Is Inner Peace Possible? – Rev. Aimee Daniels
This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our Facebook page.
DESCRIPTION
We live in challenging times with all that is going on in our country and the world. Many people are experiencing separation from their loved ones due to differing political views. How do we find and maintain a sense of inner peace regardless of what is going on around us? Join us this Sunday as we explore the spiritual tools and practices that support your realization of Inner Peace.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Aimee Daniels (00:00):
That was beautiful as it always is. Thanks for giving me a technical moment here. We’re all sharing a computer this morning. So is inner peace possible? That’s what we’re contemplating today. So I want to begin by creating an analogy for you. And it’s an analogy about life. Have you ever had the experience of rafting or kayaking and you’re going down along the river and it’s really beautiful and it’s really calm and it’s really peaceful. And if you’re with other people, it might be kind of idyllic. It might be idyllic if you’re by yourself too, but you might be laughing, you might be having fun. But if you’re rafting, there’s this thing called rapids. Anybody ever been through any right? And rapids require our full attention because they can be a little bit dangerous. And I know that because the first time I went rafting, we flipped and my stepdaughter at the time was about seven.
(01:05):
And I grabbed her and I put her on the overturned raft, but we didn’t know where her father was. He got shot down the river, which happens with rabbits. We didn’t know it was okay for a while, but I think that’s a good analogy for life. Sometimes things are smooth and sometimes things are a little turbulent and they’re like the rapids and life because life is like that. We have a choice. What do we do in the midst of that? We can think as spiritual people that it should all be calm. And if it’s not calm, we can make that mean something about us. What was I thinking? I must have believed the wrong thing instead of saying no. Everything that happens in our life is an invitation for us. It’s a chance to really actually practice our faith and to be with what’s happening and not resist it to do our spiritual work with whatever it is that’s happening.
(02:04):
To talk about peace, we have to talk about not peace. When we’re not at peace, it wakes us up and life can seem like it’s happening to us. Then it’s really easy to feel like we’re being victimized by whatever it is that’s happening. Or in a relationship. It could be like this person, they’re doing this to me, but we can’t allow ourselves to be unconscious because then we’re building our sense of separation. And it could also not peace right now, it could also look like anxiety. I’ve heard more people talk about not sleeping, having anxiety than I’ve ever heard before. And I think that that reflects how we’re living. We’re always plugged in. Most of us are on social media a lot and we’re always seeing what’s wrong or we’re seeing what could happen. Or maybe we’re comparing ourselves to someone else and thinking our life should be like theirs, but that can cause anxiety for us. Not peace can also be reacting to a situation that triggers us. I think a lot of people are having that experience right now about politics. They might even be having it with their loved ones. One of my friends yesterday said I couldn’t help myself. I tried to talk my sister into changing who she was voting for. She goes, it did not go well all.
(03:43):
But this is the reality, right, that we’re living in right now. And we have to figure out. We will talk more later about how to be with that. But what happens when we’re triggered? We can feel overwhelmed, we can feel angry, we can feel hurt. We can feel like we’re a little bit out of control and it can feel like our life is falling apart. And I want you to think as we go through today, I want you as we go through this talk together, we’re going to talk about some ways to cultivate peace. But I want you to think for a second. Is there any place in your life that you’re not experiencing peace? And as we go through this, I want you to use that as your opportunity to do some work on it. Whatever it is. It could be big, it could be small.
(04:35):
So let’s talk about what peace is. We talked about what’s not peace. So peace can help us to wake up to the truth of this ever present reality, which we would call spirit. We would call God, whatever you call it, that beingness that you are part of. And when we practice peace, because I believe it is a practice, something that we can choose to do every day, it moves us from feeling separate to coming back into our oneness. And so that’s the invitation for this month is to cultivate peace. But today, specifically inner peace. And I really do believe this is a choice as Hunter read to us. Dr. Holmes says, the infinite is always at peace because there’s nothing to disturb it. A realization of our oneness with omnipresence brings peace. The peace which is accompanied by an consciousness of power. And I always like to borrow from our friends at unity because we’re cousins in our teaching, they all studied with Emma, Curtis, Hopkins.
(05:50):
And metaphysically peace means harmony and tranquility derived from the awareness of the Christ consciousness. What do they mean when they say Christ? Consciousness? It’s a state of consciousness that’s based upon true ideas and the understanding and realization of spiritual truth. And so this is great in theory, but in practice it can feel a little harder, especially if something has happened that’s concerning us. I know for me, a lot of my demons seem to come out at night. Rich will be sleeping, he’ll be breathing next to me and then the dog will be sleeping and breathing. I’ll be like, why am I the only one in this house who’s awake right now? But I’m going to share some things that help me today when that happens. So it can help you at night, but it can help you all day. It can help you in the middle of a meeting or whatever you’re doing.
