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OVERVIEW
Julia Camerson shares, “There are always those one or two people who we are so sure are in the wrong. They may well be-but so are we, as long as we are stewing in resentment toward them, going back over what they have done or jumping into the future, fantasizing about what they ight do. As long as those people are living rent-free in our minds, we are not free to prosper.” Our resentments and non-forgiveness keeps us stuck because we continue to live those moments in our minds. Join us this Sunday as we explore tools and practices that will help you release the past and open up possibilities for your life.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
FREE YOURSELF TO PROSPER: Releasing the Rent-Free Tenants In Your Head – Rev. Aimee Daniels
Rev. Aimee Daniels (00:05):
That was positive and upbeat. And I have to say, when you’re talking about forgiveness, I’m always worried, am I going to be positive and upbeat here? So I’m just going to say right now, I’m going to be both, but we’re going to end with hope and I got to be careful about the chords. I do want to share something before I dive in because I want everyone to hold this in prayer. And that is, we did look at a space this week that could work for us. And so just want everyone to hold that in prayer. Does it have heat? Yes, it has heat.
(00:38):
You don’t need your park to come to church. So I just want to invite everyone to take a deep breath with me and just center into this moment just breathing in and breathing out. And I was intending to tell one story this morning to start, but on the way in spirit was doing a little bit of work on me. And I thought, well, that’s not the story I should be talking about. That’s not my story. So the story I want to share with you is about forgiving myself. And I’ve been divorced for about 24 years. And let’s just say there were warning signs before I said yes to marrying this person. And things went quickly downhill. And I remember thinking to myself, okay, why did you marry me? Right? Why did you marry me if you weren’t all in? Right? And some things came to light over time.
(01:43):
That was when chat rooms were still new and he would be on chat rooms and all of that. And just our marriage was not emotionally connected. He was this super smart, successful person who was my biggest cheerleader. I would say that that’s true. And yet on the emotional level, our marriage didn’t work. And I don’t need to go into how it all got worse, but the reason I think the story came into my heart this morning was because about a year after I got divorced, I got really sick and I had been on a trip and was on my spiritual seeking, the beginning of my spiritual seeking. So I had gone to Nepal and Tibet was on my wishlist. I was sort of a Buddhist at the time, sort of evolving into going to Unity. And I got e Coli and I was so sick.
(02:49):
I got misdiagnosed at the hospital. And that was what really led me to forgive what happened one night when I couldn’t sleep for a week and I had 104 degree fever, I just had this spiritual insight that he had, had a difficult childhood. His father wouldn’t show up to pick him up when he was supposed to. And I just had this insight. Neither of us were emotionally prepared to really be in a marriage because my parents had not had a good marriage. It taught me everything the wrong way. But I think the reason it came up this morning too is because I realized my body took the hit for the fact that I hadn’t actually forgiven him. I didn’t even know I was mad at him until the person I had started dating said, you’re so pissed. You don’t even know you’re pissed at him.
(03:51):
You are pissed. And I was like, oh, okay. Because trying to paint a happy face on it, be nice, whatever. And the reason I share this is because I had to forgive myself because on some level, I knew, I knew before we got married that something wasn’t right and I ignored it. I didn’t have confidence in what I knew about myself, and I didn’t listen to my intuition at that point in my life. I listened more strongly to the voices of other people than my own intuition. And so I had to forgive myself for that. But I also look back on that, which is the other thing I was reflecting on driving in this morning, and I think I would not be on the spiritual path if that had not happened to me. It is the thing that put me here. I was a Methodist before this.
(04:49):
That’s what I grew up in. And it’s a wonderful church. They believe in social justice. But for me, I was searching and that’s what brought me into new thought. And I’m grateful for that because what I would say was a very disappointing experience in my life. And I had a lot of self-blame, and I could go on and on and tell you all the stupid things I did too. So I’m not blaming him. It was both of us and I had to own my part of it. But if that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have gotten the gift. And so that’s where the hope is in any situation that we need to forgive. It’s that whatever is happening is for us. If it’s happening to us, it’s happening for us. And you might be saying to yourself, well, it seems kind of strange to be talking about forgiveness in the middle of a month or two months about prosperity.
