The Exist Poem

Just about all of the assignments for the Spiritual Practices class were to do spiritual mind treatments for our prayer partner, a classmate. I'll keep his issues and concerns private, as well as those I did for other friends. This, however, is my final project for the class, a poem. I think it summarizes pretty well how I was feeling during the class!

Divine Right Relationship

Another class I took before I started my practitioner training was Spiritual Practices. We learned about affirmative prayer, meditation, visioning, and journaling. We had prayer partners in class to practice doing spiritual mind treatments for others. Our week two assignment was to write a spiritual mind treatment on a current condition we would like to change. I wrote a treatment to release past attachments and attract a new romantic relationship. Feel free to use as is or adapt for your own purposes!

Realizing My Full Potential

In week seven of the Self Mastery class, we read "Some Elements of Commitment" in our student workbook. The four elements are:

• My Principle-Centeredness. The foundation of faith that undergirds my human life and values, and validates WHO I AM. My Centeredness in Principle provides inner strength and stability in all I do. 
• My Purpose. What I am in the world for. My faith-based sense of mission and direction. The thrust of my life. My Purpose gives basic meaning to my life. 
• My Finite Objectives. My work. The finite ways in which I express my faith in my Purpose. My Objectives define the actions needed to implement my Purpose and bring my Vision into realization. 
• My Vision. My capacity to see ultimate, archetypal possibilities in my Purpose and move toward making them real. My vision is my potential for creativity in living. 

Our assignment was to pick one of the elements of commitment that needed the most strengthening and write a spiritual mind treatment addressing it. I chose My Purpose and to some extent My Vision. I focused on the sense of unworthiness that up until that point had been keeping me from my mastery.

Releasing the Need to Please

This is a treatment addressing how I was before I discovered Science of Mind, living in denial of my human potential and spiritual needs. This assignment was for week six of the Self Mastery class. Feel free to use as is or adapt for your own use!

Spiritual Mind Treatment

Condition: 
My need to please is preventing me from reaching my full human potential, preventing me from being true to myself.

I Am Love and Absolutely Worth Loving

In week five of the Self Mastery class, our assignment was to write a spiritual mind treatment for an issue that came up while reviewing the chapter on 'Freeing Myself and Others to Love.' Here is mine. Feel free to use it or adapt it if it resonates with you!

Spiritual Mind Treatment

Condition:

Fear of abandonment makes me reluctant to trust in love relationships. It is difficult to believe that I am worth loving.

My Presence Is a Gift

In week four of Self-Mastery class our assignment was to read the following piece by Paul Williams from Remember Your Essence and write a thought paper: 

          Your Essence

          Picture a burning log, like in a fireplace, a hearth. 

          Now see it as if it were floating in the air a few feet in front of you, 
          and notice that there are two elements here: the log, and the fire 
          that clings to it. 

          Now move this image of a burning object into your body, so that you 
          can feel it like a warm, comforting glow inside your chest. 

          This burning log is real, and it exists inside you. 

Restoring Myself to Wholeness

My assignment during week two of Self-Mastery class involved a spiritual mind treatment for the issue that came up for me while we were doing some heart work (our more uplifting term for 'homework') on Wholeness. I had not been taking very good care of myself. Time to love myself more. 


If this treatment resonates with you, feel free to adapt it for yourself. 

Embracing My Oneness with Spirit

The next class I took after Foundations was Self-Mastery. Many of the assignments involved writing spiritual mind treatments, prayers that call positive experiences into being by affirming that God qualities which appear to be lacking really are already present. The prayer plants a seed in Universal Mind - if it is given the sunlight and water of our full attention and trust, it must grow into a beautiful demonstration!

I thought I would post the treatments here to show my progression throughout the course. Feel free to use them yourself if the condition fits!

The Journey

Wow! It’s been over four years since I added to this blog. For the last three years, I’ve been deepening into spiritual studies at the Center for Joyful Living in Wilmington, DE. The last two of those years were specialized studies to become a Religious Science of Mind Practitioner. I passed a grueling written exam and am now in the internship phase of my studies, using affirmative prayer in coaching sessions with clients. I’ve come a long way since avoiding eye contact while saying affirmations at Agape! I understand much more about how the Universe works, how my thoughts create my reality. Applying that knowledge, consistently, in a way that makes a substantive difference in my life has been more challenging, but I’ve made definite progress.

Video Kismet in Philly

“This is my wife, Lyubov.” I looked up at the round-cheeked woman with big brown saucer eyes and shook her hand.

Russkaya, shto li?

“Da, russkaya.”

She switched back into English and I don’t think she even noticed we had exchanged that little bit in Russian. Her husband explained that we were discussing the possibility of working together on some video projects. With his new camera and various equipment, he felt comfortable shooting just about anything. What he didn’t know was how to organize the pieces – what questions to ask, what shots to get, how to edit it all together. I knew how to direct and produce, but I wasn’t too skilled on the technical side of things. We could be a match! 

Falling Into Love, Gradually

September. My summer love project is officially over, and I haven’t had any dramatic breakthroughs. I was getting a little discouraged, but I remembered something that Reverend Michael said once in a sermon, that the changes sometimes come gradually, unnoticed until we look back and compare who we were then with who we are now. I decided to continue the project into September, October, November – to fall into love! I mean, if you think about it, love works in any season.

My first experience at Agape International Spiritual Center last January was stressful, particularly doing the affirmations. We had to lock eyes with another parishioner and repeat after Reverend Michael, something like “I see you. I see who you really are. You have potential. I know because I have it too. I see myself in you...” Saying the affirmation wasn’t hard in and of itself; it was the eye contact that killed me.

