We Have IT… Let’s Use IT! – Rev. Jacqueline Triche Atkins
This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our Facebook page.
DESCRIPTION
There is me, thee and us. That is the world. Can I recognize and live my Truth, while honoring your Truth and our unity? Can we then live in peace, contentment and prosperity in a world that works for everyone? Join us Sunday as we look at the magnificent Power that is our Truth and discuss how to use it.
SUMMARY
- Recognizing one’s own intrinsic greatness and value beyond external factors
- Activating the power of faith to move mountains and achieve freedom and transformation
- Using diligence to cultivate positive thoughts and emotions, replacing negative ones
- Practicing mindfulness to be fully present and embrace challenges
- Applying concentration to understand impermanence and interconnectedness
- Developing insight to cut through suffering and cultivate a sense of non-self and unity
Rev. Atkins emphasizes that by embracing and harnessing these spiritual powers, individuals can work collectively to build communities and a world that works for all.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Jacqueline Triche Atkins (00:00):
Thank you. Thank you. You can just talk some more because I’m, and I’m so happy to be back here. I love coming back here. This is awesome. You all don’t know, I feel like I’m at my cousin’s house. It’s always good food at your cousin’s house and there’s always a lot of love and it might be some fussing from time, but that’s all right too. And I even have a timer up here. I saw Rev Darrell do this.
(00:44):
But I want to just start with a couple of announcements, not big ones, just some short ones. One is after service. I know some of you’re going to hang around. All the ladies. I want you to stop by that table over there because there’s something phenomenal going on in April, and this is the 19th year that it’ll be occurring. It is a women’s conference that I have produced every year and I have a team member here. There is Tina Scott.
(01:19):
But what it is about, simply, is an opportunity for women to be reminded of their intrinsic greatness and to learn how to live out of it. Too often we’ve lost sight of our true value. We have degrees, we have jobs, we have a honey, and we think that has something to do with value. No, your intrinsic greatness is always, and whether you’re a woman with a sable coat in the middle of State Street or standing naked in the middle of State Street, your value is the same. And so that’s what we do for three days Thursday through Saturday afternoon at the conference. So stop by there. Right now we have a, how can I say it? A black Friday, six week, 10% discount. So if you register between now and the end of November, you’ll have a 10% discount off of what it normally would cost.
(02:17):
Enough of that. I want to mention one other thing and then we’re going to get started.
(02:22):
Use the microphone. That’s it. Oh, I didn’t put that on the microphone. I have to start all over again. They did. I did not have anything about the conference on the No, I won’t. But I do want to mention something. Can I see that book you have? I told you I have two dear friends who’ve come here to visit with us this morning. This is Jason and Tina Scott and Tina is one of my team members. But aside from that, they are new authors. They have a book called Manifest a Joy-Filled Relationship, and they’re going to be around for a few minutes after service. It’s an awesome book. It’s an awesome book. And I don’t say that lightly. I don’t say it because I like ’em because they’ll tell you if I don’t like something, I’ll let you know. Uhuh. It’s terrible. But it’s really an awesome experience and I’m going to give it back to Jason. I don’t have any more room up here, but I wanted to share that with you. Thank you Tina and Jason for coming out this morning.
(03:16):
And thank you Reverend Aimee wherever you are for letting me come in and be a part of the Cityside spiritual community. Yeah, give yourselves a hand. Just give yourselves a hand.
(03:33):
I go a lot of places and every place is not warm and loving. And you may say, well, there’s not a million people here, but it is so full of love in this room. So I’m grateful to be here. Right now, we’re going to talk this morning about what was the name of it? We have it. Let’s use it. We have it. Let’s use it. And you have been working with this concept of power throughout the whole month. And those of you who are here for the first time, because you’re excited about Reverend Jackie being here, I want you to go back and check out the rest of the past Sundays. Because it’s been powerful, powerful. (What am I sta..? Oh, there’s the…)
(04:20):
I want to ask you a couple of questions this morning. The question is how do you celebrate or perhaps recognize and live you? How do you celebrate you? Think about that. And the second question is, how do you gather, guard, and guide your greatness? How do you gather, guard and guide your greatness? In answering those two questions… I’m going to do one other … In answering those two questions, you will, we can come close to understanding our power to create a world that works for everyone. When.. if I can answer, how do I recognize me? and how do I gather, guard and guide my greatness? Answering those two questions in an honest way, authentic way will absolutely enable me to come close to understanding how my power and your power, our power can come to create a world that works for everyone. Too many folk think that to be great one must be better than everyone else. To be great. I got to be better than everybody else. But I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that. I know everyone can achieve greatness so long as they are committed to achieving and using their power.
