OVERVIEW
The intersection of religion and the LGBTQA+ community has a history of judgment and condemnation. The meetup has frequently been the exact opposite of Cityside’s mission. It often is not safe, inclusive, with no path to living authentically. However, the book, The Four Pivots, offers an answer. As found in chapter one, when we cultivate insight and ask the right questions, we connect to our profound inner Truth that sustains us and empowers us to create authentic inclusion. Join us on Sunday as we explore this more deeply.
TRANSCRIPTION
Good morning. Morning. So you can see undressed up today. I wanted to put the G in the L G B T Q A today, <laugh>.
Um, so we’re going to talk about, uh, Sean, uh, gin Wright’s book, the four Pivots. And my task, my job assignment for today is to talk about the first pivot, which is lens to mirror. And, uh, it’s really this brilliant talking. We haven’t gotten a chance to get into the book. I would really recommend it. And so today I want to get into that. I think looking at Sean reading his book and, and seeing him interviewed a couple of times, my, my sense is that he was very inspired to come at this from, um, a racial justice perspective, but we’re going to take that into a, a little bit of an expanded consciousness. So we’re gonna look at it through the, through reflecting on the LGBTQ QA experience. And I wanna start and get into that by telling a couple of stories. So these are true stories from my past, long past, like a long time ago, a horse and buggy kind of past, um, <laugh>.
So a long time ago I had some friends who had moved to LA and I eventually moved to LA as well, but before they moved and went out for a visit. And I don’t, I was trying to figure out what year it was and I decided I didn’t want to do that <laugh>. But I know that I was thinking, you know, we had plans, we’re gonna go to like Studio one and we’re going to, you know, we had our sort of weekend planned out and I was thinking, oh, I hope I don’t get carded. So I know I wasn’t 21 yet, so I had to have been maybe 18 or 19 at the time. And we’re at the Gay Pride Parade. And those days, I dunno if it still does this, but in those days, the Pride Parade would sort of weave around in, in and through, um, like west, the West Hollywood area, and it would come down Santa Monica Boulevard, past Laga and end at the Pacific Design Center.
And there was a big giant parking lot where they would have the festival. And so that was the end of the parade, and that’s where we planted ourselves. And I was with some friends, and one of my friends had a boyfriend who was older. So we’re like, they’re, everyone’s like my age. Maybe they’re a little older, like in their very early twenties, but the boyfriend had to be, I don’t know, early fifties. I know age difference. Judgey, judgey, judgey. But <laugh>, he was really a wonderful, warm, loving person. And they were just so happy together. And I always, always live and let live. So, you know. Anyway, he was there and we were at the end of the parade and we were wanting the parade and the camera crews came in and started setting up. So, you know, in those days, I don’t know if they still do this, but the news would always capture footage of the parade inhabit on the news.
So he sees the cameras, this older fellow who’s with us sees them sending up the cameras, and he said, turn around. And I’m like, what do you mean turn around? The parade will be behind us if we turn around. He said, turn, if you’re seen on television at the gay pride parade, you’ll lose your job. And this was the reality. This was the, the world that I was living in at the time. And it was sort of my own naivete being sort of opened up and going, oh, you know, and for us at that age, the stakes were pretty low. If I lost my job, you know, I was in school, I was whatever part-time, but for him, the stakes were very high. And I could see the path, I could see the reality. This was the lens, part of lens to mirror this is the way the world works.
The other story I want to tell you is that, that time, maybe the late, this was like the late 1980s, there was a woman who looked like she stepped out of central casting. If you were casting the part of Presbyterian church, going button up conservative church lady person <laugh>, she was, uh, you know, she the silk blouse and the bow and the coughed hair. And she’d look really stern if she didn’t smile. But she smiled all the time, and her name was Louise Hay. And, um, Louise at that time was working with and getting together groups of young men who were HIV positive and working with them. And there’s two things I really want you to know about this. One is that at that time, at that time, all we knew, all we knew was that HIV was a death sentence. That’s all we knew.