(06:50):
And just remember that whenever we’re experiencing not peace, there’s something for us to heal. It could be a belief, it could be a pattern, it could be sort of an ingrained way of being. But when we’re not at peace, there’s something for us to heal. And we’re trying to create a clearing within ourselves through this practice so that we can come into our awareness of what Spirit is trying to do. When I’m triggered, I can’t do that. I don’t know about you, but when I’m triggered, that’s all I can think about here. Lemme click forward here. So one of the teachers I really like a lot is Tik, not Han. I found out this week that I’ve been saying his name wrong forever. When I listened to someone talking about him who actually worked with him, and he was one of the foremost teachers of Buddhism.
(07:43):
And if you don’t know his story in the 1960s, he was writing in Vietnam and he was writing about peace and both sides banned him because neither of them were interested in anybody who was encouraging peace, which kind of reminds me of America right now to be honest. But I’m going to talk a little bit about Buddhist thought because it points to the same thing as Ernest Holmes was talking about. But it feels a little more approachable to me to say like, oh, just unite with divine consciousness. Sometimes that seems pretty difficult, doesn’t it? So the root of the word boo Buddha bood means to wake up, to know and to understand. And a person who wakes up and understands is called a Buddha. And the capacity to wake up and understand is called Buddha nature. And so Buddhists practice, they say, I rely on the Buddha in me.
(08:46):
And what they mean when they say that is I believe there is this place within myself that has the capacity to wake up. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? And I think to find peace where we’re living right now in this time, we need to cultivate this sense of love and care in ourselves first and work through our triggers so that we do become available for understanding. And one of the things I also love about Tik, not Han, is he talks a lot about love. He talks a lot about cultivating our loving nature. We tend to talk a lot about the love in centers for spiritual, excuse me, the law in centers for spiritual living. But the love is also part of the teaching. And I think for all of us right now to move from up here to down here is the invitation. So we need to get into a peaceful place to do that.
(09:42):
And Tik Han says, start with your breath. And so we’re going to do this together right now. He invites us to breathe and we’re going to use this mantra, but he also encourages you to smile at the end of the breath when you breathe out, just to remind you to connect to the moment that you’re in. And he also, the one other thing he talks about in one of his books is he goes, you could do this with your family when you sit down to dinner. I’m like, I really wonder what my family would think about that. We’re just going to have a breathing exercise, everyone. I mean, why is that different than grace, right? Saying grace, if we all grew up saying grace, okay, so we’re going to take a moment to do this together and I just invite you to close your eyes and I’m going to read this to you, but say this in your mind. It’s eye breathing in. I calm my body, breathing out, I smile dwelling in the present moment. I know that this is a wonderful moment. Okay, let’s do it again. Breathing in. I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile. Dwelling in the present moment. I know this is a wonderful moment. Let’s do it one more time. Breathing in. I calm my body, breathing out, I smile dwelling in the present moment. I know this is a wonderful moment.
(11:29):
So I invite you now to bring your awareness back to the room, and I just invite you to look around with your smile on your face and look at the people in the room with you in this present moment. It’s really a beautiful moment. It’s actually the only moment we ever have. We forget that. So that’s something you can do at any time, even if you’re in that triggering conversation, I could be just like, Hey, I need a minute. I got to breathe here. Okay, now my computer’s frozen. We’re having some, John mentioned we’re having technical difficulties this morning. I’m like, I’m glad I’m not having them. So the next thing you need to really think about is how are you making space for your spirit? I don’t know about anybody else, but if something’s troubling me, sometimes I just need to sit and be with it. Sometimes I need to go outside and take a walk. I find that nature really calms me down very much. Being around trees and stuff, it’s wonderful. Sometimes I just need to be alone.
(12:42):
And if I give myself space, I do find that peace arises. So make the space and do that for yourself. We’re taught, it’s selfish to be focused on ourself, but if you’re not at peace with yourself, you’re really not available for anybody else. So make your peace a priority. I also want to really encourage you to consciously unplug. I will confess I am a terrible phone addict. I am. It’s the truth. We’re so used to like, oh, I’m bored. What am I going to do? I’m going to pick up my phone. I’m going to go see what everyone’s doing on social media. I’m going to play the New York Times Spelling Bee, which is my personal addiction. But I was listening to James Clear this week who created the book Atomic Habits, and he was talking about how he had to change his life when his children were born.
