OVERVIEW
There is a concern among science fiction fans that if time travel were possible, someone might go back and, by making one small change, forever alter the present. So let’s consider making one small change in the present and creating a future that expresses a consciousness of peace, love, and abundance. Continuing our study of A New Design For Living by Ernest Holmes, we’ll examine what changes we need to make and how we can create that beautiful future for ourselves.
TRANSCRIPTION
So New Year’s Eve, or Yeah, new Year’s Eve, I was, um, I didn’t have any plans. And um, and it was wonderful. I was like, oh my God, thank you. This is such a gift. I don’t have any plans tonight. So I decided to go for a walk. It was probably, I don’t know, something like seven o’clock at night. And I walk outside and in my neighborhood, I live in a sort of residential neighborhood in Chicago and in the neighborhood, someone or some group had put out these, um, they were like paper bags, about six or seven inches tall, white paper bags with a little bit of sand in the bottom and a lit candle, so like a, a homemade lantern. And they, they were, oh, about four or five blocks going north and south and maybe three blocks going east and west. They were just blanketing the area, lining the sidewalks.
And I was walking through this sort of ethereal experience, and I kept thinking to myself, I wonder how they got permits to do this? Or how, how did they put this all together and get them all lit at the same time? And, and I thought, let go of the how and the, the logistics and just be in the experience of it, that just stepping into this and what came to me and what I, what I understood was this was a reflection of my own consciousness that I was expressing and experiencing. This beauty had to have come from within me to be out in this world. And what I want to do is have you share that with me. I want you to think of a time when you were, I don’t know if it’s a sunset or a moon or a face, someone’s face, but that moment when you saw some beauty in your life, and I just invite you to own that, that that is your consciousness expressing that your beauty is already, your consciousness is already expressing as that beauty, as that self.
So my job assignment today was to look at, um, a new design for living by Ernest Holmes. And I got assigned chapters 13 through 18. And I looked at those chapters and they’re all kind of a little different. And I thought, I don’t know, I could, I could come and, and put together like a book report and say, okay, well this is what I read. And I thought, that’s a little boring and nobody wants to hear that. So I thought, I just have to share with you my response to it. And what came up for me as I was reading this and, and kind of spending some time with it is two ideas that he presents in these chapters. Um, success and abundance. And I think success is kind of interesting. It’s a, it’s an interesting word because I think we kind of all have an idea of what success is, but I bet each and every single one of us hold it just a little bit differently, means something a little bit different for each of us.
And the thing, same thing for abundance. Abundance can mean something a little bit different for each of us, right? And, um, so what came up for me as I was working with this idea and I thought, what do I wanna say about this? How do I really feel about this? And where I landed with it was on healing. And I know <laugh> like success and abundance, they kind of go together. You can kind of see them together, right? The more successful you are, the more abundant you are. And sort of vice versa. The more abundant you are, the more you’re seen as success. Um, but healing feels like it’s something else. But I connected it. And I wanna, I wanna bring you into that connection. So when I think about healing, what comes up for me and, and others have shared this, is, is not my idea.
This is something that’s out in the world and it’s a, it’s an a an approach to healing that I really like and I lean into, which is this idea that all healing is self-healing. That what we’re doing really is just revealing that self-healing. Like our bodies are always regulating our blood pressure and our temperatures and all of that. And when we go to see a healer, a medical person, or a herbologists or a reiki master, what we’re getting is someone who’s changing the environment of the body so that the body can just express what it wants to express naturally, right? These healers are really just adjusting the environment of the body. So if I go to the doctor for my blood pressure and they’re gonna give me a pill, that pill is really just changing the environment of my body so that my body can do what it wants to do already.
It wants to express itself as the perfect blood pressure, right? And if I go to the herbologists, the herbologists is going to figure out I’m taking, I have too much of this and not enough of that, and they’re gonna bring it back into balance. They’re gonna bring it back into homeostasis so that my body can just express as the vitality that it is. And the same thing for the reiki person. The reiki person’s going to move the energy and work with the energy and pull out old emotional wounds. And I’m holding in my body are old traumas, and bring that environment back into balance so that the body can just express what it’s always wanting to express. That perfect wholeness. We talk about this all the time, that perfect wholeness. And so for me, this is the same thing as true for success. That success is our natural state of being, that it is always wanting to express through us and abundance, always wanting to show up.