That was our experience. That was what the medical community was telling us. That was what we knew. Um, and the other thing I want you to know, and this may be hard for some of you to get, but some of you will totally understand, um, at that time, you know, when we, when we were born into this world, people my age, certainly, uh, men older, some younger gay men who grew up, we grew up in a world where, from birth till whenever, you know, we get messages from all areas of life, they just come pouring in on us. And we, the messages that we were getting in from the family and the extended family, and the friends of family, and the teachers and the coaches, and the choir directors and the ministers, and the books and the TVs and the movies, and from everything, everything, everything, every message told us, told me that I did not belong.
That I was an abomination in the eyes of God, that I was, I didn’t even, I shouldn’t even exist. That I was a reject from society. This is the messaging. And of course, I intern. We all did, we internalized it. Why wouldn’t we? It’s coming from the people we love most in the world, right? So we’re taking that and it’s coming from everywhere. So we have this group of people that are living in this truth, internalized truth of self-rejection, self-hate, this extreme bitter shame, this belief that this was true. That we were really an abomination. That we really were rejected, that we really didn’t belong. If you ever want to be cruel to somebody, I don’t know why you would be, but if you ever want to be really cruel to somebody, just tell ’em they don’t belong. And this was, and then you add on top of that h i v in the death sentence.
And these are the people that Louise decided she wanted to work with. Crazy lady. So she gets them together, she gets them to do, and she gets them to do what she calls mirror work, where she has them look into a hand mirror and they see themselves in the hand mirror. And she’s big on affirmations. So she’s getting them to say affirmations to themselves in the hand mirror. But these guys as, as earnest as they were, as as wanting to bring forward something new, some change, couldn’t say the words, they wouldn’t come out this reality, this, this paradigm that they were in, this the way the world works, locked them in. The words wouldn’t come. But she worked with them and she coached them, and she coached them. And she got them to say to themselves, looking in the mirror, I am love. I am loved.
I am loving. Nobody was saying that to these people. At that time. Nobody had aids patients, they didn’t want to be in the same room breathing the same air. That was not happening. Nobody was saying this, I am love, I am loved, I am loving. Say that with me. I am love. I am loved. I am loving life changing simple. But this was a shift that was happening within this shift that took them from this place of self-hate, to self-love, to rediscovering, to, to reconnecting to that God truth, source energy that is within them to rediscovering their own inner truth. And this was seismic. It, it reverberated across generations. Until today we have gay marriage, we have, um, civil rights and protected class. We have more widespread acceptance than ever before. We have a scenario where I can stand in a spiritual center, in a church and give a talk like this.
This, this was answered prayer. You know, I can almost hear Jamie Lulu sing, and there’s a healing going on. And I know that it wasn’t healing of the body. The science hadn’t caught up with our prayers yet. But in the context, in the understanding of our philosophy, is our understanding of how this works and what we study here, that belief that we are spiritual beings, having a human experience, that life is eternal. We hold that context. This was the healing that had to happen. This was the right answer to the right prayer at the right time. And this shift moved from an old way of seeing the world, a new way that changed the world. And this is the mirror work. This is the mirror side of, of lens to mirror that Sean Jin Wright writes about what we understand, what we know, and what we see is that l that fear, this fear, you know, underneath it, in this lens side of things, when we’re really talking about, you know, being in that way, the world works.
The way the world works, by the way, is your cue, is our cue to be like, oh, I’m in the lens side. I ever sit there and kind of go, well, that’s just the way the world is. Oh, time for me to do my inner work, time to move into the mirror. And when we get locked into that, it’s, it’s what’s really underneath it. If we can unpack it and we can just tear away all that’s underneath it, what’s really underneath it is fear. What’s really underneath it is fear. And what Sean Ginright tells us about is if we, you know, in our zeal to be activists and our zeal to make change, and our zeal to jump in there, we’ll just jump in and have this knee-jerk reaction. A lot of times if we haven’t done our inner work, we’re coming from fear too.
It can be a fear of, you know, oh, maybe it’s true if everybody’s saying it. Maybe there’s some truth in this. Maybe there’s some truth in that. I’m, you know, a sin, I’m rejected by God or whatever it is. Or if it doesn’t show up that way, it can be a buying in a fear of this mountain, this immovable this, this way. The world is just so permanent, so there so real that it can never be moved. It can never be changed. It can never be pierced. We can buy into that. And so what happens is it’s fear meeting fear. Fear clashing against fear. And what happens in that case is it just perpetuates itself. It just keeps regenerating and regenerating and regenerating. But when we step into the mirror side, when we step in and do our work, and we get clear, we know our truth, we step into knowing that we are love, life, joy, source, we step into that consciousness.
