Category: Sunday Video Files

6 Steps to Spiritual Maturity: Step 4

Step 4: Using denials and affirmations, I cleanse my consciousness of all error thoughts.

Gratitude means paying attention – noticing God in the small things. And, in these times, you are my reason for gratitude.

I see God in the comment stream on the Facebook page whenever we go live with our Midday Faith Lift, Wednesday Night Meditation, or Sunday Celebration service.

God shows up as each of you on the Coffee Hour Zoom call following the Sunday service. God moves through our community in the care you all offer one another.

I have also seen and felt God working through the generosity of many of you who have supported Unity Center for Spiritual Growth during these weeks of “Staying at Home” as you continue to support us through your tithes and offerings. Thank you to those who have become consistent givers; we are grateful for your commitment and support.

I have some good news to share with you. We have received funds from the Payroll Protection Plan Stimulus, and we are assured of payroll for the next two months. Your Board of Trustees is monitoring the guidelines that are coming from the Maine CDC and Governor Mills and will keep you informed when we feel it is safe to begin to have services once again from our sanctuary.

I also want to give a shout out to you who have signed up for Automatic Giving. I know this can be a stretch for some to use this form to give of your tithes and offerings. In the reading I have been doing regarding church post-coronavirus, passing the offering basket will not be happening, so we are encouraged to invite you to do automatic giving or to go to our donate button as another online option. Of course, checks in the mail are always welcome.

On Sunday I continued with Step 4 of the Six Steps to Spiritual Maturity. It is: Using denials and affirmations, I cleanse my consciousness of all error thoughts.

This is one of my favorite steps because when I learned about denials and affirmations my life changed. I had learned about affirmations but never about denials. These are “handles to power.”

The most necessary part of learning is to unlearn our errors. Our purpose in Unity is to learn to see rightly. A denial is the first practical step toward seeing rightly by wiping out of our minds the mistaken beliefs that raise such havoc in our lives.

The definition of denial is a declaration that something is untrue; its purpose is to cleanse. We do not deny things out of existence; we deny wrong thoughts about them.

Charles Fillmore in the book Prosperity says, “Denial usually comes first. It sweeps out the debris and makes room for the new tenant that is brought into the mind by the affirmation.”

An affirmation is a strong, true statement about yourself or a situation.

Here is an example to be used if you are longing for Peace of Mind:

• The denial is: This anxiety, confusion, or fear is powerless to take or keep my good from me.
• The affirmation is: Divine love now dissolves and dissipates all anxious, confused, or fearful thoughts, and I am peaceful in Mind and heart.

As you change your beliefs you change your life. Denials are the belief changers.

Take away:

• The tools for cleansing our conscious and subconscious mind are denials and affirmations.
• Both our thinking and feeling is engaged in the process of denials and affirmations.
• Denial is our ability to release the energy and power we have invested in negative (error) thinking…feeling…beliefs.
• Affirmations confirm the conscious recognition of Truth.

This coming Sunday we will complete the series with Steps 5 and 6:

Step 5: I commit to developing a conscious contact with God through prayer and meditation.

Step 6: I demonstrate spiritual maturity by practicing these principles in all areas of my life.

I leave you with this thought from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: “The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination.”

You are a blessing in my life,
Rev. Patricia Bessey

6 Steps to Spiritual Maturity: Step 3

Step 3: Through Introspection I Identify the Thoughts I Hold That Create My Experience

My intent in writing this is to give you something personal that either we have experienced or from my interactions with you. However, this morning I am rather stumped. What I am finding, and many of you may be also, is that my days look about the same and so not much newsworthy is happening. I am taking an online class with Mirabai Starr which I am enjoying. The course is called Live the Sacred Blessings of the Women Mystics

Mirabai Starr

Mirabai Starr

and Goddesses. Taking this class makes me realize how blessed we will be when she comes here in November. She is a real wealth of information and inspiration. The homework for this week is to write for 10 minutes starting with this carrier phrase “When I grow still…”. I invite you to take 10 minutes in your day, set a timer, and see what nuggets reveal themselves. I found it very helpful.

I am also doing some work with Mary Reed. You may remember when Mary came a year ago this past fall and she delighted us with her presence and mystical teachings. You can find her on YouTube and her website, unwittingmystic.com. She has a course offered for free or love offering called Divine 444. Check it out.

