Your Inherent Courage | Rev. John Riley

We have been on this journey, a journey of discovering the principle of abundance that is always active in our lives and working in our life. We began with becoming one with life and knowing our oneness with that internal energy of … I forget what the other talks were. Let’s see, it was being grateful, gratefully aware and available. Do you remember that? Being gratefully aware of our own inner consciousness and the rise in our consciousness and being available for that presence, for that energy to flow through us, and then to have grateful focus and flow, making sure that we attune our thoughts and our minds to that right purpose.

Then last week Rusty talked about being passionate, and bringing that passion forward to create your goals, to create your dreams, to live that life of abundance every day. So, how’s it going for you so far? Good, yes. We have some claps. About 20% of the audience. That’s good. How about the rest of you? Have you run into some rocky roads? Have you run into some steep inclines along this journey, along this path? That’s good. That’s good. Did you know that’s good? Well, now you know it’s good. It’s because when you hit that rocky road, when you hit that edge you are hitting the edge of your comfort zone. You are hitting the edge of where it’s easy for you and it starts to get a little more difficult. And that’s exactly where you want to be because it’s through that challenge or those rocky roads that we grow and that we change. To live that life of abundance, to live a life worth living, we need to expand our view of the world and we need to change a little bit, and sometimes that can be a little bit difficult.

When Inertia Kicks In

Have you experienced along that path when you have this goal and you are chugging along and then all of a sudden that road block comes up? Have you experienced that rocky terrain when it starts to become really difficult? And it’s at times like that when inertia kicks in, when gravity kicks in and says “Well, I did one step today. That’s enough for today. I’m going to go do something else”. Have you ever experienced that? Have you ever experienced the times when you say, “Okay, I know this is my next step but before I do that I’ve got to do the laundry. Before I do that, I’ve got to fix my bathroom sink, which I haven’t fixed yet by the way. Before I do that, I have to …” We distract ourselves with other things when it starts getting a little hard, when it starts getting very hard.

There may be times in our lives when that road, that path looks like a mountain of rocks and treachery and difficultness. At times it may be too hard. There may be times where we need to take a step back and to breathe. It’s at times like that, that you really need to dig deep and become courageously blessed, courageously blessed. It’s that idea that it does take some courage to move through some of these obstacles in our lives.

The interesting thing about courage is we often look at it from the perspective of, “I need something to give me courage”. I love listening to music. So, there are some songs that, different songs will pick me up in different ways. Some songs will get me really energized and excited about life. Some will take me right to that place of peaceful bliss. Maybe there are some movies or shows you watch that will give you inspiration. Maybe there is a minister you hear or a friend that you talk to that says words of wisdom or you get on your Instagram and find a saying for the day that picks you up and moves you a little bit closer to the way, a little bit further down the path. But it takes that courage to pick up that phone and look for it. It takes that courage to reach out to our friends and family. It takes that courage to move forward.

Now, courage doesn’t mean that the fear and the challenge go away. This isn’t metaphysical malpractice that says, “Okay, well I am just going to imagine it being peaceful shores all the way there and all of a sudden this happens. Well, it just isn’t working.” That work, that’s your work when you run into that. It’s like, “Okay, here’s my mountain that I need to climb. Here is the path that I need to go through to strengthen myself, to really draw forth more of that wisdom, more of that which I am here to create.” And there are times when it’s going to be a little bit difficult.

In the book, excuse me, in the book The Art of Abundance, the author, Dennis Jones — which is the book we are following this month — he says, “Inherent in every human being is the desire to expand their horizons, to know and express greater freedom. But most people ignore, deny or in some way, some other way, repress that impulse” because it starts to get hard. We want to grow, we want to expand, and we want to achieve all of that passion that we talked about last week. We want to go in that direction, but we start to repress that desire because we are running up against the edge of our comfort zone.

The good news is, that’s all it is. It’s just a comfort zone and you can push forward. You can continue to move forward and in that moving forward we grow, and we expand, and we move forward towards that goal. “What they fail to realize is that the universe is calling them to a higher ground to see and then actualize the life of their dreams”. To see and then actualize the life of their dreams.

Overcoming Obstacles

I mentioned we were on vacation – excuse me — I mentioned that we were on vacation this last week. The family, my kids and my wife and I went to Hawaii. We went to the big island and it was really just a month or a month and a half beforehand that we decided to do this, so we just very quickly got an Airbnb, got a car. We got a car, yeah that’s amazing. And we were able to go and experience the big island. I don’t know if you have ever been to the big island but it’s one of my favourites. It’s very diverse. It’s got the active volcano; it’s just got everything, waterfalls and rain on one side, desert on the other side.

