Robbins Hopkins

Spiritual Health: Being at Peace in Everyday Life

spiritual health

Clear the FEAR

Fear is on my mind today. Fear comes in many forms. We hear about it on the news, we read about it in other media, we feel it with our relationships, children, health, job, travel, government, and the environment. Fear is with us constantly UNLESS, we clear for fears frequently.

Photo by Milada Vigerova

If you do nothing else for your spiritual health, make a habit of clearing away your fears. This will truly lighten your energy and bring peace to your thoughts, dreams, interactions, and body. There are 365 references to fear in the Bible, one for every day. This is a really good indicator that fear is as present as air, water, and sky. The unique truth about fear, however, is that because we create and feed our fear, we can also command fear right out of our energy fields.

Fear does not need to be a constant companion always lurking in the background. If you try to ignore fears, they just remain and actually grow within because you are ignoring them. You are not meant to carry fear so if you are carrying fear, it will make itself known in many ways as your soul’s way of saying, pay attention to this fear! You have to name those fears you do not want to look at and command them out of your energy field.

Some of the big fears are fear of how we look, feel, present ourselves, and interact with others. Fear of being alone, unloved, unhappy and saddled with an unhealthy relationship are prevalent. Fear of being a failure, not measuring up, not making a contribution, not feeling important, not making a difference, not finding a good place to be and not having a way forward are truly present in epidemic proportions. Fear for our loved ones, for our world, of losing our partner or child, of falling apart and fear of death rate right up there in the top one hundred. Just reading about all these fears can dampen one’s sense of wellbeing. Imagine what living with these fears does to us! It is not a pretty picture. 

You often keep these fears hidden from your consciousness as a way of thinking you are not being affected by them. However, this is fallacious thinking. If you have a fear anywhere in your field, it affects you whether or not you are conscious of it and whether or not you are hiding from it. The only way to be free of fears is to name them and command them out of your energy field.  Otherwise, the fears fester and grow. Consider taking up this cleansing and profoundly freeing approach to spiritual health. It is an easy thing to do.

1.  Use the Six-Step Healing Protocol to open Sacred Space and begin

2. Name the fear, such as fear of panic-attack trauma energy and all symptoms

3. Follow the six-steps to clear the fear from your field

That’s it. Your body, mind, and soul will thank you profusely by coming into greater and greater balance.

Spirits Having a Human Experience (1/2)

Most of us in body, in this Earth dimension,  generally think of ourselves as humans having an occasional spiritual experience.  However as our consciousness expands, perhaps more accurately said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” This quote is from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), the French philosopher and Jesuit priest.

Paradise Bridge by h.koppdelaney

The one and only thing that a group of renown spiritual teachers, mystics and writers including Deepak Chopra, Barbara Kingsolver, and Marianne Williamson agreed on after days together in conference was that we are spirit beings having a human experience. Assuming this may indeed be so, there are some implications for living as spiritual humans which can help us  on our journeys.

We are here first and foremost in our bodies for some reason, otherwise we would be elsewhere.  Repeatedly, it seems that we are here to work on our relationship to All That Is/God/Great Oneness.  We come with all sorts of baggage from previous incarnations and we continue to accumulate baggage in this lifetime as well.  However, perhaps because all healing must take place in the dimension in which we incurred the imbalance, we return repeatedly and attract to ourselves conditions which give us the opportunity to heal, come into wholeness, peace, joy and balance.

Could it all be as simple as our being here to clear our minds, bodies and souls from fear and blocked energies which we are carrying within ourselves? Is life being given in body so that this time we may choose Love and Peace, Wholeness and Balance?  Could our ancestors be looking on saying,

  • MAYBE THIS TIME, she will choose Love and Wholeness.
  • MAYBE THIS TIME, he will choose Peace and Joy.
  • MAYBE THIS TIME, they will keep the deep spirit ways close to themselves and find Loving Kindness in all things.
In Chains by purplemattfish

When we release blocked, negative energy, we diminish our sense of darkness and our feelings of separation from All That Is.  Our consciousness expands as fear receeds. We become more aware of our connection with All That Is, The Great Oneness and increasingly aware of our spiritual selves.