And what happens is we, we start to cover it over, um, um, I think of it like, um, you know, the, um, ivy at Wrigley Field, like the vines, the Ivy Vines. That’s what I pip that’s the picture I get is like these vines growing over that which is wanting to express that success that is naturally ours. Um, um, and we’re socialized to it. We’re socialized to think of success as something we have to go out and find and something we have to go out and get. But it is in reality something that we already have. And it’s just wanting, it’s just wanting to come through. And this ving over Ernest Holmes talks about this in this chapter. And what I find for myself about Ernest Holmes is reading him is great, but I think you have to read into him. And what I’m reading into him on this is he is saying that, um, this ving over represents a pattern of thought.
I really like that idea, this pattern of thought, because we talk about our thoughts or manifesting after they’re kind thoughts that we hold in mind are manifesting, uh, after they’re kind. And what I like about this idea of a pattern of thought is we can have one-off thoughts and maybe it shows up as a hiccup, but a lot of times they’re just passing. But a pattern of thought is something that we’re holding over and over again, and it’s showing up as this experience that we’re having, right? And this ving over represents that pattern of thought that is learned, that is acquired, that is believing in something other than our own natural wanting to express. And you can do this. And, and just so that it’s not so esoteric, I actually want to do this with you. So let’s, let’s do an affirmation together. We’ll do, um, um, I am abundant really simple.
So let’s say it three times. We’re gonna say it out loud. I am abundant and at home, I want you to say it out loud too. I know you’re gonna feel silly, but I want you to do it anyway. So ready? Okay, you ready? We’re gonna say it three times. I am abundant. I am abundant. I am abundant. And hold that for a minute. And I want you to ask yourself, what do you really believe is gonna happen next? I mean, what do you really believe is gonna happen next for a lot of us? Sometimes it’s like, I don’t believe anything’s gonna happen, right? If I’m honest with myself, if I can, if I can get out of my own way, if I can not make myself wrong, and that’s huge. It takes courage. But if I can let go and I cannot make myself wrong and I can step in that space of what do I really believe is gonna happen next, we start to understand that pattern of thought.
We start to understand what we are, what we have conviction in. And conviction is our faith. Krista asked me if I was gonna talk about faith today, and I said, I don’t know what I’m gonna talk about <laugh>. But um, yeah, that, that, that idea of, um, whatever we’re holding is actually what is made, made manifest. And it is making up this pattern of thought that we’re holding. And so getting in touch with that is so powerful and that’s why I encourage you to not make yourself wrong, to really dig into that honest revelation. Because what’s inside of that is power. What’s inside of that is choice. The minute you become, we become, we all become aware of it. I can choose something, you can choose something else. And that is where we create space in this pattern of thought. That’s where we create an interruption, a disruption and something different can come in.
Ernest Holmes talks about this in this reading that we change our pattern of thought bit by bit, item by item, thought by thought. And we can bring in something new, something different, and we can get rid of those vines. They start to fall away. And what we hold is what is manifesting out in our lives. And I talked about this a little bit, new year’s day, that what I believe we need to do in that, in that situation, in that, in that state of consciousness is be in integrity with ourselves. And I want to explain a little bit of what, what I mean by that. And I’m gonna have to tell a little bit of a story. It’s not an excuse to start scrolling on your phone, I promise I won’t be very long. It’s just a little story. But, uh, I don’t know, maybe a year ago, maybe more, I was thinking about, I was praying with Reverend Amy and I was like, things are going a little sideways at work and I wasn’t really enjoying myself and it wasn’t as much fun as it used to be.
And I was just, I sort of came up with and presence that I think maybe this is a sign that this job is winding down for me in some way. That it’s time for something else, time for a change, which I did not want. Cause I’m very comfortable been there for a long time, I know my way around and I thought I can just ride this out until they take me out of their feet first, right? Um, but something else is wanting to come. And I thought, well, what on earth am I gonna do? And I thought about, well, you know, the traditional path of update the resume and go look for jobs and go on interviews and all of that. And I was like, yes. I don’t know. I had no energy for it. I had no desire to do it. It was not firing me up in any way, shape, or form.
So I started to just take an inventory of what’s been happening for me like over the last three years. I think if you go back much further, your consciousness is so different. It, it, it isn’t really impactful. But over the last three years I thought, okay, what are all the things that are coming to me? And I thought about, you know, I have this nonprofit experience and leadership experience. I have all this spiritual community experience and one of the other things that’s been happening for me had been happening are these opportunities to do public speaking. Which is kind of crazy cuz I am not the most well credentialed person in the world where I would be like, of course we’re going to have him come and talk. But that was what was happening. And also what was interesting to me about it is I didn’t like seek it out.
