OVERVIEW
Have you ever had trouble letting go of anger? Most of us have at one point or another. And it can feel as if we can’t let it go until someone else acknowledges it and validates our viewpoint. Until then, we are stuck in our anger. What if anger was simply a signal that it is time to use your Inner Artist to creatively express yourself in order to release these pent up emotions? We explored how to use our Inner Artist (no painting or drawing skills required!) to release us from painful emotion and to use the power of love to liberate us.
TRANSCRIPTION
So take a minute to get settled here. Good morning everyone. As the last speaker of the month, I had intended to summarize the eight golden rules that we’ve been studying this month so far. In Matt Kahn’s book. The Universe Always has a Plan, but as I got started with that, there was a lot. There were eight rules, and by the time I added up my time, I hadn’t even gotten to rules nine and 10, and I’m supposed to talk on them. So I decided you probably didn’t want me to talk twice as long, I’m guessing. So instead, I will begin by focusing on the premise of the book Letting Go, which he sets up quite nicely in the introduction. The promise he sets up in the introduction is enough to keep you reading. So if you haven’t bought the book, if you haven’t started reading it yet, I encourage you to do so.
There’s a lot in there for you. Anybody else struggle with letting go of outcome? Oh, yes. Good. I’m not the only one, and I imagine there’s some people at home watching who also struggle with this. I can remember many years ago when I was invited by my therapist to let go of the outcome. I remember that vividly. I also remember looking at her like she had grown two heads at that time in my life, it didn’t seem possible for me to be able to let go of something IO desperately desired. Through the process of becoming emotionally free, Khan encourages us to see that the mystery of outcomes can excite us rather than overwhelm us. Our passion can invigorate us and we can act upon courageous decisions with unwavering clarity. Oh man, sign me up. Then he goes on to say, the infinite current of unconditional love nourishes your heart.
It allows you to flow with reality instead of attempting to control it. Cool. I am completely down with everything so far. Then I read the first golden Rule. You’ve done nothing wrong. And every regret I have ever had, every judgment of myself for past behavior, things I’ve done, things I haven’t done, started screaming, no, no, no, you do not understand. I can give you a list of the not so great things I’ve done in my life. And so then it’s like, okay, breathe, Judy. Breathe something that he invites us to do throughout the book. And as I did that, as I breathe and I settled my body, I realized that I don’t read this rule as a free pass, but ironically enough, it might be a get out of jail free card. Now, by that, I do not mean there are not negative consequences for our behavior or that we are not responsible for the harm that we may have caused others.
However, it does mean it can mean that we do not have to keep ourselves in a mental emotional, and maybe even a bodily prison if you know what that feels like for our misbehavior, for the ways in which we have screwed up. So if you have a similar reaction to this idea of not having done anything wrong, you might have to read that chapter more than once like I did. And I offered that reaction because I had many such reactions to some of the concepts he writes about in this book where my humanists, the parts of me, my ego, if you want to shorthand it, bumped up into the spiritual concepts he was imparting, some of which, which challenge some spiritual truths that many of us have believed over the years. And he discusses these in the last parts of the chapters, in the sections on spiritual myth busting. And so it was a good opportunity to practice the self-compassion that he invites us into time and again throughout the book. So similar to when you’re on a flight and the who are those people, the flight attendants, that’s who they are, invite you to instruct you to put the mask over your own mouth before your own face, before you try to help someone else. He recommends that you be the first recipient of your compassion.
Now, normally when I start giving a talk and when I start developing it, the introduction is where I start. Makes sense, right? But that comes fairly easy after I’ve got that, the jumping off point, well, how I want to set it up, how do I want to introduce the topic? Then the conclusion comes into view also. And when I’ve got the beginning and the end, then all I need is that through line that connects the two. And that middle part generally fills in pretty easily for me. So that’s my process and that’s what I was expecting to happen today for this talk, except that it didn’t, I just for some reason could not find the jumping off point, the starting point to dive into this topic. So what I’m going to do today is a bit different from previous talks. It’s maybe one part inspiration and three parts desperation. And so what does a minister to do when she doesn’t know how to do her talks? She gets her audience to help her. So rather than just stand up here and talk normally for 25 minutes, we are going to play our own game of spiritual Wheel of
Fortune.
