dailydatewithgod

One of the gems of the human experience are the feelings that we have.  There is a lot of discussion psychologically as well as neurologically as to what feelings are and what they mean.  The bottom line is that they carry a lot of energy.  We can have such intense feelings that we create a physical response–a tense body from anger, tears, a lifting of the heart from joy.  I used to run from intense feelings.  Being a sensitive person I was overwhelmed as a kid and I didn’t have a way of processing them so I would shut down.  I would judge them as right or wrong and never let myself actually feel them.  Later on I needed a substance to help keep them shut down.  It’s funny how when you let ideas go unchecked they grow.  In the years since stepping out from behind the curtain of using food and sugar to keep me checked out, it has been a process of coming to peace with feelings.  The feelings themselves I have come to see are not right or wrong, it is my thoughts about my feelings that I need to face.  When I notice myself acting in a default mode of judgment about feelings or anything for that matter, it is an invitation to go deeper and see where it is coming from.  A feeling is an indication of my thinking.  While, at first, I might be hesitant to take a closer look, when I do so with God by my side the excavation isn’t so terrifying.  I have learned that no matter what I find–good or bad, right or wrong, I can then make a choice to keep or let go.  Then the idea no longer has to run me because I hand the artifact to God and say, “Hey, what do you think I should do with this?  Put it in a museum or my pocket?”  My prayer for us today is that we be open to doing a little excavation of the things in our lives (a feeling, an idea, a reaction, etc.) that carry the most energy and determine with God whether it belongs in a museum or our pocket.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

One of the wonderful things about God is that through God’s eyes we can see the benefit of all experiences.  Using only my mind to measure experiences I look at good vs. bad, waste of time vs. good use of time, right vs. wrong.  God looks at situations and sees growth vs. stagnation, love vs. invitation to love, tenderness vs. recognition of resistance to love.  God asks us as we experience things to evaluate them based on the standards within our hearts not our mind. But when our ego is running the show, it rarely stops to pause and consult the heart and the spirit.  When my ego and judgment are running amuck and I am not at ease, I pause at the recognition of disease and ask God for help, to be open to seeing this very experience as worthwhile.  My prayer for us today is that we use our language of waste or stupid or bad as an invitation to ask for God’s perspective on how that very thing is worth our presence in the moment for what we can learn from it.  Make it a great one! Peace~Colleen

We cannot control our thoughts.  The good news is that if we let one pass, another will come and then another and then another.  Our brain is doing what it is supposed to do.  The mind chatter goes on about what is happening and what it means, it is trying to figure out where to file the information it is processing.  We can decide, however, what to do with the thoughts that we attach to.  It is a process of first noticing the ones we attach to.  Most likely they are the ones that hold an ego identification for us.  They are familiar and some of them are so integral that we don’t even realize when we are bathing in them because it is automatic.  Most of this is going on without us being conscious of it.  We do notice when we have feelings.  Feelings carry much more energy than our thoughts. When we attach to a thought and expand on it–analyze it, give it meaning, focus on it, it creates motion around the thought and energy in motion is e-motion.  We often don’t wake up until we feel the feelings.  I find it helpful to pause at this point and ask God for help to unpack what is happening.  Then I can take a closer look at what I am really reacting to and come from a place of action.  And the beauty of life is that when I am wiling to unpack I find God in the middle of my suitcase.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to pause and unpack and find the beauty that lies within us.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

We have a choice when we take in that breath each morning.  We can choose to go on the path of the one who gave us the breath or we can choose another one.  If we stop for a moment to reflect on the power of the One who gave us the gift of the breath, we can see clearly that is a power greater than us.  I believe that I have beautiful plans for my day today and I am hoping that many of them (okay, all of them) will work out.  However, the plans I have come up with re the ones that I came up within the constrains of my human mind.  There is a whole vast universe of possibilities that exist for this day that I cannot even comprehend.  In fact, if I try to comprehend, my head hurts–it is beyond me.  But what if I were to enter into a relationship with the very Being that Created it all and ask to be guided into more than I can imagine.  It is a little scary, a little exciting, a lot unknown, a lot outside of my understanding.  That is what makes life a mysterious gift. If I believe that this Creator Spirit is invested in my living life to the fullest and getting the most out of every experience of my day so that I can be fully connected to who I truly am which is LOVE, then I can trust that I am being shepherded in the “right” direction and whatever comes along my path is what is supposed to be.  It may not be what I imagined, it may look or feel different then what I anticipated, but in my heart of hearts I will experience the truth of myself and of God a little bit more today than yesterday.  My prayer for us today is that we be open to being shepherded towards a deeper experience of ourselves (LOVE) and not get stopped by its shape or experience being different then we imagined it would be.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