We have free will so we can choose to explore our spirituality in this lifetime or we can choose to completely ignore our spiritual selves. We can spend as much time as we like ignoring our spiritual selves. However, there are a range of imbalances in the soul of each person in body which can only be re-balanced while we are in body and when we decide to work on our inner sense of peace.  All our perceptions of our outer lives are formed through our sense of inner Peace.

Meditation can allow us to temporarily escape the human requirements of our lives and be in Silence and Stillness.  The process of entering a meditative state eventually helps our minds and bodies to remember the feeling of inner balance.  Often in the beginning of this process, however, we must face the areas of our lives which are out of balance.

Spirit + Nature by h.koppdelaney

Places of stillness can also be reached through yoga, long distance runs, dancing, biking and swimming to name a few. Reaching this state, through movement is sometimes known as hitting the “zone”.   Others can find deep Stillness in gardening, walking in nature, painting or creating.  All efforts towards stillness result in our remembering what balance feels like.

Prayer is the conscious request for Divine Energy to help us in our quest for greater Peace and Balance.  Prayer is like speaking to our deepest Divine Knowing within ourselves and calling upon other available spiritual energy to support our  journeys or that of another.  Prayer in its most powerful sense is a call to balance.

Fear is the opposite of Love.  We therefore have to name our fears and face them. Further, in order to become free of those thoughts and feelings we have to caste the fear out or deny any further power to that fear which we may be holding onto.  This allows us to fully embrace Love in our lives. All acting out, physically or emotionally stems from fear, often fears we do not recognize but none the less, fears we are expressing.

When I am out of balance, one question brings me to a place deeply within.  I have finally learned to remember to ask myself,  what fear is producing this imbalance within me?  This is one of the most important questions we can ask along the way to inner Peace. to be continued…

Read Part 2
Spirits Having a Human Experience (2/2)

Ordinary Mystic; Part 1

Presented to CommUnity on the Hill Congregation*

Washington, D.C. , January 24, 2010

I am an ordinary mystic.  This means I spend loads of time in Silence and in communication with all forms of Divine Presence and I also live in society.  From the outside I usually look pretty normal in the clothes I wear and the company I keep.  I have a home in the suburbs. I have been happily married 37 years and have two sons in their 20s.  I have gradually come to embrace my ordinary nature and my mystical nature publicly though the knowing has been inside a long time.

Earth Hour 2009 by Alicepopkorn

I realized one day that I was beginning to really feel that God and I were One.  I felt it deeply and uncompromisingly in meditation.  From those feeling I began to see all other distinctions about who I was, what I was doing, why I was here, and what I was facing, begin to melt away. Therefore, the seeming contradictions I had silently harbored of the mystic and the mother, or the mystic and the wife or the next door neighbor were really not contradictions, but merely different views of the whole that is me.

What I mean by God and I are One is this.  The Love, Passion, Power, Knowing and Light of God is the same Light of which I am made.  There is no difference except in my seeing this as indeed true.  I now feel this knowing has been true all my life and perhaps all my other lives as well.  And it is true for everyone in body regardless of what is going on in our lives.  We simply have to release the deep fears we have and call in Spirit to be with our Deepest Companion and Friend, The Beloved.

It is possible that I may have done this ordinary mystic thing before.  It feels much better now that both the ordinary me and mystical me have found each other.  Before this time, I had lots and lots of indications that major parts of my life were out of balance.  I had chronic, deeply serious back pain for 18 years.  I spent a lot of time defending myself whether I was leading a workshop or managing a dorm of 55 adolescent girls.  I spent a great deal of time, it seems to me now, getting angry at even the tiniest challenge to my right to be fully independent, competent and powerful as a woman.  I more than once laid into my brothers or my dad, men of the deep South, if they even hinted that I was “just a girl”.

