A church message by Rt. Rev. Hope Hewetson. Please feel free to listen to the audio online or download to your computer (click on download link, wait for window to load, right click on play bar, save to computer).  Sit back, and enjoy! Or you may read the printed version below!
Good morning! Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and go to that quiet place within you! Validate your grounded connection to Mother Earth and allow yourself to have a healing during todays message!
It was fun choosing a quote for today’s theme. After spending an hour or so perusing poetry and quotes from all time periods and varieties of writers, I finally realized I really just wanted to find something that made me laugh!
That set me off on a Google search of: Funny Spiritual Quotes. I wanted some amusement, and I didn’t care if it fit my theme for today! And so we have:
“Dear God, so far today, I’ve done all right. I haven’t gossiped, and I haven’t lost my temper. I haven’t been grumpy, nasty or selfish, and I’m really glad of that! But in a few minutes, God, I’m going to get out of bed, and from then on, I’m probably going to need a lot of help. Thank you! Amen.”
Many people are experiencing a lot of emotional, mental or physical intensity as they navigate life amidst the changes and challenges going on! We are evolving as souls. We are shaking up and sifting out, rearranging and eliminating every last piece of the lie of separation that keeps us in the illusion that we are somehow separate from each other, and separate from Divinity. That lie fuels every single trouble in our lives, and all the games being played out on the planet.
This lie that we mistakenly believe essentially says, “You are not Love”. As we raise our vibration and set our sights and intention of being the Limitless beings that we truly are, all the rest has to be released, to be transmuted back to Love. We are doing that right now, breath by breath.
We have been in this transition for a while now, and I imagine that each of us has experienced those days when we wonder what rock our wisdom went and hid under! The payoff of those harder days is they offer opportunities for our brightest and grandest blasts of growth and wisdom! We get a chance to love and forgive in a way that we never thought we could. And although there may be days when it does feel best to stay in bed, we don’t always have that luxury! So, what’s an evolving Soul to do?
There are so many things that are helpful in this process when staying in bed isn’t an option, with meditation at the top of the list! Take time each day to get quiet…whether sitting or walking or enjoying music or a flower, or doing some of your daily tasks. Take time to reflect, be still, and to just enjoy the moment. Be in gratitude wherever you are, for no reason. The most important part of this is: For No Reason. Breathe, and imagine a bubble in front of you.
Put the words, “Doing something for no reason and with no expectations” into the bubble. Notice thoughts and feelings that come up around that concept. There may be a few! It is so counter-intuitive to what we are taught about in terms of how to be in the world. We are driven to do what we need to do in order to be what we are supposed to be. Let the energies and arguments release into this bubble or down your grounding cord. Let them go!
We are taught to identify and justify our existence based on what we do and what we have, what we accomplish, who we are supposed to be for others. We are taught to identify with everything other than the only truth, which is we are Love. But we can’t maintain that identification with the other stuff, and feel our value, because it’s impossible to. It all changes and goes away, and we think our value goes with it and it causes pain in our space. Sometimes we become the pain, and we act it out! We forget who we really are. We aren’t identified with the limitless truth of ourself.
The mind is brilliant. We would not have our body without the mind, because the mind projects form, the form of all that we see. The mind is also designed for remembering and figuring things out, so that we can survive, and not have to learn the same thing over and over. The problem, is that that is a very robotic function. Things that we memorize and store in the mind always have a purpose. Memorizing a phone number, how to count money, actors names, how to cook, how to plant a seed. But along with that retaining of information, each item is stored with emotional responses. And that is the problem. When we do things from that original purpose, over and over, we lose the ability to see it for what it really is. We lose the ability to bring awareness to it, and thus allow the belief to morph and change and become something new and different.
The mind always has purpose, and the mind creates the body. The mind needs help having Spirit and Love present. And this is the dichotomy. The Soul/Beingness/Love of the true you has no purpose. It is just awareness. There is no agenda, nothing to become, nothing to judge, nothing to be nasty about, nothing to gossip about because these is nothing deficient in anything or anyone, in the realm of Spirit.
So meditate! Find time to just Be, with no purpose, no reason, just being aware and allowing the havingness of the experience be enough. This is essential to these changes we are going through. It is so hard to put it into words. More important is to feel it, to feel the truth and understanding of it. To have an experience of it.
There must be space for the mind to change it’s mind, so that it can project the body that can have the vibrational shifts. And this will only happen when you balance awareness and intellect. Choose to fuel your motivations from Love versus fear. Healing the run-away mind takes love and patience. The Ego is not giving up easily and it’s not just the ego within each of us that we are healing, it’s the greater picture of our world built from the premise that it’s what outside of ourselves that brings us joy, it’s what we look like that matters most, it’s how other’s see us that is most important.
A person came to me recently because her elder dog was getting ready to die. She was grappling with the decision whether to put the dog to sleep or to let it die naturally. The dog was in pain. As a Buddhist, she was taught never to kill anything. Religion is a great example of the imprisoning level of beliefs that are memorized, and then enforced in the emotional stigma of being good, being worthy, being saved. Religious beliefs take away our ability to be aware as loving spiritual beings.