We step out of the way the world works, and we let that go, and we move into a new paradigm. We move into a new idea about ourselves, a new understanding, and a new truth about ourselves. Then we go and decide what is ours to do in the world. Then we take action. It is coming from a place of love. It is coming from a place of truth. Capital t and truth, love will always stand against the fear. The fear, the truth is built on a, on a foundation of reality, on a ba, on a foundation of truth. The fear is based on nothing. So as Rob Wozniak would tell us, in course and miracles, the fear is always going to collapse in the face of love, always. So this is what Sean, uh, Ginwright is really encouraging us to do. Um, so the question that we move from is, you know, what is mine to do?
It’s a perfectly good question. I think it’s a wonderful question. But before we ask that, we move into the question of who am I to be? Because if I’m moving out of, if this is the way the world is and I’m moving into, and I’m letting that go, and I’m moving into a new paradigm, who am I in this new paradigm? Who am I to be if and for me, this is about, I wanna be connected. I want to be a channel of love. I wanna be an expression of love. I want to be in love. I want that to be my, my new truth. And so as I move into connecting with anybody that’s showing up as oppression in my life, what I’m meeting there, I meet them with compassion. I meet them with forgiveness because I can see that what they’re holding onto underneath it is really just the fear.
So I’m not bucking up against them in a way of I’m right and they’re doing their, I’m right routine. I’m coming at them from a much more gentle place, from a much more expanded consciousness place. And shifts happen. We’ve seen it happen. It happens all the time. We can look back and reflect on it. Our friends who are the aids, uh, HIV positive guys with Louise Hay show us this. They demonstrate it for us. Um, one of the things that, um, there are two things that I wanted to, two quotes that I wanted to share with you. One is from, um, uh, Richard Rohr, the wonderful Richard Roar. If you don’t know Richard Rohrer’s writing, I recommend, you know, exploring his writing. And he would say that we, um, we become what we behold.
So the call that, uh, Chanin Wright has for us to move into this reflection, to move into this mirror is really clearing that up so that what we’re beholding is love, light, joy, laughter. Even if it’s masked with a lot of fear, we can still see beyond it. We can still still see to what’s underneath it, which is that god light source truth, right? The other thing that I wanted to share with you is Louise, Hey, I found this, this, um, video of Louise and she’s talking, and I had never seen her quite talk like this before. You know, she has this really soothing, warm, lovely voice. She’s always doing her affirmations, but this was really more like her channeling something. And in this video she talks about, like, she talks about a few things, but she, she lands on this idea of, in your heart, contains all the love that is needed to cure all the illnesses.
So think about that just for a moment. I mean, it kind of feels, seems extreme, but what if that were real? What if that were your reality? What it invites in is that we kind of get locked into reality is what it is. But we already know as meta physicians, as as, uh, uh, as science of mind people, as cityside community members. We already know that this reality’s pliable. So what would it be like if that were our reality that we, or all the love that is in my heart can cure all the illnesses? Maybe we’re ready. You know, I’ve been, I’ve been doing this, uh, I’m in a class now called Minister as Teacher, and I have to create a class as part of the exercises, and I’m creating this class called on the brink of abundance because I feel like we’re always on the brink and we’re just ready to step into it.
And so this is the call. This is what, um, Sean Jen writes four pivots do. And then there are other ways to do it, and I have my way of doing it, but we’re being called into this new, this new truth, this new reality, creating the new reality. And, um, um, Joe Dispenza talks about this too. He talks about like the need to, when you, when you really want to get into manifestation, when you really want to capture a new reality, you have to let go of the material world. You have to let go of what you think you know. And if you can do that, if you can get into that space a full potentiality, then you can step into and set an intention for yourself and start to build a new world. And we know this happens. We’ve seen people do it. It actually absolutely demonstrates itself.
