Our Personal Power – Rev Aimee Daniels
This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our Facebook page.
DESCRIPTION
New thought teaches that there is only One Power in the universe and that Power flows through us, Join us as we examine how our personal expression of power reflects our inner work, our intentional focus and alignment with our values. By connecting with our inner power, we can cultivate a presence that uplifts and transforms ourselves and the world around us.
SUMMARY
The key points of this talk by Rev. Aimee Daniels are:
- The power of spirit is within us, not outside of us.
- We are all equal in the divine and there is one power that created all of us.
- We should learn to trust this inner power and not try to control how our prayers are answered. We should have faith in the demonstration of our prayers.
- To cultivate this inner power, we should practice activities like affirmations, meditation, prayer, and self-inquiry to ensure we are using our power for good and in alignment with our values.
- Anyone can make a difference in the world by expressing their inner power and gifts in service of others. This can be done through simple acts of kindness and creating communities that support one another.
- The ultimate goal is to remember that the power of spirit is our power, and to use it to bring more life, love, and compassion into the world.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev Aimee Daniels (00:00):
Thanks for bearing with me while I get all my chords and microphones set. And thank you for that beautiful song. The music team, that’s one of my favorite songs because it’s the heart of what we teach. And when I think about what this teaching has meant to me, my personal story coming to understand that the power outside of me, I really went through a time of seeking. It probably started when I was in high school and then finally I landed on new thought. But when I was growing up and as a young adult, I lived my young life. I was on a constant audition to be good enough and this belief that God was this God that we were auditioning to be chosen or saved, it really had, at least for me, my sense of self was totally outside of myself. And that’s a mistaken belief that we even need to prove ourselves to whatever our idea of a higher power is, whether we call it energy or God or spirit.
(01:09):
It doesn’t matter what you call it. And I would argue it doesn’t matter if people believe in it because we’re still part of it, but we’re all equal in the divine. We’re all equal. We all come from the same substance. There’s no better or worse in God’s spirit. There isn’t. So as Don read to us, the door of the soul opens inward because there is one power. And this idea of a power that’s not outside of us has been transformational for me. A power which literally created all of us. It created you, it created me. It’s living and moving and having. Its being as our life in every moment, whether we are aware of that or not. And it’s not separate from you, it’s not something outside of yourself. It literally is you. And you are the chooser of what you do with that power, how it expresses through you and you choose how you’re going to be.
(02:16):
Also, we don’t talk a lot about our beingness, but what’s the energy we show up in life? That’s our beingness, right? And that’s how you’re choosing to bring this power into the world. Linda talked to us last Sunday about the different types of power, and she talked about power over, which is how we usually think of power in the world like someone or something has power over us. But when we use the word power here and our context, we’re talking about the power and presence of spirit that as we say, the presence which is never an absence, that power which created all that is all that we see. All that is around us. It created us individually. It continues to create our lives, but that power works in as and through us. And so as Emmett Fox says in this quote, we want to recognize that the door of the soul pushes inward.
(03:23):
If we’re pushing in the outer world, which I was before I found this teaching, we’re not connected to that power. We think our good is outside of us. We think we have to prove something to someone. We have to strive. But if we’re centered in our inner power, we don’t have to strive. It doesn’t mean we don’t have any goals. It doesn’t mean we don’t have anything we want to do in our life, but we’re coming from a centered place. If we know this powers within us, we might be more allowing. We might just allow things to unfold. We might be more trusting, we might feel more confident in moving in faith. But this is often where we do get tangled up as human beings. We might pray for something, we’re big on prayer here, but then we want however it goes after the prayer, we want to dictate how it happens, don’t we?
(04:19):
And if the process isn’t going the way that we think it should go, then we don’t have faith. But often an answered prayer looks different than we think it’s going to look. And I always say, oh, thank God the divine is smarter than I am. The divine certainly has had better ideas for my life than I had myself, but our faith needs to be in the demonstration. We talk about love and law here. Law is how things come into form. It’s like quantum physics and that law is consistent. So we want to have faith in the demonstration of our prayers. And so we need to walk in trust with this, but spirit is always working perfectly on our behalf. So we want to work on knowing our connection. That’s why we want to focus on the door going in And think about it, if you’re pushing, trying to get out the door, you’re closing the door. You don’t want to close the door.
