This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our Facebook page.
CREATING A LIFE OF ENOUGH – Rev. Darrell Jones
OVERVIEW
On the path of living a life of a prosperous heart, we inevitably will encounter hard times, doubt, seeming droughts of our good and more. To live a prosperous life is to live a life of sufficiency and enoughness. This is not a life of settling, but rather moving from the space of what I have and who I am today is enough for today. You will make it through today with what you have, and tomorrow as well…even 10 years from now. Trusting that life and you are enough today is creating a life of enough that gives way to a heart and life that truly prospers.
TRANSCRIPTION T/C
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Darrell Jones (00:00):
Good morning everybody. So this is the second time that we’ve done this type of service. We call it unplugged. Obviously we are plugged in. We are still on Facebook Live. We are still on YouTube live. We still have electronics plugged in the room. But the unplugged vibe I guess of this is that during the talk, during the sermon, during the message today, it’s intended that it’s not just me talking at you, throwing out some ideas, posing principle in theory, which I still will do, but it’s an opportunity to be in more of a dialogue space. So there’s a microphone that John has that is available for you to raise your hand to grab to the best of our ability. I’m looking and toggling in between Facebook and YouTube, but I know we’ve got folks in the back and folks in the room that are online.
(01:03):
If someone makes a comment or a question and they want to pose something, please raise your hand and speak on their behalf and we’ll bring that voice into the room. Fair? Good. Okay. So I want to just, I guess, get us going. I have prepared some thoughts here, but I also want to speak an intention. So you may or may not know that we throw this word around that someone’s a practitioner, a spiritual practitioner, and some people know what that means. And some, I think a lot of us don’t exactly know what it means. A spiritual practitioner, first and foremost is all of us. We are practicing spirit, whether we have gone through a formal program or not. This teaching of science of mind points to the truth that our thoughts and our beliefs are the things that create our experience of life. So we are consciously as well as unconsciously using our thoughts, beliefs, and ideas to create our world.
(02:10):
The example that I always give is if I walk around saying, I want love, I want love, I want love, I want love. But inside that little voice that’s always kind of angry and beating myself up, which is what I grew up with, oftentimes saying, you’re not worthy. How could anyone love you? You’re a fraud. That is probably the stronger and more emotionally charged voice. And so even though outwardly I may say, I want love, I deserve love, if I’m only saying that a handful of times and throughout the rest of the day, those words inside of me are contrary to that, guess what I’m going to produce in my life, not the thing that I actually declare that I want. So in terms of being a practitioner, we are practicing the relationship with life of that our words are powerful and create our reality.
(02:58):
A spiritual practitioner in terms of someone who has gone through training is someone there to be for the community and most importantly on the individual level, to help us realize those thoughts that maybe don’t serve us, and then find powerful ways, most importantly through prayer or what we call spiritual mind treatment, to engage our consciousness out of that default thought pattern into one that actually does have congruency with the things we actually want. And so I say all of that because I want this to almost be like a group practitioner session that we are all here today to be in conversation, not to just posit and throw out the things that we know, sound right, the spiritual speak, but to bump up against the very internal thoughts that are not helping us step into a prosperous heart. And when I talk about a prosperous heart and when Julia Cameron from the book that we’re focusing on mentions a prosperous heart, it is not just about money. Prosperity oftentimes gets oversimplified down to how much money can I get in my pocket or in my wallet or in my savings account, or in my 4 0 1 k, what’s the most expensive thing that I can buy? Can I stretch my ability to get, which it is? Some of that. But if we take out what the medium is, which is money, a prosperous heart stems from a consciousness of connection to sufficiency.
(04:31):
The title of the talk is Creating a Life of Enough, and that’s actually the subtitle of the book. It gets glossed over. It’s the prosperous heart, and everyone’s like, yes, I want prosperity. I want a prosperous heart. I want all the love. I want all the donuts. I want all the things. And it’s okay for us to want and to yearn and to crave. It’s natural, but there’s also another natural component to our existence and to life that is this subtitle. I don’t even think it should be Creating a life is enough. What if it was just a prosperous heart? Life is enough. We don’t have to create it. That’s part of the mind game that we play with ourselves, that we have to make something, that God, that the universe, that whatever we want to identify it as hasn’t actually given us what we needed. That life doesn’t actually have what we want. We have to make it happen.
