This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
The Stories We Inherit – Rev. Darrell Joness
DESCRIPTION
We all inherited beliefs about money long before we chose them consciously. This week we explore our inherited stories with compassion, and reframe prosperity as a muscle built through small, believable wins.
The summary and transcription were auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
SUMMARY
Rev. Darrell Jones discusses inherited family stories about prosperity and consciousness in this Sunday sermon. He begins by acknowledging the collective emotional exhaustion felt by the congregation, urging kindness despite political divisions. Jones introduces the month’s theme of prosperity, identifying the uncomfortable relationship many have with money—they want it but avoid discussing it.
Drawing from restorative justice principles, Jones advocates separating financial circumstances from personal worth, emphasizing that money doesn’t define one’s inherent value as “a great loving expression of the living spirit”. He references Reverend Michelle Wadley’s book “Flow to Overflow,” focusing on day eight’s exploration of how unexamined generational patterns become internalized truths about money, love, and success.
Jones illustrates this through a story about someone who believed she disliked donuts simply because her mother said so, demonstrating how children infer beliefs before they can critically evaluate them [0-ts737.94-16.98] [0-ts754.98-20.8] [0-ts776.18-24.38] [0-ts801.08-21.06] [0-ts823.46-10.99] [0-ts836.32-13.14]. He stresses that this work of examining inherited stories requires compassion rather than condemnation, as “awareness brings choice” [0-ts625.2-15.1] [0-ts641.16-13.96] [0-ts655.6-16.0] [0-ts673.42-23.9].
The sermon addresses building “prosperity muscles” through small, achievable goals rather than dramatic overnight transformations, comparing consciousness development to physical exercise [0-ts1052.08-14.14] [0-ts1066.62-12.56] [0-ts1079.7-19.32] [0-ts1100.02-14.14] [0-ts1114.7-15.32] [0-ts1130.9-13.32] [0-ts1144.24-8.52] [0-ts1154.78-23.4]. Jones shares his personal struggles with inconsistent tithing when facing variable income, noting how freezing in shame disrupts both giving and professional flow [0-ts1274.0-28.98] [0-ts1303.36-23.32] [0-ts1326.72-29.36] [0-ts1356.4-11.8] [0-ts1368.42-31.72].
The service concludes with group recitation of affirmations—I am peaceful, I am prosperous, my life is full of possibilities—accompanied by a physical metaphor of opening hands to receive rather than clinging to inherited stories that may limit abundance [0-ts1641.66-11.18] [0-ts1653.36-14.72] [0-ts1668.42-11.66] [0-ts1681.4-24.32] [0-ts1706.12-30.66] [0-ts1737.0-18.16] [0-ts1755.58-14.1] [0-ts1769.74-11.02] [0-ts1781.94-16.6] [0-ts1798.84-15.28] [0-ts1815.42-39.18] [0-ts1856.04-23.96].
TRANSCRIPTION
Rev. Darrell Jones:
Thank you. Thank you. Lovely music as always. Good morning, everyone. How’s everyone doing? Great. I want to acknowledge… I don’t even know… Hi, my name’s Reverend Darryl Jones. My pronouns are he/him. It’s good to be with you today. And there was something palpable when I walked into the building today, as I interacted with a handful of folks, and I felt it a lot this week. I walked in a little bit later than I wanted to. When I sat down, I went… And then someone said, everyone’s kind of walked in with that. Is anyone feeling like a big exhale right now? Yes. Now, some of it you may connect to what happened this week in our country, which is a beautiful thing. Yes? But here’s something I want to caution us in. I am so adamant, this is a personal thing, I’ll own this for me, that we must remember that we are one country, that we are brothers, sisters, and family that must care for one another.
And yes, we are going to have diametrically opposed routes of how we want things to happen in our country, but we must be kind to one another. And in the midst of everything that I personally am happy for this week, I’ve still seen a lot of unkindness and it’s hurt my heart. And that’s kind of maybe the exhale that I was feeling today. The other thing I want to acknowledge is, what are we talking about this month? Prosperity. Prosperity, which everyone wants. Everyone wants to have the flow and the money that they want to have. And there’s this interesting thing that happens around money that makes people squirm. They want it, but they don’t want to talk about it. They want more of it, but they don’t want to reveal what they have or what they don’t have. There’s this just weird relationship, and we may not personally hold it this way, but there’s a collective energetic that happens around money whenever it’s brought up, at least I’ll own it for myself.
