Clear the Clutter in Your Mind | Rev. John Riley

Thank you, Debra. Thank you Ronnie. Thank you Russell. And welcome, welcome, welcome. Boy, I do not want to be up on the roof.

Do you ever feel like you’re in the middle of a storm, that there’s chaos, swarming all around you? No. Good. Okay. Good truth. Students in here. Well, this last week I obviously this last week was quite an adventure. An adventure in chaos, especially on Monday when all the wind was coming in. Those, those in incredible winds. I was here at the center and when I went home for lunch, I was driving just around the block and down a side street. The car in front of me started to slow, had to their turn indicator on, and then stopped and pulled over. And I, what’s going on? I look over, there’s an entire tree. I mean, this tree was probably this big around that snapped at the base and was covering the entire street. And it’s like, wow. And then a little bit later I got home and discovered my entire back fence had turned into a bridge into my neighbor’s yard.

That was kind of fun and exciting. And then later on that evening, another tree had snapped in the neighborhood and took out the power at our house. I know what’s interesting is when I was heading back from lunch, I passed that same place cuz I wanted to see it again, that big tree. And you know, what I realized is how grateful it didn’t hit anything other than the road. There were cars on either side of it. It fell right in the middle, and the workers were already there. Thank God for our employee, our city employees or whoever takes down those trees. They’re about halfway done cutting it up. And then by the end of the day, they had moved the big log off to the side big, I mean, as big as this stage in that hot, that tile off often the sidewalk so they can take care of it later because they had the power to fix. Our fence is still a bridge.

Be Grateful In Everything

But you know what they say in everything, be grateful in, in every, not for everything, but in everything. Be grateful. So I’m very grateful for the workers who very quickly went to work. I’m also very grateful because the next day I came back to the center with my fingers crossed because I don’t know if you’ve been in the parking lot, we call it the, the bridge parking lot over there. There’s some pretty tall trees. Have you noticed some big bohemoth eucalyptus of different variety? Well, along that far set far fence that borders our neighbor, there were two eucalyptus trees that every year we had a long, you know, a 15, 20 foot branch fall off. And in January when we had that first storm, a big branch fell off and it broke the fence. It broke a chair, it broke a lamppost of our neighbors.

So we had been working with the city for many years, not many years, but for a few months to get the trees taken down because they were, every year this happened and, and we’re doing our due diligence, right? We have our arborists out to take care of the rest of the trees, and the rest of the trees were in perfect condition. So those two trees in January, when that limb fell down, the neighbor texted me, “John I fear loss of life.” And if you recall the news, then that was a reality in some other part in the world, in our, in our state, when trees were falling over. So I picked up the phone and called the city. And that day I had the permit. Now we still had to go through our process, right? We had to post the sign, I had to go up on the website just in case anybody wanted to complain.

But the arborist determined that it was diseased. There were some issues with it. So we had it taken down on Valentine’s Day the week before this last storm. I can’t imagine what would’ve happened had we not done that work. And if you look at the trees that are out there standing and how not one of them had any loss of limb, including that giant bohemoth that’s in the corner of our parking lot. And I thought to myself, as I was looking now, we still had clutter to clean up. There was still a lot of debris, you know, smaller branches and leaves and things, all in a parking lot in the, in the, in the courtyard there. And again, grateful for our landscape maintenance crew who came in and cleaned it all up. But what I thought about was just how perfect a metaphor this is for my clicker. It was working perfectly yesterday. this is the perfect metaphor for Lent. Now anybody grow up with an a lent experience? Yeah. So we have some sort of Lent experience. And was it something like you had to give up something that you really liked? Oh yeah. What did you have to give? What did you give up? Chocolate. Chocolate. That’s the number one answer I think.

And you, you’re not eating chocolate anymore, right? Oh, I’m eating more. Oh, you’re eating more, okay. Yeah. Hmm.

Hmm. Just for the 40 days.

