Unity Connections

As those in Lewiston Maine turn to find support within their community following the horrific loss of life they endured yesterday, let us join them in a heart connection that flows beyond the limits of that small town.   From a grounded place within ourselves, we can hold their pain and devastation. We can also hold them in the energy of safety, strength and love.   I do not know the details of what drove this man to act in this way.  I certainly do not condone his actions but I do believe that there had to be something deeply disturbed inside of him for him to act out in this way.  Challenging as it may feel at times, I believe that every act of misplaced anger, hatred, and violence is a call for us all to connect more deeply in love.   Our spiritual principles and practices support us in this. Knowing the Love that we are as God expressing on Earth is where we find the strength and courage to offer love to our hurting world, and ourselves. God as Love is the ultimate source of all

"Blessed are they that are One with themselves. They will find the Kingdom .”  --Gospel of Thomas 49 To become one with all that we are is to turn toward all that we experience in life. Some aspects of our experience are more challenging than others and our human tendency to criticize ourselves when we are struggling is not helpful.  A growing body of evidence suggests that learning to replace relentless self-criticism with greater self- compassion and care supports us in meeting the fullness of our experience with greater ease. From a spiritual perspective, we know that we are forever supported in this process by the power and presence of Divine Love that resides within us, in Spirit.  Unity has long taught the power our thoughts have on our experience. Prayer and meditation are taught as the most accelerated use of that power as we purposely focus our mind/thoughts on that Divine Presence within and all around us.  Spending time in the Silence allows these ideas to permeate all

  Meditation and concentration are techniques we use in prayer to help us attain the realization of God expressing as us. There are many types of meditation and concentration methods used in the various spiritual disciplines of the world. In Unity, the purpose of these techniques is primarily to focus the attention on the Source/God of our being. The divine life and light at the center of our being and all around us. Much of what we call prayer and meditation involves practices of working with our mind. Grounding in the breath and engaging the fullness of the senses can help steady and regulate our nervous system,  supporting our ability to respond to life from a more centered place, rather than simply reacting. Just taking a moment to pause—to check in—using the breath as a focal point, and then to notice the variety of physical sensations occurring in the moment. This alone can feel foreign at first because we are more accustomed to THINKING about experiences; we are not sure ho

We are concluding our Summer of Awe series this Sunday with the grandeur of epiphany! Who doesn't love a good epiphany? Epiphanies are those big ‘aha’ moments whereby our current understanding of life gets rearranged in such a way that a whole new perspective suddenly becomes known. In his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life , the author Dasher Keltner summarizes the experiences of epiphany from the participants in his study of awe as follows: “Around the world, people were awe struck by philosophical insights, scientific discoveries, metaphysical ideas, personal realizations, mathematical equations, and sudden disclosures that transform life in an instant. In each instance, the epiphany united facts, beliefs, values, intuitions, and images into a new system of understanding” (pg. 18). I have come to consider that we are in an experience of collective epiphany. Of course our individual experience of a new understanding depends on where w

Summer of Awe Series  I hope that you have been taking time to notice the plethora of opportunities for awe and wonder that life so freely affords us.   This Sunday we will consider the power and purpose of Mystical/Spiritual Awe. The term mystical here simply means a direct, personal experience of the Divine. There are a plethora of these opportunities to connect. As we discussed last week, many of us feel this powerful connection while “walking in the Cathedral of nature” as Dr. Lisa Miller puts it. In his book Awe , author Dasher Keltner explores how our spiritual life actually grows out of experiences of awe.   Keltner refers to mystical awe as “…the feelings of encountering what we call the Divine, {meaning} what we feel to be primary, true, good and omnipresent” (pg. 195). Such experiences draw us closer to the power and presence of the Divine within and all around us. They also fulfill a deep and fundamental human need. The awe-inspiring body of work recently published

  Wild Awe Last weekend while camping, I experienced firsthand the reprieve that time in nature  offers.  This was no doubt magnified by my concurrent reading of the book, Awe by Dacher Keltner. As the Universe would have it,I was literally reading the chapter on Wild Awe which speaks to the emerging science behind what so many of us have experienced in nature! Not surprisingly, a growing number of Americans report feeling the greatest connection with the Divine while in nature. I have long appreciated that experience myself without the need for scientific data, but it is truly awe inspiring to consider why that is and how it works. It seems to affirm the fullness of divine intelligence imbued in every aspect of life – including the energetic power of nature itself to calm our nervous systems and put us in touch with the majestic vastness of the cosmos, and our small, but powerful place within it. Keltner’s explanation for why he decided to embark on this study of awe is tell