One of the things that I want to… I kind of tagged this at the end, but I feel like I want to speak it right now. In some of the work that I do in the education realm with restorative justice and restorative practices, there’s this idea of punishment not being the way that change happens, that it’s more about how can we bring people back into a community and help them learn? And one of the key things is separating the deed of something that may have happened that didn’t go the right way from the doer. That if someone did something wrong, it doesn’t mean that they are fundamentally wrong or broken. They’re a great loving expression of the living spirit. They just did something that wasn’t great. I find that same principle, we’re principle based here in our work, right? So this principle of separating deed from doer is something that we can bring into our conversation around money, around prosperity, around abundance.
There’s this weird association that we make with, if I have X amount of money, then I will be that much better of a person or my life will be that much better. It may be easier to go buy whatever you want at the grocery store or to choose to go to Whole Foods over Aldi, but fundamentally who you are, you’re an amazing living spirit, period. And no amount of money is going to make that more so or not. Agreed? All right, so let’s bring that forward as we focus on what I really wrote about today, the stories that we inherit. Who loves a good story? I love a good story.
The focus in this month, the flow to overflow, we’re focusing on this book, Reverend Michelle Wadley. She’s a great colleague. She has this really strong East Coast accent and I wish I could imitate her when I read her words because it would just sound that much better to me, but I don’t have it down today. But what I was given to speak on was looking into our family ancestry. There’s one section of the book focused on that, and then building your prosperity muscles. Then through the book, it’s designed as a 31 day, a monthly quest into exploring prosperity consciousness. I’m going to focus on day eight, if any of you are reading along.
In general, we all inherit beliefs about money long before we chose them consciously. This week today, we’re going to explore our inherited stories with compassion and kindness and reframe prosperity as a muscle that is built, that gets stronger, that sometimes gets weak, but then we can build it back up again. The first quote, I’ll come back to our reading for today. “You are the result of an accumulation of countless influences. Some come from your current life experience and others reach back through generations, woven into your DNA and carried through your family’s beliefs, behaviors, and unspoken fears. When we witness patterns without questioning them, we internalize them as truth.” That’s the most important sentence to me in this quote. “When we witness patterns without questioning them, we internalize them as truth.
We have been witnessing patterns our entire life. Before we could speak words, before we could cognate a though as infants, all the way up to this very morning, we have been witnessing patterns and we don’t even realize the pattern recognition most of the time. Our brain, our neurology, our nervous system quickly connects the dots for us. And after the pattern has been repeated or we see it again, it becomes our reality. It becomes the proverbial water that we swim in. The challenge can be that we internalize something as true and live from it where it continues to get reinforced through our beliefs, through our behaviors, through our choices, but maybe that pattern or the original story isn’t something that we would choose to make true if we really stopped and looked at it. You feel me?
Enter our work here this month. Looking at being in the flow and getting into a space of overflow to move our hearts and minds, spirits and consciousness into that flow and overflow, we must do our due diligence. A phrase that I love. Due diligence, if you haven’t really though about what that means, I’m going to give you a definition. You go,” Oh no, I love to give definitions, “but it just frames things so well. Due diligence is a systematic investigation, an audit or an evaluation of a business, of a person, of a property conducted before signing a contract, completing a merger or acquisition or finalizing a major investment.
Most of us have not done the due diligence on the stories that we have already signed a contract on and said,” Yes, this is true. “You are the result… Reverend Michelle goes on to say,” You are the result of your thinking, speaking, pondering and daydreaming the sum of your conditioning, your education, your family of origin, and the global influences that surround you. Until you raise the level of your conscious awareness, AKA do your due diligence, these forces continue to shape your experience. “It is important to look at our current influences. However, especially I believe when it relates to our attitudes about giving and receiving anything, not just money, but especially money, love, attention, support, care and more, it is so important to go back to our formative years and explore the attitudes, the opinions and beliefs that were set before we would consciously and cognitively agree to them, before we would sign the contract, if you will, that yes, I’m going to make this true.
Does that make sense? There are so many things ingrained in the fabric of who we are that became part of our reality, not because we wanted it to be, simply because it happens at a time where we didn’t have the ability to discern.