On Sunday I continued with the series “6 Steps to Spiritual Maturity,” which I had begun prior the Easter season. This Sunday was Step 3:Through Introspection I Identify the Thoughts I Hold that Create My Experience. Thoughts held in mind produce after their kind. This is the law of mind action, and with it we make our own world.

Charles Fillmore, in his book The Twelve Powers of Man, says: “Man is the power of God in action. To man is given the highest power in the universe, the conscious power of thought.”

Think on this quote a moment… we are all God’s creation and have been given the conscious power of thought. Fillmore also says in Keep a True Lent that: “The thinking faculty in man makes him a free agent, because it is his creative center; in and through this one power, he establishes his consciousness—he builds his world.” We have been given free will and with that free will we get to build our world.

If God has the power to give us the ability to form our thoughts, have you ever wondered why our thoughts aren’t all good. H. Emilee Cady, author of Lessons in Truth, a primary Unity teaching, gives a very clear answer to this question.

Lessons in TruthShe says, “Is it difficult for you to understand why, if God lives in us all the time, He does not keep our thoughts right instead of permitting us through ignorance to drift into wrong thoughts, and so bring trouble on ourselves? Well, we are not automatons. Your children will never learn to walk alone if you always do their walking. Because you recognize that the only way for them to be strong, self-reliant in all things — in other words, to become independent adults — is to throw them on themselves, and let them, through experience, come to a knowledge of things for themselves, you are not willing to make a mere puppet of them by taking the steps for them, even though you know that they will fall down many times and give themselves severe bumps in their ongoing toward perfect physical adulthood.”

I quoted many other pearls of wisdom from her on Sunday as well.

As you go through your days, only allow thoughts that build you and others up stay in your mind because thoughts held in mind produce after their kind.

Psalm 19:14: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.”

Let the words of your mouth and the meditations of your heart be acceptable — build up the world. In thy sight and in yours.

Next Sunday will be Step 4: Using denials and affirmations, I cleanse my consciousness of all error thoughts.

It is not too late to join the class tomorrow on Unity from the Inside Out… contact me right now, and I will send you the material needed for tomorrow’s class.

Dear One, know that you are loved, and I am sending you a virtual hug…

You are a blessing in my life,
Rev. Patricia Bessey

Earth Day Celebration Service

I am a follower of Dewitt Jones. You may not know him but for years he was a photographer for National Geographic Magazine, author and film director and has a website called Celebrate What’s Right with the World. He posts some of his extraordinary photography along with a positive message. You probably picked that up just by his website title.

Many years ago, when we had a ministry in Virginia Beach, we had Dewitt come and he was wonderful. Now you are probably wondering where I am going with this and I am about to tell you. I want to celebrate what is right in the world of Unity Center for Spiritual Growth. This past Sunday we had the largest viewership to date. The reason for that is because you are sharing when watching our service. Keep up the good work!

I also want to celebrate the music Deana provided on Sunday. The comments from so many were to let us know how much you appreciated the selection of music as well as how much you appreciate Deana and her beautiful calm presence and soothing voice. These are just a few of the things that are right in our world. I invite you to take stock in your own life right now and celebrate what is right in your world.

Today is the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day. Another thing to celebrate. On Sunday I dedicated the service to Earth Day. I applied Earth Care with our five basic principles.

1st Principle: “Oneness of All Creation” (One Presence & Power)
There is One Source of Life, absolutely good, all powerful, all knowing, All Spirit. Everywhere always in all Creation.

2nd Principle – “Being in Relationship” (Spark of divinity)
There is Absolute Awareness of perfect unity and relationship in every aspect of Creation. Human beings are conscious of this awareness.

3rd Principle – “Speaking Spirit to Spirit” (Law of Mind-Action)
All Creation emanates from One Source of Divine Mind. Thoughts held in mind reproduce in Kind.

4th Principle – “Befriending Silence” (Affirmative Prayer/the Silence)
Through affirmative prayer & meditation, separation from Creation is dissolved and Unity of Divine Mind is affirmed.

5th Principle – “The Flow of Life” (live the Truth we know)
Divine Mind transforms the Created World through each demonstration of Truth.