(05:19):
Ernest Holmes expresses this well in this quote because our mind is the focuser of our personal power. So Ernest says, we must understand that it is a power for good, and we must realize that this power flows through us and that the instrument of this power is our own mind. We must begin right where we are because there’s no other place we could begin. So our mind can accidentally be focused by others, can’t it? I was sitting on the plane the other day, I had to go to St. Louis for my work and there was a guy next to me and he had a news station on, and the news station was basically the whole broadcast was against a candidate. And all the lines that were coming across the stream were like saying negative things about the person. And I’m like, wow. He is allowing his mind to be fed by someone else’s thoughts and we all do it. So I’m not being too hard on him. He was very nice, man. He was very friendly and stuff, but we can put someone else’s voice in our head and we don’t want to do that. We want to be centered in our own voice. And we might have been taught that that was selfish. But when you’re centered in your spirit, you’re moving from a place of wholeness and when you’re out of alignment.
(06:44):
But this inner thing is so important. I know early in my journey when I first started working with a practitioner, I used to say things like, I have to figure this out. And when I’d be talking to my practitioner, I would tell her about the 2,700 people that I talked to get their opinion on what I should do. And I’m really, I mean, that’s an exaggeration, but I always wanted to know what everyone else thought I should do because I didn’t trust myself. But then as I began to practice, I began to trust myself and I began to trust that I would know if something was right for me. And if I didn’t know then that meant I wasn’t ready to decide. Or maybe it meant it wasn’t for me, but that I could just trust that my spirit knew what it was doing with my life. Jesse Jennings says, the value we seek in life is not conferred from outside of us, but is generated within. And so this inner power is the foundation. It’s the spiritual foundation from which we create our personal power in the world. That’s the place we want to source ourselves from.
(08:09):
So Earnest Holmes also teaches us that we should learn to trust life. There’s no power in the universe that wishes anyone ill for those of us who grew up with the belief that there was a devil. But there isn’t anything like that. I mean, there are people who choose to use their personal power in ways that are not loving and kind to others, but there’s not two powers. There’s one power, and that power is God’s spirit, whatever your word is, because we see it all around us every day. If you really think about how miraculous this world is, everything is designed to support each other. If you look in, you see how everything works together, even the seasons, there’s just a natural intelligence in that. And that’s true in you too. That’s true in your physical body. And I love this quote and our own souls and the silent processes of thought and understanding.
(09:14):
Do we not sense another presence? Even if you don’t know that that’s what it is. When you get quiet and turn within, don’t you feel a sense of peace, right? You feel a sense of peace. That’s the presence. There’s something divine about us that we have overlooked. There’s more to us than we realize there is more to us than we realize. And how do we begin to know this? I feel like we say over and over again, it’s through your practice, but guess what? It’s through your practice. What do you decide to do? Every day is who you become in your life and your habits. It’s who you become in your life. So Joel Goldsmith would say, we want to practice the presence.
(10:05):
We do this through prayer. We do this through working with the practitioner. We do this through sitting in meditation. We do this through contemplation. We do this through taking classes. We do this lots of ways. There’s so much available to us now in this world. You can listen podcasts and Gaia and whatever, but you decide what you put in your mind. And we have a great class starting on November 12 called The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success. I really want to encourage everyone to sign up for that. It’s just a reminder, how do I build that as a practice in my life? So I invite you to think for yourself, what’s your daily practice now and how might you stretch that? I know for me, doing more throughout the day, I’m really good about the morning. I’m super consistent. Don’t bother me before I do my meditation, but I could practice more through the day just being real.