But here’s the thing, oftentimes people don’t want to go back and look, or if we do, we start pointing fingers and say,” Well, it’s because of them and we want to shame our history. We want to shame where we come from as if it’s going to change where you came from, as if you’re going to go… “Go back in time and somehow change something and then fast forward back up to the current day and all of a sudden be a new person. Ain’t going to happen. So that brings us to this next though, our next slide from Reverend Michelle. She invites us to look at your family history, not to condemn it, but to understand it. And I would say it’s impact. Awareness brings choice. Get present and decide who you want to be and how you want to live. If we only sit in the criticism, it binds us.
Compassion frees us. Bring compassion to your family’s story. It is the path to freedom. Last week, Reverend Jackie, if you were listening or you watched the recording, she said,” You can acknowledge hardship without making it your identity. You can acknowledge your story and it doesn’t have to be your personal truth that can’t change, but knowing that it is influencing you is everything.
“She said that life follows the filter of consciousness. This week I invite us to explore that consciousness flows through the filter of our stories. So we can have this great consciousness, we can have great principles that we read and study about, but our stories, that’s what it’s moving through. And I see it time after time with myself. I’m not exempt from this. As I was sitting in meditation, one of my dear irreverent ministers, I won’t use all the language they used, but sometimes I think what we’re trying to do is clean up five pounds and putting it into a two pound bag. It doesn’t work. Can you feel the energy of that? All right, let me tell you a story. So I was at an event this week where we had a potluck and someone brought some things and one of the things that someone brought were donuts.
And one of the people I was with started laughing and they said, “I used to believe that I didn’t like donuts.” I was like, “Huh, really?” They say, “Yeah, my mom told me that we don’t like donuts.” It wasn’t until she was in high school, she was a very active, still is a very active athlete, but when she was in high school, she was hardcore, like 6:00 AM practices for various sports. And one of the coaches, because of the 6:00 AM practice, started bringing in donuts as kind of like an incentive and a reward for their willingness as these high school kids to get up early in the morning before school. She was kind of appalled by the donuts and she was like, “I don’t know if I can eat them.” She started talking to a classmate on the team and they’re like, “Just eat the donut and see what you think.” She ate the donut.
To her surprise, it was delicious.
It was amazing. She was completely flabbergasted that it was good, but she’d been told a story very early that we don’t like donuts, that you don’t like donuts. At that young age, she didn’t go, “Is this mom trying to get me to not eat more sugar or make better choices?” She just said, “I don’t like donuts,” and never ate donuts until she was like 16 or 17. What? No one ever told me that story. No one ever told me that story either. But this to me, it seems simple. This is a simple direct illustration of how the stories that we inherit works. We get told something, but the thing is we don’t even have to be told something. We can just witness something. We can just infer something. Most of our learning at a very young age is inferred. If you don’t know the definition of inferred, here you go.
It is a conclusion, an idea, or an understanding that we work out from indirect evidence, clues or context rather than from a direct source. We learned to read between the lines before we could even explain what that phrase means.
Before we had the language, we were learning the stories. And the challenges is that at those early moments, I would say even up through the first quarter of your life, so even into adulthood, I’m not just talking about young, but definitely young, that’s where they get established. But as I move into the middle range of my life and I start working with more young adults and I understand now, no wonder I got married and divorced in my early 20s. I didn’t know about nothing. I definitely didn’t know anything about myself. I didn’t have this capacity to really, really pick through and go, what is it that I actually believe? What is it that I actually want? Do those two things match?
This is the awareness work, the learning as well as the unlearning, the unconditioning that we need to do for the rest of our lives. This doesn’t happen in a month. This doesn’t happen in a week. This is not a condemnation that we are somehow deficient and we can’t do it, but this is the work that we must do. Every single day, every single year, every single month, we must become aware of the inherited stories on money, on love, on work, on health, on wealth, intelligence, learning, education, so we can either reinforce consciously the stories that do support us, but without a doubt, disengage from the stories that do not serve us and shift ourself into the direction of our desires, our hopes and dreams. Whenever you are experiencing a deficiency or a deficit in some way in your life, seize it as an opportunity to go, “Whoa, what’s the story that I’m telling myself about this?
What is the meaning that I am bringing to this?” Now, of course, there might be something, an actual thing that you must do to right the ship, but if you don’t understand why your ship veered into those troubled waters in the first place, I guarantee you’re going to go into those waters again.