I did expand on each of these and you can hear that when you watch the service.

For the meditation I used an adapted version from Living in Balance: A Dynamic Approach for Creating Harmony and Wholeness in a Fragmented World by Joel & Michelle Levey.

I ended by a speech attributed to Chief Seattle in 1854:

The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land.

How can you buy or sell the sky, the land?

The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air or the spark of the water, then how can you buy them?

Every part of this Earth is sacred to my people; every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect.

All are holy in the memory and experience of my people. We know the sap that courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins.

We are a part of the Earth, and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle: these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and the man all belong to the same family.

“Will you teach your children what we have taught our children: that the Earth is our mother? What befalls the Earth, befalls all the sons of the Earth. This we know: The Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the Earth.

All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the Earth, he does to himself.

One thing we know: our God is also your God. The Earth is precious to him, and to harm the Earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

The complete message is in today’s video. You will hear the closing song that got so many comments. It is Colors of the Wind by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Stephen Schwartz for the Walt Disney movie Pocahontas.

In celebration of Earth Day and in the kick-off of our Season for the Earth, Anna Ritchie and I have been chatting about our gardens this year. Anna has a vision and here is an excerpt from her email to me:
”…but I’ve been meaning to email you to see if we could do the gardens and potentially expand to be ‘victory garden-ish.’ Gardens feel safer than grocery stores right now 😉 and planting seeds is a message of hope and journey for a future, which I think we can all use.”

If you are interested in hearing more about the project and how you might be able to help, let me know and I will then set up a Zoom call for us all to vision and plan for feeding our own and others.

Have a great week… find things to celebrate and know you are not alone; we are in this together.

You are a blessing in my life,
Rev. Patricia Bessey

The Power and Glory of Easter

Happy post Easter! At the beginning of this year I signed on to be part of a self-care group with other colleagues and so I decided not to schedule anything on Monday and Tuesday following Easter as my self-care days and it has been a wonderful sabbath for me.

I look forward to the time when we can look at this pandemic and speak of it as post-pandemic; however, we are not there yet. Where we are is staying home to stay safe and healthy. For the first few weeks, I felt totally unsettled and having little ability to focus. I was doing just what I needed to, and it took all my energy. I am slowly coming out of the fog and I am thinking that may be true for many of you as well.

Up until we started staying at home, writing this for Heart Thought was about recapturing the message on Sunday; however, now with us going live on Facebook and having the live video on our webpage I feel called to a different format. 

What seems most important is to connect and share how we are moving through each day and to ask you to do the same. Rev. LeRoy and I are spending our time together in the morning, as we have for 30 years, doing spiritual readings and meditating. We schedule a walk the days when the weather cooperates, and we do an afternoon Yoga Nidra for Relaxation meditation. It does just as it says, relaxes me. I, like you, often have a difficult time quieting my mind, but with this meditation my mind is quiet.

Rev. Airin Wolf Minister of Prayer

Rev. Airin Wolf
Minister of Prayer

I recently read something that Rev. Airin Wolf wrote to one of my colleagues and I asked him for permission to share it with you… I think you will see how important the Unity teachings are to his work. The title of the writing is “Chaplain Work During COVID-19.” He begins with this quote:

“Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.” ~ Og Mandino

At the hospital I work from 20-30+ hours a week depending on what my boss, Tia, needs. He calls me his ninja because he knows he can count on me to cover a shift, day or night. It is pretty intense, especially right now with COVID-19. Entire PT floors have been moved to a new location in the hospital and we have two new floors that just got completed in time that have intensive care capability. They are two state-of-the-art oncology floors but during COVID-19 one has become the temporary location of all the ICUs. Anyway, I could go on and on with all the changes. They are all measures to keep patients and employees safe.

So, for patient care, I use the Prayer for Protection that I have Christine print on a card for me. It gives so many people comfort, now more than ever, along with the prayer that Patricia Bass, (Interim CEO of Unity Worldwide Ministries) sent out. This one, staff members practically took it out of my hand and was in gratitude for it. I have titled it “for fear and anxiety.” I use my own prayers too, of course. The relationships that we have built with the staff as chaplains is paying off now in the COVID-19 castle areas of the hospital. It is negative pressure in the entire unit so it can’t spread to the rest of the hospital. It gets sucked outside.