One of the things we were going to do was snorkelling. We were going to go on the manta ray, the manta ray tour so you can see the giant manta rays swimming by and swim with them. Before that we had — I wanted to make sure that everybody remembered how to snorkel. So, we got some snorkel gear, and we went down to — it’s called two step, down on the southern tip on the leeward side of the island in case you were wondering. Just a nice, easy place to go snorkelling, a lot of beautiful coral, a lot of beautiful fish. I saw some stingrays down there. It was just, it was fabulous.

But to get in the water you’ve got to walk across volcanic rock. To get out into the place where you can swim freely, you’ve got to go through literally this much water, between you and the coral below you. It was not an easy journey to get out there. It was pretty hard. I had been there once before but gosh, I don’t remember snorkelling being this hard before. But I finally got out there, and crawled my way out into the area. Getting back out was another story that I’m not going to get into. That was much more difficult and painful. But we will talk about that later.

The terrain on the big island is really pretty rugged. It’s beautiful but when you get off of the pavement you’ve got sharp, volcanic rock pretty much everywhere. Getting out into the sea, into the area to snorkel was difficult. It was a challenge to do. Then we finally got out there, I got out there, my son got out there and this was his first time snorkelling and he was just like, oh this is great. “Okay, come on back to shore”. Off to sea he went.

So, sometimes you are going to come across these rocks that are sharp. Sometimes you are going to come across these attitudes in your life, these attitudes from other people that tell you, you can’t do that. That passion that you have, that dream that you have, sometimes it’s going to look like “Well that’s a great dream but how am I going to make a living out of it? That’s a wonderful dream but what am I going to do about my kids’ — what’s it called? – education? I’m retired, I’m living on a fixed income. How am I going to do it?”

There’re all these different things that run through our head that bring us back that inertia, that bring us back to status quo. It brings us back to our own perceived equilibrium, our comfort, where our comfort zone is. Even if we don’t like it, it’s where we are comfortable. Not all of us want to really push out through the rocks to get to that place where we are free, where we experience freedom, where we see new things, new fish we’ve never seen before, new experience of life.

The Power of Faith

The one thing I have discovered is, the key to this is what Unity calls the power of faith. The power of faith. It’s more than a set of beliefs. In Unity it’s a power that’s within you. It’s an ability within you to see and to shape substance and to bring forth that passion that you have, to bring forth that motivation to manifest your dreams and your goals. The power of faith is what is our creative process, our creative power that creates always.

So, it’s a question of, are we creating from that consciousness of abundance, of knowing that we are one with the universe, of knowing that the universe is always there pulling us up, lifting us up to a higher consciousness, a higher awareness of that divinity within us, that spark, that higher self within us? Are we creating from that or are we creating from the lack and limitation? Are we creating from the victim mentality? Are we creating from the “I’m not enough”?

Now, what gets in our way are all kinds of fears. You can label them however you like. It may become difficult in life. There may be some struggle that I need to go through. I may need to learn something in order to achieve my goal. I may need to go back to school. I may need to go back and study more or work harder or do more heavy lifting, whatever that is for you. But it’s that idea of being able to move forward in that moment.

The biggest hurdle that we have is fear. But it’s not the fear of failure. It’s not the fear of success. Those aren’t the biggest fears, although we talk about them and think about them that way. The fear, the biggest fear is criticism. The biggest fear is being wrong. The biggest fear is not doing it right and failing in someone else’s eyes. Now, we succeed and we fail all the time. Has anybody failed this week? Anybody go out to try something and it didn’t work out? And you are all still alive. We are all still breathing. It didn’t work out and it could be something small but when you add something like “this is my passion”, oh, then there is a lot of weight to it. “If I fail one little step, I’m done for”, the criticism from some people about whether you are doing the right job or not.

There is a great story in the book about — this is actually a different book – but about a programmer who was working at, a marketeer who was working at a young start-up software company. The marketeer was in charge of creating this new product and finding books around the world that they could come and create — this was a long time ago — and create some software around to really bring it to life. Out of the forty or fifty people of programmers there, he was given two. He had about a month before they had to go on the market for Christmas. So, what did he do? He knew that there was absolutely no way he could get beyond this with just two programmers. He knew that that was a brick wall and as a young marketeer in that world and in that company, it was like “Okay this is it. I’m either going to succeed or not”.