Does that make sense? You picking up what I’m putting down, as my wife says? All right, so let’s shift gears into the other section of the book, Building Your Prosperity Muscle. Our next slide is going to really shift us here. It’s not limiting to set realistic achievable goals. In fact, it’s wise. Begin with small wins, prove the process to yourself. Each success strengthens your prosperity muscle, your capacity to intend, to believe, and to receive. I love this, especially this first part. It’s not limiting to set realistic achievable goals. In fact, it’s wise. A lot of the work that I do is helping people either establish, reinforce, reinvent a meditation practice. And again, here’s a principle. I’m talking about meditation, but the principle you can apply to your relationship with money. Most people, when I’m coaching them, they want to go all in and they’re like, “Let’s get it going.
I’m ready to meditate. I want more peace in my life. I want to bring down my blood pressure. I want everything to be better.” The challenge is, is that it’s less important to do 30 minutes or 45 minutes of meditation. What’s most important is that you do something every day to start behaving in a new way. So I always encourage people to set an achievable, easy goal. Most people are like, “Oh, I’m going to meditate for 40 minutes.” I’m like, “When was the last time you meditated for 40 minutes?” “Well, I did that one class in college where they invited us for two weeks to do it. “I’m like,” And you are 63.
Were you in college last week? “So it’s been a couple of decades. Let’s start somewhere and set yourself up for some success. If you are at the end of a meditation after 30 or 45 minutes and you’re just like,” That was horrible, “what are the chances that you’re going to say,” Yes, I’m going to do that again tomorrow. “Pretty small. Even if you think,” Oh, I’m going to force myself. I’m going to will myself to do it. “After two or three days, if that is not something that is easy and achievable and successful and feels doable and sustainable to you, I guarantee it’s going to start to… This is the problem. As we move into the end of this year, I can feel that, at least in myself, I’m like,” I’m going to change my life in 2027. We’ve got new people in government and I’m going to change my own government.
I’m going to shift things and I think I’m going to do a 180, but I need to start with something small. “This is the biggest setup that I see around prosperity consciousness that shoots everyone in the foot.
We get excited and we think we’re going to change our life in two weeks, that somehow we are going to up and flip over the proverbial tables of the taxpayer of lack of consciousness in our mind and somehow become a new person. Now, that’s magical thinking. I believe that our life can be and is magical, but consciousness doesn’t work that way. Consciousness is like the muscle in your body. You have to exercise it a little bit to bring either greater flexibility or strength to it. You don’t just wake up because you chose to be stronger and you can lift 200 pounds when you haven’t been able to lift 25. Principle, it applies to our consciousness. I’m really working on this as it relates to giving and tithing. I’ve been working on this for years, not weeks, years. And I really think it’s going to be part of my continued work until I take my last breath because the stories that I have around money and giving and receiving and what it means to have money are so deep and unconscious, not really something that I would choose.
I’m bumping up against them all the time. I mean, it’s like I’m walking around with a blindfold all the time, bumping into these stories that I tell, these stories that I inherited. So as it relates to giving, the challenge that I have sometimes, especially living a life as like a contractors, I will have a good chunk of money come in and then there won’t be some, and then there’ll be another good flow come in and it’s great. And I love the independence that I get to have around that. But if I don’t say, all right, I’m going to give on this as soon as it comes in and I’m like, well, I’m going to wait and buy this and I start manipulating all this stuff in my head, I’ll get down to a week, two weeks, three weeks, maybe it’s a month and I haven’t given anything out and then all of a sudden I say, I want to give 10% and I’m looking at a chunk of change and I freak out, how can I give that much money now?
I should have given it more back then. I should have given 10% then and then I freeze. I get into a shame spiral and I stop. And not only do I stop my giving in that moment, it literally starts to impact my work. I’ve watched it happen over and over again where all of a sudden the work that was flowing and coming in, I get freaked out and I’m still kind of out to the world looking like the same person, but all of a sudden I look at my emails and the invitations to work are not there. So my work is like staying in that consistency, staying in that flow. I think there needs to be this big amount that I should give that’ll all of a sudden make me glorious in the guise of the universe and make me whole and complete. As I said at the beginning, we are whole and complete as we are.
There isn’t an amount of anything as it relates to money that’s going to change your inherent value as a person on the planet and in this community. So let’s just get about being in the flow, yes?