When a COVID-19 patient dies and we are called there outside the room to say a prayer for the family who can’t be there, everyone stops what they are doing in the unit and pauses, even the doctors, and that usually never happens in normal hospital patient visits.

That’s all I have time to share for now. Maybe I needed to write about it, no coincidence. Thanks for listening.

Thank you, Rev. Airin, for the blessing you are to everyone in the hospital.

If you have an experience you would like to share with others, please send to me and we will get it out.

Speaking of getting information out to others, I would like to enroll your help. We are expanding our reach with Facebook Live and you can help us to broaden it to a greater extent. It is easy… when you join us live for any of our events, please click the Like button, Follow and Share. You can also do this when looking at any of the postings on our site… You are the Best!

Join me this Sunday, April 19, at 10 a.m. for our Earth Day message.

You are a blessing in my life,
Rev. Patricia Bessey

Palm Sunday Service

This Holy Week will go down in the annals of history as an anomaly… who would have ever dreamed that we would be experiencing the likes of what we are. That being said, I pray that you and your loved ones are healthy. So much is being written and spoken about COVID-19 that I feel exhausted and in overload, and I probably am not alone.

I want to thank everyone who has been joining us via live stream during the week. A shout out to Rev. Elizabeth for her dedication to the early morning prayer at 6:30 a.m. and supporting me in the Midday Faith Lift, Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 12:10 p.m.… Deana for doing a Tuesday evening mini-concert at 7 p.m. …music is soothing to the soul… and Rev. LeRoy’s Wednesday evening meditation at 7:10 for his calming presence and message.

I have spoken with many of you and had Zoom calls as well. Please reach out to any of us if you would like to connect. We know this too shall pass but, in the meantime, you can be supported.

palm

Sunday was Palm Sunday, and the message I gave found Jesus in the garden at the home of Martha, Mary and Lazarus in the evening after his ride into Jerusalem earlier in the day, reflecting on the experience. Although we cannot know what he was thinking, could it be it dawned into his consciousness what could be called the splitting of the atom, the great idea of the divinity of humankind, the awakening to the realization each person contained within them the individualized expression and experience of the divine?

He also could be thinking that in Jewish tradition, in his own background, was this recognition of the coming of the Messiah and the many prophetic utterances that led to this coming of the Messiah? He knew that the Messiah was not a person that would come, but a state of consciousness that would be awakened within all persons, each one individually. It could be at that moment he understood his role and thought, “I will accept the mantle of Messiahship; I will be the one to demonstrate the potential sonship of all persons.”

Most thought he came to tell of his own divinity, separating himself from the race and making him the great exception. They couldn’t seem to understand that his desire was to help people to know their own divinity; therefore, to show himself as the great example of what every person could do and be. And he said, “Remember all these things that I do, you can do too if you have faith.” If you understand this divine presence within yourself. That our goal is to discover the power within each person, this dynamic power of the Christ self.

During these extraordinary times we have the opportunity to be the example of the Christ in how we show up and respond to those we are interacting with daily and to all of humanity. 

You can watch the service live each Sunday morning at 10 a.m. by going either to Facebook or our home page.

My friend, be well, stay home and take more time for prayer and meditation. There is immense value in prayer, and this is a good reminder. This comes from one of my daily readings from Letters of the Scattered Brotherhood, which was written during WWII but is as relevant today…

”You have undertaken a homeric task, for the world and all in it are suffering from soul sickness; the air you breathe is full of it, of anxiety and pain, of hysteria and savagery; but those who can find safe haven in the spiritual awareness of their own godhood, awareness of the Spirit within them, not only stand near to the love of God but lift the race with them. Whenever you draw near to the secret place you do not go entirely alone, you take mankind with you. It is one way of serving your neighbor. It is never a selfish thing, for by the healing and renewing of your own spirit you send out light to all consciousness. This is as scientific as the fact that in the physical world you cannot lift your hand without vibrations caused by your gesture being felt throughout it. How infinitely more is felt the victories of the inner you, into what far reaches of darkness in another may your light shine without a spoken word!”

You are a blessing in my life,
Rev. Patricia Bessey