(06:16):
Rumi wrote it this way, “You were born with, and that’s Rumi is that tell me pronunciation? The poem. Rumi, thank you. I was saying rummy, what was I thinking about? Rumi. Rumi. Rumi. You were born with potential. You were born with goodness and trust. You were born with ideas and dreams and you were born with greatness. And then Maryanne Williamson writes it, “Go for greatness. Anything else is a waste of time. And she wrote that with the assumption that you have greatness to go for. So our potential, our greatness, that’s our power. That’s what it is. It’s our power. And the power. This month the word has been the light guiding cityside. And I’m so grateful here. I’m gratified that I get to put the wrapping and the ribbon on the package of truth that has been taught here at Cityside this month. Our book, the Art of Power ByThic Nhat Hanh defines our power from his perspective. And that’s what we’re going to talk about.
(07:32):
I had to really work with that because sometimes I often read Charles Fillmore and Charles s Fillmore talks about power in your 12 powers. How many people have heard of the 12 powers before? Yeah, but as I really worked with it over the last couple of weeks, I recognized you can call it a tree if you want to. It doesn’t matter. It’s your power. And it’s sometimes good for you to hear about it in a different way to get ahold of it. So I’ve been rolling in with this author Thic Nhat Hahn and understanding. And as I talk about it this morning, know that you may have a few questions, but get the book, the Art of Power, and listen, it’s on audible and just listen to it and listen to it and listen to it and listen to it.
(08:33):
And eventually you start saying, oh my God, he’s right. Okay, I’m going to take the next few minutes talk about to bring up, to line up these spiritual powers as defined by Thic Nhat Hahn. And realizing that if each of us will gather our power, gather our power, that is to be aware of it. When you gather something, you know got it. And you put it together and so that you can use it whenever you want to. Okay? So if each of us will gather our power and so that we can bring it to our mind consistently, then guard our power, guard it so that as is said in the Bible, the thieves won’t come and steal your good stuff. And what are the thieves? Your erroneous thoughts and feelings or external happenings that are making you lose sight of your power? And finally, we want to be guiding our power so that we are led to manifest our greatness.
(09:44):
Is that right? You want to manifest your greatness, right? Some people do in here. I’m glad. Thank you. We can have this conversation. If each of us, what is so wonderful about that manifesting greatness. If each of us manifest our greatness, guess what happens? We will have a great opportunity to create a world that works for everyone. And Lord, Lord, Lord, don’t we need that right now? We want to create a world that works for everyone. We’ll have an opportunity to create. This is assuming if you working to manifest your greatness, we’ll have an opportunity to create community after community gathering, guarding and guided by the five spiritual powers that we have that Tek not Han is bringing to us to help us understand. The first is the power of faith. The power of faith.
(10:54):
He describes it as a source of energy, a source of energy. And he says, and when you activate that energy, I love it. He says, when you activate that energy, I tell you what the five are. I didn’t tell him. Lemme tell you what the five powers are. The power of faith, the power of diligence, the power of mindfulness. What The power of concentration and the power of insight. Okay? Those are the five powers that not han say that we have, that we can use to manifest our greatness. I’ll say ’em again. You’re going to hear ’em for the next few minutes. The power of faith, the power of diligence, the power of mindfulness, the power of concentration and the power of insight. The power of faith, he says describes a source of energy for us. And when you activate that energy, when you activate that faith, you are strong.
(11:58):
You are strong as is noted. He says what Jesus said. Jesus said, if in fact you have faith, you can move mountains, okay? And he is saying that if in fact we activate our faith, there is nothing that cannot be accomplished and that part of that accomplishment is going to move us into greatness. If you are feeling great and I’m feeling great and I’m getting ahead of myself, and we are one, we’re going to be able to create a community that’s good for everybody. You understand what I’m saying? So we will have this faith, this power of faith according to Tek, not Han provides us with a path that leads us to freedom, liberation, and the transformation of afflictions. Ours is to open our eyes to our path, open our eyes to our path. For if we don’t do that, you know what happens? We wander around lost. We wander around lost. We suffer. We don’t know where to go when we have or when we activate our faith, our eyes are bright and our steps are confident. This is power. And we can gather this power every moment of our daily life. It will bring us a lot of happiness. You all. And folks being happy. Being happy suggests that the world would have a better chance of working for everybody.
(13:44):
The next power, the power of diligence. That’s where he starts talking about your conscious mind and your subconscious mind and you all in his homes, you all done, done some subconscious subjective mind. And so he is saying, your conscious mind is your living room and your subconscious mind is your basement. Okay? That’s how he wants us to understand it. And in your basement, you have everything. Everything is there and you have to be careful of what you bring up. When using our power of diligence, one, we do not let negative emotions manifest in our living room. That’s the conscious mind. We don’t let negative emotions.
