Breathing Freely | Rev. John Riley

We made it! This is the last Sunday of 2021. 2021, can you believe it? For me, it has gone by in a flash. How about you? Has it just flown right by? Has it, was it too slow, too much of a drudgery?

Well, here we are at the end and the wonderful thing, the thing I love about this ritual that we do here at Unity Palo Alto called the burning bowl, is that it brings us to closure. It is a ritual designed to help us release and let go of all of that which does not serve us from this past year. The beautiful thing about the end of the year, because we as human beings, we want to have closure. We want to have these senses of beginnings and endings.

Breathing Freely

So, the end of the year is a perfect time to have this service where we get to let go of things. We get to release so that we can breathe more freely, so that we can be, experience life anew. So this is a preparation for that. I don’t know — whenever I am tense and stressed out — tell me if this is you — I start to get a little tight in the chest, my shoulders start to get a little rigid. My breathing really shortens. I have really short breaths. And then all of a sudden you realize that you are not really breathing. Have you ever had that feeling of the exhale where it is just like aaaahh? You can feel it. Anybody experienced that? Yeah. That ability to just aaaahh, to let go. And that’s really what we are shooting for here is letting go of all of that stress and strain, letting go of all of those resentments that we have been holding onto, letting go of all of those things that have been holding us back.

Resentment and Fear

So, what types of things can we let go of? Well certainly, as I mentioned, there are resentments, there are fears. But I hope you look a little bit deeper beyond just “I want to let go of fear” because fear is a natural component of being human. It can be very helpful sometimes. It’s when we are obsessing, obsessively fearful, that becomes a problem. When we are fearful about things that have happened in the past, when our stories come up from the past. In any relationship that we are in, if you are starting to catastrophize it or story-tell about it, it’s all about something in the past. It’s not happening in the present moment because that person would be there in the present moment and you wouldn’t be able to catastrophize about it. You would be engaged. So, you know it’s all about the past, right? It’s time for us to let go of that so that we aren’t carrying that burden with us for the rest of our lives.

Forgiveness

One of the songs that Margo sang was about forgiveness. I forgive me. There is a saying — I think Wayne Dyre said it — all forgiveness is self-forgiveness. All forgiveness is self-forgiveness because what we are doing is we are allowing ourselves to be okay with what is. We are no longer resisting what is when we are forgiving ourselves. We are just allowing it to be who we are or an experience in our life that has happened. Instead of trying to push it away and fight it away, just allowing life to be without struggling against it allows us to be in the flow of life with it and see where it takes us.

So, take a moment and just think about some things that you might want to release from this last year. Think about it. If you would like to shout it out, I would love to hear what is in your heart, what is in your mind about letting go. What is it that you have been holding onto? Self-judgement. Thank you, Mary. Self-judgement. Self-judgement. Think about how often you are judging yourself, and can you forgive yourself for judging yourself? Forget about what you are judging yourself about. Can you just release yourself?

I have a story I will tell you and maybe this will help spark something. In a moment we are going to do the burning bowl ceremony at the end of my talk and I am going to invite you to think about something that you would like to release from this past year, something that no longer serves you. Maybe it’s a thought. Maybe it’s an idea. Maybe it’s a belief because that is really all that it is. Those things, those things that are noodling around in our heads, any resentment, it’s just a thought. Any frustration or unforgiveness, it’s just a thought and a belief that you can let go of.

So, here is my story and mine comes from this morning. I don’t have to look far. Mine comes from this morning. So here’s my routine on a Sunday morning. I usually wake up at about 5 a.m. I have my smart watch set for 5:30 just in case I sleep past that. It’s my smart watch so I don’t wake up my wife, Tiffany, during that early, that God awful early on Sunday. But I tend to wake up automatically at 5:00. I have discovered really what that is, the heater goes on about that time and the wind is blowing and that kind of wakes me up. That is my cue, then I wake up and I start going into kind of a meditative state when I am thinking about the talk.

I have been thinking about the talk or writing about the talk all week and now it’s time for me, I just really sink into it. I drift in and out of sleep. I drift in and out and I forget which frequency of the brain wave that is when you are kind of on the cusp of being awake and asleep. Anybody remember which one that is, gamma or alpha? Okay, we’ve got the whole alphabet now. That part where you are just on the cusp where really insights can come, where your intuition really kicks in. So that’s my morning. The first, and I wait and then the room warms up and I’m ready to get up. I get up and I get going.

