OVERVIEW
What if your entire life and what continues to unfold for you is the dreams of your heart building you? So often we push and get frustrated because the life we dream of isn’t looking the way we want…you are a dream made manifest that continues to evolve always. Not certain about this idea.
TRANSCRIPTION
Hello People in the room help. Hello. People out there floating amidst the frequencies, the vibrations, those that are on the internet, and those that are on the larger net of frequency and vibration. The vibration of love and light. So I wanted, I, before I jump into my talk, I I, I was looking at the end of this page and, and Greg we’re doing the song. I was like, let me take a look at these lyrics again. There’s a question in the lyrics. It says, can I handle the seasons of my life? The answer is yes. We’re going to explore that today.
Well, I’ve been afraid of changing anyone afraid of changing? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, because I’ve built my life around you and that you can be lots of things, right? It can be your name, it can be your identity, it can be a partner, a person, a family, a job, anything. We put all of our definition on these external things. We build our life around you, but time makes us bolder. Even children get older, they go through the becoming the transformation. And I’m getting older too, but I take these words here. Instead of that I’m getting older, just in terms of age, is that I’m getting wiser. I’m seeing more. Good morning.
Before service started today, I said, we’re praying hard today. So I’m doing this internal dance of like wanting to unleash the energy that’s like coming up through me, but I don’t want to like, hit you with the hose water like a fire hose. I’m trying to just use the, like, pressure from the garden hose. What do you want? The garden or the fire? Fire? Okay, <laugh>, the talk titled this morning is, oh, let me put my timer on. ’cause once the fire hose starts, there we go. All right. The title this morning is Becoming, the Dream is Building You. And this is inspired from the book of the month, brave Thinking, the Art and Science of Creating a Life by Mary Morrissey. The general idea that we’re gonna delve into today, the summary of my talk is what if your entire life and what continues to unfold from now is the dream of your heart building you?
That’s kind of a heady concept. So I’m gonna repeat it again. What if your entire life, so everything that’s happened from the moment that you came out of the womb into the world, all the ups and downs, the good and bad, the sad, and the happy, everything that has transpired up to this moment of you sitting in this room and you watching online, everything that has happened. And then everything that will continue to happen from this moment forward is the dream of your heart building. You so often we get frustrated with our lives. Anyone frustrated with something in their life right now? Okay. It’s part of the human experience. Michael, put it up extra high, super frustrated. Right now, we push and we get frustrated because the dream of our mind, the dream of our intentions isn’t, isn’t coming to pass. And most importantly, we probably have an opinion. We think it needs to look a certain way. There’s a certain outcome that we expect and we spend a lot of time on what isn’t coming to pass the way we want it to be. But today, I am here to remind you that you are a dream. Your dreamy, your dreamy. Take that in for a minute. You are a dream made manifest, and your life is always a dream coming to fruition.
So depending upon what’s happened in your life in the past 24 to 48 hours or maybe two weeks, you might beg to differ. Well, Darryl, you just don’t know what happened to me yesterday. That’s no dream coming to, to reality. Yes, yes, it is. Even what happened two weeks ago, two years ago, 20 years ago, all of it has somehow brought you to crossroads and paths and decisions that put you in one direction or another. It’s okay. You can beg to differ. That’s the point of today’s talk is I wanna explore this idea of becoming, it’s a really interesting word. My intention today is to leave you inspired. I’m not gonna give you an answer. So often we come to workshops, we come to services, we come to one-on-one practitioner sessions with people. We go to our therapists, we talk to our partner, we go to the important circles in our life, and we’re like, I don’t know what to do.
What do I do? And we listen intently, and we’re listening for an answer. And it’s good to get some sort of feedback, but I want to inspire something inside of you. I want to inspire you to listen to that still small voice, as so many spiritual teachers have said. That is speaking something, expanding your mind, your body, and your spirit today. So I wanna come back to the reading and, and I, I feel like I do this every time, Reverend Amy, but it’s just something that I appreciate so much about you and my personal spiritual growth and journey. The very book that I wrote, the Foundation of the ministry work that I do, it’s all about exercise. It’s all about working out. And one of the fundamental things is being inspired by reading, being inspired by others’ words. And every single month you keep bringing books that inspire.