I did not suffer fools gladly.  In fact, I embraced confrontation on a regular basis.  But all this was very wearing.  It was not fun and it was certainly not in balance.  So, there was a warrior spirit alive and well within me long before there was a peaceful spirit revealed.  Perhaps that had to be, so that I could even find a mystical path.  For the signs to introspection are not easily seen, nor culturally supported, nor readily embraced by most humans in body.  However, for whatever reason, I was pulled into a greater and greater balance in part, a great part, by my eldest son.

Our first child, a son,  came as the happiest, smiling person one could imagine.  We even called him smiley face, a lot.

Smiling Baby by Mallu 2007

When he was 10 he had what was considered routine surgery for a benign cyst in his jaw, discovered during the process of getting braces.  That began our odyssey into the world of medicine, fear, pain, loss, trauma and anguish.  When he came out of the surgery, he was a completely different person energetically.  He had lost his smile and many other aspects of his personality.  He was unable to study, focus, go to school, go to sleep or interact with anyone at all, in the way he had before.  He had so loved his lego creations and had spent hours creating happily by himself.  After the surgery, he would sit and simply not be able to create anything.  He was glum and withdrawn.

The surgeon declared the surgery a full success.  We knew differently however.  We were the ones sitting with him as he cried and raged 2-4 hours every day for months and months, and months.  We were the ones sitting with him until 2 or 3 in the morning when he might or might not fall asleep.

The first year, we saw 27 doctors and psychologists trying to get help.  I stopped my work to take care of him.  I had to. He was out of school for months and had all types of strange new behaviors.  He would suddenly freeze and stare as if blinded like a deer caught in the headlights.  He would fall down and shake or sometimes he would simply withdraw and not be able to converse.

We went and went, searching for medical help and the going wore us all out.  After 12 months our son came to my husband and me  one night and said he could not go to any more doctors, they were not helping him.  I cried myself to sleep that night with the deep fear that we would never find someone to help us if he would not go anymore to doctors.  We had been having great toughs of war for the past 3 months about going to doctors at that time.

In a great state of fear, I thought the only thing left for us was to really, really pray together, out loud and ask God to help us.  We had done all we could possibly do ourselves and it was not working.  Amazingly, my husband and I had not actually sat down together and prayed about this with God in the past year since it had all begun.  We did pray together, out loud and things began to change almost immediately.  At the time, we really did not know what had actually happened to our son.  He had had the surgery and then had to take his braces off and he had to go to eye therapy after the surgery but we had no sense of the source of the imbalances for him.

After our evening of praying together, however, we were led just a surely as if God took us by the hand out of the dark times into the Light.

Holding Hands by annstheclaf

Our son took 2 years to appear mostly healed to us with some remaining remnants of those times still showing up for the next 12 years or so.  This experience catapulted me completely and wholly into spiritual healing.  Our experience dramatically affected our entire household in the most profound and unexpected ways.  We each know Spirit in individual and specific ways because of what we all went through together.

Come forward with me 16 years and here is what I have learned spiritually.

Spiritual health is THE basis of all health , happiness and well being.  Spiritual health and physical health are one and the same though we do not live our lives this way, for the most part.  We still think of healing and health as a physical phenomenon.  We still act as if the recurring pain we have originates in the body.  We and most of the medical profession look at health strictly through the lens of the body.

Our bodies are the encasing of our consciousness, of our knowing of All That Is.  Every nerve, fiber, cell and pathway daily reflects our sense of peace as well as our sense of anxiety.  Our bodies are no more than the outer casing for our consciousness.  We either exude joy, peace and delight or we exude burden, stress and regret and everything in-between.  The choice is ours.  We are our thoughts, our feelings, our traumas, our fear and our hopes all rolled into one bundle, we know as the body.

(click here for the rest of the story)

*Comm-Unity on the Hill is a Unity Congregation which meets on the grounds of the National Cathedral in Hearst Hall at the corner of Woodley Ave. and Wisconsin Ave,N.W.,  Washington, D.C.  Services are weekly on Sundays at 10 A.M.  They can be reached at cothdc@verizon.net or 703-379-4450.  All are welcome.