Hello Dear Ones!

What a whirlwind Easter weekend! Fun, occasionally emotional and deeply enlightening. AHA moments all over the place. Check out one of them in my She Says – The Sandbox post.

The other major AHA moment is the one I’ve chosen for this post. Yes, the subject line – Trusting the Divine – tells you the potential intensity of the topic. Intense, yet powerfully uplifting!

It was my Day 3 of the 40 day and 40 night guided inner journey with Iyanla Vanzant’s book: One Day My Soul Just Opened Up that set all of this expansion into action. It is my writings from that particular exercise that I wish to share with you. That and the unique happenings that arose the next morning.

The topic of Iyanla’s Day 3 is: Honor the Divine with … PRAYER.

Now before I go further I want you to know that, though I was raised in a Christian faith, I have added to my religious and spiritual studies over the years. Considering myself a spiritual person, rather than a religious person, prayer is not a word in my vocabulary. I meditate – connecting me to the god of my understanding. I express gratitude and appreciation from my heart for the  laughter and the love, the synchronocities and the creativity and all the gifts and the people so bountifully bestowed in my life. I live by my understanding of the Golden Rule. Yet I do not consider any of this prayer. It is my life.

At least I didn’t consider any of this prayer till that evening. Prayer, to me, had always meant one of two things: saying words that others had written, to be repeated from memory and at specific times with no sense of emotion or connection; or it meant I was desperate for something I couldn’t see my way clear to providing for myself, or that I had and didn’t want, and asking God to help me out,  yet not really expecting I’d get what I was requesting so why did I bother asking in the first place. Saying ‘Grace’ in words or thought at meals I did not consider a prayer – it was a true expression of gratitude from my heart for the bounty of the earth given for the nourishment of my body.

So, that’s where I was at regarding the subject of prayer when I began this 40 day journeying into Self.

Day 1 gets into TRUTH as it relates to the Divine. I’m good with that. Day 2 moves into TRUST. A little trepidatious with that one -  you can learn why and how by reading my She Says post above! Then Day 3 – whammy! Here are the key points Iyanla asks her readers to remember about what she writes:

PRAYER is a form of communion. It is the method of communication between (us) and the Divine.

(Iyanla Vanzant suggests:)

Let Me Remember:

I have the power to call forth the Divine.
Every PRAYER is answered according to Divine Will.
Everything I need I already have.
PRAYER brings me into alignment with my good.
I trust I will recognize the answer to my PRAYER when it shows up.

(Note: Bold text is mine for my own emphasis.)

At the end of each exercise, Iyanla suggests certain statements that she begins and expects the reader to complete. This is the statement on Day 3 that gave me a challenge: “Today it was easy/difficult for me to pray when … “

Here is my completed statement: ” I did not pray today. I gave thanks. I was truly appreciative of the many blessings in my life. I am so very grateful for all that I am given, all that I am able to give, for all those with whom I was blessed to walk for a moment, for an hour, for this day. I do not pray because there is something within me that stops the realization of my deepest prayer requests from showing up. Fear maybe? Fear of what, though? Fear of failure? Fear of success?”

Yes. Pretty heavy stuff. Though I did take the time, as always, to focus on all the amazing positives in my life before I fell asleep, I awoke to an interesting blend of emotions. Let me share what happened.

Every morning as I awake, I smile, stretch, take at least 5 very deep breaths and bless the day. Then I greet my hubbie, ask him if he slept well and if he had any dreams he remembered. He does the same for me. We share our dreams. We get up, and together we grind up our coffee beans of choice, make a pot of delicious brew and cut up whatever fruit we have on hand. With fresh fruit and coffee, we sit in bed propped with oodles of pillows and we read for at least an hour. It is our morning ritual.

This morning as I was reading, even as enjoyable as the book was, my mind wandered over to the window. Moments or more later I realized that I had been gone from the room. Where my mind took me I do not know. Yet when I came back I realized that I had traveled somewhere consciously unknown to me.

With my return to the physical, came a feeling that I have been experiencing a great deal lately – an inexplicable and unsubstantiated sense of fear. I was filled with a sense of trepidation and insecurity.  I did not feel safe. Yet there was no apparent reason for the emotions. There was nothing in my life that could or should cause such a rush of panic. I was truly, deeply afraid – of what I did not know.

I shared my feelings with Mike. Though I had had such experiences many times before, today was the first time I had been able to express what was happening to me in words that I could relay to Mike, or to myself, for that matter.

Mike, as always the wise counselor, commented that I have been doing a great deal of inner work lately – releasing that which is no longer required in my life. He suggested that possibly I was freeing up some of the negative aspects of what I had recalled as being part of my past that I had unintentionally buried in my body’s cells. Having had a love/hate relationship with food over the course of my lifetime, my weight has fluctuated and varied over the years with the comings and goings of happy and sad times.

At this point in my spiritual journey, my body weight is reducing. I am releasing the fat and, Mike added, likely the buried emotions as well. As they surface, rather than fearing the fear that arises and compounding these negative feelings with more of the same, why not honour their release by consider the following possibility:

Envision a glass of water. As moisture evaporates from it into the air, it is not at first noticed that any displacement of liquid has been removed from the glass. It is only over time that the water level can be observed as having lowered – evaporating into the air to be returned to the earth as a blessing in the form of rain. If I envision that the fearful, unexplainable emotions that surface from within me at uncalled for or unexpected times are like that water in the glass, then so too can these emotions evaporate.

I can and do understand that analogy. Yet into what would the fear evaporate? I realized so very clearly this morning – it would evaporate into the Divine.

Iyanla states in her book that: “PRAYER is an inward exploration undertaken to cleanse and to perfect consciousness; an act of reaching in to the Higher Self.” I wrote those words out the night before this occurrence. To find the very next day that I am undergoing an emotional cleansing in order to reach in to my Higher Self and to lead me ever closer to perfect consciousness (though I’m a long way from that point!) is an amazing revelation. Ask and it is given!

Applying Mike’s analogy, by allowing the fear to surface and to evaporate back into the Divine, it will be lovingly blessed and converted back into pure positive energy for use wherever it is needed. A profoundly freeing sense of peace filled me to overflowing with those thoughts!

Seems I did (as stated in the inset above): recognize the answer to my PRAYER when it show(ed) up!

It showed up as fear. Fear that comes to the surface of my being – as the sweat comes to the surface of my skin, and the wind and sun evaporate that moisture – that fear can be released into the Divine. The Divine – the All That Is of which I am a part and that which is within me. Fear that I now know how to release from my body through the Divine. Trusting the Divine to keep me safe, and to provide all that I require. Communicating with the Divine and keeping myself “in alignment with my good“,  this I can do. There is a clearer two way communication between myself and the Divine. I guess, according to this definition and explanation – that I really do pray.  And in praying, the answer was provided – I have a trust in the Divine today that has never been this deep, this rich, this profound. Blessings be!

In Light and Laughter,

Marcia