Thank you for that. This book, brave Thinking, the Art and Science of Creative, uh, uh, science of Creating a Life of Love. If you haven’t read it, I invite you to explore it, get it electronically, put it on your phone. Just read a little bit here and there, or get, if you liked the tactile pages and you like to dog ear things and lick your finger and do all that stuff, get it. Check it out. These are some powerful principles, uh, of religious science or of science of mind. For those of us who love Earnest Holmes, the foundation of the teaching of centers for spiritual living. But the beautiful thing about a principle is that it doesn’t matter who says it, it’s always true. Principles are principles. They’re, they’re, they’re foundation, they’re radical, they are root, they are the cause of things. And people find ways of explaining them. The way that, uh, Mary Morrissey brings them forward in this book, in this idea of brave thinking, I think is really powerful. So the reading that the last chapter, so I’m focusing on the last chapter, entitled, becoming, hence The Fuel for the Talk. These are the words that really jumped out, uh, to me.
She writes, the greatest impact comes not from achieving your dream, but from awakening to the person you are becoming as you listen to the still small voice and pursue your dream. For higher, good spiritual gifts unfold, like surprise presence. These gifts, which far exceed your original vision, allow you to find pleasure and joy and all that surrounds you, the person you evolve into as you build your dream through the struggles, victories, and disappointments. This is the true dream. Let me read that again. The person you evolve into is the dream, the person you evolve into as you build your dream through the struggles, through the victories and disappointments. This is the true dream. Your evolution can begin at any age and knows no bounds. You thought you were building a dream, but in fact, the dream was building you.
Can you get, can you get with that People online? Throw up some hearts, a thumb up something. Let us know that you’re there. Don’t check out, don’t multitask. I’m gonna call you out. You’re here for you, for your heart. So listen to what’s going on today. So I wanted to illustrate a little bit this idea of, of a dream. Does anyone have a dream for their life? I hope everyone has some something bubbling beneath the surface. So sometimes we have shared dreams. Yes, one of them is known as cityside, spiritual community. This is a shared dream. We all come together and say, yes, I want spiritual community. I want some friends. I want some love minded people that I can come and connect and talk about. So we have our individual dreams that give to our collective dreams. My wife and I carry, we have a collective dream, and it’s been to have a house, a house with a yard. And we recently bought a house and it was needing a little bit of t l c. So it’s in the process of being cared for and new plumbing and all of those things. But the dream was to be in a house, in a home.
And as I was reflecting on the talk this week and just going about and living my life, I found myself in the backyard, my new backyard, which has been grown, uh, a little wild ’cause we’re not living there right now. Um, as work is being done, I was like, I just gotta trim back a little bit of this and a little bit of that over there. The dream of being in this home has connected me to a part of myself that loves to be dirty, a part of myself that loves to be connected to the earth, a part of myself that reminds me of the relationship that I had and still have with my father, who also was a farmer before he was a minister who grew up in the sticks of North Carolina. And as I was clipping this weed and cutting this edge, I found that this dream was connecting me to a part of myself. I was becoming connected more to myself and my life, and my lineage, and my history and my ancestry in ways that I could not have even planned. The dream was building me. I was becoming more of myself in a way that was surprising, that was exciting. So the title is Becoming, the Dream is Building You. So let’s look at the word becoming. You know, I love a good definition.
The definition of becoming is the process of coming to be something or of passing into a state. So when we are becoming, we are passing into a state, and usually it’s a new state, right? We’re leaving an old state. We’re going outta Michigan, we’re coming into Illinois. The caterpillar is going from the state of being the caterpillar to becoming the what? The, the butterfly or the moth. The embryo becomes the fetus, and then it hangs out for a while and camps out until all of a sudden there’s this push, literal and figurative to become what a baby. Now we have all experienced this one, and depending upon if we have our own children, we’ve watched it happen. Teenagers become at some point in time, adults <laugh>, right? There is this state of transition out of one place of being into another that is becoming, is anyone experiencing some tension in their life right now?
If you are experiencing tension or tightness, then trust that you are becoming trust that you are becoming. It is one of the constant stint symptoms of growth. You cannot grow and be comfortable. You cannot grow and not experience tension. Now, tension is, it’s, it’s an interesting word. The the general idea of tension is that something is being stretched, right? As you stretch something out, the tension is greater. When we go from one state to another state, as we become, we are being stretched. There is a tension that is natural in normal as anyone being stretched right now, you are in the state of becoming.
If you’re experiencing this tension, if you’re experiencing this stretching, let it not be an indicator that something is wrong. Let it be the indicator that everything is right and that something is moving. You may not be able to see it at this moment. You may not understand all of it, but trust and know that that tension, that stretching is symptomatic of becoming. But here’s the thing. Not everyone I think is interested in becoming. I really don’t. This is why Mary Morrissey uses the word brave. You’ve gotta be brave to become, you have to be willing to step into relationship with tension. You must be willing to be uncomfortable for a while. Becoming requires bravery.
