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Gentle Healing Year 1 ~ Tip for Lesson 50

April 6, 2019 By Jacquelyn Eckert

Lesson 50. I am sustained by the Love of God.

Today’s lesson begins, “Here is the answer to every problem that will confront you, today and tomorrow and throughtout time.” The Self that God created needs nothing. It is complete and it is real. A Course in Miracles says “If God is real, there is no pain. If pain is real, there is no God.” The truth be told, you can put any of your fears into that same line of thinking and see the absurdity of a reality without the Truth that is God.

If God is real then worthlessness is not.

If God is real then vulnerability is not.

If God is real then abandonment is not.

If God is real then betrayal is not.

If God is real then attack is not.

If God is real then rejection is not.

If God is real then condemnation is not.

If God is real then guilt is not.

If Love is real then fear is not.

What God created is real.

The introduction to A Course in Miracles says:

Nothing real can be threatened.

Nothing unreal exists.

Herein lies the peace [and the Love] of God.

God and his Son cannot be threatened and the aforementioned fears are not real. Only what God created and is, is real.

If a thought does not come from God it is not real, and the only thing to do is to release it and harbor it no longer because God did not create it. Nothing exist apart from God because God and his Creation share one Will. Some believe we must maintain the temporal for sustenance because we believe we threw away Eternity. Thank goodness we are loved and aligned with a Higher Power and therefore truly invulnerable. And, according to Brent Haskell in his book Journey Beyond Words, “There is nothing outside of yourself that can have any effect, of any kind, upon you, or your experience, or your awareness…The only way anything can happen to you is if there exists a something different from you” [but] “when God loves you, In reality, God becomes you.”

The Love of God sustains us because, as today’s workbook lesson tells us, God’s Love is “eternal, changeless[,] forever unfailing” and real.

Schedule Change Starting April 23rd for Gentle Healing Year 1 with Rev. Jacquelyn Eckert and Connie Poole

April 5, 2019 By Dawn Fernandez

Please note in your calendars that starting April 23, 2019 our new Awakening Together Sanctuary Schedule will be as follows: Tuesday April 23 Gentle Healing year 1 with Rev. Jacquelyn Eckert and Connie Poole will begin a half hour earlier. It will now be a 2-hour long program that begins at 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm ET. Gentle Healing year 3 with Regina will remain the same. But then the Sanctuary will close half an hour earlier, just after Gentle Healing Year 3.

Also, please note that Shawna Summers will no longer be on Tuesdays. Her new time slot will be on Sundays just after Regina Dawn Aker’s program called The Guiding Light, that will now be only a half-hour program. Look for Shawna at her new time of 7:30 pm ET on Sundays.

Gentle Healing Year 3 ~ Daily Contemplation #59

April 5, 2019 By Regina Dawn Akers

Please read and contemplate quotes 205-207 in The Seven Steps to Awakening with your inner teacher. This is the last quote today:

In the silence is the highest peace because wavering is the intellect’s unreal work; there the knowers of the Eternal, mighty-souled, enjoy unbroken happiness of partless bliss, recognizing the Self as the Eternal.

Note: The next Daily Contemplation will be available tomorrow morning after 2am ET at this link.

Gentle Healing Year 1 ~ Tip for Lesson 49

April 5, 2019 By Jacquelyn Eckert

Lesson 49. God’s voice speaks to me all through the day.

God’s Voice is silent. It communicates with no words at all. We ‘hear’ God’s Voice more as an intuitive feeling. An example of God’s Voice is the feeling ‘all is well.’ When we feel ‘all is well’ under all circumstances, we are listening to God’s Voice consistently.

God’s Voice prompts us in daily life, if we are willing to ‘listen’. It may come through as a feeling that ‘I don’t need to do anything’ about a particular situation; ‘I can wait’ or have patience. It may come through as a feeling that ‘it is best if I say nothing now’. Or it may come through as a feeling that ‘it is best if I say this particular thing now’. It may come through as awareness, noticing that ‘I am listening to an out-of-control mind now’ and a reminder to breathe and shift attention, etc.

The brain has the ability to translate God’s silent Voice into your language, which means you can hear God’s Voice as words/thoughts. This may or may not happen for some individuals. It may happen sometimes but not all of the time.

Open to ‘God’s Voice’ in whatever way it comes to you today. If you close your eyes for 5 minutes and have no other experience except feeling more relaxed after the 5-minute practice, you heard God’s Voice. That’s it.

This Sunday in the Sanctuary ~ April 7, 2019

April 4, 2019 By Dawn Fernandez

Join us at 10:15am ET / 7:15am PST for our Weekly Gathering with The Mystery Minister.

This Sunday we will have our mystery minister. Come and see whom it will be!

*Weekly gathering is held every Sunday morning at 10:15am ET in the Awakening Together Sanctuary. Join us after the Gathering for our Fellowship Time, hosted by Rev. Jay McCormick

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Join us at 7:00 pm ET / 4:00 pm PT for The Guiding Light with Rev. Regina Dawn Akers

Regina is reading and sharing from The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi.

Join us at 8:00 pm ET / 5:00 PT for Reflections from the Retreat House

We will have inspired sharings from the recent retreat participants.

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Join us at 9:00pm ET / 6:00pm PT for Fully Human Fully Divine Satsang with Craig Holliday.