(11:02):
I’ve started doing a little practice when I get in bed at night. I’ve done it informally, but now I’m doing it formally just to kind of give thanks for the day and just to pray for anyone who needs prayer that I know in my life who needs prayer just to center myself again in that energy. Because I believe when we sleep, we get plugged in, we get plugged back into the divine channel. And so it’s a great way to enter that. That’s why meditating when you first wake up, I took a class, several classes actually with the Chopra Center and the guy who taught the meditation there, they have something that’s sort of like transcendental meditation. They give you a mantra and he said, you should meditate first thing. And I’m like, without having coffee first. But that was his belief that you should meditate first because you are already sort of peaceful and plugged in. So then when you do your meditation, you go to a deeper place.
(12:05):
So another way that we can cultivate this presence and power, we all know about affirmations and we teach affirmative prayer here. And I was working on this with my practitioner a few weeks ago because I was having an experience where I was feeling like things were happening to me. Now let me tell you, I know better. That’s the kingdom of consciousness. I’m a victim, but I just felt like I was at the effect of things. And we can all get that way even when we know better. So we have to give ourselves some grace. But I think I just felt fatigued at the work that I knew that what was going on was going to create for me. I’m like, no, no more work. I don’t want more work. So we were working with this idea of speaking affirmations out loud, and she reminded me of something that Michael Beckwith taught like many years ago.
(12:59):
And this is how a way to say an affirmation. So when you say it, this wasn’t the quality that I was working on. But when you say it, the first time you say it, you say, I am powerful. Then you say, I am powerful. And then you say, I am powerful. And it begins to activate the vibration within you, and that’s the spiritual quality. When we say that, that’s what we pray for When we do an affirmation, we’re praying for a spiritual quality. But the deeper state of that is a state of beingness. It’s a state of beingness. So I want to be powerful, but what is the state of beingness? It’s power. And we could say that for anything. We could say the state of being. This is if we want to affirm freedom, the quality is to be free. But the state of being is freedom just to realize, even when we pray, even though we know what affirmative prayer is, we have the ability to just work more on embodying it.
(14:09):
Like MI embodying power, MI bodying freedom if that’s what I’m praying for. So we’re going to do this together just to practice. And the other thing I want to say is when you speak out loud, it activates the vibration of what you’re saying. That’s why it’s powerful to speak a prayer out loud or to have a prayer spoken out loud for you because you feel the vibration of the prayer now. So we’re going to do this together and we’ll do it two or three times. And I’m just going to invite you to say along with me and emphasize the word that’s highlighted. It’s a little hard to see that on the first one, but I in the first sentence is highlighted. Okay, you ready? I am powerful. I am powerful. I am powerful. And then let’s do the beingness. I am power. Let’s do it one more time. I am powerful. I am powerful. I am powerful. I am power. Do you feel that when you say it, it really, it starts to activate it in your vibration. So our first step is always to affirm our spiritual qualities that we want to call forth. And it’s also to really affirm the state of being that you want to call in. That’s our first step.
(15:46):
And the second encouragement, because we are following the CSL themes and there are encouragement is to talk about, to look at keeping our inner power clean through self-inquiry. What does that mean? You’re an instrument for this power expressing in the world, and we keep our power clean by doing our inner work. And you want to check yourself to make sure your power is coming from a place of pure intention, not from ego. And if it is coming from ego, hey, we all do that. So just forgive yourself and adjust, right? We all can be in our ego sometimes, but what out pictures in our life reveals how our inner work is going. Our life is always speaking to us. It’s always telling us how we’re doing. So what out pictures in your life is telling you how your inner work is going? So here’s some questions you can ask yourself.
(16:50):
Is there a hidden agenda in my expression of power? When I was in my corporate job, I don’t even know if I had an hidden agenda, I had an agenda I wanted to get ahead. That was my agenda. It sounds terrible to say that out loud, but if you’re trying to shift, you can just ask yourself this question, what’s my, why am I doing this? What am I hoping will come from it? That really points to what’s your agenda or in your agenda to I was trying to cure a sense of not feeling like I was enough just to ask yourself that question. And you can do this in your meditation and write in a journal. How does my expression of power relate to my values? So do you know what your values are? And as you’re bringing your personal power into the world, are you expressing your values? That’s one of the reasons I left my corporate job. I had to sit down with myself on a weekend and I’m like, I say, these are my values. This is what my work life looks like. What am I doing?