You know, we get so caught up in, I call it, and this is part of my class that I, I’m putting together, I call it the vow of obedience. We get caught up in the vow of obedience. I must be obedient to the collective thinking, the societal rules I have to get, I have to be obedient to the institutions. So it’s, a lot of times it’s church or it’s state, or it’s corporations or whatever. I must be obedient and follow the rules. And my call to you, and I think as Sean Gin Wright’s call to you is break your vow, <laugh>, break that vow, step into something new. Um, you know, I think that, um, we can, we can, because living in that vow, we f we, we fall into a, a feeling of powerlessness. So stepping into the mirror side of it, that process is a reclaiming of our own personal power.
Um, I’m looking at my notes, I’m trying to make sure I’m hitting on all the points I want to make. Our power does not lie outside of ourselves. Our power was within us. And that’s the problem with the vow of obedience. We’re placing the power outside of ourselves. We’re giving our power to something else or someone else. So this process is a process of reclaiming that power and knowing the truth. Now, as Sean Gin Wright says, and we heard in our reading, you can, it’s a process, right? So we’ll go into it, we’ll go into it, and we sometimes fall, we sometimes stumble. We sometimes, uh, even go back cuz there’s a polarity. There’s a, there’s a, um, uh, like an inertia that wants to pull us back to the old paradigm. Um, and it show up a lot of different ways. So we have to keep coming back to our practice, and we’re gonna talk about that a little bit.
But before I get there, I wanna expand this conversation even a little bit more beyond LGBTQ qa. Or maybe it’s, maybe it’s just a different aspect of it. Um, coming up in August, I’m gonna go to the, um, parliament of world Religions. There’s this gathering that’s happening. Reverend Linda’s gonna be there. Reverend Linda’s gonna be there representing new thought and she’s gonna be representing Cityside for the week. I’m going for a day and I was trying to figure out which day to go. Now, this has been going on since 1890 something. This has been going on for a long time. And it’s, it’s a gathering of all the in, it’s an interfaith gathering from around the world. It’s powerful. And I was trying to figure out which day I was gonna go. It was either gonna go Tuesday or Wednesday. And, and, and Tuesday was a better day for me work-wise.
I thought I, maybe I should go Wednesday. So Tuesday morning I was looking at the schedule. Tuesday morning is a women’s gathering. It’s, it’s for women. And you can imagine I can anyway that in world religions as the way religion has played itself out, that women have had the experience of being marginalized, of being suppressed, of being, you know, power taken away or not in, invested in. And so there’s probably a lot of healing that still needs to happen when you think about from everybody around the world, there’s probably a lot of healing that needs to happen there. So I think that’s beautiful, that’s wonderful. Um, and I think, I wonder what the next thing is after that though. And, uh, Sean Ginright talks about that this, in his book, he tells a story about this guy who’s very experienced, he’s very knowledgeable about d e i, diversity, equity, inclusion work.
He’s very schooled in it. And he’s a very, you know, promoting of it and having done it for a long, long time. And he’s in this meeting with a bunch of people and there’s some, a couple women there that are sharing and he, he’s listening to them share and he jumps in over them and he says, oh, well, let me tell you what you mean by that. <laugh>. Let me mansplain that for you. Let me, you know. And he, he, he, you know, he has really good information. But the result, even though his intention was good, we talk about this a lot in d ei work, intention versus impact. His intention was good. His impact was to marginalize those women. Was to silence them, was to make them feel disempowered, which was not his intention, but that was the impact, right? And it’s beautiful story.
And then he has an awakening afterwards going, oh my God, I can’t believe I did that. Right? But I, I wonder what’s his that he stops there? But I think he should have taken it a little further because to me the next question is that guy didn’t just show up out of the blue behaving that way. That didn’t come out of nowhere, that he was socialized to be. That we are as young boys and young men we’re taught to be aggressive, taught to be, um, competitive, taught to be leaders. And we’re taught that, you know, women need to be how we have to hold the door and help ’em with their code and do the thing. And they’re all the weaker and they need all the support and they need us to be the front lines for them. And we’re taught this, this is the cycle of socialization.