(14:35):
We use whatever tools, spiritual tools that we can so that we don’t let negative emotions manifest in our conscious mind. That’s using our power of diligence. When using our power of diligence, there’s three other things don’t do or we do. We calm ourselves and replace negative seeds that do manifest in your conscious mind or in your living room because some of them sneak up in there. And so using our power of diligence we use, we replace, we replace seeds, those negative seeds, he calls them seeds, we call ’em thoughts and we replace them, but it’s mine. We do not replace them by fighting or resisting. Why? If you’re, whatever you resist gets what? Come on, somebody’s got some. Whatever you resist, tell me, decide, persist and gets stronger and stronger. So we use spiritual tools, we lovingly release it. I love to say those are your children too.
(15:45):
Okay? So you don’t want to kill ’em, you want to lovingly release them. So they go back to wherever they came from, the nothingness from which it came from. When using our power of diligence, we always invite good seeds, good thoughts to manifest thoughts of love, thoughts of forgiveness, thoughts of joy and peace. We learn ways to touch them and help them manifest. And how are some of the ways, for some of us it is, where’s the musician? This crochet? Oh yeah. No, no, no, no. The musician who crochets. Yeah. For some of us, what is that? Crocheting. Crocheting, yeah. For some of us, it’s crocheting. For others, it’s our reading and our prayer, and it’s our staying focused on the truth. Spiritual practices that will help us to touch and help those seeds of love and forgiveness and joy manifest. And when using our power of diligence, we work to keep these good seeds in the conscious mind as long as we can, as long as we can.
(17:00):
And again, if you notice, diligence is where you are absolutely being mindful of what you’re doing and you do it. Whatever works for you from a spiritual stand so that your living room can be beautiful all the time. Okay? You are looking to have living room with all kinds of wonderfulness in it for as long as you can, and you do that by feeding them and continuing in the ways that brought them into manifestation. Are you all with me? Yes. Okay. Okay. The longer the positive stays, the stronger it grows, but the longer anything else stays, the stronger it grows. Okay? So you want to make sure you’re working with the positive for true diligence can bring much joy and happiness to all of us and those around us. If I am walking around in my conscious mind, joyful, happy, peaceful, that’s a good thing and why it’s so good, it’s also good that I’m going to impact and affect all of you.
(18:14):
You’re going to impact and affect those who are around you. We are extraordinarily powerful when we actually use our power of diligence. We can transform ourselves from being yucky and we can transform ourselves to joy and peace and love and then help to transform our community and create a world that works for everyone. The third is the power of mindfulness. And Reverend Darrell brought light to that power last week. So I’m just going to drop a couple of thoughts. You all know about mindfulness. The power of mindfulness is truly something that we’ve used as we talked about the power of diligence. It is the energy of being aware of what is happening in the present moment, the energy and being aware of what is happening in the present moment when we are fully present. Listen to this. When we are fully present, we are living deeply each moment.
(19:16):
If you’re in a moment of joy, if you’re in a moment of joy, you are in it. Even if you are in a moment of sadness, that’s all right because you can be in it and move on away from it. You are in it. The power of mindfulness is the capacity to recognize things as they are, therefore, therefore enabling you to be joyous or to be able to embrace challenges, to move beyond them. When I am not being mindful, I can be being challenged and not even know it. I don’t even know why I am being challenged, because I am not being mindful. Are you with me? Yeah. The power of mindfulness will help you to embrace any challenge and then to move beyond it. Mindfulness, I love it. No need to regret the way we have lived with mindfulness. It helps us see and be in touch with our loved ones, with our community, with mindfulness, we are able to create a world that works for everyone.
(20:26):
And then the power of concentration. What is that? I said, sir, what is that? And concentration he writes, can help us look deeply into the nature of reality and bring about the kind of insight. So he got powers working together that can liberate us from suffering. I want to know about it some more then when using concentration on impermanence. This is the really good part. There’s a lot written there, but we recognize everything is constantly changing. Okay? And so let me tell you why that’s so good. It is so good because if I know things are constantly changing, I need to make sure I’m being loving today because tomorrow is going to be another day, right? Tomorrow may be too late. But one that another, which is also our power of concentration helps us to understand our interconnectedness.
(21:31):
We are one, tell your neighbor we are one. Tell somebody we are one. Tell the one you don’t like. She’s not sitting next to you. Make sure think in your mind, oh, we are one. We are one, yes, we are one. We are one. And concentration. This power can help lead us to the fifth power. Power of insight. The power of insight is a power. Or as thi not Han describes, it is a sword that painlessly cuts through all kinds of suffering, including fear, despair, anger, and discrimination. As he writes, if you are using your power of concentration, insight allows you to fully see what you’re concentrating on. What does that mean? The true benefit is our power to know that everything is as he says, impermanent. But what he says really helps you. He says everything is impermanent, including injustice, poverty, pollution, global warning, warming, violence, despair.