(05:34):
And on some level, there’s some truth to that. We need to move into a practice of getting congruent to receive the good that is already there. But what if it was just life is enough? When was the last time you really stopped and said, my life is enough. I am enough right now. We’re sitting in this room. It’s colder in here than it is outside. So it’s easy for us to go into a space of negation and go, what’s wrong with this? Why didn’t anyone turn the heat on? What’s wrong with this freaking building? Are they not paying their money? Are we not paying enough rent? Why isn’t the heat on? This isn’t enough? I’m cold. And we literally constrict. Now, I’m not trying to diminish the feeling of discomfort. Life is uncomfortable all the time, but we have enough. We’ve got a coat. We can get up and move around. We can do some jumping jacks. There’s some coffee and hot tea out there. Those of you online, if you’re feeling some discomfort right now, you can do something to get more comfortable. So we have the things that we need to care for ourselves, but oftentimes we don’t think the things that are in our actual immediate surroundings are enough. There’s always this idea of wanting and yearning. I got to get more.
(06:55):
The reading today comes from the chapter that’s focused. The title of the chapter is Staying the Course and Julia Cameron, this is the latter part of the book. So there’s basically one more week of focus on this book with Cityside, right? One more week. Yeah, these latter chapters. This one in particular is about staying the course because for if you’ve been following the book or if Julia Cameron, it’s basically like a twelve-step program. She has these different weeks that you engage in different exercises. And so this is week 11. So you just imagine if you’ve been, whether you’ve been here every week or not for the past two months, you’re on a journey. And sometimes on the journey things get a little rocky, things get a little bumpy. And so how do we stay the course when there seems to be apparent? Lack not enough worry, doubt, fear.
(08:02):
We look outside of ourselves to somehow appease this fear that we have. And that’s partially what she’s speaking about in the reading, which I’ll bring back. But the practice and the exercise of a prosperous heart is not about getting something from outside of us. It’s engaging in awakening and remembering something within us. So here she says, when we’re in this particular chapter, she highlights a section on jealousy and competition, which is whether you consider yourself to be jealous or competitive, I’m going to call bs. If you say, I’m not, because I say that I’m not. I’m one of the most competitive people in the world, maybe not outwardly with other people and be like, I’m going to do more than you. But there’s this internal competitor that is always in this competition with either the derail of old or the derail of to come. Does that make sense?
(09:03):
So it’s like I look at my body today, I turned 50 this year, and somehow I’m in competition with my eighteen-year-old self. Somehow I think that my fifty-year-old body is supposed to be like my eighteen-year-old. And I’m like, oh man, remember when? And I get jealous of who I was over four decades ago. And then I start getting into the space of fear and well, am I going to be in 20 years from now? And so then I just don’t stay present to who I am, what I am and what’s here. And if I can take a deep breath and go, all right, who I am and what I have today is enough, I may not like everything I see. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have an opinion and that you won’t have an opinion, but actually if I just humble myself for a minute and get over this jealousy and competitor inside of me, I recognize that who I am, the life that I have and what I have in my life is actually enough to get going what I want to get going, but I don’t sometimes want to take the responsibility to get going what I need to get going, to have the life that I want.
(10:04):
Anyone resonate with that? Yes. Okay. So she says, when we are focused on competition, whether it’s in competing within ourselves or with another, or if we are jealous of another, we are probably avoiding a part of ourselves. We are avoiding ourselves because we are afraid. We are afraid that even if we were to give it our all, our all won’t be enough. Let me stop there, take that in. Anyone ever had that feeling, thought, belief, idea. If I give it my all, it may not still be enough.
(10:42):
That’s an intense thought to give it your all. And then to think that who you are is not going to be enough to live the life that you want. We’ll come back to that so that we aren’t enough, that we are second rate, man. She’s just using words that are cut into the heart here, that God’s will for us is to not be as successful and acclaimed as the person we are fixated on. God’s will for us is to be fully, completely prosperous, prosperously ourselves. We are the treasure we are seeking. You are the one common denominator that will show up no matter where you go, what relationship you’re in, what time or season of your life you’re in. You are the one. You are the treasure that you are seeking. But until we focus our gaze squarely upon ourselves and redirect all those jealous energies towards our own projects, we will never find the pot of gold.
(11:49):
So I was thinking more and more about this idea of jealousy, and I always try to explore making this work so practical and real and not full of loftiness. That seems unattainable because that’s one of the biggest struggles that I’ve ever had, especially when it comes to prosperity. It’s like I am rich and abundant. I will have everything that I want. Now I’m putting on a little bit of an effect there, but there’s a tone sometimes of if I say that voice that is not authentic, that is not the way Daryl talks, that is not the energy that I have in. There’s a practical part of Daryl that has been on this journey of spiritual growth and discovery that still has a, I can’t remember. Is it okay to swear? Sure. Okay. So there’s a part of me that’s always like bullshit.