Oh, that’s right. I’m just supposed to give up chocolate for four 40 days. I don’t anything. Okay, Joe. I don’t think I could do that.

Lent: Clearing the Clutter in Your Mind 

But here’s why I think this is a great metaphor for Lent, because what I think lent is really about, it’s about clearing the clutter in your mind. Lent us a time of preparation of spiritual preparation as we move towards that Sunday that we call Easter. And the celebration of the rise in the Christ consciousness, as we say in Unity, the rise in the Christ consciousness, or that divine consciousness that is within you, that is your true identity, that’s your authentic identity, right? The rest of it is our personality taking over, our ego, budding in. And so the intentional cleaning of the clutter in our yard is what Lent is about the intentional cleaning of the clutter in our consciousness so that that divine self can emerge so that divine self can shine. Charles Fillmore, one of the co-founders of the Unity movement in his book, keep It True, lent wrote, lent is a season of spiritual growth, a time for progressive unfoldment.

So unless your chocolate is part of your spiritual growth, that you, you can make that choice. It could, because it may be right, your physical health might be a part of it. But if we look at it from that perspective, less about, I have to give something up and more about, this is about my spiritual growth. What can I step into? How can I grow through this period and let go of things, clean the clutter in my consciousness so that I can experience that awakening, that aha moment when we get closer to e Easter or when I can experience that every day. It’s really about personal transformation and personal growth. And so we began a process on Wednesday, Ash Wednesday called 40 Days of Letting Go. And we’re following Unity, puts out a booklet, it 40 days of letting go. And every day there’s an opportunity, a little reading, for example, I let go of luck of lack.

I said luck, I let go of lack the little reading from somebody in a scripture. And you can use that as a spiritual practice. And so what we’re doing is we’re following the themes of each day, and I’m creating a little video. You can find them on our website, on our homepage to click through to it, where every day I take that same affirmation and then give you a different perspective. So you can follow along with the book. You can, you can, I have a few copies here. And you can get a copy for free from Unity.org. You can download a pdf however you’d like to do it, and you can follow along. And it’s a wonderful opportunity to consciously let go, to consciously look at things that we can let go in our life every day so that we can experience more of that authentic self in a day.

Let Go and Find Relief!

So for example letting go. I let go of anxiety, blame, and bitterness. That’s where we start. That’s a great place to start. Anybody wanna let go of their anxiety, blame and bitterness? Yeah. No, it, it, not everyone does. So thank you for raising your hands because there’s a lot of juice in being bitter. There’s a lot that you get out of it. But if we let go and let that divine energy emerge this is what it kind of looks like. So we begin with anxiety. I let go of anxiety together. I let go of anxiety. Anxiety is like that tree blocking the road.

Anxiety blocks our path. Anxiety creates a sense of pause, a sense of, I don’t know what to do. Confusion, anxiety can create distraction. Well, you know, I, I don’t wanna do that, so I’m gonna go do this over here. I’m just gonna go home and get back into bed. Anxiety, left untreated can really cr block us from achieving things in life. Oh, there are plenty of things that we can blame, like the tree in the road, right? But, but anxiety is that feeling within us that we are stuck. And so it’s okay to plan, right? It’s okay to plan, but, and we plan all the time. We plan our year. We are having a annual meeting after the service, and we’ll talk about how we’re going to plan. And it’s a wonderful roadmap so that you can begin walking. But the thing about the plan is we can’t control the outcome anymore than we can control the weather.

So instead of while we have our plan, we move through life open and receptive to Spirit, to what’s happening, to what’s wanting to emerge. So one of the best ways that I found to get beyond your anxiety is to become curious. To become curious. When you start feeling anxious or, or confused or blocked, what am I worried about? What do I think is going to happen? Who can I call on? What can I, how can I get some different perspective and what can I do differently? And when you start getting curious about it, the anxiety opens up. When you’re anxious, everything is focused. You can’t see anything but the tree. But when you start getting curious, what emerges as possibility, creativity, and opportunity, what emerges is creative ways to get around the tree. Because trees happen. Anybody know that tree? That’s a saying I think. Is that a bumper sticker? Trees happen.