There’s one more slide and I want you to read it with me. Okay, here we go. One, two, three. I am willing not only to shift my consciousness, but also to do what is necessary and to be moved into right action and effective action. I live in and from the consciousness that declares I am rich. Because I am rich in consciousness, I behave in powerful, responsible, integrity filled ways, accepting that I am rich, that I am a money magnet, and that I live from a mindset of abundance in all ways. I take action that reflects this truth. All my affairs are in order. All my business is handled responsibly. She goes on in the book to say, there are countless ways to heal from these deep-rooted influences and this part of your journey must be taken seriously. Choose the methods that resonate with you and trust yourself in the process.
The two that get highlighted in almost every single book, course, workshop that I’ve ever done related to prosperity is forgiveness and gratitude. There’s more that you can do, but those are the two big ones that are suggested.
Reverend Michelle goes on to say, “I cannot recommend these practices enough. Until you heal the inner landscape of limiting thoughts, the weeds of old belief systems that thrive when left unchallenged, you will continue to project them outward into your life. We must do our due diligence. You must be willing to invest time in shifting your thinking and habits. Watch your mind,” she says. “Question everything. As you raise your self-awareness, you will interrupt the thinking errors that created your current circumstances. Lastly, she highlights that frequency matters. Investing consistent time matters, and most importantly, you are worth the effort. It is only condition thinking that has ever convinced you otherwise. Plant these new thought seeds in your mind with conviction, consistency, and love, and watch as your inner garden begins to bloom.
Last week, Reverend Jackie brought in some good old Bible wisdom from Romans. I’m going to bring it back again. Be transformed by what? Renewing. The renewing of your mind. And that means looking at what is the mind operating from, cleaning out which doesn’t work, and then putting in some new things, an affirmation, a statement, a declaration that puts you in the direction of your desires. Here is this week’s affirmation. It’s three phrases. You can write it down. You can go back and listen to the recording, but I guarantee if you let yourself, your mind, your body, your spirit, your cellular self, your energetic body is going to remember these phrases. Repeat after me. I am peaceful. I am peaceful. I am peaceful. I am peaceful. That’s the first one. We start with being peaceful. Forget about what’s happening out there. Just let yourself get peaceful for a hot minute.
Just a hot minute. The second one, I am prosperous. I am prosperous. Not because of what shows up, because you are and you’re declaring it. So I am peaceful. I am prosperous. And then the last one, my life is full of possibilities. My life is full of possibilities. So the three, I am peaceful. I am peaceful. I am prosperous. I am prosperous. My life is full of possibilities. My life is full of possibilities. I am peaceful. I am peaceful. I am prosperous. I am prosperous. My life is full of possibilities. My life is full of possibilities. I am peaceful. I am peaceful. I am prosperous. I am prosperous. My life is full of possibilities. My life is full of possibilities. Take a deep breath in. Uncross your legs and arms. Let your hands turn upward in your lap in a receptive posture.
And what I recognize here now in this moment, as we sit with our hands open, that not only is there a physical opening happening, but there is a consciousness opening. There is a mental, emotional and spiritual opening taking place. Try closing your fists for a minute. Closing your hands, make a fist. These are the stories that we inherit. They do not necessarily make us receptive, but if we look at them, all we have to do is pause for a moment and open our hands. Open your hands and be ready to receive. You are peaceful. You are prosperous. And because you actually don’t know everything that’s going to happen, your life is full of possibilities. This is the truth of the living spirit. We can’t possibly know all that the divine is. Thank goodness it doesn’t fit in that box of your mind. It is way, way, way, way, way bigger than that, but it is in all of mind.
It is in all of life. In your life and my life now. So from that place of oneness, I bless us as we step into this week of declaring our peace, declaring our prosperous nature, and being open like our hands in this moment to the possibilities. Possibilities in love, possibilities in health, possibilities in wealth and finances, possibilities in community, possibilities in solutions, possibilities in every single place. It doesn’t matter the size or the magnitude of what we desire, big or small, there is a possibility.
And so I say yes to healing and revelation, to letting go and embracing, the divine dance and paradox of stepping into this prosperous flow to overflow. May it reveal to you and through you and as your life starting right here and right now. And so it is. Stay in this space of reflection and knowing. And I invite our practitioners to stand with me. And if anyone needs just a little bit of salt on top of that meal that we just had, you need a little bit more spice, a little more flavor, you can get a one minute blessing for you from one of these individuals. Feel free to come up and say, speak truth here, speak truth here, and let the word continue to anchor and release the old stories that may not serve us and help write a new one, a one of trust, a one of power, and a one of courage.