I wasn’t like chasing after it, it was just happening. And these invitations kept coming. And here I am today again with another invitation to speak in public. So I kind of put all this together and as I was looking at all of this, an email came and it was from Kathy Hearn who was at the time running the ministerial school at csl. And it was an email sort of ad that basically said, so you wanna be a minister? <laugh>, come to this webinar. And I thought, huh, if I add all this up together, that makes sense, could that be the next chapter? Could that be what comes after where I’m at right now? And so I stepped into it and what I found was there’s like a whole package of information. You have to go through this whole big long rigamarole application process. But I, I opened up and I started looking at the application.
It was like, you know, tell us about your min, you know, your spiritual history. Oh, okay, I’ll start writing that. And before I knew it, after a very short period of time, I had done, like most of the application, it just kind of poured out of me. It was, I had to do a background check and I had to pay money and I had to, but all of it was just sort of, there was like a stream of energy that was surrounding it that I was, Amy talks about this, Reverend Amy talks about this that I was pulled to it. The, the the, the more traditional path felt, felt like I had to push myself to do it. So there’s this pull me, push me thing happening, right? So I was on this stream of energy, it was unfolding in the right and perfect way and I ended up saying yes.
I ended up moving into it. And what I like about this is, is if I think about it like it, it’s north. So minister is north and I’m on this train ride going north. I can’t step into it and be like, it’s both specific cuz I’m, I’m not like trying to be a computer programmer. I’m not trying to be a chef. I’m heading towards minister and I’m on this train. And yet at the same time, I’m completely open to however it’s gonna show up and whatever it’s gonna be. So it is both specific and I’m completely open to however it’s gonna play out. And I think that’s really important because we, we talk about that a lot here and it can get confusing because we want to be specific, but we also want to be completely open. And that’s what was happening. And so this character, these characteristics of being open and yet being specific, of being in this pole, of being in this fire of like, this is drawing me in, this is calling to me, these are all characteristics of co-creation.
That I am in co-creation with the God of my being, the spirit of my being, the love, the light, the joy, the source of my being as Willie and I were talking about today, this morning, and the life force of my being. And so can you, and you may be thinking, well, you know, okay, well that’s just for other people or that’s good for him, but what about me? But what I wanna do is I want to take us all the way back to where I started this talk where you are celebrating your own consciousness, that you have already done it. You are already there. This isn’t something where you have to go to an ashram and Tibet and find some guru to teach you how to do it. It is that natural organic success that is wanting to express that natural organic abundance that is always present and wanting to come through.
We just have to say yes to it. And you already have done it. You’ve already created that beauty in your consciousness. You can do it again. And so with that, I really want to take that idea and that consciousness into prayer with you right now. So let’s go into our practice and just take a breath and just recognizing that in the center of all that is, is love. That in the center of all that is, is this life force, this power force, this truth capital T that is, and I know that I am one with it. I know that I am one with all aspects of it. I know that this idea of my own natural success, my own natural abundance, my own natural wholeness is this source showing up in and through and with me. And as I know this truth for myself, I know this truth for each person.
I see and know, each person here is connected with this oneness as connected in this source, this expression of their own beauty, their own success, their own abundance, their own wholeness. And I just wanna stay here for a minute because this is huge, that there is this connection, that there is this oneness. That this is the truth of what is happening. This is the reality of what is. And I just know this truth. This is my conviction, this is my faith. And so from this place, I just know for each and every single person that as they say yes, as they let go of any place in their life where they may be making themselves wrong and they, they sit in the truth of who and what they are and how they are expressing. They find their power. There is power in this and this power to choose, this power to make a new choice and power to interrupt a pattern of thinking that has been, uh, limiting them and to step into a, a pattern and to create a new pattern that is expansive, that is rising up, that is expressing through, that is carrying them forward, that is pulling them to this next new experience of life.
I just know that this is a stream of love, a stream of glorious stream of joy. And that it just, it just sustains us. It just empowers us. It just aliven us. And I’m so grateful for this. I’m so grateful for the way this shows up. I am so grateful for this consciousness. I am so grateful for knowing this truth, that I am success, that I am abundance, that I am wholeness. And I
Am so grateful to see it and know it for each and every single person. I am so grateful for the expression and the demonstration of this love, this light, this laughter, this joy, this success, this abundance that is here and now. I am so grateful for this consciousness. It is rating out, in and out and through all that is, I am so grateful for each and every single person in this community as we come together and we hold each other in this consciousness and we hold each other and sustain each other through this, that we rise up in this idea of love, this idea of God, this idea of truth. So grateful for this. And I release it now into the action of law. I release it and in releasing it, I just affirm my faith. My faith is in the release that I, there’s nothing else for me to do. I release it and know that it is done. It is complete. It is here, it is now. And together we say. And so it is.