We each ultimately have to make our own decisions in life. But we never grow and evolve if we are not allowed to bring awareness to our beliefs, and re-calibrate them to our spiritual wisdom of Love and Wholeness, versus the mind, which is designed to retain information because it is useful, and then defend those ideas based on the emotional baggage attached to each one. You can see this is a huge topic. Gee, this could entertain a person for their entire lifetime!
So in the dog scenario, bringing the choice to assist a dog in its passing could be seen as much more loving than letting it suffer needlessly. This person needs to choose to release a belief in order to do that, and trust their awareness of the situation over a memorized doctrine. There is no right answer, it is their choice.
Another example of this is food, vitamins, drugs, anything we ingest to feed the body. Especially now, with so much data and information flooding us daily about what to eat, why to eat, GMOs, chemicals, fats, sugars etc… Food is important to our body, and it’s yummy! But release the expectations and energy on the food. Bring it back to neutral. Try grounding everything you eat in gratitude, and release the need to expect it to do anything. Listen to the body, bring your awareness to it, instead of what you read and are told. What if you change your purpose of eating? What happens when you bring awareness to it?
The mind is designed to retain information, so lets give it a job! What if you desired Awareness, in all that you do? Just try it. See what happens! What if you give your mind the job of helping you desire to expand, instead of the desire to acquire more things. Instead of being a robot so much and going through the motions, decide to be aware of what you are doing, for No Good Reason! Let there be no purpose, except to be in that moment, and to have awareness. Awareness of whatever comes up, then let it go and just be aware. That is meditation, and it is time to bring that ability more into our life, no matter what we are experiencing, the good stuff and the challenging bits!
Notice something in your life that doesn’t seem to be working right. There is frustration or effort in it. Put it in a bubble in front of you and ground it. This could be something around work, the body, relationship, money, creativity, anything! Know that you originally started to do this thing from the wrong intention. There had to be purpose in it, probably People- Pleasing- Purpose! There had to be outcomes and there were expectations, because that was how you were taught. There are beliefs attached to this issue. Let some aspect of those beliefs go! Let the purpose go! And just let this thing be. Send it love and just have awareness of it. No agenda. Breathe. There is nothing you have to get from this event in your life, because everything you need is within you. Take the demand out of this bubble. Just let it be. For no reason. Have awareness of you. You don’t need a reason. You are All. You are enough. See this bubble filled in with your Soul/Beingness/Love vibration. Take a deep breath and pop that bubble!
One summer day the venerable old Chao-chou proposed a little contest of Zen repartee with his attending disciple, Wen-yuan: to see who could identify himself with the lowest thing in the scale of human values. Chao-chou began: “I am a donkey.” Wen-yuan: “I am the donkey’s buttocks.” Chao-chou: “I am the donkey’s dung.” Wen-yuan: “I am a worm in the dung.” Chao-chou, unable to think of a rejoinder, asked, “What are you doing there?” Replied Wen-yuan: “I am spending my summer vacation!” Chao-chou laughingly conceded defeat.
That is about the ability to have awareness, no matter what is going on! And choosing awareness now, means that even if you are on vacation in the the donkey dung, you will have awareness, and you will not stay there long, because on the tails of that awareness comes another awareness, and suddenly you are in an entirely new space, continually aware and awake, with loving eyes, compassionate eyes, the eyes of limitless spirit. You have the life- giving power of the sun radiating from within you.
I would like to end today’s message with a piece written yesterday by one of our students, Janine Moderski. She said she woke up yesterday morning and wrote:
“Today I am grateful for having learned to love myself
Today I am grateful for being awake
What I mean by awake is that I’m actively participating in my life
For so many years I walked around blinded by what everybody else thought of “who i was” or “who I should be”
These beliefs blinded me from connecting with my own truth and brilliance
Today I woke up to the lies that have been running through my system
The lies that prevented me from clear seeing
Today I am grateful for being intimate with my truth
For today is one of the first days that I can look myself in the mirror and see me clearly
why is this?
Because I erased everybody else’s projections that had solidified themselves on the reflection I saw in the mirror—
I stopped falling victim to all the lies i had seen in that reflection that were causing me pain.
Today I am grateful for being awake to my truth.
—Janine Moderski
Take a deep breath. Visualize a big gold sun over your head. Notice, in this moment, what you are awakening to. What are you grateful for? What are you bringing your awareness to? Fill this gold sun with permission to take a step in your awareness of your mind, your ability to bring awareness to your thoughts. Have permission to release old beliefs, or re calibrate them to your Divine, Loving Knowingness, that only needs one Purpose: to Be the Love that you Are! Let this gold sun fill in every cell, every chakra, and your entire aura bubble. Amen.
Say hello to a neighbor, and share something about purpose versus awareness, or something you are grateful for, or just share something about yourself!
Rt. Rev. Hope Hewetson originally wrote this Message for Meditation Service at the Church of Inner Light in March 2013.  If you repost this message or any portion thereof of this message please give credit to Rev. Hope Hewetson, www.psychichorizonscenter.org.