What Are Anxiety & Blame?

Maybe I got it wrong. I don’t know. I think that’s close enough. So when we start to question our anxiety and what’s happening, then opportunity starts to open up from us, for us. And it’s important to do that. If we don’t, we hold onto the anxiety. And the anxiety turns into blame. You know, I can’t get there because of that tree. I can’t get here because the city didn’t come out quick enough to clear the tree. I can’t get here because the owners of the tree didn’t take, take care of that city tree. It was a pretty healthy tree. And that’s why I think it fell. It had a beautiful canopy. It was very thick. But you see how we, we then start to move to who else is at fault here? What else is going, who else can I put the blame on? And sometimes I think, you know, blaming is simply a way to beat up someone else, to make ourselves feel better about our own clutter.

Sometimes blaming is really, it’s like that fallen fence, right? Our spiritual boundaries have broken, have fallen down, and they’re, it’s my fence. It’s my spiritual boundaries. When I’m blaming someone else, it’s not someone else’s fault. It’s mine because my fence fell down. My spiritual boundary that says this is me and I’m accountable for me. And what happened to out there is not my responsibility, but this is my responsibility. And so we start, it’s really like violating someone else Spirit, someone else’s spiritual boundaries. That’s what blaming is all about. It’s getting into someone else’s O P C. Yeah, you know me, you know that one. No, O P C, that’s a different song. O P C, other people’s clutter. 

My fence has fallen down. It’s a bridge to the neighbors. And I gotta tell you, look at what the neighbor needs to clean up

That’s why the bridge fell down. The fence fell down. Look at that. Look at that. Those things that were leaning up, leaning up against it, it must have been getting into other people’s clutter. So one of the best ways to get around that is to rebuild your spiritual boundaries is to say, what is mine to do? Ask that question. What do I own here? What’s my part of the fence? Where did I let myself fall down? Where am I getting into other people’s clutter? And when we start to do that, when we start to let go of blame, accountability emerges. I’m now owning my own stuff. Fences fall, what was the term? Trees happen.

I start to become more reliable. My own sense of reliability. I can rely on myself. I feel grounded starts to emerge. And my own sense of authenticity begins to emergy, without, when we have blame, all of that is covered up. All of that is covered up by the fallen fence. So we have to rebuild that fence, if you will, rebuild that spiritual boundary so that we can allow accountability, reliability, and authenticity to emerge. And if you don’t rebuild that, if you continue to blame, then what does blame turn into? Bitterness. Bitterness. It’s literally a poison pill. That’s why they call it the bitter pill to swallow. Because bitterness really, really, it’s like, it’s like the tree that knocked out the power. Bitterness will sap you of your energy, of your personal power, of your spiritual power. Cuz all that energy is going into being bitter after time.

What happens? We know, we know the people. They, it becomes, you know, our sense of being, it becomes who we show up, that bitter person. So how often are you noticing that bitterness within you? And the question that I like to ask, I mentioned it earlier, what’s the payoff? What’s the payoff for, because there is a payoff when we’re bitter. Maybe it’s inner vindication, right? I feel judged and I’m gonna show them by being bitter at them. But it’s all in here. So the payoff is that juice of vindication. I’m right and they’re wrong. Or what about projecting suffering? You’re angry at, bitter at someone and we’re actually projecting our own suffering upon them. Or maybe our, our bitterness is about defining defining the situation. But I think what really lies behind the bitterness, if you look back behind it, cuz it’s not about the tree falling on the power. That’s a situational thing that can be fixed. But if you look behind that, what I believe it usually is, is a desire, a wanting, a deep yearning for connection. We often get bitter at things or people because we feel left out. We often get bitter because we think that, you know, we’re not wanted.