So she goes on to right here, whatever the status of your dream. So let me, let me come back. Does, are there any dreams in the room? Any dreamers, big dreamers online, dreaming, dreaming with your cup of coffee, sitting in some sweatpants on a little nook, a comfy nook, whatever the status of your dream, Mary Morrissey writes the status at this moment, whatever it may be. Please know that you have accom. What you have accomplished thus far, far exceeds the sum of your efforts. Your dream may be unfolding as you envisioned or very differently. It may have taken an unexpected detour, perhaps some old paradigms, ways of being have resurfaced, throwing you off. Course you can honor your progress before your dream comes true. Sometimes we can be so focused on the future that we miss the beauty available in the present moment. Let me read those last two sentences, please.
For anyone who is experiencing tension and thinks that something is going wrong, you can honor your progress before your dream comes true. Are you honoring your progress? Are you willing to sit in the tension in the stretching? Yes, we have these dreams that oftentimes are aspirational and they’re intended to stretch us and they live in the future. But that is not the thing. The dream is actually doing something in the present moment that needs some celebration, that needs some attention, eh? Okay? And you may be saying, all right, that’s all good. I get it intellectually, Darryl, but you don’t know my life. You don’t know me.
There’s so much going wrong in my life. There’s so much happening in my life that I don’t like. Don’t worry. Mary Morrisey’s got you covered. She goes on to say, and, and there’s just to make sure are there, there’s dream builders in the room, right? You’re here building dreams, okay? All a ll all dream builders experience failure. What all dream builders experience failure. They spend a portion of their lives building castles whose drawbridge they will never cross. If what you desire comes to pass, or maybe the dream manifests only to crumble as it did for Mary Morrissey. If you know her personal history take heart, and each adversity is planted the seed of greater good. The infinite has not you. As you stand for better over bitter, you find that it is your very failures that can propel you toward a higher level of awareness and success.
Three words actually. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 words. Take a stand for better over bitter. It’s easy to be bitter. It doesn’t take any effort. It doesn’t take any skill to be bitter, to be disappointed, to be let down, to be frustrated, to be unsatisfied. This is why it requires bravery to stand for better, stand for better over bitter in your life. I’m not saying don’t be frustrated. I’m not saying don’t experience those things. That’s the tension manifest. We’re not trying to gloss over that or to use the term in, uh, spiritual teachings. So we’re not trying to spiritual bypass. I’m saying stand in front of it. Look at the very thing. Look at the very person. Look at yourself. If you’re looking in the mirror and you’re frustrated and you’re bitter with who you are and the choices you’ve made, and where you are in life, and take a stand for being better and welcoming, better into the moment, and celebrating that. There’s some kind of good in there.
The image, especially with, with all the fires and the smoke that we’ve had coming through the country this summer, we’re focusing on the fire. And I’m not saying it’s not a bad thing, but something happens when those fires take place. It burns down a bunch of things and seeds drop into the ground and something eventually grows a whole new force, a whole new line of trees. So somewhere in your life, you may have a fire that is raging, that might be burning down some things around you understand? And know that there is something, there are some seeds in the midst of that, that just need a little bit of love, kind attention. Water them with your prayers, taking a stand for better over bitter.
So you might be saying, well, Dar, why are you spending so much time and energy talking about the stuff that’s hard? Talking about the stuff that’s wrong? Isn’t that not using the law the way that we teach it here? You’re focusing on the negative. You’re just gonna catapult yourself and, and create more negative in your life. Well, okay, I can, I can hear that argument, but I have yet to transcend this human experience completely, where I find that there’s a lot of frustration. There’s lots of bumps in the road. So I am trying to figure out how I can deal with the bumps in my spirit and my humanity. We can find the divine, we can find the seeds, we can find the good in the midst of all the challenge that is there. I guarantee it. This is the brave seeking and searching that Mary Morrissey has been inviting us on in the journey of reading this book. She says, you thought you were building a dream. In fact, the dream was building you this whole time. Dang.
So if we are aware now that the dream is building us, then what can we do? What can you do? My dream of being a minister was not my dream at first for, I would say the first 25, maybe 30 years, maybe even more of my life. People are gonna be like your dad. You’re gonna be a minister. And I was like, no, that is not my dream. That is your dream. Thank you very much. But then I caught a little bit of that yearning and desire and had my path that led me to going to ministerial school, graduating, getting my license and so forth. And I had a very specific dream in my mind of what ministry was going to look like for Darrell. It was not going to be the ministry that I watched my father do. And I’ve seen so many other ministers do.