(12:51):
There’s a part of me that always says bullshit. It is not always the conscious part of me, right? It’s like I’m prosperous and I have everything that I need. Bullshit. If that was true, then my car wouldn’t be jacked up right now. If that was true, I would have another pair of shoes if that was true. And I find all these reasons to prove that I’m not. But coming back to the talk title, creating a life of enough prosperous is in being in prosperity is not about having a just things in a storage locker with stacks of money up that you can do whenever you want and nothing regardless of what the economy does, that it doesn’t impact you. Prosperity is not about hoarding. To me, prosperity is about being in the flow, the giving and the receiving of life. So when we are in this jealousy state, has anyone ever been jealous before?
(13:49):
Am I the only one? Okay, just want to make sure. So when we are in a state of jealousy, this is what happens because our default tendency is to go into harmony with life, to actually be in the prosperous heart. We see someone who’s driving the car that we want. We see a loving relationship that we want in our life. We see someone who has the physical body that maybe we desire to have, and we go, oh, dang, look at that. I want some of that. And so there’s an energy lift that happens. We start to move into a vibrational congruency with what’s there. So we are feeling that prosperous nature. We’re feeling the creativity and the possibility of the divine. That is the natural way things are. But then this humanity within us, this capacity to tell a story, all of ’em goes, why don’t they get to have it and don’t something must be wrong with me, or they’re just one of those people, nothing touches them. And we get in, look in my face. I’m just like, there’s a different energy and vibe. And just a second. Prior to that, we were in that space of generosity. We were in that space of excitement, and within a matter of a second, that jealous or competitive spirit comes in and it squashes.
(15:13):
So back to that idea of science of mind and how this thing works is the thoughts and the beliefs, the feeling tones and the emotions that we walk around with are the things that catapult our experience of life. I’m not talking about magic. I’m not talking about the secret in just positive thinking where I have enough and I have all the money that I need, and then it just kind of crystallizes into the air. It doesn’t work that way. We are in process. We have to meet the edge of our beliefs and come to terms with the actual dialogue that we’re speaking in our hearts. Does that make sense?
(15:52):
So this brings me to the idea of generosity. And generosity is something that I think we have a misconception about. Here at Cityside, we are in the space of the pledge drive or the giving campaign where we’re asking people to commit to giving something to Cityside on a regular basis so that the community can budget for its life, the budget can take care of itself, and to be generous is always at its base level, seen as it’s a one-way street. I have to be generous, I have to give. And when that is the relationship that we have with generosity that is similar to probably the relationship that most of us have with love in our life, I have to give it.
(16:54):
And if we have to give, then things get conditional really fast. Well, if I’m going to give my money to this community, they better X. Whatever it is that you think you need or you want or that the community should have or shouldn’t have. We get a little stingy with our actual good that we can give or in our relationship. All right, my partner, my friend, my family member, my pet, even if I’m going to give them what they need, they better give me what I need. And if they don’t watch out, now I’m being a little kind of dramatic about it, but does that live inside anybody besides me or am I just the only conditional human being on the planet? Okay, thank you. I’m just trying to keep us real here, folks. So generosity is not only about giving. I want to flip it a little bit and ask the question, does anyone have a problem or a challenge generously receiving? Just think through this past week, someone tried to do something for you, whether it was a stranger or someone you knew, someone tried to maybe even pay for something for you. Someone tried to maybe say, don’t worry about that. I know that’s your usual responsibility, but for whatever reason right now, they’re deciding to say, I’m going to take care of this. And you’re like, no, no, no, no, I couldn’t possibly let you do that. Did that happen to anybody this week?