So I kept the music team up here just for this to be my own personal Don Pardo’s. So as they exit the stage now, I’m also going to invite you introduce my own personal Vanna White Quincy, also known as Quincy, who is going to be helping us today. So you guys, thank you. So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m tasked with speaking on rules number nine and 10, which are projecting anger drains you of energy and love is your liberator. So I’m going to begin by asking the audience to call out letters that they might think are in this phrase, no, not under it. I will call it out. You will turn ’em over. Okay? So as you guys call them out, Vanna Quincy will turn over those letters, letter or letters, and after they’re turned over, I will speak whatever letter is revealed.
I will speak on a concept that begins with that letter in rules nine or 10. So I think that this is fairly easy. Most of us know how to play Wheel of Fortune. I’ve seen it a lot of times on reruns or back live back in the seventies. So a few things about this game that we’re going to play very important one is you do not win anything for guessing a letter, nor do you win anything for solving the phrase. So you might figure out what the phrase is fairly early, but please don’t guess it. Don’t call it out loud because you’re really going to mess up my shtick here, and it’s going to be a very short talk. Plus Quincy is very excited, as you can see to play Venice. So do we don’t want to spoil her fun, and Connie is here to assist. So we’re going to start just call, oh, people online. We don’t have anybody in the room to call it out, but you can put your answers in the, oh, you’ll call it out. We got somebody to call it out. So people on chat, if you want to guess, we will have John will call it out in the room. I just had a letter. You want to v? V? Okay, so where is a v? Vanna?
Oopsie. So as she turns that in rule number nine, projecting anger drains you of energy, Khan speaks about no longer being hypnotized by his own righteous viewpoint that he needed someone else to see so he could be released from his commitment to his own anger. Anyone insisted, demanded that someone understand what you were saying, that they understood why you were angry, and that it could not be resolved until they did anybody be in that situation? Yeah, it’s not very comfortable, and often it doesn’t work out that way because amazingly, the people that we are angry with have their own viewpoint that they are equally wedded to. And so oftentimes what you get is a stalemate. It’s like, well, okay, you’re angry at that. I’m angry at this harrumph, and not much else gets done. Okay, so let’s call out another letter. What do you got a, just call ’em out. You don’t have to raise your hand. I’m going to go with the one that I hear first. Okay, Vanna, what do we got there?
Okay, in the meantime, I have to find the letter A. Okay. Conn writes that in every heart there is an artist waiting to be born. And it is through the creative expression of that inner artist with the wisdom of spirituality that grounds and integrate us, integrates us, and makes us whole and complete. So don’t get too hung up on that word, artist. It is not like you have to sing or dance or paint or draw. I don’t do any of those things or not that well, sorry, Linda, she probably dinging me for that one. It does mean, however, that you are somehow able to narrate your experience, your transition from victimhood to hero or from ego to soul as Khan describes it, however you transmute those feelings. The anger in the case of the ninth rule is a form of creativity. It doesn’t matter how you do it.
When we are aligned with our inner artist, we are liberated from anger by letting creativity set us free. Some of you have met my husband, he’s come here before to listen to me talk, or he’s been here for some of our events that we’ve sponsored. So you may have already had one of these conversations, or you may in the future have one. And they’re usually something about, for my husband, how things work. He’s got one of those brains he can very mechanical, very, he figures out how everything clicks. He’s quite brilliant in that. So if you had one of those conversations, you know what it’s like. And those of you who might have one in the future, just a forewarning, you will get more information than you have ever thought possible on that particular topic. He can be voluminous and love my husband. My son’s here, he can attest, but I bring him up in this context because I was having one of those conversations with him not so long ago about shutoff valves.
Now, if you own your home and you have a hose, you know about shutoff valves. If you live anywhere but a tent, there are pipes in your home and there are pipes with shutoff valves, hopefully, and hopefully you know how to use them or how they work. So when a shutoff valve is horizontal to the pipe like this, the water does not flow. When it is in the vertical position, when it is in alignment with the pipe, then the water can flow. And this is how I think of creativity, right? When we are in alignment with source, when we are in alignment with our inner artist, creativity can flow. So let’s call someone, call out another L. L, all right, mom called out an L. All right, so it’s just K says that when love is your liberator, it is only the love that you cultivate within your own heart that sets you free from any pain created by the conduct of others.