Think about it this way. Think about any young couple that you know that are announcing that they’re going to have a baby. What is the very, very, very, very first question that everybody always asks? Is it a boy or is it a girl? Who cares? What difference does it make? Well, because from birth till whenever they’re gonna be socialized to be little boys or little girls, and that means something. But what if we let go of that paradigm? What if we let go of that reality? What if we just let them be children until they’re in their teens and let them decide for themselves? I’m feeling very girl, I’m feeling very boy or whatever. I have a friend, um, that, uh, a recent, a recent friend who I’ve met who’s a young man, he’s married with two children and he and his wife are, um, he’s working his way through it, but he’s moving away from the key him pronouns to the they them pronouns.
And the reason is because in his partnership with his wife, he is just as responsible and just as engaged in the, in the homemaking, in the nurturing of the children as his wife is. And his wife is just as engaged in the breadwinning and the, you know, um, assertiveness and, and all those characteristics that if you were to put it on a map and go masculine feminine there, there’s just crossing back and forth, back and forth that that doesn’t really exist. Our own Reverend Amy two talk ago, I’ll call her Al cuz she’ll forgive me. <laugh>, hopefully, uh, two talk ago was talking really about, a lot about masculine feminine energy. And I got a little like, hmm, I don’t think energy has a gender. I don’t think it really exists. It’s a socialization that blows people’s minds. They cannot handle it. You know, I love this idea of women getting together and doing their healing, but then where are the men?
When, what do you do next? What happens when you are healed? Where do you go with that? You know? So that’s the question that I ask. It’s like, are you really just wanting to stay steeped in the dichotomy? Do you really just wanna stay steeped in that truth of um, oh men are terrible, women are awful and I have to have my women’s group? Or are you really looking to affect change? Are you really looking to bring forward healing? That’s the question that we have to get to. That’s the question that I think Dr. Ginright talks about. Um, and I think the answer is yes. And so one of the beautiful things about our teaching and our community is we honor your yes, we honor your no. If you’re not ready to let go of gendering and masculine and feminine that works for you and that ideology sort of lays a path for you, that’s fine.
You’re not ready, don’t let it go. Hang on to it. Your yes is your yes, your no is your no. But if you keep coming back, and I find if I keep coming back, I keep doing my mirror work. If I keep going within that, that wherever I land, that landing pad that I land on almost always gives way to something deeper. Eventually. So be, you know, so just go there, just let yourself go there. And I think our trans friends in the lgbtq QA community really have been helping us really move away from this paradigm of masculine, feminine, male and female and really broadening our understanding of it doesn’t really matter really. It really doesn’t. And some of this can feel kind of heavy, you know, it can feel like a lot. We have to keep coming back and doing our work again cuz we keep getting pulled back into these paradigms that keep locking us back in because it’s comfortable.
That’s the, that’s the attraction of the old paradigm. I know my way around here, it may not be a, it’s a cage, it may not be even my favorite cage, but I know how to navigate it. I’ve learned how to survive. I know what it is. I know who I have to be in this. The new is new, the new is unknown, but the new is where it’s at. The new is where all that beautiful potential can, that new reality can come forward. So how do we do this all the time over and over again. And I have three things that I’m gonna share with you just to wrap this up. So three ideas. One is spiritual practice, right Linda, Reverend Linda is sharing with us a class on spiritual practices. We offer them here, we did them today and we’re gonna do more of it.
So meditation, getting in that space of just being with yourself, just finding out what is my yes, what is my no, what is my truth? What is my reality? Where is it that I’m feeling oppressed? Where is it that I’m feeling limited? What am I wanting to say yes to? And more expanded understanding and more expanded experience. Meditation can be a beautiful place to just be centered and be quiet and be still and be with yourself. And prayer. We have prayer here at Cityside. You can have at any time we’re gonna have prayer after service. You can have prayer online. You’ll see the zoom link. You can just jump in there. You’ll be in the waiting room and you’ll get called in to sit with, I mean the most amazing, brilliant practitioner we have the most incredible practitioners. And the thing about practitioners is they’re trained to see beneath the surface, they’re trained to see your truth.