(18:33):
Now, there’s nothing wrong that’s just kind of part of our humanity, but to break down these principles of the prosperous heart, generosity is not one way, it’s two way. So just as we need to be giving to city side, giving to our loved ones, giving to our bodies good food, to nourish it, we need to also be in the space of receiving because that’s the way it goes actually, generosity, there’s so much good in the world that it doesn’t just flow through you. It comes at you and flows through you and back around. Yes. So how do we keep it going? By the way, is anyone saying anything online that they want to bring into the room? Okay, how do we stay the course, which is the other chapter besides generosity, how do we stay in the game? How is it that when we have doubt, when it seems that there’s a drought in our life, whatever that drought may be for you? Is anyone in a drought right now experiencing drought? Okay, how do we stay the course in the midst of a drought? How do we stay in our prosperous heart when we look outside of ourselves? And there’s a war are
(20:00):
How do we stay in our prosperous heart when we turn on the television? And all that is talked about is the shit show of our economy and what it’s going to continue to be. How do we stay in our prosperous heart when we watch television programming that just highlights and celebrates how horrible people can be in relationship? I’m watching a TV show right now called Suits, and there’s an entertaining component to it. But my wife and I hit a wall every once in a while and we’re like, oh, I can’t watch anymore tonight. I’ve hit my shit on other people quota for the day. There’s just so much tit-for-tat and back and forth, and it’s very, very conditional, and it’s very me-centric from the standpoint of there isn’t really enough of anything, so I’m going to protect and fight. Now we’re laughing, but all y’all are watching this show because some of y’all are like, yeah, I know that show. That is what we are bombarding our consciousness with on a daily basis as the truth of what life is like. We find that entertaining. I think I’m going to have to go on a suits fast after this talk today. If I’m just honest with myself. Why would I keep bombarding myself watching that television show about the horribleness of humanity and the insufficiency when I’m trying to step into, as the talk title says, creating a life of enough,
(21:34):
All that is doing is diminishing my capacity to see that life is enough. The thing, and this is not just because thanksgiving is coming around next week, the thing to me that everyone can access to engage staying the course in this prosperous heart and in this prosperous life, regardless of what is or isn’t happening around them, is the practice of gratitude, appreciation, thanksgiving.
(22:16):
And there’s a couple of different ways and energies of thanksgiving, of appreciation and gratitude that we can access, and there isn’t one that’s better than another. Because ultimately, if we go back to this idea of science of mind, what are we holding in our consciousness? What’s the sum total? At the end of the day, think about this for a moment. If you are spending more thoughts in gratitude, if you are spending more energy, investing more of your time in this idea of I’m enough, life is enough, I’m thankful for the enoughness that I have, then what’s your relationship going to be with everything that is around you, regardless of your opinion of it, it’s probably going to be a supple relationship. It’s going to be an agile relationship. It’s going to be one that finds ways out of apparent no ways. So to engage gratitude, it softens the edges. It disrupts the default tendency of our humanity to go to negation. What’s wrong, what isn’t working? Because when we go there, it doesn’t take any effort.
(23:31):
It at least it doesn’t take me any effort. I never have to effort to go to a space of negation. Has anyone ever I’d be like, oh, man, I really need to have a negative thought right now. Let me try. No, it doesn’t work that way. That is the default tendency of the human mind. Why? Because we’re animals. And at one point in time we lived outside where we couldn’t turn on a switch to turn on the heat. You’d be like, oh my gosh, it’s so cold. I need to, and it would propel us into a natural relationship with the sufficiency of life to gather wood or build a shelter or put some clothing over our naked bodies, whatever it was to keep ourselves warm. But now, in this modern day, we’ve created so much around us that we’ve lost that relationship with our natural flow and sufficiency of life. We always have what we need, but rarely do we allow ourselves to see it because the conditional mind is telling us a different story. So how do we disrupt that gratitude? Meister, Eckhart? Anyone familiar with that? Dude? I mean hundreds and hundreds of years ago said, if the only two words in a prayer that you can offer is thank you, it’s enough.
(24:50):
So a practice that I do sometimes is just saying, thank you. Breathing in, thank you. I’ll go into a meditation, and I think we might do it in a second here, but literally just sitting in, breathing in, thank you, breathing out, thank you. Let’s just try it. So wherever you are, whatever you’re doing out there in the world, if you’re multitasking, which we tend to do when we do virtual experience, stop everything else and just focus on you, the most important person on the planet for a second. And let’s take a deep breath in, and as you exhale, let your attention go inward to your heart. Closing your eyes if that feels safe and comfortable. If it doesn’t, then just drop your attention down towards the floor. And for the next few moments, I want you to just inundate your mind with two words. Thank you. Breathing in. Thank you, breathing out. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Over and over again.
