Spiritually Empowered Wholeness

Help Wanted: Apply Within                                                                                                                                                             

I love having online access to so many beautiful images!  One of my favorite is the radiant lotus blossom to the right.  This image has become my visual mantra, symbolizing for me not just the Christ in me,  but the awareness and experience of that presence in me.   I focus upon it as I begin to pray or meditate and I feel an actual warmth spreading out from my heart center.  And in moments of stress or too much busyness, just a moment's focus allows me to re-center on that image.

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Lent Season

Take Up Your Bed & Walk

Lent is a time of seeking personal transformation.  Easter is a celebration of that transformation.  The story told in John 5:1-15 about the man healed at the Pool of Bethesda represents far more than a simple physical healing.  This story demonstrates a transformation in consciousness which then manifests as a physical healing.

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Praying Our Way to Wholeness

"To Live Until We Die"  --Kubler-Ross

God is the Source of all Being, all substance and an unfolding universe of infinite possibilities.    Learning to express more  of our true nature, our God self, leads us out of limiting thought patterns and into an understanding Faith in God as our Father.  When challenges arise in our lives, we are better able to seek underlying meaning in what is happening and to grow through those events.

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Transformational Living

Keys to Wholeness: Forgiveness

The Burning Bowl is a powerful symbol of forgiveness and letting go to grow. We can hold on to anger and resentment and warm ourselves by the burning fires of turmoil in our stomach. Or not.

It sounds like a ridiculously simple and logical choice: forgive or suffer. Yet, consciously or unconsciously, we slide into “instant replay” mode and allow the perfect storm of ricocheting emotions to build up into an overwhelming wall of doom. Jesus said in Mt. 5:44-45:

“But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.”

In Mt.22:37 He said:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. And, You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

Fr. Thomas Hopko addressed the issue of forgiveness in “Living in Communion”. He writes that we are created in the image and likeness of God and that forgiveness is essential if we are to ”carry on in a spirit of love without letting the evil poison the future.”

We must acknowledge the facts--the pain, allow ourselves to grieve and then we must forgive because:

“The only way you can prove you love God is by loving your neighbor, and the only way you can love your neighbor in this world is by endless forgiveness.”

Transformational living requires that we make conscious choices, daily, to come up higher. Cast off the mental and emotional burdens of the past and begin the New Year lighter and brighter, freer than ever before. As Fr. Hopko wrote:

“Forgiveness is not just the healing of the other, it is the healing of yourself, too. If you don’t forgive, you allow yourself to be poisoned.”

Rev. Claudia Naylor

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A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Ego: The Current State of Humanity

Eckhart Tolle defines the ego as a false sense of self, based on mental concepts, which identifies itself with forms, ie, that which is seen. The ego is ever looking back, placing blame, and looking forward toward the acquisition of those things which will 'fulfill' it's desires. Because current possessions fail to provide the lasting happiness ego demands, it has no interest in being present in the Now moment.

The true self, the I Am of Christ Consciousness, has a free playing field in the Now and is free to experience the essential self without labels and pre-judgements. Instead of greeting friends and acquaintances with a lot of mental baggage, we meet them in the Now, free to discover what each of us has become. Tolle wrote:

When you don't cover up the world

with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous

returns to your life that was lost a long

time ago.

Tolle related judging a fellow commuter as crazy because she always talked out loud to herself, complaining and fussing as she went along her way. He, of course, was running a silent commentary about her insanity when he suddenly realized that the only difference between them was that he kept his thoughts to himself instead of talking out loud to himself as she did. I know I have done the same thing all too often--even though I am not verbally venting on the world, those same trash thoughts are chasing themselves around inside my head.

When we shift our attention from what is wrong when we are ill or injured to an external object, such as a flower, we can find and feel the wholeness and beauty in that flower and allow that feeling to wash over us. By connecting to and contemplating the aliveness of the flower, we can shift our awareness into the Now and draw strength and hope into ourselves. This 'transfusion' of aliveness helps us to reconnect with our true self, the eternal I.

Life will give you whatever experience

is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.

How do you know this is the experience you need?

Because this is the experience you are having

at this moment.

Rev. Claudia Naylor

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Jesus Christ Heals

Healing Through Praise and Thanksgiving

Living with an attitude of gratitude consciousness is essential to fulfilling our purpose on Earth as the sons and daughters of God. We co-create the world we believe in by seeing it to fulfillment, not by dent of hard labor and suffering. And we know that it is so much easier to give praise and thanksgiving for that which we have already demonstrated in our lives.