Craig Holliday continues his examination of what it means to be both free and human.

Gentle Healing Year 3 ~ Daily Contemplation #58

April 4, 2019 By Regina Dawn Akers

Please read and contemplate quotes 201-204 in The Seven Steps to Awakening with your inner teacher. This is the last quote today:

Reality can be experienced only with the eye of understanding, not just by a scholar. What the moon is like must be seen with one’s own eyes. How can others do it for you?

Note: The next Daily Contemplation will be available tomorrow morning after 2am ET at this link.

Gentle Healing Year 1 ~ Tip for Lesson 48

April 4, 2019 By Jacquelyn Eckert

Lesson 48. There is nothing to fear.

Today’s lesson obviously builds on yesterday’s lesson: God is the Strength in which I trust. The reason there is nothing to fear is because God is the Strength in which I trust.

More and more there is an awareness that our true identity is Spirit. However if we are still believing our thoughts about being a person within a world, giving up these concepts may be scary. But the truth is there is great joy in relying on your natural state. “Your truth is joy, so whenever you are not joyful you are misunderstanding what you are.” NTI James 1

It feels scary to think about stepping out of the world, but the mind is the cause of the world, therefore we can never be helpless victims.

When we hold Self Realization as our goal, we begin to detach from the world and realize there is nothing outside of us. All goals then are consistent with God reliance. My decisions are no longer based on what is happening on the screen or the values the world and I once shared.

The problem is we are still uncertain about Spirit. We have not really bought into the truth that God is our Strength in which we can trust. It is seen as a risk rather than an opening up to Strength. Confidence comes from practicing and focusing our attention on our true desire. NTI James 1 teaches, “For with practice and focus, your true desire stands clear within your sight until the naturalness of your being is as natural in your awareness as true desire is now in the quiet of your Heart. God is the truth within you.”

Journey Beyond Words teaches “God is within me. God Himself is within my being. God’s strength. God’s Love, And the Light with which I will see, are deep within me. They will never leave. And I, in all the power of my imaginings, Cannot make it go away. Truly, there is nothing to fear.”

4-3-19 ~ Regina & ‘I Am That’- “Dormancy or Bliss, That is the Question.”

April 4, 2019 By Dawn Fernandez

Regina Dawn Akers read and shared from her contemplation of the May 10, 1980 conversation in Consciousness and the Absolute: The Final Talks of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

Listen to this audio

Gentle Healing Year 3 ~ Daily Contemplation #57

April 3, 2019 By Regina Dawn Akers

Please read and contemplate quotes 197-200 in The Seven Steps to Awakening with your inner teacher. This is the last quote today:

Thus, O sage, it is clear that Self-knowledge is beyond the reach of the jugglery of words.

Note: The next Daily Contemplation will be available tomorrow morning after 2am ET at this link.

Gentle Healing Year 1 ~ Day 2 with Lesson 47

April 3, 2019 By Jacquelyn Eckert

Day 2 with Lesson 45. God is the Strength in which I trust.

Trusting in God’s strength rather than our own is really a shift in the way we relate to the world. It is a shift from attempting to control life in order to take something from it (which is what the thinking mind/ego structure/conditioned self tends to do). It is a shift to experiencing life from the perspective of our true nature, open-allowance-awareness.

Thus, this lesson aims at helping us open to living in the mystery. This willingness to live in the “not-knowing” has been described by some as liberation itself. In his article, Freedom and the Unknown, Adyashanti writes:

Human beings have a drive for security and safety, which is often what fuels the spiritual search. This very drive for security and safety is what causes so much misery and confusion. Freedom is a state of complete and absolute insecurity and not knowing. So, in seeking security and safety, you actually distance yourself from the freedom you want. There is no security in freedom, at least not in the sense that we normally think of security. This is, of course, why it is so free: there’s nothing there to grab hold of.

The Unknown is more vast, more open, more peaceful, and more freeing than you ever imagined it would be. If you don’t experience it that way, it means you’re not resting there; you’re still trying to know. That will cause you to suffer because you’re choosing security over Freedom. When you rest deeply in the Unknown without trying to escape, your experience becomes very vast. As the experience of the Unknown deepens, your boundaries begin to dissolve. You realize, not just intellectually but on a deep level, that you have no idea who or what you are. A few minutes ago, you knew who you were—you had a history and a personality—but from this place of not knowing, you question all of that..

Understanding that you do not know is a good thing. The truth is that the currency of consciousness is a felt sense of what is. That is why, when meditating, we look at this felt sense of being – what we call “awareness.” Resting in this place without definition is abiding in awareness.

To need to know (as well as the need to be seen as if you know) is the will of the personal I to exist. Can you see how that will builds the structure of thinking mind and the I thought? You can also see how the fear of not knowing (or being wrong) provides reinforcement to that structure. In fact, this fear of not knowing is the same fear often referred to as the fear of nonexistence. It is this fear that must be faced and traversed. Letting go this fear is letting go of the I thought. Letting go this fear is the death of the ego. Letting go this fear in faith and in trust is what we are to do.

In order to get in touch with that which lies beyond conditioned self, we can begin to practice the awareness watching awareness method as we go about our daily lives. We can ask ourselves who sees what the eyes perceive. Who hears what the ears report? How does this blanket feel? What is my actual experience in this moment now? This removes the narrator/definer/describer from between awareness and experience.