things around. It’s to be aware of your own, what the Urantia Book calls “the co-creativity of personality, of who and what you are, and of the part you are playing in everything happening to you.” Otherwise you get caught up in a kind of fatalism where your self, the situation, and the people in the situation around you are simply fixed. They are just what is being given to you moment by moment and you have nothing to do with it. Everything is just the way it is.
Terribly enervating fatalism
Some folks even have the feeling the situation is what they were born into because of some previous existence, some former life. Things are going terribly because they did something terrible before, and now they are paying for it. This kind of fatalism has such a terrible draining effect on all their vital energies–such a feeling of helplessness! Realize that you yourself are co-creating everything happening to you, if only in how you interpret all of this for yourself moment to courage, to entertain that notion. But this is the way out. This is the way to start turning things around: you turn yourself around! You change how you interpret even what seems so objective and simply just there.
This again is where meditation on a regular basis is so critical. The situation is not so much a failure of personality being too great, or too ego-centered. It is almost the exact opposite. It is more like not having enough continuity of personality, of not being continuously aware of who and what you are. You get caught up in a short-sided kind of existence where every few minutes you are actually losing yourself into your situation or your old habits.
There is no freshness. There is no conscious creativity happening in your life. Everything is just happening to you, and this “you” is constantly just re-acting to everything. You’ve lost the initiative. You’ve lost the creative spark to create something new, something different, some better way of handling yourself in the situation. So the first thing you need is this continuity. You need to be more self-aware continuously.
Meditation—reflection—throughout history
Let me give you the idea that regular meditation has been the common theme in all religious communities throughout history, in all the major religions of the world. Through all the wars, the political upsets, the famines, and the natural disasters, these have been the most successful continuous communities in the world, and they are all based pretty much on this one thing.
It is the way they start every day. The community gets together and has a common, shared practice of being mindful–mindfully aware. This is where all the bells, and the chants–all these various practices–give continuity day to day and even throughout the day. They stop everything else, shall we say at noon, then the middle of the afternoon, then in the evening before they go to bed. All these meditations are taking a break and pausing from whatever they are doing just to be mindful and remind themselves to come back to themselves, and to have a self then. For people who are so scattered their life is falling apart–this is what they don’t have. They don’t have a continuous sense of who and what they are and what they want to be.
This is why, my children, it is so critical to start meditating, to take part of your day for yourself. It is not a selfish thing. In fact it can give you yourself, a self to start having some control over your situation by using your own creative spirit. As we have offered before so many times: in your meditation, take notes. This can be a little recording as you get up from your meditation, or, with your computers everywhere now, just open a file. Monday: this is what I was thinking. This is what I need to change.
Tough, continuous consciousness & determination
This is how you turn things around. You first become conscious of them, and then continuously conscious of yourself and your situation. Otherwise you are reacting to whatever is happening outside you, or the bad habits within yourself. You have got to get this determination to understand what is happening, and seek out different ways of doing things, and rel This is how you get that determination. You take the time out to sit down, be quiet and still, and let whatever wants to come up. Let anything suggest itself. Have the courage to look at whatever it is and make a note about it. Think about it. Wonder about it. Wonder what to do about it. This is literally creating a more continuous, stronger, determined person who can turn things around.
Only then can you begin to recognize, and celebrate, and joyfully accept that things are changing. You are getting healthier. You are getting stronger and, ironically, even some of the folks around you who seem so fixed in who and what they are, you might find that they are also changing to embrace this new you. Because in these situations, my dear ones, it is up to you to take the initiative. You might be the one who is clinging to the status quo.
Give some time by yourself to be open to the presence of God within you. It is why we call his presence a Thought Adjuster. He can actually suggest things–give you concrete ideas and actual thoughts to help you analyze and get a hold of the situation. You’ll be literally creating the groundwork from which to act. Day by day you’ll be keeping track of all your experiments in trying things. Are they working, or are they not? Why aren’t they? Why are they? What is this great, wonderful health, strength, and understanding that is growing inside you? This is how you turn things around and have the glory and the wonderful, wonderful realization that they are turning around. You are getting healthier and stronger. You are getting a deeper understanding of your life.
It is up to you
So, my dear ones, it does come back to you. It is up to you. No one can do this for you. We can only tease you with the possibility that has helped so many, for this is how they’ve done it. This is how to get the determination and understanding that works. Please accept my blessing, and not just mere happenstance to let things happen. Let Michael’s Spirit of Truth guide you. Feel my own help with your understanding, your knowledge, and your courage. It all leads to wisdom, a conscious wisdom of what you are trying, and what works and what doesn’t. It’s called being alive and being human— the adventure of being human. Now if you have any questions or comments, we can get into those too.
Student #1: I find that being engaged is great. I’m getting a lot of lessons and everything. But they are very taxing. I’m ready for a little vacation right now—to take a break from all that. What do you think?
NEBADONIA: : Oh, I’d say if that is what your feeling is: give it a try! See what happens. Life is doing things and then staying open to what happens next.
Student #1: Well I’m afraid too much stuff has been happening. I want to start slowing down. I want to relax a little bit.
Creative breaks from routine
NEBADONIA: : Sometimes it takes a great creative ability to set some time aside like that and critique what can be done. Just let go for a while, and then se cannot not be sustained. Keep in touch with that old philosophy of: Simplify- Simplify your life! I think of some of your great moral philosophers always talked about that. It too is a major theme in so many religions–how to simplify your life down to what really counts.
Student #1: Well, simplifying your life, and really kind-of making it simpler actually does help in working with people because you have a lot of people working on the same thing. It does make it simpler and easier; but it certainly has to work in relationships with everyone at the same time.
Time alone to reflect
NEBADONIA: : In some situations–yes. In other ones, folks need to be alone a bit. They can feel themselves being too scattered with all their relationships, maybe even with their own intimate family. The mother, the father, even one or two of the children just need some time by themselves. But I will agree too that with certain tasks, many hands make the work light. Were there any other questions or comments this evening?
Closing
Well if not, let me wrap up this session. I thank you for your question of how to turn things around because it acknowledges that you are capable of sensing that things are going in the wrong direction and you are getting unhealthy and weaker. Maybe things are–as you say–falling apart. Maybe you’ve lost some dear friend and can’t seem to get out of the depression that’s settled over you.
Yet there is also wonderful, hopeful awareness in that phrase of turning things around. So many folks have done just this all through their lives. They’ve had things go wrong and summoned the determination, the ability, and the understanding of what was happening in such a way that things got better. They might have lost a dear friend and yet, after a period of grieving, could rouse themselves out of their depression and make new friends. They had the courage to accept that some terrible, unhealthy habit had gotten hold of them, and given it up.
Help with addictions
In this example, it is not always in being alone for there are wonderful organizations— groups of people who have fought the same kind of addiction–you can get with. Sometimes this group can help you by giving you some feedback, some objectivity on what this addiction involves, and a way of getting healthy again. It’s not always alone. In fact it’s good in your life to have a broad spectrum of being able to relate with a large group of people and enjoy their company, and yet also enjoy being alone—have both these “dimensions” of company.
My dear ones, know that this turning around is possible—to decide on a course of action, and then be open to whether it is working or not. Is it time to try something else? This is what your own creative spirit is all about—to create for yourself this other way to try.
Inescapable Adventure in Experimenting
This is the adventure of the experiment that Michael and I are very honest with you about. This is what being human is all about. This is also what eternity is all about— being in ever and ever greater realities, and learning how to deal with them, and even welcome them. So let me say, “All power to you!” Give yourself this possibility. And be in my love.
Good evening.