(05:43):
But the way I think about this is really to invite our prosperity, which to me is inner peace of mind, like a relationship with ourself where we know that we are okay no matter, and we feel a sense of prosperity within ourselves. We have to clear everything out that we’re holding onto. And we did it a couple of weeks ago with cleaning up the house, right? Clearing out the house. But it’s also true what we’re holding in our mind. It might be what we’re holding in our body. We need to clear that out so that we’re available for something new to happen. And we need to look at what are we holding onto? Are we holding onto grudges? Are we holding onto a lack of self-forgiveness? Are we holding onto a lack of forgiveness for someone else? I was thinking about Tina Turner when I was working on the talk, and she was abused by Ike and she became a Buddhist. She said she was a Buddhist Baptist. I loved Tina Turner. And she, for her, she said she sat down every day, she did her daily practice, and that’s what moved her forward, just every day coming back, loving kindness, practice. And we have practices too. We have meditation, we have prayer which Krista and Connie are doing a workshop on after service.
(07:12):
And so what the practices do is they begin to open us up. And that’s what Julia Cameron’s talking about in this post. We consciously let go of feelings, beliefs, and circumstances that don’t serve us so that we can allow the higher power by whatever name we call it, to copilot our life. And when I had the healing with my e coli, when I had that realization about my marriage, I felt like it was the divine showing me at a time when I was incapable of doing anything but listening because I was so sick. And John talked about the rent-free tenants in our head. So I just want to talk about what they are. They’re the things we judge about ourselves. They are the things we resent about others. And when we’re holding on, we’re not free to prosper, right? Because our energy stuck in the past instead of being available to move forward. So when we forgive ourselves and others, we are freed up to move forward.
(08:28):
We’re clearing our energy. We’re clearing our energy. We might say we’re clearing our energy field, which is what we do when we pray too. By the way, meditation can clear our energy field, but we’re really inviting in a shift in any negative thoughts, feelings, emotions, anything we’re holding onto, we’re inviting almost like an alchemical shift or an energetic shift, our experience of whatever that is. And the most important person forgiveness changes is us. We always think it’s so important that someone apologizes or that we apologize or whatever. But when we forgive within ourselves, whether it’s for ourself or for someone else, then we can reconnect to the oneness that is the truth of our being. And when we’re up here, we’re not connected to our oneness.
(09:31):
So what do you need to let go of? What are you holding onto that you shouldn’t hold onto anymore? I just invite you to think about that. I went all Reverend Daryl. I’m like, I need to define what is forgiveness. It’s letting go of resentment or the desire to punish. And I really relate to the resentment. I don’t personally relate to the desire to punish, but if you look in the world right now, you can see the desire to punish playing out big time. And what I want to say about that is we need to hold in consciousness that something else is possible there too or two, because that’s a certain mindset that’s sort of an eye for an eye mindset. Like, I’m going to blow you up, you blew me up.
(10:25):
We need to raise our consciousness above it, and we need to hold in prayer a possibility of something different. So forgiveness begins with ourselves. So I want you to fill in the blank. I need to forgive myself for blank. Just think about a couple things. What are a couple things you need to forgive yourself from? So I’m going to share some from my list just to make it real. So I’m kind of mad at one of my family members, so I need to forgive myself for being mad, and I’m going to talk more about that later. I need to forgive myself for poor relationship choices. I need to forgive myself for overgiving, for spending too much money for lending money to people I don’t know too well and for saying yes at my own expense. And that’s just some of ’em from my list. They’re laughing in the second row.
(11:25):
Are you laughing at me? Are you laughing about yourselves? Okay, I just wanted to make sure you weren’t laughing at me, Michael, but there’s some other things. I’m just going to share some things from this woman, Nedra Toa, that she said some of the things people need to regularly forgive theirselves for is going back to an unhealthy situation. Often we know and we stay, right? So going back to an unhealthy situation, self-sabotage, not leaving sooner, judging, holding a grudge, not trying harder, betraying our values, risking our peace, being unwilling to forgive others, repeating the same mistakes. I have to say I’ve been guilty of that. Anybody else using words to hurt someone else intentionally and knowing better and not acting in your knowing. So I don’t know if that helps anyone prompt some of the things you might want to forgive yourself for. And why do we need to forgive ourselves?
(12:36):
I think it’s really about how are we being right? How am I being? And I was thinking a lot about that this morning. How am I being in the world and how do I want to be in the world, in this world that we’re living in right now? Do I want to build a case against others in my head and be putting my vibration into negativity? Or do I want to be focused on possibility? Do I want to be focused on hope? Not in a Pollyanna-ish sort of way, but in a conscious choosing of it? What am I for? And that’s what I mean when I say what are you being? And one of the things I loved that Julia Cameron talked about that helped me is she says, underneath whatever’s going on, there’s often fear. And that can be true if we’re not acting on our own behalf in our life.