So, instead of complaining about it, instead of going into victim mentality, instead of going back into “Well, you know, I am just going to do my reports and do the best I can. Then I have something to blame. Well, I only had two programmers”. He could have probably gotten away with that, he probably wouldn’t have gotten fired because they realize you probably did your best with only two programmers.

But instead, what he did was put out a newsletter to the rest of the company and said, “This is what great stuff that these two programmers are doing. They are creating our passion. They are bringing music into software. They are bringing all these great things into the software and they are creating something special”. Pretty soon, week after week, he highlighted one of the engineers and what they were doing, and the joy that they were having, and the experience that they were having. And pretty soon, he started having programmers defect. Some of them were working on their own time and after a while, he had a team of around twenty programmers. In the month’s time he brought forth a number of new programs for the company that were wildly successful.

The young marketeer was a man named Seth Godin and he wrote the book This is Marketing, lots of different books. The man is a genius, I think, in marketing. But what he did was he pushed forward. He didn’t stand still. He used courage. He drew upon his courage to find the path to take.

Now, faith is the power that we want to use, and faith needs to be backed up. It needs to be empowered by the power of love. It needs to come from the heart. It has to be something that you are really excited about that you love. That is the energy that you put into your creative power. Faith needs to be guided by wisdom, by the mind, open to divine inspiration and open to other ways to do it. For example, in my snorkeling trip there, afterwards it’s like “Oh, I remember why I enjoyed it so much last time. We took a boat. Hey honey, next time let’s just take a boat”. So, through that struggle we were reminded of our wisdom. The wisdom comes through. Yeah, we can go to Two Step. I had that experience. I struggled through the rocks and I would rather just take a boat next time. I think the kids would rather that too.

One of the Most Courageous Things You Can Do

So, we use our heart and our mind. We use our love and our wisdom to guide our faith, our creative power. One of the most courageous things you can do is to move in that direction when you come across that mountain of volcanic rock in your path. One of the most courageous things that you can do is to know that you are in the right place at the right time right now because it’s hard. This is the opportunity for growth, for spiritual growth, for personal growth. When you come at it from that perspective, you are no longer in the victim/victor duality consciousness. You are now back to that idea of being one with the universe and knowing that the universe is pulling you forward, knowing that you are blessed, right here, right now.

One of the most courageous things you can do is to acknowledge and to know that you are blessed. You are blessed in this very moment by the gift of life, by the gift of breath, by the memory of loved ones, by the passion that you have fueling you to move forward. You are blessed this very moment by the friends and family that you have. Look around you at all your friends and family who are here to support you spiritually at our spiritual centre, with your spiritual community. Sometimes our family and our friends don’t always coincide. Sometimes the family of our origin isn’t the family of our adulthood. So, look at what you, the people that you call family in your life.

Sometimes that family, that support system are our pets. We left two cats at home with our neighbour watching him, watching them. And, of course, we expected the videos, the pictures. They’re okay. They were fine. They were happy. They were happy we got home. Somehow, they survived without us. I don’t know how. But they were there for us when we returned. We are blessed in our lives.

So, our task this week is to remember when we need to draw the courage, when we hit those roadblocks, we need to draw from within us that passion that comes from the heart. We need to draw from within us that wisdom that comes from the mind, that divine inspiration that comes to us. We need to know that we are blessed. A simple way to do that is to count your blessings. How many times have we heard that? If you grew up in the church that I grew up in, we sang that song all the time. Count your blessings one, two, three. How many of you have done it in the last week? Yeah, Thanksgiving is a great time to do it.

Let’s make it a practice to every day to count your blessings, every day look for that idea, look for that blessing in your life. If you can’t come up with something just remember that you are still breathing. You are being breathed by that one presence and one power. You are being uplifted by that one presence, that Spirit. You are being called forward. In that struggle, there is a path.

A Path Through the Rocks

One of the trips that we were going to take was the, we took a trip to the – oh, that’s right. So, after we learned how to snorkel, I knew everyone could snorkel. We went to the manta ray tour where you get to go out on a boat and swim with the manta ray. You have to know how to snorkel. I don’t know why because basically you are holding onto a raft with your head under water. That is about as much snorkelling that you are doing. We went there. It was Wednesday night at 8:00. It was their last tour out. We went out there and it’s a little chilly at night but there was no moon and so the stars were just incredibly beautiful.

