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November 21, 2005
Becoming Teachable - excerpt from The Gift of Change
Our job is not to determine life's meaning but to discern its meaning. Often we try to tell life what it means when we would be better off allowing life to show us what it means.* When Jesus said we should be as little children, it was because little children know that they don't know.* We go around thinking or at least pretending we know the meaning of things, when in fact the mortal mind has no basis for real knowing. Little children expect someone older and wiser to explain things to them; we can have the same relationship with God.
There's a way of relaxing into our center, working much less hard, letting other people have their say, knowing our being is even more radiant at times when we're in a space of not-doing. When the ego steps back, the power of God can step forward. He can and will, when we allow Him to. Too often we feel we're invisible unless we're making the cool comment, doing this or doing that. But we're so much more powerful when surrounded by silence. Taking a deep breath, knowing that what you don't say can be as powerful as what you do say, thinking deeply about something before making a response-such actions leave room for the spirit to flow, to harmonize your circumstances and move them in a more positive direction. How many times have we felt we've blown it simply by talking when we wish we hadn't or by showing off when we could have just sat there and seemed intriguing-because we were?
God's spirit will always reveal the truth to us if we simply don't block His guidance. And we block it by talking first, attitudinally walking ahead of truth. This happens when we push too hard-in a conversation or a project-trying frantically to make things happen, or keep things from happening, because we lack faith in an invisible order of things. That is why the Holy Instant matters: it is a moment of quiet when the spirit enters and makes right all things.
Often it's better to live in a question until the answer emerges; to be okay with not knowing until wisdom comes; to take a backseat and just listen until you genuinely have something to say. Sometimes it is our silence that testifies to our strength. Our entire being-intellectual, emotional, psychological, and spiritual-can relax into a more miracle-receptive mode. When we relax into the arms of God, the mind opens to greater insight and the heart to deeper love.
When we step back with the ego and let God lead the way, we become a natural space for healing. Let's say, for instance, that you have a problem; many possibilities exist for how you could solve it. Yet if you're tense about the issue, stuck in anger or frantic searching, then the chances of one of those possibilities becoming clear are decreased.
If you have a problem but you are stuck in blaming others or trying to duck out of your own responsibility, then helpful forces are repelled. If you have a problem but you try to keep your heart open-you do your best to deal with it, take personal responsibility, remain vulnerable-then others will have a natural tendency to reach out to you and offer help. Just knowing you have a problem will not inspire others to help you; how you're handling it is what will do that.
Highest solutions don't come from you; they come into you and through you. It is not your ability to figure things out, put the blame elsewhere, or hire the right lawyers that ultimately guarantees divine right action. Rather, it is our surrender to the flow of divinity that allows divinity to flow through us.
Staying calm and trusting in the flow of the universe are hard when we can't sense a cosmic order to things. Yet once we recognize that God is everywhere, all the time, we can relax into any instant and know that healing is natural. God will exalt us if we will allow Him to. And when we feel that happening, we're liable to smile a certain kind of smile, inspiring someone around us to say, "What?" as though surely there must be something that is making us smile that way. But there is nothing that is making us smile at that moment, so much as everything is making us smile. We have sensed Reality and felt the peace that follows.
~Excerpt From The Gift of Change by Marianne Williamson (pg 97-100) Click here to order now.
Posted by mwblog at November 21, 2005 6:44 PM