(13:31):
It could be because of fear. If you would judge yourself, she gives the example of procrastinating and not acting on your own behalf underneath it. It’s fear underneath it. So what we really need to forgive ourselves for is fear. And that resonated with me. It helped me in a situation in my own life, and I’m going to talk about it in a minute, but when we forgive ourselves, we make way for hope and optimism. We make way for God, spirit, whatever your word is to help us. But we still have to act on our own behalf. So often we throw up our hands, but then we don’t want to move our feet after we do the prayer. If you are guided to an insight, that means that you should act on it immediately. It means everything is lined up for that. If you’ve been given an idea, follow up on it immediately. And Colin tipping, who’s my favorite teacher on forgiveness says self-Forgiveness is letting go of the guilt and shame and giving up the need to dwell on what happened that made you feel that way, right? Because that I find with my own little tenants in my head, sometimes my tenants like to spin the story again. Instead of saying, Nope, if you knew better, you would’ve done better. Let’s do some prayer work. Let’s move on.
(14:59):
So let’s talk about forgiving others for a minute. So one of the things I learned being a divorce person is that resentment is the killer of relationships. And I wish I could say that I was smart enough to have figured that out before I got divorced, but I figured it out later. And we just don’t want to let resentment build in us. We just don’t want to let it. If I’m resenting, I need to either go do some work myself, or maybe I need to have a conversation that I’m avoiding and be honest with yourself. Do you have anyone you’re holding resentment against? We all do. Like Julia Cameron’s book, you have to write your list. I’m like, Ooh, there’s things on this list I didn’t wouldn’t have known I had on my list. And when you’re stewing over it in your head, when you’re reviewing what someone did, how they are, when you’re thinking about what they might do, that is what Julia Camera means, that someone’s living in your head rent free. So who are you holding resentment against?
(16:15):
I noticed quite a few. As I said for myself, I’m going to talk about one in a second, but my biggest one is I’m holding resentment against one of my siblings for that person’s expectations of me. And I’m going to do Colin tipping on myself for all of you. So I’m going to come back to it. But just be honest with yourself. And Julia Cameron has, there’s a lot of ways you can deal with your resentment, but she’s got a simple one, which is just to say, bless the person. Bless, fill in the blank. Bless that person. And so that’s the invitation. When someone comes up that you resent or that bugs you just bless them 10 times. You can either say it out loud, you can say it to yourself, you can write it down, but to just begin to shift the energy. And then you might find that a new awareness comes up through that and turn it over.
(17:19):
I love this quote. Those who have heard us are God’s problem and God can handle ’em. It’s not God’s will for us to stew and resentment missing out on our lives. And a hundred percent of the time when we’re stuck in a resentment, we’re avoiding ourselves. I really related to that. I can’t fix someone else. I can only fix myself. That’s the only place I can do my work. If I’m resentful, I got to work on myself first. What’s up with me? And we talk about ho AO a lot here, and I forgot what the four lines are. That’s another good practice. But I’m going to talk to you about two specific ones that I think are helpful if you want to do some work at home. And I can’t do it justice in a talk, so I’m just going to talk about how it works.
(18:09):
And then if you’re interested, you can go do it. The first one is Byron Katie. So Byron Katie’s invitation is that we ask ourself these four questions. So the first one, is it true? So I’m going to use myself as an example. This is really bad. It’s unreasonable and shows my siblings lack of boundaries that they expect me to resolve the situation. That’s a pretty resentful statement, don’t you think? And is it true? Well, it kind of feels true to me just being honest, but can I really know it’s true? Can I know that it’s true, that it’s unreasonable and it means that my sibling lacks boundaries? I really don’t necessarily know that’s true. And when I sat with this, I thought about what Julia Cameron said about fear, and it made me realize that my siblings really fearful. They’re fearful, they’re going to lose their relationship with me, and they’re fearful that someone else, one of their children, is going to lose their relationship with me. And I’m trying not to say too much about the specifics outer respect for the people. So when I believe this thought that my sibling doesn’t have boundaries and shouldn’t expect me to resolve this relationship, what do I think? I get mad because my story is I have accommodated this person my entire life. That’s my story.