When love is your liberator, it creates a shift to building an intimate relationship with your feelings. The next part of what he says really resonates with me as a therapist. I encourage my clients to feel compassion and love for all of their parts, even the ones that they dislike. He says, if I do not like the way life feels, let me love that part of myself. If I wish things were different, let me love the one who wishes for that. Let me not be a character waiting to be loved, but realize that I am love materialized into physical form. Christine, you had a letter to call out. E. E. All right, E, let’s see.
Okay. A common spiritual belief is that life is an illusion. I have often been uncomfortable with that statement. It seems too simplistic, too reductive, too minimizing of the pain and the difficult situations we can find ourselves in. And the reality of that, Khan says, because each awakening spirit must integrate into the physical body. The human experience is not something to get away from. Anything rejected in the beginning of a spiritual journey must be faced and embraced in the end just because there is a deeper truth or a greater expression of truth. He says it doesn’t negate or make wrong or illusion any initial layer of truth. Richard Rohr says the same thing about mystery. He says, mystery isn’t something that you cannot understand. He says, it is something that you can endlessly understand. This is a helpful way to understand the movement. As Khan describes it from ego to soul, we continue to understand at a deeper or a higher level of consciousness, whichever direction you want to go, both without having to make wrong or bad the place where we started from or the place that we find ourselves in. Let’s get another letter.
You don’t get to guess. You do not get to guess. How about up here? Yeah, go ahead. W w? No, w o, O. All right. Oh, we got a couple of o’s. I think although Khan says it’s okay to dislike when it gets projected out onto others, it means we are allowing the dislike to control us. Common parlance in English is to say, I am having a feeling, let’s say, of anger, but what’s closer to the truth is that the anger has us. So anger is a signal to us and an opportunity for us to use our inner artists to be creative and how we want to handle our anger. So I think we’ve already discussed the inner artists, so let’s have another letter. Go ahead, Terry. Terry, go ahead our, okay, let’s see. Okay, so ours for rules, there are 10 of them. It was harder to come up with concepts related to these letters than you think. So ours for rules, and we’re just going to leave it at that. All right, just call out another letter. Anyone? Letter. F. F, F. Okay. No, F,
F, s,
- We got an Ss. Okay.
Okay. Khan asks the question about what you are willing to do differently to bring more love into your life. And he asks several questions that can invite us in ways to be kinder and gentler to ourselves. My favorite is, is it not making yourself such a spiritual project? The struggle is real for folks, and I never minimize anyone’s pain or trauma or anything that they’re going through, any of the challenges they’re going through. But sometimes I sit across from my clients and I think to myself, it’s like, ah, sweetie, you’re making this so much harder than you need to. You are not the f-ed up mess that you think you are. Now, what if we were able to remember the words of meister Eckhart? The eye with which I see God is the same eye with God sees me my eye, and God’s eye is one eye and one sight, one knowledge and one love. If we saw ourselves and others with God’s eye, all we would see is love. And instead of ourselves being such a piece of work, we’d be a work in progress. And that feels a lot better, doesn’t it? Alright, what else? Do we have? Another letter. A, I, a, a.
All right. Life is not an illusion says con. Life is the word of divinity that comes to life in intersection of time and space. To say it’s an illusion denies the purpose of your existence without illusion to find everything could only be existential, miracle taking shape before you. I think that we can believe in the universal truth, that God is the one thing happening without having to renounce the personal realm. It’s all part of that path up. The mountaintop that the Hinduism talks about, that path to awakening and enlightenment, we use the spiritual truths, the spiritual understanding that we have through our physical bodies, through our physical experience in order to move toward that awakening. Okay, let’s have another letter. Yeah, please. Audience. T. T. Okay.
All right. So I’ve heard it said that it takes two people to know the truth, one person to speak it, and another to hear it. Hower thinks that it’s a spiritual myth, that people always need to know your truth. I think that everyone deserves to have someone in their lives who can listen deeply, who can actively listen and can know your truth without having to give advice or judgments or trying to fix. I think we all need someone like that. I think what he’s really referring to is the times when people are just not, someone is not validating your truth, is not respecting it or understanding it at all.