Well, this morning, the room didn’t warm up. I’m thinking wow, it’s really cold today. Boy, there is probably frost, frost on the neighbor’s chimney. That is a different story. There’s, you know — I thought boy, it’s really cold so I get up and I walk into the bathroom. And I feel a wind blowing and I thought gosh, are the windows broken, are the windows open? How about the skylights? Are these old skylights still working? It’s really cold. I walk out into the dining room and I usually sit down at the dining room and open the computer and that’s when I put the final touches on the talk. And I was there, and I felt this cold breeze again on me. Then I realized the heater was not heating. It was cold in my house. So, I get up and I go to the thermostat and I realize, ah okay, for Christmas we got one of those smart thermostats, the kind that is supposed to learn what you want. For some reason it didn’t learn.

I’m sitting here and turning it on and turning it off and I can hear the heater going. I can feel warm air and then it would stop. I’m thinking, what is this? We’ve got to figure it out so we started looking it up online because it was still cold in the house. The first thing you need to look at is the wiring. Make sure the wiring is exactly the way it was when you took out the old thermostat. Well there are only three wires. I can deal with three wires. Tiffany is not sure about that. White, green, red. So I got the three wires. That is the first thing you need to check. Well maybe there is something in the wiring. Our furnace is in our attic upstairs so this afternoon I will go into the attic and I will check the wiring and make sure all the fuses are working properly, whatever those things are, those electrical things. Zzp. That is how you test it, right?

Maybe I need to, maybe the thermostat just needs to learn more. There were no instructions that came with it. It just said plug it in and load the app. The app will tell you everything. Well, the app isn’t telling me anything. And I’m cold. My kids are cold, I’m sure. I don’t know. They are still in bed. So it’s Sunday morning. I’m supposed to be getting ready for my talk, here I am on, off, on, off, on. Okay it’s heating up and I sit down and now it’s cold. Wait, turn it off, turn it on. So my frustration is starting to get up there a little bit. This thing isn’t learning anything and there are no instructions and I’m from high tech. How quickly we forget. I think probably the problem is I need to learn something. I need to learn a little bit more about this smart thermostat. You think? I’m thinking that’s it.

So, as I am sitting there, I’m like this is a perfect metaphysical metaphor for what we are talking about today. We all want that warm, cuddly feeling in our lives. We want that experience of love and compassion and happiness and joy. We want that sensation of everything is going smoothly in life. My career is going great. My creativity is off the chart. My relationships are woohoo. Is that a spiritual term? It is now. Thank you, next time you can quote me. I’m going to quote John Riley, “woohoo” My relationships are woohoo. I do have to give credit to Eric Butterworth. He did have the allness phrase before I did. I’m told I have to credit him three times and then I can claim it as my own. So that is once.

Changes in Life

But what a great metaphor. When we want to change life, when we want something to be different in our lives, we have to change. We need to look at the hardware. We need to look at the wiring in our brain. And it shows up as our behavior patterns. It shows up as our reactions. It shows up as whenever we get triggered. That is all hard-wired within us. We can change that wiring but it just takes what? Practice. It takes a little effort.

I can read up on the software component of it. Those are the mind components of it, my thoughts, my feelings, my actions. I can take a look at my stories that I am telling and I can rewire those stories, change those stories. Maybe I am using something like Byron Katie’s The Work. Maybe I am using something like the Cue Process. Maybe I am using something like Radical Forgiveness. There are a lot of tools to help us change that inner operating system — as Rusty Gaillard would say. Thank you, Rusty, for that term — that inner operating system that we need to adjust.

The first component of it is making room in our inner operating system, making sure that everything is going right. It’s releasing and letting go of the power that those ideas and beliefs have over you. Did you get that? It’s releasing the power that we are giving to someone else when they get angry at me and all of a sudden I feel triggered. That’s all my inner operating system. It’s releasing the power that I’m giving over whatever condition is in my life, whatever employment condition, whatever physical condition, releasing the power that it is having over my consciousness, over my awareness of my oneness, over my true power. The first step is to let go.

So, this morning when I heard about that idea, that metaphor, that metaphysical metaphor, it’s all about consciousness, that is what I felt. I had that ahh, that exhale. I’m still cold. “Okay, it’s going to be okay. It’s going to warm up soon and we will figure it out when we get home”. So, we need that time to relax and to get centered again so that we can then fill ourselves up, so that we can then inhale.