(19:51):
And who would I be without that thought I’d be free of resentment, I’d be free of resentment. I’d just be free, really. And so then Byron Katie tells you to do a turnaround. Turn the thought around. So my original statement was, it’s unreasonable and shows my siblings lack of boundaries that they expect me to resolve the situation. So you have to, the turnaround’s a little tricky, but I shouldn’t expect me to resolve the situation is one possible turnaround. Another one is, I don’t have boundaries. Ding, ding, ding, ding, dinging. My realization is my sibling. When they’re feeling anxiety, then I start to feel their anxiety, and then my pleaser, avoider wants to go fix it. Instead of saying, that doesn’t feel good to me. I don’t think it’s reasonable for you to expect me to do that. So that’s how the work works. Okay, so I’m going to give another example of another tool.
(20:56):
Same situation, Colin tipping. He was a brilliant man. He passed away, but he has this radical forgiveness process, which is really pretty detailed. So I’m going to give you the micro mini version on this one because his invitation is really to look at all our relationship spiritually. Again, everything that’s happening to us is happening for us. This person has come into our life to play an important role for our transformation and for theirs too. So I’m going to tell this story from my victim standpoint. My sibling thinks it’s my job to reach out to their child to build a bridge because the child has judgment about something in my life, and I already feel hurt. I supported this person for a long time and they disappeared from my life.
(21:57):
And so I feel kind of unsupported in this, that my perspective’s not being considered and I feel like I’ve been supporting everybody and I don’t feel my siblings supporting me or even trying to understand the situation from my point of view. And I’m just kind of tired and hurt. That’s my truth. I’m just kind of tired of it. And then I have to feel the feelings. So I lovingly recognize my feelings and I judge them no more. I’m entitled to feel how I feel. I’m entitled to my feelings and I own my feelings. No one can make me feel them, right? They’re mine. I own them. And my feelings are a result of how I see the situation. So this is how I’m seeing the situation right now. That’s why I’m feeling how I’m feeling. And because I felt discomfort, that was my sign that I was withholding love from myself, and I’m withholding love from my sibling. And I was judging sibling. I was holding certain expectations of my sibling, and I want my sibling to change, and I’m seeing my sibling as less than perfect.
(23:34):
So then you got to collapse the story, okay? So you have to look at how you’re interpreting the story. I just told you my little emotional story about it, but then you need to collapse the story. So my story is my sister doesn’t support me. I just made a mistake. My sibling judges me, and then I open to a reframe. I realize that my soul encouraged me to form the beliefs, to magnify my own sense of separation. And so I could feel it more deeply so that I could grow spiritually. And I completely forgive myself, and I accept myself as a loving, creative, generous being. And I surrender to the higher power that I think of as love and grace. And I know this situation’s going to continue to unfold perfectly, and I’m not going to keep going. But basically it’s how we turn it over.
(24:54):
We turn it over, we open our heart to let spirit take us in a different direction, but in service of our spiritual growth, in service of our spiritual growth. And there’s a lot of processes you could do like this, even journaling. If you have resentment, even just journaling about it, you might find you get new awareness from it. And we want to take things into prayer too. When someone else prays for us, it shifts things. Sometimes we’re not capable of praying for ourselves about something because we’re too emotional about it. And so there’s always prayer available here, both online and in the room. And I just invite you to lean into that and lean into this practice because it will help you shift it. And meditation does the same. So we’re going to come back to a self-forgiveness practice at the end. But I want to pivot into just talking for a few minutes about negativity because this is another thing we do that holds us back from our prosperity.
(26:08):
And whenever we’re negative, it means we’re afraid. There’s fear underneath our negativity. And when we bring compassion, it always dismantles it. But it’s up to us whether we’re going to respond positively or negatively to other people and whether we can learn from what’s happening. And I was thinking about this very personally this morning about the political climate in the United States, which is something that’s disturbing to me. And I just sat and I thought, who am I going to be in all of this? Who am I going to decide to be? Am I going to be the voice of negativity or am I going to be the voice of kindness and help? And we live in the middle of a negative conversation right now. And so I just really invite all of us to just really embrace how can you move out of negativity? It doesn’t mean you’re never going to have another negative thought or another negative conversation, but just catch yourself and don’t plant a flag and live there.
(27:17):
Move on. Julia Cameron reminds us that the prosperous heart feels secure and does not go looking for trouble. I like that the prosperous heart knows that negativity is born from fear. Ernest Holmes said, life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker that which he thinks. And Louise Hay said, your prosperity consciousness is not dependent on money. Your flow of money is dependent on your prosperity consciousness. And we could change, she used the word money, but you could use the word love, you could use the word happiness. You can use any word you want to fill in there. The flow of your good is dependent on your prosperity consciousness. I should have changed the slide. And the thing we want to do is we want to move forward. And John Mackey’s favorite teacher is my top quote. You can cleanse your mind for prosperity by getting things in order.