Yet it is by praising the good which we desire in our lives which "releases the pent up energies of Spirit within man" according to Charles Fillmore in Jesus Christ Heals. God does not withhold our good from us, but awaits the seeker's understanding to reveal that which is. Our healing, our wholeness is not external to we ourselves, but intrinsic to our true nature.

Instead of a heaven after death,
the new Christianity teaches a kingdom of
the heavens existing now as a righteous state of mind.
It teaches that man makes his heaven here and now
by the formative power of his thought.

Every story in the Bible is about more than the simple facts of the story. In the story of the loaves and the fishes in Matthew 14:13, Jesus gives thanks for what is already evident (the 5 loaves and 2 fish) and blesses the potential for that which is needed. The miracle isn't an event frozen in time, but the teaching and the demonstration of the riches of the Father as our instant, constant and abundant supply.

When it dawns upon man that he has
within him the primal spiritual spark of God,
the living Word or Logos,
and that through the Word he is (linked) with the
original Mind, he has the key to infinite soul unfoldment.

Nothing is impossible with God! When I begin first by praising and giving thanks for all the good I feel and see all around me, my soul leaps up with joy and I begin calling forth all the good I desire!

Rev. Claudia Naylor

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Jesus Christ Heals

"Producing Results"

Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, co-founders of Unity, demonstrated the healing power of faith in God through transformative thinking. Believing in and affirming that "I am a child of God and therefore do not inherit sickness!" allowed Charles and Myrtle to overcome their own health challenges and lay the foundation for a world-wide prayer ministry.

Charles Fillmore wrote in Jesus Christ Heals that healing must follow the inner realization of our own true nature.

"I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly."
Jn. 10:10

When we recognize it and open our
consciousness to it, it comes flowing into mind
and body with its mighty quickening, healing power,
and they are renewed and transformed.

If I truly believe that the perfect life of God dwells in me, then I ought to demonstrate perfect health in mind and body. Yet, I do not. Last Friday I had meals on wheels to deliver and a long list of new mothers and their infants to visit at Southern Regional. When I got up that morning, my left knee was giving me fits and I informed it that I didn't have time for pain. For the next three hours, "it" was a non-issue. But the minute I finished the last visit, the pain came charging back!

Now, clearly, my mind was fully capable of setting aside pain and the limping it would trigger for three hours but then allow it to return without a conscious decision to do so. Even though it really hurt, I had to laugh at myself for "playing" such a stupid game with mind and body. The glimmer of belief begins in the mind, but must be irrevocably linked to inner faith and conviction before the outer demonstration of wholeness can manifest.

Rev. Claudia Naylor

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Jesus Christ Heals

"Realization Precedes Manifestation"

It seems to me that we are often so focused on seeing the demonstration or manifestation of Truth, that we "put the cart before the horse" in our prayer work. And because we don't see the results we seek, we virtually beat on the door of God-consciousness demanding results, repeating our prayer request ad nauseam. Or worse yet, perhaps we lose faith in God.

In Truth, God never fails! Sometimes we don't recognize the answer because it doesn't look like or sound like the answer we seek. Sometimes the answer is no. But often, the problem lies in our failure to "seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." (Mt 6:33)

Realization is the foundation principle of manifestation and "the supreme realization of man is his unity with God". (Charles Fillmore) Whether I pray for myself or others, I must first abide in the power and the presence of God, allowing myself to feel His love, lifting up my mind and heart into His care and keeping. With a deep sense of gratitude, I release any concerns, any requests in the sure knowledge that they are answered in God's own time. Fillmore stated it this way:

"When man becomes so much at one with
God-Mind that he abides in the consciousness
of health he enters the eternal peace in which
he knows that 'it is finished'."

Rev. Claudia Naylor

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Jesus Christ Heals

"Be Thou Made Whole"

Modern medicine 'creates' miracle upon miracle, yet all too often it feels as if our lives are overrun by disease, dis-ease and discomfort. The disease of the moment seems to be 'swine flu' because of the current media frenzy. Is it just me, or do you find yourself wondering why we find ourselves suffering from, if not dying from, diseases our grandparents never even heard of or never worried about if they had?

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