SPIRITUALITY 101

TRAGEDIES ALLOW US TO REDISCOVER OUR PERSONAL STRENGTHS.

Tragedies shake people’s consciousness.  When shaken, we are forced to become more flexible in our thoughts and actions.  For example, if our home is destroyed, we are motivated to find solutions.  We must make decisions.  We find ourselves forced into new thinking patterns and into discovering how flexible we can be.  What we had, what we thought about life in the past no longer applies.  Though the chaos, we are forced to rediscover our own power.

The world continues to bring us tragedy after tragedy.  Our lives are shaken.  Many of us begin to distrust the world and the future.  But many of us also learn to trust our own abilities to survive.  Those are the individuals who decide to reach deep down inside themselves and rediscover their strength.  This strength somehow enables them to go beyond the tragedy and to work at creating a life out of the chaos.  The pain is terrible and consuming yet they move ahead regardless.  They become like the large oak tree that bends and sways in the storm yet whose roots hold fast.

Chaos, disorganization and confusion can be the builders of the opposite.  They force us to reevaluate.  They stir our stagnate waters of life.  Observe a flowing stream and watch how its constant movement brings clarity to its water.  Observe water with no movement and you will find it dark and unclean.  Allowing movement in out lives can also bring clarity.  As we move, our life takes on new meaning.  We are forced into a new flow.  We are encouraged to recognize and t o find new possibilities and solutions. This is a time to remember our faith and though our life will be different as a result, we will survive. We are forced to leave our past, renew our present and rethink our future.

USE THE POWER OF YOUR MIND – SPIRIT RESIDES THERE.

The mind is not only the physical brain.  It is a combination of both thinking and feeling.  When we think, we feel.  The two are intertwined.  We cannot have a thought without some element of feeling attached to it.  And when we learn to integrate and balance them both, our outer world will reflect this and become more harmonious.  It’s when we combine feeling with action that we become a mighty force.

In the concrete world of humanity, feeling plus thinking is an ability that must be cultivated.  If feeling is allowed to dominate, inertia can result.  We can become so involved with experiencing the emotion that we do not move beyond the emotion into action.   We can then become stuck.  We must learn to move with our emotions into constructive actions.

Each of us is working and growing towards personal advancement and spiritual maturity.  Whether we consciously recognize this or not doesn’t matter for it is a natural progression of our nature.  We yearn for advancement and improvement.  Being aware and being conscious of this process helps to increase and escalate it.  Becoming conscious of it is an awakening as from a sleep.  We can then act and move towards possibilities.

Humans are by their very nature divine yet also imperfect.  After all, we are placed within an imperfect body, in an imperfect world, and we make imperfect decisions.  Yet we are given the ability to choose, to learn and to retain knowledge.  We learn from what we do.  We learn from what we did.  We learn from how we feel.  We learn from how we felt.  No other animal has been given these capabilities.  We can move from feelings into constructive actions and into making a better life for ourselves.  Explore your possibilities.