(28:16):
Generally, that means our mind. It means our life. It means the affairs of our life. Get things in order and get your relationship with yourself in order. That’s the most important thing, being centered in yourself. And you can always use a little bit of an Earnest Holmes affirmation. I know I’m drawing my good to me good old Ernie. But it begins with you being honest with yourself. Where’s your work? Where’s your work? Where do you want to move forward? If you feel stuck, it’s an invitation, right? It’s an invitation to do your work. But we know that whatever we affirm happens, whatever we put out there happens. It doesn’t mean it happens the way we want it to, but we always get a shift. You look at all the zigzags of your life and you’re like, even what I call bad ended up to be good because it was for me, right? I wouldn’t be standing in the room with a bunch of like-minded people right now if my life hadn’t zigzagged. I’m really grateful for that. It’s a blessing to live your life with other people. It’s a blessing a lot of people don’t have, actually. So what do you need to do to clear any blocks to
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Your energy? That’s the invitation. And what do you want to do to free yourself up to prosper? So I’m going to invite Greg and Nora to come back up here. We’re actually going to do a little short self-forgiveness meditation to close. And so I want to invite, Greg is going to give us a little tune in the background. And Nora, I just want to invite you to close your eyes and just invite in a clearing of your energy, close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Let’s breathe in together and breathe out together. Breathe in together and breathe out together.
(30:43):
And just bring your attention to the sounds around you. In the room. The music can hear the heat going, and just allow the sounds around you to anchor your attention in the room and hold your presence in the present moment. And as you do that, you begin to get really related to the here and now. You might even want to put your hands on your heart to more deeply anchor yourself and your body. And as you learn to focus your awareness, just go a step deeper. Focus on your personal space, the personal space of your body, your energy field around your body, the energy of your heart, the energy of the blood pumping through your body, this miracle of life that’s you.
(32:08):
And just breathe in and out again a few times and just become related to your breath. Just listen to the sound of your breath coming in and out, and start to bring your mind to yourself as a child, a younger version of yourself. And it can be easier to offer self forgiveness to of yourself. So as you see yourself as a child, I just invite you in your mind’s eye to say, may I forgive you. I forgive you as much as I can. I forgive you. I love you. And if you find your mind drifting into a story, just repeat the words to yourself again in your mind’s eye. I forgive you.
(33:38):
I forgive you as much as I can. May I forgive you. I love you. Now, picture yourself as you are today, and see if you can tap into this intention to forgive yourself for any perceived shortcomings that you think you have. And if you don’t feel like you can forgive yourself right now, just cultivate the intention to forgive yourself and say the same phrases to your present self that you said as to your child self off. I forgive you. I forgive you as much as I can. May I forgive you. I love you. And it’s okay. If you don’t feel that forgiveness yet, just stick with it. Sometimes it can take time.
(34:59):
I forgive you. I forgive you as much as I can. May I forgive you. And as we hold these intentions to forgive in our minds, we move into the alchemical space of prayer. We know that prayer changes things. And in the prayer, we are inviting our desired state got a little tongue tied. And I know in this moment that this presence of spirit, this presence of love, this presence of forgiveness, this presence of grace is surrounding and supporting us. And I know that it is the truth of our very being. Love, grace, kindness, forgiveness, perfect divine wellbeing, perfect wholeness, perfect oneness. And so from this place of oneness, I just speak my word knowing that a healing is happening here, knowing that as we set the intention to forgive, spirit hears us and says yes to it. And I know that things shift. I know that there is an energetic shift that is happening inside of each and every one of us as we set the intention to forgive ourselves and others. As we look forward to the future with hope, with possibility, I know that more is possible. Love more, love, more grace, more abundance, more prosperity, better relationships, deeper sense of connection, all that we might call in.
(37:07):
Bring it to your mind’s eye and just affirm it to yourself. What is your intention? I say yes to this on all of our behalf. And I’m absolutely certain there’s this prayer and that a shift is happening now. I’m grateful for our self forgiveness. I’m grateful for our forgiveness of others. And I’m grateful to know that hope abounds, that there is always hope. And there is always new possibility, and it is happening now. And with so much gratitude, I simply say, and so it is. Amen.