Next week we are going to be talking about the inhalation process with the White Stone service. Today we are going to be going in deep about exhaling. And forgiveness is one of the key components because the idea about forgiveness is not that we are making it okay, we are not saying, “Whatever you did is okay”. But we are taking back our power. Forgiveness is an internal process where I’m knowing that this is the situation and it does not diminish me. I am still whole.

A Fresh Start

I love this quote. This is from Dr. Martin Luther King in his talk, in his sermon about love. Oh, I didn’t get the whole thing. That’s okay. The first part of it was, forgiveness is not about being okay with evil, that saying evil is okay, as he put it. With evil, I am simply thinking about it from the things that we say and do that hurt each other, the things that go on in our lives that we hold unforgiveness for. It’s not about saying that that’s okay, but “Forgiveness is a catalyst for creating an atmosphere necessary for a fresh start and a new beginning”. Forgiveness is a catalyst for creating the atmosphere necessary for a fresh start and a new beginning. That’s the choice that we have through forgiveness, through letting go.

We exhale and let go of that and feel that energy draining from us so that we can inhale and start again, feel that oneness within us, know that oneness within you and the universe, knowing that God is ever present, knowing that isness is part of your life. The allness of life is moving in, through, and as you. We are swimming in it. There is no place where God is not. God shows up in that consciousness as us.

So, we get to breathe, and we are breathed into that. That exhalation is letting that Spirit move us, letting go of the reins so that we are guided by our intuition, so that we are led by that joy that comes from knowing that oneness, when we can connect with each other more effectively because we see the light in each other even if we don’t agree with each other, even if we are triggered.

It’s not like those things are going to go away. Life is. Human beings are humans. As one of my teachers once said, I trust people implicitly to be human. Everything else is questionable. But that one thing I trust to be true, that at some point in time we are going to have these experiences and we can live through them and learn through them very effectively when we learn to release.

Renunciation

The process that Unity came up with, Charles Fillmore and Myrtle Fillmore, the co-founders of Unity — this was back in the early 1900’s — was this idea of denial and affirmation and I want to explain what they meant back then. Charles Fillmore defined the term renunciation. “Renunciation is a letting go of old thoughts in order that new thoughts may find a place in our consciousness.” We have to do that over and over again because those old thoughts are hard-wired in our brain. They are hard-wired there until we change the hard wiring. We do that through the repetition, through the practice, through meditation and prayer, through our worksheets.

However you want to do it, you have to do it over and over again before the wiring comes into place because there’s more than three wires in my brain, I hope. I could be wrong. Sometimes it feels like I am wrong. He defines denial, “The mental process of erasing from consciousness the false beliefs of sense mind”. So erasing from consciousness the false beliefs of sense mind. Sense mind, that human mind, that human mind that says well, I’m cold and therefore I am at risk, that human mind that says, “Well, that person just yelled at me therefore I’m hurt, I’m scared, I’m sad. And that person is now my enemy.” All of those stories and beliefs that we create come from that sense consciousness, that ego consciousness, that edging God out consciousness.

So, the first part of that is just releasing those ideas. When that thought, that story, comes up, it’s just like, and I feel myself tense up, it’s like oh breathe, exhale and just consciously doing that. Once I become aware that I am in that state, then I have the choice to exhale and to release and let go. Then once I exhale, I inhale and breathe in something new, breathe in a new statement of truth principle. That’s the affirmation component of it. We exhale and we inhale. It is as easy as breathing when we are aware. So, our first step is awareness.

Self-Awareness

Every master, every master teacher that I know of talks about this idea of self-awareness as being the most important thing in life. The more self-aware you are, the more you understand your oneness with spirit. The more self-aware you are, the more you understand your oneness with the universe, the more you understand those triggers within you, the more you understand how those beliefs are false, and which beliefs are true, when you become the observer, as Eckert Tolle might say, the observer of the thought. There’s the thought. It’s just going to happen. That is what thoughts do, but our awareness says “is this true or not?” and I can release it and go to something new.