That you are perfect, whole, complete exactly where you are exactly as you are. And they call that out. So you don’t even have to go in with a story, you don’t have to go in with anything. You can go in and say, I’m just feeling more limited in my life than I want to. I want to feel more expanded. Great. I can help you with that. I can hold that prayer for you. And so can any practitioner in this room and online. So I invite you to, it’s free, do it. Bring them your prayers, prayer@cityside.me. Do the prayer work and any other visualization, visioning, all of our spiritual practices. If you’re curious about them, jump in the class with Reverend Linda. The other thing that I wanna share with you is because it is this push, it can feel like a push pull. It can be hard sometimes.
Be tender with yourself. You may fall down, you may do it as Sean Gen Ray tells us in our reading, we may get it wrong. We may just backslide tenderness. Be tender with yourself. Be gentle with yourself. Think about it. If you were counseling or, or sitting with a friend who was struggling with this, you would be so kind and so empathetic and so gentle with them. Be gentle with yourself. Just say, yeah, okay, I love me anyway and I’m gonna keep coming back to this. And then the third thing I would offer is perspective. Perspective in that, you know, going back to our HIV positive friends who are working with Louise Hay, think about that for just a minute. These were reviled people in the world. They were frightening. Everybody. Everybody was making up all kinds of stories about them. The reality was they were just really sweet, gentle people going through a horrible experience.
But there were all these stories being made up about them. It’s God’s will, it’s God’s punishment. Ah, you know, and in the midst of that, with all that messaging coming in from every single angle with their life, their days numbered because they’re living under this death sentence with no way of, no one ever really offering them any kind of an olive branch to, to know that their truth is not the truth that’s being pounded into them all the time. Nevertheless, they chose to sit in Louise’s living room and do these affirmations to shift the consciousness. And they did. And what I want you to know about that is if they can do that, so can you.
So I wanna take this into prayer. Just close this out. So just taking a breath, however this comes, however this lands, there’s something good, great. If something tension coming up, triggering coming up, that’s okay too. Just sitting with what is just knowing and holding you in truth and knowing that truth. You know, the thing about the sitting with my friends, it’s really hard to, you know, the circle of friends. It’s hard to imagine. But imagine if you, I don’t know, you probably don’t want to imagine it, but an entire circle of friends, just dropping dead is not something that anybody wants to imagine. But that was the experience. And we were running around trying to fix them all this efforting.
And
It was really just about love. It was always just about love. And as Louis Hayes reminds us, what if in your heart contained all the love that was needed to heal all and cure all the wounds and all the
Illnesses.
So just recognizing that this love, this source, this joy, this God, this truth is, it is in and through me. It is in and through. All that is. It is in and through you. It is. It is in and everywhere, every when it is expanding, it is ever present.
We
Come home,
Home,
Home to this truth, home to our center, home to our what we always knew to be truth. To begin with. This coming home, this connection, this thing does. It does what it’s supposed to do. It loves us up. It fixes us. It prepares the, the, the old paradigm. It allows us to let it go. And we step into this truth. We know that this is our truth, our abundance, our life, our joy. And so as we say yes, what is only required of us is to say yes. And it’s up to you. Do you say yes? You say yes to this new understanding, this new paradigm, this new way of being, to letting go of the old, to letting go of the real old mountain. We know that it can give way. We know that it isn’t as real as it seems to be. We can be guided home. We get guided home by our spirit, by our soul, by our heart, by our truth. We go deeper into this. We know this truth that resonates within us. We come back again and again and again. We just sit in this love, light, joy, laughter, allow ourselves to create, to dream. No small dreams, to live and expand and grow into our power. To let it express in and through us. We know this truth. And we seek the help of our practitioner friends and our minister friends and each other in supporting our, our affirmation that this is the reality. This is the real truth. This is the real truth.
So grateful. So grateful for this revelation, so grateful for this truth presenting itself. So grateful for Dr. Gin Wright to share, so grateful for this community to hold this truth, to be committed to centering in this truth all the time, to living an out, loud and out proud. I just know there is great, good unfolding for each and every single person.
I just celebrate that. I celebrate that in this month of pride. I celebrate that in seeing it in each and every single one of you. I see it as clear as day and I call that forward. And I’m so grateful for it. I released this into the actionable law, knowing in my release that I am demonstrating my faith. I am affirming my faith. My faith that I know it is already done. It is already real. It is already here. I have just said yes to it. And so it must be, and collectively as a community, we say, and so it is.