Ambition

Artist Miyeon Yi

When my career began, the professional niche of "spiritual teacher" didn't exist. This served me well, because if you don't think there is anything to be ambitious for, you're not ambitious. And ambition gets in the way of anything having to do with spiritual transmission.

To be ambitious is actually to doubt God. To be ambitious is saying, "I need to walk ahead of God here, I need to make something happen." The spiritual life is not where you are making something happen, the spiritual life is where you're allowing everything to happen. And that really is what this course is about. This course is about moving from dispensing information to actually allowing your consciousness to be on some level a conduit for transmission. In A Course in Miracles it says, "People hear you on the level that you speak from."

Marianne Williamson

Money

Artist Daniel Raynott

Your relationship with an object such as money..If financial interactions are stressful for you, you are not seeing money clearly. You are seeing your negative interpretation of money. Money is a neutral thing, and there is nothing inherently stressful about it. Stress is far more attitudinal than situational. The idea that "money is the root of all evil" is fabricated by the ego, which is infatuated with evil and its causes. The Spiritual Eye, by contrast, sees money as a vehicle to express love. Money blesses you when you receive it, and it blesses you and the recipient when you give it. It is life-giving. Fear, not money, is the root of all evil. When you see money as the root of all good, it becomes your friend, finds its way to you, and increases happiness in the world as it circulates to and from you.

Attention

Artist Wassily Kandinsky

"People think a soulmate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soulmate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life."

ELIZABETH GILBERT

Change

Change your conception of yourself and you will automatically change the world in which you live. Do not try to change people; they are only messengers telling you who you are. Revalue yourself and they will confirm the change.

Neville Goddard

Small Kindnesses

Artist Mark Rothko

 

by Danusha Laméris

 

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”