(13:40):
He had been working 90 hours a week to really make it right. He’s a writer, and I think he’s a speaker too. And he said, I just realized I couldn’t have small children and keep living this way. And he said, one of the first things I did is I deleted my email apps from my phone. That’s a lot to think about, isn’t it? But I discovered yesterday that there’s a way, the other thing he said is only twice in one year did he have an emergency when he was only with his phone that he had to redownload his email to do something twice in a year. Think about that. So you can limit how much time you spend on your apps. There’s actually a way to set that on your iPhone if you have one. I found that out yesterday. There’s also something called downtime. You can turn your phone off after a certain time of night that you have to give it permission to get into something. And it really helps you to be aware like, wow, I really do this a lot.
(14:47):
And so I just invite you to do that because we’ve built, we bought into being plugged in all the time, and it’s actually not good for your brain. It really isn’t. So make space for your spirit. And there might be some situations in your life where you need to unplug from people or situations or in the case of my friend, she needs to unplug from trying to have that conversation with her sister. It’s not going to change anything. And so what do you need to be unplugged from to be more at peace? Is there anything you need to unplug from the next practice I want to talk about? That’s really helped me a lot, iso. And I’ve shared, I’ve had a situation with one of my siblings where my sibling told me about five months ago that her son who used to live with me had a grievance with me.
(15:54):
And I said, well, that’s really interesting. He didn’t choose to talk to me. And so when it happened, I’m going to be honest and say I was very defensive because I’m just kind of like, really? He lived with me for five years and he doesn’t care about me enough to come and actually talk to me about this. And I’m like, so you’re telling me? And so at the time, it was really easy to be right. I have to just say, and my whole family agrees with me like, oh my God, can you believe it? But my primary goal in my relationship with my sister is my relationship with my sister. And for a while that looked like I didn’t talk to her about it, right? Because I’m like, I don’t want to hurt my relationship with her. I love her my whole life. She’s 12 years older than I am.
(16:52):
She has always been one of the people in my life I go to. And so I had to do my own work. I did a lot of work with my practitioner, but when it first happened, I did the ho Pono Pono. It’s a mantra. The purpose of the mantra is we repeat it over and over to ourselves to help us take responsibility for our negative thoughts, our actions, and our emotions that contributed to what happened. And I like when I do it, I also like to send love and blessings to the other person. You might be the person you need to send love and blessings to because sometimes you’re like my friend yesterday who was like, oh, I really blew that. Why did I do that? I created Discord in my relationship. Why did I do that?
(17:48):
We know this kind of conflict is happening right now between people around politics and stuff, and we’re going to do a pono pono in a minute. But my practical advice right now for everyone is to really be thoughtful and consider whether you want to be in conversation with someone in your life has a blatantly different point of view. I have a lot of people, I have a lot of clients who are more conservative than I am, and I can normally hold the space and just have a conversation and be curious. Honestly, none of us are just in one point. There’s not one point here and one point there where none of us are just one point. And I have found that with most people, you can have a conversation and just be curious. What’s your point of view? I have a client, his father’s 102 year old Holocaust survivor, and he said, I think liberalism caused the Holocaust.
(18:49):
I’m like, huh, that’s curious. I never heard that before. But I’m like, but that was his interpretation of history. I might frame that differently and say the reaction to liberalism caused the Holocaust, but I’m interested in keeping my relationship with him. So I’m curious. I have another client also very conservative, and he said to me last week, Amy, I realize my newsfeed only shows me my point of view. And he said, so I’ve started to go look for the other point of view. I’m like, wow, I am so incredibly proud of you. So I think with some people, you can have a conversation. You need to decide, is this someone you can have a conversation with? And I like to think I said this to my friend yesterday. A lot of people are afraid of losing what they think their life is, or they think they’ve already lost it and they want to blame someone else. And I think we can relate to this because we don’t want to lose the progress that we think we’ve made in things as those of us who are more liberal.
