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Everything Serves the Purpose of Your Healing and Awakening

by Rev. Jennifer McSween, O.M.C.

I had been a smoker for the greater part of my adult life, and I really enjoyed smoking. Cigarettes were my constant companions, present in my life whether I was socializing or going about my daily life. I looked forward to lighting up with my morning coffee, and anytime I was on the phone — this was back in the day when we mostly used land lines. I also couldn’t wait to take a break from whatever it was I was doing to have a cigarette or, as I had convinced myself, to help me concentrate. After meals… well, for me, smoking was better than dessert. It was my dessert. I could never understand friends who would say they were “social smokers.” They smoked only when socializing. I remember thinking to myself, they must have serious issues with committing.

But my joy of smoking turned into agony as I found myself moving in the direction of what I called back then a “Spiritual Path” and felt that smoking was not in alignment with that path. Having judged it as being unspiritual, it felt wrong, even sinful, to continue to have smoking be a part of my life. But I still enjoyed it and wanted to continue doing it. I couldn’t even imagine myself not smoking.

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Pause to Encourage

by Mary Gerard Lenihan

The Pause Practice holds possibilities! One possibility in the Pause is encouragement. We never know just how lifted up we can be until we lift up someone else. Who doesn’t need encouragement? Who cannot benefit from being encouraging?

To “encourage” is to literally instill courage in another. A student was feeling disheartened the other day because her goals appeared to have fallen apart in her hands. She was given the space to simply be with her experience, to pause. In the pause she shared that new possibilities were showing up in her mind; life wasn’t over after all.

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Freeing the Children

by Rev. Barbara Goodman Siegel, O.M.C.

Like so many of you, I was shocked and deeply saddened to see little children torn out of their mother’s and/or father’s arms and put into cages. “What have we become?” I thought. ”How low can we go? When is enough, enough?”

I was haunted by my thoughts about these children. I kept imagining how alone and afraid they must feel. I expected to see thousands of people in the streets protesting this action, but to my great surprise, that didn’t happen. I went to a vigil to bring attention to what to me was an atrocity. The vigil was sponsored by a large, local church and less than a hundred people showed up. Again, I was shocked and dismayed. Have we so insulated ourselves that even this doesn’t get through?

I felt that I had to take my sadness into meditation, a place where I often go to ask Mother Shekhina (a.k.a. Holy Spirit) for an answer to something I just can’t wrap my mind around. I hope the answer I got will help those of you who are also struggling to understand this seemingly inhumane and un-American turn of events.

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The Way Back to God Is to Practice Forgiveness

by Rev. Savina Cavallo, O.M.C.

Forgiveness is the central idea and message of A Course in Miracles. I have been reading the book, practicing its principles for 12 years now. Forgiveness as the Course teaches it has been a challenge for me to understand and apply.

Forgiveness is defined as follows: “Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin.” (W-pII.1.1:1-3)

And sin is defined as a false idea about God’s creation.

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