Nothing wrong with it. But I wanted to do something new. I wanted to do something fresh. I had a very, very specific idea of what it looked like, and I was so focused in a good way. But then sometimes we need to step back. I was just talking to a client yesterday, that importance of being focused, but then having that 30 feet or 30,000 feet aerial view, taking in, breathing a little bit, seeing the impact of it. I was so focused though, on what I thought my ministry needed to look like. If you would’ve told me when I graduated from ministerial school, that the bulk of my work in my ministry was showing up in the corporate space, teaching mindful meditation to people I don’t know even know if I would’ve gone for it. I mean, I love doing it, but it’s so different than than the dream that I had.
But the dream was I wanted to do something different. And if I step back and I look over the past 10, 15 years, I’m like, wow, that dream has been building me. I’ve been making decisions. Some of them I’ve liked. Some of them haven’t been the best, but the dream has been at the bo at the, the, the bed of it. It’s been underneath all of it. And it’s been fueling and informing everything that I do and that I don’t do. Even the missteps, the mistakes that I’ve taken are helping that dream. Forget about ministry. I’ll bring it into our humanity, maybe a bigger and vaguer way. Um, this purpose in my life is I am here to love and be loved. I’ve talked about this before. I almost had this like James Earl Darth Vader, James Earl Jones, Darth Vader voice inside my head before I said yes to practitioner training that said, Daryl, you are here to love and be loved.
And if you would’ve told me that, that purpose and mission would have had me get married and then divorced in order to understand the power of relationship, interdependence, codependence, all of that has been a dream to love and be loved. And it has taken me on a journey of relationships in my life, romantic, familial, and friendship wise that I don’t know. If someone would’ve said, okay, darl wolf, you’re gonna love and be loved, here’s the stuff that you’re gonna do over the next 20 years. Are you ready? I may have stepped back from the edge and said, Nope, that’s okay. Why? Because there was a lot of tension. I was getting stretched in all of those relationships. But the beauty of it is that I was becoming me in the midst of all of it. 2020 hindsight, right? We can look back and say, oh, okay, yeah, yeah, I got it. That’s what I learned. You have the capacity though, to have some 2020 vision in the present moment and not just some vision. I think this is the people that are quote unquote seers, the people that we go to that can see into the future. All that they are doing is standing in the principle that there’s one thing happening. And that is creativity. You are being created by the dream of your heart.
When I let the dream of my heart of loving and being loved really consume me, I, I have grown, I have expanded. I have become the last quote from our book, Mary Morrisey says, the dreams not the prize. What? The dream is not the prize. The prize is who you become as you move toward the dream. That’s the gift of it all. The person that you become, the stretching that happens as you move towards the dream. And this has been a theme, uh, personally for me, but I think it’s something that I, i I just encourage us all to, to get humble with. Next month I turn 50. That may be a big or small number, but it’s kind of a halfway point. I think I’ll be on the planet for about a hundred years. So I’m like, all right, I’m hitting, you know, the 50 yard line here.
There may be some things you talked about building castles, and you may not ever get to see the drawbridge grow down and walk across to it. I’m realizing now that there are big, big dreams bigger than me, for our culture, for our society, for our planet. I may never see, but what I know right now is that I’m planting and watering seeds for the greater good of life, regardless of whether or not I see it come to fruition. ’cause chances are it’s gonna be such a bigger dream that I can even hold in my mind. And as I think about some of the, um, the pillars of social justice, the pillars of liberation theology, if you’re familiar with that, the pillars of the folks that have questioned things, most of them have been inviting a conversation in a realization of God on, uh, earth in a way that they would never, ever get to see themselves. So are we willing to keep the good work? Even if we don’t know it’s gonna come to pass in the way that we want to see it? I say, do it because it, it will do one thing. It’s gonna give you the prize of you becoming more of who you are. And then the gift beyond that is you get to share it with everyone else. Alright, three points I want to close with today.
The killer of all dreams is comparison. Right now, you may even be in your mind, you’ll be like, yeah, Darrell, but man, I’m not gonna be like that person. I don’t care if you’re like that person and you shouldn’t either, because you’re not them. You are you, you have a very specific thing wired within you that exists no other place on the planet. People go and spend thousands of dollars and travel around to go see some of the big sites, right? We go to see Mount Rushmore, we go to see, uh, um, the Taj Mahal. These are unique things that you will never see anywhere else. But did you realize that there’s something that you, no one else will ever see, something that no one else can possibly experience? And it’s you, it’s right wherever you go. So let go of comparing yourself a little bit.