And so connection is a great way to reestablish, to let go of bitterness. And as we let go of bitterness, what starts to emerge? Relief. Have you ever let go of something and just said, oh, I feel so much better now, actually let it go. And may have took some, may have taken some processing and may have taken some, some therapy or a therapy or some spiritual, spiritual practice. But I got to the point where I, I’ve released it. That’s what forgiveness is, right? It’s rebuilding that spiritual boundary and it’s reconnecting with Spirit. How about connecting with that allness of life love and wisdom that’s ever present within you. But the bitterness has turned it off within us. It’s blocked it so we can allow that, that experience to flow more freely. So what emerges is freedom.

And you realize, gosh, I’ve been chaining myself to this person for the last three weeks nonstop because all of my thoughts have been those bitter thoughts. What happens is connection. We’re able to reconnect with people in a different way. We’re able to reconnect with Spirit. I think, you know, what’s the payoff is a great question to get us in that motion of moving what am I getting out of this and what can I…how can I get that sense of belonging, connection in another way? You know, maybe make a list of all of the people who you really love and connect with them and just tell them how much you appreciate them and see how what it does to you. Now, in every practice, I always use meditation and affirmative prayer cuz meditation allows me, it’s so much easier to let go of the stuff when I practice it. An affirmative prayer reaffirms my oneness with the allness of life, love and wisdom. My affirmative prayer reaffirms and reconnects me with that source of Spirit within, because Spirit is always there and love is always there and peace is always there in the middle of the chaotic storms around us. It’s always there. And so it allows us to really reconnect to that.

Importance of Spiritual Practice

And it all comes back to doing our work. You remember at the beginning I was telling the story about how we’ve called the arborists and so all of our trees have been trimmed and the two trees that were diseased, that were falling down, that needed to be removed before this last storm. Spiritual practice. Daily spiritual practice. Sometimes it takes effort, right? Had we not taken care of that tree, had we, if we don’t take care of those dis disease, diseased thoughts in our consciousness, when the storm comes, it’s gonna blow us down. So we do our daily practice so that we can do the work that needs to be done. It’s not always fun. Yes, it’s effort. There’s a cost, there’s a cost to cleaning things up. There’s some effort to cleaning things up. There’s an effort to cleaning up our consciousness. It’s more effort sometimes to, to let go of anxiety and blame and bitterness.

But the results at the other end are magnificent. Are you being open and more receptive because the storms are gonna happen again? They say this was the worst storm in since the eighties, which tracked with me because I moved to the Bay area in the eighties and it was in the middle of high school. And I remember we were eating outside at lunch and the storms are just ping down and I was freaked out. Of course I was from Southern California. Now they have blizzards back then. Yeah, back then we didn’t have blizzards. I very rarely didn’t wear shorts even in the wintertime, even when it was raining. But up here it’s like everyone was in jeans and I didn’t own one pair of jeans. I was a new age dork. I dunno what to tell you, but I’m sorry, new wave dork, not a new age dork.

Maybe I’m, I’m not anyway, enough about me. We have to do our daily practice. That’s all it is. And when we do our daily practice, then we’re ready. We stand tall like that big eucalyptus tree out there, the storms, I looked at it, I took a video of it. Trees are flying back and forth that thing’s just like, no, I’m cool all the branches are up. I and I ask the arborist, they look at it, Nope, that one’s in good shape. And he was right. And that’s what doing our spiritual practice daily, our daily practice does for us is it continually puts us in that place of being able to let go of the stuff that comes up, the trees that come up, being able to let go and allow that divine consciousness to shine in every moment of the day. The master teacher in Matthew said, “don’t worry.”

Can any of you add anything to your life a day to your life by worrying? The answer is no. In fact, the opposite is usually true, right? The more we worry and stress and bitter our life cycles, our lifespan probably shrinks. I don’t have any data to back that up so your scientists can tell me that later. But if we tend to our consciousness before the storm hits, then we are firmly planted in the ground. Let’s move to our affirmation, Felix. I’m gonna read it once and then invite you to affirm it with me and really soak it in and then allow that energy to, to express out.