(18:01):
So we have to be honest with ourself. Ernest Holmes talks about we should be bringing more life and not do harm to others. So how am I using my power to bring more life to the world? When we bring life to the world, that can also be we’re bringing encouragement to others. We’re bringing love to others, we’re bringing a sense of connection and how we interact with others. Next one, does my expression of power harm anybody? Right? Sometimes we harm people accidentally, just to be clear. We hurt somebody’s feelings. And so it might say, you might immediately dismiss it, but it’s like it’s a good question for us to ask ourselves, am I within myself in how I’m being? Am I causing any harm? It doesn’t mean you’re doing it on purpose. And then the last question, how can I use my personal power in a more clean and life sustaining way? Am I using my power in a way? I don’t know the example that’s popping into my head. So often in today’s world, I see workplaces where people are expected to run themselves into the ground and just work so hard and always be plugged in and whatever. And we don’t want to continue necessarily to magnify that, right? People need rest. They need time away. They need their personal selves to be honored. So is anything I’m doing, how am I helping bring that forth a place where people can care for themselves and everybody matters?
(19:43):
So Rob Bell, does anyone know who Rob Bell is? He was kind of really hot maybe 10 years ago. He was a fundamentalist preacher and he had an awakening, and I think he has a TED talk out there. I’m really not sure. But if you google Rob Bell and watches Ted Talk, it’s like he’s got this sort of genius thing about how all of humanity got created and he weaves in the spiritual and stuff like that. But he wrote this quote, what would it look like for you to approach tomorrow with a sense of honor and privilege, believing that you have worked to do in the world, that it matters, that it’s needed, that you have a path and you’re working your craft?
(20:30):
It’s a great quote, isn’t it? So if we want to use our power for good, we want to embody that state of inner power in whatever gifts we choose to offer, and anyone can make a difference. So what good you create by using your inner power? A great story about this to me is the story of Rosa Parks. There’s different stories about what happened that day on the bus where she refused to get up, but I would argue she had been active in the civil rights movement. And at that time where she was living as a black woman, if the white section of the bus got full, she had to give up her seat, she had to go to the back of the bus. And on that particular day, she decided not to because she in her consciousness, she felt this is not right. And so she stayed put, and that caused a one year picket of the buses.
(21:32):
And I think that was Montgomery, Alabama. People wouldn’t use the bus system for a year. But ultimately the Supreme Court decided that that was illegal, that that should not continue. That practice of segregation on buses should not continue. And so she was moving in a consciousness of change. She already had that in her consciousness. And then when she was presented with the opportunity to take a stand, she did it. She’s a great example of how we can all use our power in that way, but maybe you don’t feel called to serve at that level. Maybe just saying to yourself like, I’m just a regular person. I feel that way a lot of the time. But for me, the way I want to use my personal power, especially at this point in my life, is to create communities where people can support each other. I do that in my work. We do that here at Cityside. I think it’s more important than ever because I think people feel disconnected in the world. A lot of people feel isolated. And so it’s important for us to have places that we come together and whatever you have to offer is needed in the world. We all have different gifts.
(22:51):
This week I was in a meeting with someone who’s been a mentor to me, and he’s in his late seventies now, and his grandchildren have lived with him most of their lives. His daughter’s been separated from her husband for a long time. So I think it’s three or four children have grown up in his home. And he was saying like, yeah, I really don’t know if I make a difference for them or not. And I said, can I tell you a story Steve? And I said, my sister, when her kids were growing up, my sister was a little psychologically unstable and they had a rough time. They really had a rough time. And I said, I was talking with my niece last weekend. She came to visit me and was saying, I miss my mom. She goes, I Ms. Graham too. And the reason that she missed my mom so much is her entire life.