Ticht Nhat Han said, “One of the challenges that we have is that people have a hard time of letting go of their suffering. Out of the fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar”. So we tend to get stuck in our ruts. We tend to relive our tragedies over and over again. “Every boyfriend or girlfriend treated me this way and this has been my experience. Every time I go to a new job it really ends up this way”. And we think it’s the other person or the other situation when it’s really our own fears, our own fear of succeeding perhaps. So, as we let go of that fear and step into the unknown, we can let go of our suffering.

Forgiveness

Catherine Ponder, one of my favorite Unity ministers and authors, said “When you hold resentment toward another, you are bound to that person or condition by an emotional link that is stronger than steel”. You are bound to that person. Well, we know this. We go home and we talk about all the tragedies that have happened in our life. “Can you believe that this person did this to me?” and we are just reliving it. It’s like they are there. It’s like, “Here’s your 3D movie”. So, we are bound to that person.

Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link and get free. Remember forgiveness is internal so that you can free yourself. Not so they can be free, but they will be free as well, because you will show up differently. Forgiveness is the ability for us to reclaim that power and to have that big exhale.

The great author — I think she is great — author, civil rights activist and poet, Maya Angelou, said, “It’s the one greatest gift that you can give yourself, to forgive”. So forgive everybody, every day.

The Burning Bowl

What I love about this service that we are about to step into, this process, is that it is a ceremony that you can do over and over again and you don’t have to burn something although you might want to. If you are at home, you might want to put — if you don’t want to burn something in your house you can put something in your shredder. That is my favorite thing. I do my worksheet, in the shredder it goes. Don’t want to see that again. You can tear it up. You can recycle it. However you want to do it. But the process is something that is, the invitation is something that we are practicing today and that you can do every day. Whenever you have that tension look for that big exhale.

So, you should have received as you walked in, an envelope. If you didn’t, I invite you to raise your hand and Ann will bring you one, and we have some up front too. Everyone have one? Jho, can you give one to John there? Oh, Ann’s got it right behind you, John. So be careful because it may have dropped. There is a very small piece of paper and a little pencil, a very small piece of paper. Now if you got our packet, our holiday packet, look for that little piece of paper and if you are at home and you don’t have a holiday packet, that’s okay. You can find a piece of paper but make it small. Now why do we make it small? Anybody want to venture a guess? Keep your responses small so you don’t go into your story, so you don’t start catastrophizing because pretty soon we will have seven or eight pieces of paper. That is pretty good, Marcy. That is a good size. There is your week worth of letting go. Yeah.

So, I ask you to just use a little piece of paper because what we are going to do is, whatever it is that you are going to release in a little moment, whatever it is you can just culminate it into one word or one phrase. Spirit knows.

The universe knows what you want to let go of. The universe knows better than you do what you need to let go of. Otherwise why would it bring you all of these wonderful lessons and opportunities to grow from it? Thanks, universe.

Are you all with me? Once you do that, we will invite you to go outside and there will be two burning bowls out in the, out there. If you are at home and you have one of our pieces of paper, it melts, so you can write on it and put it in water or maybe the porcelain throne and just allow it to melt and dissolve. It’s a spiritual term. Because we are releasing. Okay? It will take care of itself. It will dissolve completely.

Prayer Requests

And then when you come back in, what I want you to do is use the envelope. If you open the envelope the top part says prayer requests, prayers of gratitude. This is where you are ready to create your new affirmation of truth for you. You are releasing and letting go, denying this idea and belief, the power that it has over you and you are creating a new belief for yourself. So this is just a very short affirmation about who you’ve come here to be. You are releasing that idea. What do you want to fill it up with, what do you want to replace it with? So, come back in and write what you want to replace it with.

You are welcome to put this in the love offering box afterwards or in the baskets, wherever they are. All of the prayer requests will go into our Prayer Chest. Every day, during my meditation and prayer, I hold these prayer requests in the field of prayer. And then after thirty days we send them to Silent Unity, Unity’s worldwide, 24/7 prayer service where they will be prayed over for thirty days continuously. So it is an opportunity for you to release that which you are holding onto, to free yourself, to unhinge yourself, to loose yourself and then to affirm your good.

Prayer for Protection

And now our Prayer for Protection. Together:

The Light of God surrounds us;
The Love of God enfolds us;
The Power of God protects us;
The Presence of God watches over us;
Wherever we are, God is!
And, all is well.

Have a wonderful, safe New Year’s. Blessings. We will see you next year. Love and blessings. Have a wonderful day.