(25:59):
Thank you, thank you, thank you. A deep breath in, and as you exhale, lift your attention back into the room or to the screen. Now, notice I didn’t say find something to be thankful for. I didn’t say thank you. Finish this sentence. I’m grateful for. It was just two words. Thank you. It’s a mantra. It’s something to repeat, and it is just like doing push-ups, swimming laps, riding your bike in terms of our physical exercise to say thank you over and over and over and over, and over and over again like that, preferably for a little bit longer than what we just did, but even what we just did in those few seconds, it did something to disrupt the default tendency of the mind to go into its human fear space, or am I full of it? Okay. So that’s one way of welcoming gratitude, and I like using that, especially when I am in the muck and the mire of my life where I’m super conditional, where I’m competitive and jealous, and I’m like, there’s nothing I can be grateful for. Well, it’s okay. Well then just be grateful. Just say thank you, and you don’t even have to like it. That’s the beauty of this work. Your opinions can just scream and kick all day long, but the practice still works.
(27:31):
And if you do it long enough, you’ll actually start to believe that you’re grateful for something. You may not still know what it is yet, but you’ll finally, eventually touch upon the hem of the feeling tone of gratitude. When we do that, that’s when things start to open in our lives. Another way that you can practice this is to actually be grateful for something. Now, it’s not setting up conditionality, but in terms of touching upon how prosperous we are, let’s see if I remember the quote here. We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude. We often take for granted the things that most deserve our gratitude. When was the last time you actually stopped and you were like, man, this is amazing, this thing called a sink. I turn the handle water comes out. I don’t know how to put it on the stove and boil it. It doesn’t need to go through some filter. I can just drink out of the tap. Or if you’re 13 or maybe regardless of your age, you can drink out of the hose if you’re playing outside, when was the last time you just like, oh my gosh, I’m so grateful for fresh clean water at an easy way of having access to me. I take for granted this abundance that is flowing to me all the time, and to stop and to be grateful for that, and then immediately go to, oh my gosh, I’m grateful for these shoes that I have on my feet. You know what? I’ve got 10 other pairs of shoes, five of them I never wear.
(29:26):
I am rich.
(29:32):
I’ve got a pantry. I don’t like those chips. I don’t like that bread. I don’t like that cereal. But for some reason, it’s in there and I’ve got so much food that I don’t have to eat it. It can just sit there until I get so hungry or have a craving that I have to have cereal and I’ve eaten all the cereal that I actually like. There’s still some more cereal there that I can have. Are you flowing with me here? There’s so much in our life that we can be grateful for, that we take for granted. And if we want to have a prosperous and a more prosperous sense of our living and of our life, then to start just cataloging and going, whether you write it out and journal it or you just go, I’m, I’m prosperous. I’m so prosperous that I have clean water coming my way.
(30:20):
I’m so prosperous that I have 19 pair of underwear. I’m so prosperous that I have three different types of bread in my freezer. I’m so prosperous that I have two refrigerators in my house, one that I just fill with soda and water and whatever else, and then the other one has food in it. I’m so prosperous that I’ve got this piece of plastic that holds tender on it that when I need to have transportation or buy something, I just wave it in front of this other plastic thing and this humanity that we’ve created, we’ve created this technology that allows us to give and receive money without actually having to carry around gold or wood or do some sort of thing anymore. I can just wave this plastic and I can walk out of a store with some food or with something to drink if I’m thirsty.
(31:09):
I’m so prosperous. This life is so abundant that there has been these materials that nature has created that are completely safe for me to use, to put over my head so that when it rains, when it snows, when there’s a windstorm, I’m still safe. When was the last time that we actually were grateful for the home that we live in? Most of the time you go, oh my God, I got to fix that roof. I got to fix that thing. Can you believe it? When I moved into this apartment, the hideous color that they painted this? I mean, we just are always in this kind of like, this is what’s wrong mode. But there’s so much that’s right. There’s so much that’s good, and it’s quite plentiful, so it may be a little harder to get there some days. But to go into that practice of just finding the smallest things to be grateful for, it again puts our consciousness in a space of prosperity, of receptivity. We are in the flow.