It’s natural, I do it, but the practice here is coming back to our center. And when you come back to your center, when you come back to your dream, when you come back to remembering that you are enough as you are, and the life that you’ve lived up to this point is sufficient, and it’s your dream manifesting you, then you keep momentum. This has been my word for the week momentum. This is the science nerd in me. Anyone want to know what anyone got? The, uh, the equation for momentum? Physics? Anybody? It’s, it’s simple. It’s the mass of the object times the velocity, the speed. So we can break this down in lots of different ways quickly. It can be your physical weight times how fast you’re walking. That’s your velocity. But the weight of your consciousness, the weight of your love times, the quickness of your thinking, times the speed of your prayer times, the, uh, duration of your meditation, whatever it may be in consciousness, this is a great way to keep momentum going. And the only thing that’s required for momentum is movement. That’s it. It doesn’t have to be fast or slow. Momentum doesn’t say only the mass of the object times really fast movement. No, it just says velocity movement. So whatever you are doing today is keeping the momentum going. So trust the momentum that you have right now and let it continue to f fuel you. And then lastly, I’m turning 50. Hip hop turned 50. So I grew up with hip hop. She’s been really good to me.
I want to give you a gift from hip hop. Back in the eighties, nine nineties, there was a, uh, a group, um, that, that did a lot for me as a, as a black male kind of giving me a different message. And um, their name is probably one that you’ve heard, but maybe not one that sounds loving public enemy. One of the members of the group oftentimes gets set aside ’cause he wore this crazy big clock around his neck and he was always like crazy. He’s like making noises. He was what is called a hype man. Now it’s gender specific. So he’s a hype person and all he said, I mean, he said lots of things, but mostly the first word that always came out of his mouth. Anyone want to anyone remember? Yeah.
He was there to do one thing. And that is to hype up the band. Hype up the crowd, hype up the listener, keep the momentum going. You need a hype person in your life. That’s part of the dream of this community. I think it’s a hype community. It’s here to hype you up and get you excited about your spiritual practice. That’s my person personal mission. If you could say, I’m a minister of hype, I’m here to hype you up. I’m here to get you back into practice. The practitioners here in this community are here to do one thing, to hype you up and know the truth, that there is a power and presence that is always working for you. So I am here to challenge you. I dare you to get hyped about your dream and don’t do it by yourself. Invite someone, invite someones to join you.
Whether it’s getting prayer today online, you can get it to right. We got someone online today. You can get it online. So don’t think, well, I’m out there. They can’t get prayer wrong. Someone’s ready to pray for you after service today. If you want prayer after service today, get it from someone, but don’t let it fall on only today. You’ve got six other days in the week to get hyped. Monday. You need to get hyped ’cause it’s Monday, Tuesday get hyped because it’s Tuesday. There’s always gonna be a reason not to get hyped. We’re praying hard today, people. You ready? Let’s get hype right now. Take a nice slow breath in and as you exhale, let your attention drop down into your body. Feel your feet on the floor. Know that there is no other place that you could be or should be right now other than this very moment.
Your dream called you here. Whether you realize it or not realize it now that it did. We are here. We are here in this very special moment to recognize something, to recognize that there is a creative life force that has been working through you for you and manifesting as you day by day, by day by day. You can call this force whatever you’d like. And this moment, I choose to call it love. I identify it as spirit. I know it to be creativity. I call it freedom. I call it possibility. I call it hope and expectancy. This is my life and your life. Now, I’m not an exception to the rule. We are all exceptional. And so it is from this place and space of knowing and affirming that we are one with the very life force itself. That I affirm that right now we are all becoming.
We are all becoming, regardless of our age or stage in life. We are becoming, regardless of the amount of money in our bank account, we are becoming regardless of the status of our romantic relationship or the proximity to the relationships of our friends and family, we are becoming. Why? Because we are breathing. Celebrate your breath. Know that it is enough and let it propel you. Let it continue to hype you up, to take another breath, to step into the next moment, to know that this day, this very day, you have stepped across a line. You have said yes to stretch yourself. Let yourself be stretched by your dream today and this week in a way that it never has before. And let it become you. Let the dream build you. I’m so grateful for whatever stretching has taken place and what will continue to take place. And so it is with a knowing heart, a peaceful mind that I say thank you. I say thank you for what’s manifested and allow it to be and continue to be over and over and over again. So we let this word go surrender and gratitude. And so it is. And so it shall be. Thank you dreamers. Peace and blessings to you all.