It apparently does not take it, I’m sorry, lost my place. It’s not requirement of truth telling that others believe it. Just because it is an inconvenient truth or something that doesn’t quite fit into your worldview, doesn’t make it less true. We live in a world of alternative facts. Unfortunately that’s going on in the public sphere, and that is what’s happening out there. So we’re talking about our personal truths here, the ones we tell each other. And so that’s what we’ll focus on. Otherwise I’ll go on a little bit of a rant. We don’t want that. So con says that perhaps the most important one to hear the truth is the person who is sharing it. What is important is that we are using our voice. We are using our inner artist to creatively express our truth. Whether or not someone agrees with us, what do we have left be? We have a be. Okay.
Love is your liberator, is bold and courageous. Any feeling, anger, betrayal, abuse, heartbreak, anything that arises could only be begging for communion with the truth and presence of your unconditional love. Khan invites you to feel into your heart, into your body. What’s begging for your attention? Is it a memory? Is it a thought? Is it a fear? It is often said in grief work that we have to be able to touch our grief, and we have to be able to approach it, look at it, hold it in order for us to move through it. If we could take that approach to all the pain in our life, we could stay in loving compassion with all parts of ourselves and activate greater and deeper healing in our lives. Okay. Anymore why?
Okay. John’s going to sing for us. All right. I got scroll through. Okay. Conn talks about the need for honesty in order to bring attention to the parts of us that beg to remember their eternal wholeness, like a processional line of emotion, standing single file. They’re waiting to be embraced by the light of their source. That source is none other than you. Isn’t that the most touching thing? I mean, I just love this imagery. How often do we think of our emotions as especially our painful ones, standing in a line waiting for our attention, our acceptance, our respect? Maybe even a hug. You love hugs. All right, so how many do we have left to go? One more. What is it you, you van has supplied that one. Unconditional love can be something that some may have rarely, or maybe even never experienced contacts about this filing system.
We have in our brains, in our subconscious mind where we put things into familiar and known things and unfamiliar and foreign things. So we’ve got those two filing systems. And when unconditional love is not something you’ve experienced, then it goes over into that unfamiliar, unknown category where things that are unknown and unfamiliar can feel not safe. And so, of course, a way to help that feeling of unconditional love become more safe. You experience it in relationship to others, hopefully. And also in our connection, our alignment with the ultimate source of unconditional love, which I call God, but everybody has their own name for that.
Alright, have we turned them all over? Okay. It’s hard for me to see. So as you can see, our phrase is love is what is it? Love is your liberator. I’ve only been talking for 25 minutes. All right. So thank you for playing our game of spiritual Wheel of fortune. Please give a hand to our lovely Van O White who’s been assisting me. All right. Thank you. Vanna, you can sit down. Thank you. Thank you. Free time. You’re welcome. To close. We are going to say, allow the spiritual pledge of allegiance that Dawn read for us at the beginning of service. Now, to do this, I’m going to ask you all to stand now. This is by invitation only. If you don’t feel like doing it, that’s fine.
And so we are going to say our own pledge of allegiance. This is how we did it. As children remember facing in our facing the flag in our classroom. Now we’re not pledging allegiance to the flag. Obviously, we’re pledging allegiance to ourselves. So I’m going to invite you to turn to your neighbor and place your hand over your heart. You can do this in the way that we did it as children, one hand over your heart, or two hands over your heart center. And I’m going to invite you to do this, all parts of this, and please do it at say it out loud. It’s a way to ground us. So facing the partner, we’re going to replete the pledge aloud with our hands over our heart, making eye contact and saying aloud these words. Now, this is the part of truth telling where we get to speak our truth to each other and have someone else listen. Now, we’re all doing it at the same time, but you get the adrift. So you’re going to repeat after me. Here we go. In this moment, I am pledging allegiance to myself to always be my ally, to
Always be my
Ally, to never be an enemy, to
Never be an
Enemy, and to always be on my side, to
Always be on my side.
I cannot be against anyone. I
Cannot be against
Because the energy it takes to be against someone is time away from being there for me. So we will allow that to be our prayer as we leave here today. And together we say, and so it is. Amen.