(20:02):
And if we can have compassion for that, then we’re available to have a conversation. And the other thing I just want to remind us before we go do our ho is God’s spirit is bigger than all these human issues. And that’s why finding this place of peace is so important within us. I truly believe that spirit is using all these difficulties in our country and the world right now to show us there’s a different paradigm that we could embrace here. And that paradigm is peace and love and understanding. That’s the paradigm. And I really truly believe that over time that will emerge. But it’s kind of the old fighting the new or however we might say that. But I really believe that that’s going to happen. And so for us as spiritual people, we want to cultivate this first in ourselves because it does impact the people around you, whether you know it or not. However you’re being, it does impact them. So I want to invite you now to call into mind a situation in your life that needs healing. And you can close your eyes if it involves someone else, just bring them into your mind and picture that person. Or it can be yourself. Maybe you need to forgive selves. And so I’m going to say the words, but I invite you to say them in your mind’s eye.
(21:37):
I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. And I love you. I just let those words settle in for a moment, and I invite you to open your eyes now. And if you’re working this at home, you might need to do it 10 times. You might need to do this many times. And there’s no right or wrong in this, but it’s just you’re creating that clearing. Prayer does the same thing. Prayer creates a clearing, so does meditation.
(22:51):
So as we move toward the end of my talk here, I want to give you just a little acronym that you can use at home to move into the practice of peace. It’s stop, drop and pray. So stop whatever you’re doing and notice without judgment that you’re not feeling peaceful. You could do some breathing, then you can do some hoa, pono, pono. And then you want to drop, as I mentioned earlier, from your head down into your heart. You can do that with your breathing. I find sometimes it helps me to put my hand on my heart just to remind me, go ahead to heart and just breathe and calm and go within. Just make some space for your spirit. Remember, we’re cultivating love as our nature. That’s what we’re doing. And then pray. Pray affirmatively from that awareness of peace, your spirit, your Buddha nature, whatever you want to call it. You’re praying from that place, that part of you that knows that you are able to wake up and that you are able to be in this place of love and peace and just reminding you that spirit’s bigger than anything that’s happening to you. So whatever it is in your life that’s happening, your spirit is bigger than that.
(24:21):
And I really want to encourage everyone. We’re going to go in and do a little Earnest Holmes mantra together for peace to close, but we can always choose what our focus is. And we can choose to feed the discord that we’re experiencing, or we can choose to focus on peace. And whenever you’re experiencing not peace, you can make the decision to practice peace no matter what. And if you don’t have a practice of affirmative prayer yet, I really want to encourage you to sign up for the class Linda has starting in a week or so called change your thinking, change your Life. It’s a great grounding in our principles, but you’re also going to begin to learn about prayer. So I really encourage you to sign up for that. If you haven’t taken it, you can also take it again, but get supported. That’s why we come together in community.
(25:16):
We come together to be supported by like-minded people. And I actually had an experience this week where I was reminded how important it is to hear other people talk about their process because it reminds you about your own. Sometimes something someone else says, you’re just like, wow, that’s it. That’s what I have going on. And that’s what happens in classes. So I really encourage you to take her class. So as we move into our closing, I’m going to invite you to say this aloud with me. This is an Earnest Holmes little affirmation for peace. If you haven’t learned how to pray yet, Ernest Holmes has so many great books, have little prayers in them, and I can tell you what a few of ’em are if you want to see me after a service. But this is one of them from one of his greatest books to me. This thing called you. It’s probably the simplest book, too easiest to follow. So I just invite you to repeat this after me or let’s just say it together. You guys ready? Everybody ready? Okay. I am surrounded by peace. I am immersed in peace. There is nothing but peace. Peace, deep, calm, undisturbed. And so I invite you to turn within in this moment just breathing into the goodness of this moment.
(26:41):
And in this moment, I know the presence and power of spirit. I know this presence which is never an absence, this presence which is guiding and directing us, this present which is loving us and pointing us in the divine direction for our lives. Presence of love, this presence of grace, this presence of goodness. And I know that I’m one with it. Just as each of the beautiful people hearing my words are one, with this presence and power of love, of goodness, of peace, of perfect divine wellbeing. So from this place of oneness, I just speak a word knowing and claiming for each of us that we are open to heal whatever needs to be healed within us, that we are open to listening to the voice of spirit, which is calling us to toward more peace,
(27:41):
Knowing what needs to be healed, knowing what needs to be let go of. And so I just know and claim that we are open to the experience of healing, whether it is within ourselves or in our relationships. And I know in a firm for us that healing is also happening in our country and in the world that peace and love will have the final word. And this is what we are a stand for. So I say yes to this. I know that God’s got this and all is well, and I’m just so grateful for this, so grateful for this peace that passeth understanding. So grateful for the peace that lives within each of us. So grateful to know that this prayer is fulfilled now. And together we say, and so it is.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Thank you.