Greater Freedom
Hi Friends!
I am currently in the airport preparing to fly home from Kansas City after spending the week at my first Unity World Wide Ministries conference! "Back to the Future" is this year's theme, offering a nod to the confusion we feel in knowing which way to go in our rapidly changing world. The future is always before us and yet; we often find ourselves looking backward.
Our human nature seeks to find comfort in the seeming stability of what has been. Of course, there is always good to be found in what has been- in all that we have learned and experienced and celebrated along the way- in our personal lives, our Unity Ministries, and in our shared, collective human experience. Accompanying that good are also the limitations, misunderstandings and seeming failures along the way. We often label these as 'bad' but they are only really ''bad' if we don't learn and grow from them. We don't know what we don't know, until we do! In my understanding, our ignorance is only 'bad' when we continue to perpetuate it after we know better.
The challenge before us then, is how we can take the good to the next level of
expression by integrating what we have learned along the
way. However, doing so requires us to be willing to first acknowledge those limitations and the pain they hold in order to get close enough to learn
from them. This requires great courage and understanding which in turn, paves the way for greater wisdom and possibility.
This is not easy nor is it instantaneous. It takes time and patience to actually be in this liminal space. It takes a willingness to be with all that comes up from within us in that process, instead of denying or resisting it. It takes surrendering to the process that is seeking to work through us all in order to reveal what there is to heal so that we can truly create something new.
I have likened this experience to a collective mid-life crisis! No matter our age or life stage-we have all been catapulted into this confusing time of questioning, and doubting, grieving, and yearning. Few of us are all that well equipped to handle it with ease and grace. A good number of us want to pretend that nothing is happening, let's just get on with life as we knew it. Then there are those of us who wish we could do that, but in so doing, we feel even more discomfort and disillusion.
I will be the first to admit that I have wished I could find a way around it all and avoid the confusion and discomfort. I have ignored areas in my own heart and mind that needed my courageous attention and understanding over the years. Sometimes it just feels safer to limp along 'as is' than to do the deeper personal work that deep change requires. Yet, I can be assured that all I will get in return is more of the same- even as I chant, “I am ready to be changed.”
Ready or not, things are changing. We can resist it or we can open to up to consider what we have to offer to the process of evolution. We can also call upon our power of Faith to ground us in the knowing that Divine Intelligence is at work in this process. As we trust that, we can also trust that we are being called to grow beyond who we have thought ourselves to be.
As our nation prepares to celebrate freedom and independence, I am holding that the goodness of our past shine so bright that the corresponding limitations and failures of that past continue to be revealed and healed for each of us individually, and our dear nation as a whole. May we all experience a deeper sense of inner freedom in the process.
Take time to consider
for yourself:
- What does freedom mean to you?
- How and where do you most experience it?
- Do you experience it as being free from something or free to be something?
- How have you, (or can you) experience a sense of freedom from your past?
Photo by Kristina V on Unsplash
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