(23:49):
My mom made it a point to spend time with her, and it could just be that she came for dinner. And the joke in my family was my mother as she got older, would accidentally poison people. She’d serve shrimp that was expired for a month or something like that. But for my niece, that made a fundamental difference in her life. And so we all can do that for the people in our life in big or small ways. So how you show up in the world, how you offer your gifts can be simple because you never know whose life you impact. Simply being kind to someone makes a huge difference. And that’s what I would love to see in this country. It’s just people being kind. Again, people saying, I’ve been trying to do this. Someone can have a different point of view from me. I just want to be curious about it. It doesn’t mean I agree with them, but that I can be a space where I don’t have to be in against this space. I want to be in this space where I’m for something.
(24:50):
So everything we do, every decision we make, every interaction that we have, any endeavor we try to do in our life to take on, it’s all an opportunity to express our inner power, to express our love, to express our compassion, and we get the choice of where we want to channel our power. We get to decide. And you might be sitting here thinking, I’m going to change my channel. And if you are, that’s okay, right? Or maybe you want to hone your channel, but just to be really clear, how do you want to channel that which is within you? We’ve talked about several ways that we can begin to tap into our inner power. The first is just to remember that spirit is the foundation of this whole thing. Ernest Holmes says, there’s a power and presence for good, and we can use it so anyone can make a difference.
(25:48):
That’s the second thing we focused on. You are an instrument for that power. You want to keep your power clean. You want to practice your affirmations. We did the I am power, I am powerful together. And you want to do some self-inquiry on your own use of this power in your life. Are you directing it where you want it to go? And we want to use our power for good because the activity is spirit is in. As in through each one of us, we each have our own gifts to offer. I always say thank God for that because there’s a lot of people who are great at what I’m not. But we all have our gifts to offer and we can let the spirit work through us as that. So my invitation to you is to think about how will you make a difference? How will you use your power to make a difference? It can be big ways, it can be small ways, but how can you tap into this power and use it to do good in the world? That’s our invitation.
(26:51):
As we turn within to pray, I just invite you to close your eyes. Let’s just take a deep breath together, just breathing in and breathing out. And I invite you to say, after me, the power of spirit is my power. Power of spirit is my power. So as we turn within, we remember this presence and power, this presence which is never an absence. This presence and power, which is in as in through all things, it is in as in through me. It is in in through each person hearing my words, this presence, which is the truth of our being.
(27:44):
So as we speak, as I speak this word from this place of oneness, I just invite you in your own mind, in your mind’s eye, to just set an intention, maybe a word, maybe it’s a couple words about how you will use your inner power more fully in the world. What do you want to call forth as your beingness? And in this moment, I just know that spirit’s always talking to us. So whatever word you’re getting, whatever ideas are popping in your head, whatever you’re feeling in your spirit, that is the divine speaking to you. And I know that the divine knows what it’s doing with your life, that spirit, God, the universe, whatever word you use, that power and presence has you. It is guiding. It is supporting you. It is living in as in through you. So by the power of this word, I magnify the feeling nature of this spirit within each of us.
(28:57):
I just know a deeper realization of this inner spirit, this inner power, this inner presence for each and every one of us. And I know that as we move through this week and through our days, that this gets even more magnified, that we are intentionally choosing and moving forward from this place of ease, grace, goodness, just trusting spirit to show us its divine path for us. And I know that that is what’s happening. I know that that is what the truth is always. That spirit is always guiding and directing us. And so I know that we make a difference each one of us as we go out into this week, as we go out into this world. And I also just know and declare that Cityside makes a difference. I know that it is powerful to come together to magnify the spiritual energy. And I just say yes to this for all of us. And I’m just so grateful to know this prayer is fulfilled. I’m so grateful to know that spirit is living and moving and having, its being as each one of us. And I’m so grateful to know that this prayer is fulfilled now, and with so much gratitude, I simply say, and so it is. Amen.