(22:49):
And because they are impermanent and we know it, as we understand and read how he is written, the powers they can be transformed if we use our power of insight into how to live in the present moment. Oh, that was a lot. You’re going to have to step back and listen to that. But it is powerful. It made me really happy. It gave me some hope. Grappling with power, this power to create a world that works for everyone. And that’s what we were grappling with today. We want to think about a power to create a world that works for everyone. Insight enables us to cultivate the insight of non-self. What does that mean? And it’s critical as we are contemplating using our power to create a world that works for everyone. Because non-self means that you and I, and I mentioned it earlier, we are not entirely separate entities.
(23:54):
We are not entirely separate entities. He gives some profound examples. If I hurt my left arm, it’s hurting because let’s say of rheumatism, I try to take care of it. I don’t cut it off. I try to massage it. I try to do everything I can and work with it. Okay? If I’m a phenomenal teacher and I have a student in my classroom who’s angry and interrupting, I try to work with that student. I don’t want to toss him or her out because as a teacher, I want to make sure my class we’re one. It gives an example of hanging a picture. You’re hanging the picture and you’re using your whatever hand you’re handed and you trying to hit the nail in the wall and you hit your thumb. Yeah, you hit your thumb. He calls that Uhuh. He says, wisdom of non-discrimination. We all have it and we make use of it because I’m not going to cut my thumb off.
(25:02):
I’m going to try to work with my thumb because it’s a part of me. And when we understand that we are one, whatever you want to believe, whatever you want to say, I don’t have to like it. I don’t have to be around it, but we are one. So guess what? I’m going to try to hold myself, hold my peace, and I can do that by remembering my own greatness. I don’t have to need your reminding me of anything. I can let you say and be as you are. And we can be at peace. A peace that will create a world that works for everyone. So gather all of our power. Guard your power. Protect it from being shadowed by era thoughts or feelings. And right now, your power can be shattered. You need to protect it. You need to know who you are and where your power is from.
(26:01):
Your power is within. And if someone doesn’t agree with your power, so be it because they have power and I’m one with them, I’m not going to cut them off the same way. I wouldn’t cut my thumb off. You guide my power so that they lead us to manifest our greatness and recognizing our non-self, recognizing our non-self. Recognizing that we are one indeed we can create. That is if we are all pulling and working from a power position. That power being as we talk this morning, that power being God led and God fed. Okay? That power being that of power, we can create community after community that works for everyone. That’s with person after person making a difference. Yes, it’s a collective effort. It’s a collective effort to create a community that works for everyone. This creating a world that works for everyone, collective effort, interconnectedness, knowing that you are not separate every small action, having a rippling effect on everyone else.
(27:14):
Unity and collaboration unleashes the boundless potential of collective power. And it requires a conscious and intentional approach that extends beyond our, you can’t just have passive observation folks. No, no, no. Because you are powerful. You are great. So you want to line your power up and live the change you wish to see. In other words, taking a stand that honors equality, compassion, and harmony being a presence for good. This month, this month cityside and has been intentional about enabling us to understand the concept of power to the people. And it only really happens, it only comes alive when each of us, when each person, each of you, raise your hand and say, when I, okay, embrace, embrace and control. My power. My power. Recognizing. Recognizing my connectivity, my connectivity. While we are being something. While we are being something. And against nothing and against nothing. And God bless you each and every one of you. And so it is, and so it is.
(28:43):
I want to close. There’s a prayer that’s usually said, but I want what we are talking about is being free. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about being free. I want to be free to be able to use my powers and I want to be free enough so I can see you use your powers and be okay with it. That’s freedom. So I want you to hear this. Yeah, please come and join me. Listen carefully. Listen carefully. This is a way of talking about freedom. It’s freedom or bondage a choice. Freedom is living simply in God’s abundance. Bondage is abundance. Complicating your life. Freedom is continuing to worship God as the things are added. Bondage is worshiping the added things. Freedom is just nodding yes sometimes bondage is mandatorily, arguing every point. Freedom is knowing that God understands even when your prayers are mumbled.
(30:04):
Bondage is not even praying. Freedom is realizing that your indwelling God is your source. Bondage is mistaking the position, the money, or the partner as your source. Freedom is you recognizing you as a worthy and significant person. Bondage is believing. The lie that you are short on value may be even worthless. Freedom is knowing that conflict is not bad. Bondage is being afraid of conflict. Freedom is loving your neighbor as yourself. Bondage is building a jail sale of judgment. Freedom is understanding that there is a season for everything. Bondage is refusing to let the season pass. Freedom is knowing that in your Red Sea experience, away will be made. Bondage is visualizing all of the horrors. Freedom is being alone with your God. Bondage is thinking that you are alone. I leave you with the question, bondage of freedom. What are you producing in your life? Which is your choice? God bless you.