(32:12):
One of my favorite authors on the planet is a woman by the name of Melody Beattie. And I am committed to the rest of this year practicing gratitude daily and seeing what miracles it may bring, whether it is just saying thank you, whether it is I’m grateful for whether it is writing out a gratitude list. It doesn’t matter as long as I commit and show up every day to find 10 minutes to stay in the consciousness of gratitude. Because she teaches that if we can do that for just 10 minutes a day for like 30, 40, forty-five 50 days, it will do something miraculous. And we want magic. We want the magic of all of a sudden there’s more money in our bank account. Or we wake up tomorrow and 20 pounds have fallen off our ass. Like, okay, it’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with wanting that, but we are in a process. And if we’re willing to commit just 10 minutes out of twenty-four hours for the next however many days there are this year, what might it afford you in terms of a prosperous life? That’s what I’m committed to. And she has such beautiful turnings and use of the word on gratitude, and I wanted to close our talk today with these words and go into a moment of practicing gratitude together. So she wrote that and instructs us, say thank you until you mean it,
(33:53):
And we could just stop right there, say thank you until you mean it. So when we did that thank you exercise, probably the first five of them were just lip service. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. But if we keep saying it until we actually mean it, there’s a journey and a process of awakening and softening that takes place. So she says, say thank you until you mean it. Thank God, thank life. Thank the universe for everyone and everything sent your way. Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough and more.
(34:33):
It turns what we have into enough and more. The sufficiency of life. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. It turns problems into gifts. It turns failures into successes, the unexpected, into perfect timing and mistakes into important events. It can turn in existence into a real life and disconnected situations into important and beneficial lessons. Gratitude. Take a deep breath and hear this. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow. Gratitude makes things right. Gratitude turns negative energy into positive energy. There is no situation or circumstance, so small or large that is not susceptible to gratitude’s power. We can start with who we are and what we have today. Apply gratitude, then let it work. It’s apparent magic. Say thank you until you mean it. If you say it long enough, you’ll believe it. So today, let us shine the transforming light of all the circumstances of our lives.
(36:09):
Sri Chinmoy, anyone familiar with that individual? He once said that gratitude is the sweetest thing in a seeker’s life. Does anyone here consider themselves a seeker? You’re seeking. You’re looking for something. You’re trying to understand God in a greater way. You want more prosperity in your bank account. You’re seeking love. You’re seeking greater health. Anyone else seeking, or am I just the only seeker here? I would think we’re all seekers. So gratitude is the sweetest thing in a seeker’s life, in all human life. If there is gratitude in your heart, then there will be tremendous sweetness in your eyes. The prosperous heart, the grateful heart, will allow you to see the sweetness in your life who’s ready to have a sweeter week, the sweetest week. Maybe they’ve ever had the sweetest week this year, not just because you’re going to have a day off and eat a bunch of Turkey or tofu, Turkey or whatever you decide to eat on Thursday, but because you’ve been in a practice of gratitude, let’s close with a few moments to bring the sweetness. Thank you, thank you, thank you,
(37:27):
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, th I thank you thank you thank you thank you thank youank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank
(37:39):
You. I am grateful for our time together this morning. I’m grateful for the Cityside community that is so big and transcendent. It actually can’t fit in this room. We’ve got people all over the planet tuning in. I’m so grateful for the connections that are constantly being made through this community. I’m so grateful for the giving nature of this community. I’m so grateful for the giving nature of each individual, whether they are giving their actual money, their time, their talent, their treasure. This is a community of givingness, and what I know is that it is simply a reflection of the giving nature of life, the generous, prosperous heart, heart that has always given us everything that we need to make it through this day. This is the only day that we need to be in. We have everything that we need right now to be here in this moment.
(38:39):
Let us celebrate that. Let us be grateful for it, and allow it to catapult and create a vision for tomorrow, that tomorrow we will wake up and be in and be enough for that day. I am grateful for that truth, but come back to this moment right now and welcome the healing power of gratitude, the capacity for Thanksgiving to allow us to see the sweetness in the moment. And what I affirm is that every single person listening to my voice, whether in the room or afar, the power of gratitude in some way, shape or form, is impacting their ability to be in the flow and the relationship with the good that is inherent in them. Because they are simply here. There is a power and presence that doesn’t need to be coaxed. There is a power and presence that doesn’t even have an opinion of you.
(39:31):
All it wants to do is give. All it wants to do is create. So let us use gratitude to open up the door to that creativity, to open up the door to more good in our hearts, to open up the door to more good in our bodies, to open up the door to more good in our relationships, to open up the door to a life in a world that doesn’t live in fear and doubt and not enoughness, that we have to hoard and fight and kill one another in order to just subsist. There is enough for us all. And I’m grateful to know that truth. I’m grateful for gratitude to descend and move through, and to soften and to heal any wounds, any cuts, any scrapes and burns from this life, so that we can once again, be fully optimized and live in the natural flow of life that is sufficient. That is enough. That is whole. So let that be what happens today and every day forward. Releasing this word in our time together with a grateful heart as always, and so it is. Amen.