Propeller Miracles

Day 18 of my Summer Love Project. As usual, ideas and insights are coming faster than I can write about them, and as I was away in Florida for almost two weeks with intermittent Internet access, I have some catching up to do here! I am still working on being present, on being love – doesn’t happen all of the time, probably not even the majority of the time, but I do a little every day when I think of it, and I have noticed some subtle changes. Nothing dramatic or earth-shattering, just a little more inner peace every day, an inner glow and happiness more often than before, and a higher tolerance for noise and dysfunction that used to upset me horribly. I’ll take it.

Before I left for Florida, I went over to my brother’s house to do laundry. The dryer at my parents’ house was broken, and there wasn’t time to air dry everything before my trip. My brother and his wife came home with their two little boys before I finished, and the four-year-old, Lukas, wanted to stay and play with me rather than go to the gym with them. I was tired and had a lot to do at home, but I decided to stay and spend time with him. With his Lincoln Logs we built something that vaguely resembled a barn; he put in his toy cow and then went to get some ‘hay’ for him from behind the television, and I told him we needed to leave the cow so he could eat and take a nap.

Starting Summer Love!

It’s August 2 – day 2 into my Summer Love Project! Reverend Michael at the Agape International Spiritual Center in Los Angeles is always saying that we need to ‘be the light in the room,’ to ‘be love,’ so I decided to make a challenge for myself. For the month of August, I am going to make a concentrated effort to be love. I’m hoping that a month of practice will make it a habit for me.

I can’t say that I totally understand what this means. In general, when I find myself turning inwards and shutting down, closing myself off from others, I think of my niece and nephews. I remember how excited Noelle was to give me a delicate gold necklace with a tiny volleyball charm or how Sage laughed and laughed as he scooped up sand from the sand box and dumped it on his head. My heart fills up with love; I imagine myself hugging all five of them at once, and then I try to breathe into that feeling so that it stays with me in all of my interactions. I’m sure that feeling love for them and gratitude for what they bring to my life helps me by raising my vibrational level. (It must, right?)

Home at Agape

In my continuing KLOVE quest to find “heaven in 2011,” I decided to check out the Agape International Spiritual Center in Culver City, near west Los Angeles. Its founder, Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith, was a featured speaker in the film The Secret, and I had always been meaning to attend a service there and check it out.

I got to the 11 am meditation on time, but with all of the people leaving the earlier service and arriving for this one, a good fifteen minutes had passed before I parked and found the center. Once the meditation portion of the service begins, doors are closed until it is over (I learned), so I lined up with the other latecomers along the railing outside the door. After my experience the previous week with the twenty-person congregation, I was amazed at how many people filed into the line. I’m terrible with estimating numbers – 100 maybe? The queue snaked back into the upper parking lot and coiled around and around the maze of temporary line dividers.

The Search for KLOVE

Back in December, I was in the awkward position of still living with my ex-fiance after I gave him back the engagement ring. My two good friends Nancy and Karen came out to LA to visit me. Our plan was to take a road trip to Portland, OR, and stop at all of the vodka distilleries we could find on the way. We decided to get a rental car so we could spend a little more time in Portland and fly back. It was a basic rental, no GPS or satellite radio, and we forgot to bring CDs. As we drove along the remote coastal areas of northern CA and into Oregon, the only music we could get was on the aptly named KLOVE, a Christian radio station.

The Good Fairy

A week or so after I went to see life coach Frank Gjata, my therapist, Sandy Gartin, MA, MFT, (whom I cannot recommend highly enough) read me “The Good Fairy.” It’s by an unknown author. I found it so helpful that I’m reprinting it here; if anyone does know the source, please let me know.

The Good Fairy!

From the corners where the silence remains, there came the urgency to go to a mountaintop and scream out the whole truth. I sent out a prayer to the Universe – “It’s too painful; I can’t take it!” – and she came to me, the power of my mind, the Energy of the universe, in blue like the Good Fairy in the Wizard of Oz, waving a wand.

To Tolerate the Temperature of Happiness

A few years back I worked as the program manager for the doctorate program of an acupuncture college. My boss, the director of the program, made it a point to constantly compliment my work, particularly in front of others. Look at this wonderful handout Marianne made, he’d say, waving the paper around. It’s just a handout, I’d mutter, feeling like I was ten years old, getting praised for coloring within the lines. I felt patronized and doubted his sincerity. I couldn’t stand the attention. When I went on a cruise with my ex-fiance’s family, their constant solicitous concern for my sea queasiness made me crazy. My therapist found it amusing that while I’d been craving more attention my entire life, I had such a difficult time accepting it. Apparently the feelings, although generally pleasant, made me uncomfortable because they were unfamiliar.

All Twisted Up and Stuck

Sometime in the fall I signed up for a free consultation with life coach Frank Gjata. He did sessions over the phone, but since he was in the LA area, I went down to see him at his house on Monday, January 3. I was unhappily settled in my new temporary abode after the end of my engagement, and I was determined to start the new year off as soon as I could with some changes.

Roses on New Year's Eve

You know things are not going well when a good friend wishes you to be smelling the roses on next year’s New Year’s Eve. Yes, on the eve of 2011, friends were wishing me strength to make it through the new year so that I could be in a position to celebrate the following year. Right before Thanksgiving I had given my engagement ring back to my fiancé. I had used up my small savings decorating his new condo when I moved in, and my contract job was ending in January 2011. I had no partner, no job, and nowhere to live. What I did have was a lot of grief, sadness, and fear about my future. Not an auspicious beginning to a new year.