We got out there just with the anticipation of seeing and swimming among these twenty-foot creatures and they said “Well, today they will probably be more like fifteen or ten foot”. Oh gosh, well, only ten feet. These gentle giants of the ocean who you can swim with and they come very close and you can just really experience them. We got out there and there were no manta rays. We sat out there for a while. They turned on the light and we got all excited, “Wait, was that one?” and they were waiting, waiting. Two more boats came in. They turned on their lights and got their rafts out and all the people jumped in the water and they looked and they looked and they were like, yeah, there are no manta rays. So, we left. We went back to the dock, back to the harbour and that was the end of our trip. Was it disappointing? Yeah, a little bit. I will say though I am very grateful that they didn’t make us get out and get into the water at 8:00 at night, to get back onto the boat, to see nothing but sand and then to get back on the boat and be cold on the way back. At least we were warm.

On the way back, we were looking, and you can see the trajectory that the planets take in the sky and there was Neptune and there was — I think it was Saturn — and then at the bottom there was another planet. I got out my app on my phone, Star Walk, and I can see the stars and we saw the belt of Orion. We saw Orion was on the horizon. Everything was all weird because we were at the equator. I don’t understand. The stars were different than they are here. Actually, there were stars. There was no moon. We saw the Milky Way. How many times have you seen the Milky Way? It’s been a while here in the Bay Area.

So, we all three of us, Ethan, Erin and I, riding the boat back we are like okay, there are no manta rays. It’s disappointing but it’s just what it is. Halfway through the trip, Ethan has my DSLR camera and it stopped working. It gave us general error 99. We looked it up. Yeah, you need to take it in. He was disappointed because he was in a photography class and he is taking all kinds of photos. We had that night the one beautiful sunset. There was only one beautiful sunset that whole trip. Can you believe that in Hawaii? Aren’t they supposed to be beautiful all the time? One beautiful sunset and his camera is broken. He was disappointed and then he says “Well, you know, it is what it is”. Later on, he said “Well, there is nothing else I would rather be doing than being on this trip with all of us”.

Regardless of the rocks that are in our road, regardless of the volcanic eruption in front of you, there is a path through it. With faith, guided by love, guided by wisdom, you can find your way through that if you have the courage. A lot of us look for courage outside of us. A lot of us look for –what is that other C word when we are feeling good about ourselves? – confidence! — outside of us. Thank you, Rusty. We look for courage and confidence in what other people tell us. But courage and confidence do not come from outside of us. True courage and confidence come from the heart, comes from that idea of faith, knowing that I made a mistake. I failed three times this week already and I will keep going because I have confidence in that divine presence. I have confidence in the universe, knowing that I am always uplifted even when it doesn’t seem like it. When we have confidence that comes from within, it doesn’t matter what the critics say around us. As Brené Brown would say, it doesn’t matter what the people in the cheap seats say because that confidence is coming from within you.

Even in the face of the challenges and the confusion and the upset-ness, grounding ourselves with love and wisdom and that creative constructive energy to find our way through it is called faith. We will achieve that vision. We will find a better way to do it. We will take the boat next time instead of crawling out on the rocks, on the coral.

Let’s move to our affirmation. Our affirmation is on the screen. I am going to read it once and then invite you to affirm it with me. As you affirm it, really get a sense of it. Really get a feeling for it and allow it to really be truth for you.

Guided by love and wisdom, I stand in my power of faith and courageously live with a consciousness of abundance. I am blessed and I am a blessing to the world.

Would you affirm that with me? Together:

Guided by love and wisdom, I stand in my power of faith and courageously live with a consciousness of abundance. I am blessed and I am a blessing to the world.

Dennis Jones says, “Because you are one with the universe that is expanding by its very nature, when you bless something you are instructing the universe to enlarge upon it. The practice of a lifetime is to make blessing your life a daily routine, a daily ritual. Knowing that in doing so you are accessing and directing the principle of abundance in a very productive manner.”

You Are a Blessing

You are a blessing. You are blessed. So, this week count your blessings and then share your blessings with others. Share your blessings with your feelings of love, of harmony, of wisdom, allowing that energy to go to all of your friends and family, to go to those of you who you might consider to be an enemy. You don’t have to tell them you are doing it. Just allow that energy to flow from you.

Prayer for Protection

And now I invite you all to stand again as we say our Prayer for Protection. There it is. 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.

Love and blessings everyone. Have a wonderful week. Happy Thanksgiving. Merry Christmas. Namaste.