We are meaning making machines!  Our minds are active with interpretations and reasoning and wanting to understand the “why” of life.  Delving into understanding can add a fuller layer of being to our lives.  There is however, a danger that we can fall into.  Sometimes there is no clear explanation of why. Sometimes it doesn’t actually mean what we think it means.  Sometimes it doesn’t mean anything.  More often that not, if I wait around to understand the why of something before I take any action I will be waiting a long time. I want to live in God’s meaning.  My meaning is limited to my perspective and what I can comprehend. So if the meaning is something larger than my viewpoint or capacity, I am left interpreting with my default.  Early on in life we create these stories, these meanings of things and our ego attaches to them.  We wear these identities like our skin and when we our not paying attention to our thoughts we go with our default meanings.  The strongest ones, because our default is based on survival, tend to be the less than positive ones.  For example, some of my default meanings are “It’s all my fault,” “I must have done something wrong,” “it is crazy to think that,” “no one cares what you have to say.”  So given a particular situation if I can’t explain something my mind jumps in with a default explanation.  Left to my own devices I become like the Greek god, Atlas, trying to carry the world on my shoulders.  Too much of a burden.  The good news is that these default meanings can change over time, but I must be willing to let them go.  My spirit rejoices at the idea of being freed of them because it knows that I am so much more than some idea I latched onto because of a circumstance.  My ego that has defined itself by these meanings is a little less than willing.  It becomes a patient and compassionate process of letting go a little at a time.  The more I embrace the meaning of life from God, the more I am open to letting go of my default meanings.  My prayer for us today is that we be open to the process of letting go just a little today.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

We have a tendency to think that because we think it, it must be true.  But perhaps there is more to the story than what our thoughts conjure up.  As physicists and neuroscientists have discovered, what we understand as reality is not as solid as we would like to believe.  But it gives our ego great comfort to identify with something solid whether it is an idea or an actual physical thing like a table.  We also tend to think that our brains are like cameras and we are seeing what is happening. They are actually more like projectors.  What we see is what we think we see.  This is why eyewitness testimony is actually not as reliable as it sounds or how two people can be present at the same event and see two different things.  It all comes down to looking at what we rely upon for our basis of understanding of who we are and who we are being in the moment.  A step in the direction of Spirit would then be to rely a little less on my thoughts and a little more on my heart and who I am being instead of what I think about the moment or experience.  I need God’s help with that one.  My prayer for us today is that we have the courage to ask to be aligned with not just what we think but who we are at our core so that we may experience the fullness of life.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

There are many things that are passed down to us over time that have created what one might consider our cosmic inheritance.  There are the physical traits and thinking patterns from our family. The state of the world and the environment from our society is another one.  We also have a spiritual inheritance.  We come from the Creator of All Creation and we have inherited a spiritual essence that comes from All That Is.  Most of the time we are focused on our physical and literal inheritance because we live in a physical world.  But what if we were begin to shift our focus and look at our birthright based on who our Creator is?  What characteristics does God possess that we can see in ourselves?  What ways of being do we have within us that give us power and dominion over our own reality?  Life is 10% what happens and 90% how we react to it (in other words, what we make it mean).  In that space of meaning we can draw on the literal physical interpretation or we can avail ourselves to a fuller perspective, one that might be more holistic, to determine the meaning of our lives.  When we avail ourselves of our full inheritance in this existence we get in touch with the Greatness from which we were born and the purity of our true selves as light and love.  My prayer for us today is to walk in the knowledge of a grain of the understanding of where we come from.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

Life is constantly enfolding.  New moments, new ideas, new relationships, new breaths, new endings, etc.  The only thing constant is change.  If we approach things from a fixed perspective of “this is how things are supposed to be” then we close ourselves off to what can enfold and unfold in the mystery of this moment of life.  If you watch and spend time with children you will notice their general curiosity about things.  They also go through that “why” phase where they ask incessantly why things are the way they are.  It is within all of us to have that questioning and that curiosity, it just seems to tone down over time as we accept things as they are.  But acceptance does not mean we have to lose fascination with how things happen.  If I am truly open to what God might have in store for me today, outside of what I have planned, and I trust that God will have my back no matter what happens, I can approach my day with  a lightness of heart and spirit.  Then the difficulties I come across are not things to mess me up but opportunities to experience something I hadn’t thought about.  There is so much that we don’t know that we don’t know.  God lives in the mystery and if I live in God then I want to be open to that mystery.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to take an inquisitive look at how we react to the situations and people of our lives and ask, how might this be a mysterious gift from God today? Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen