Fearlessly Feral Living!
Fearlessly Feral Living!
The Treatment Series: 3rd Step: What Do I Want?
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This is the 3rd in a 4 part series on Treatment, or affirmative prayer, which is a foundational spiritual practice taught in Centers for Spiritual Living all over the world.
This podcast details the 3rd step of treatment, a 5 step process that is described as Recognition, Unification, Realization, Thanksgiving and Release. God is, I am, It's done, thanks, bye.
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Well, hello, hello, hello, everybody. This is Reverend Karen speaking on your Fearlessly Feral Living podcast. I'm broadcasting to you from the Woogie Ranch in rural northern Nevada, where I'm a half an hour away from the nearest gas station and the nearest grocery store. And our mission is to provide a strong and unshakable inner foundation that works for successful long-term living. Our purpose is to activate inner self-awareness, and our vision is a world in which everyone lives wild and free. In other words, fearlessly feral. So, what have I been doing with myself? Well, I wrapped up my interim assignment with Center for Spiritual Living Bakersfield. I did that at the end of the month in, I just remembered I forgot to put my phone on airplane mode. And sure enough, it'll probably ring while I'm recording this. Um wrapped up at the end of July. It's now August 11th. And uh I've just been kind of taking it easy a little bit, but I have plans. I have plans, and I'm I'm implementing those plans a little bit at a time. I am working on my third book. I actually just started rereading my first one because after the third one, I'm gonna redo the first one. Yeah, I've decided to do that. But yeah, lots of rest and uh some weddings here and there. But right now I'm doing, I'm in the midst of a series of four podcast episodes all about treatment. Now, if you're just tuning in, treatment is what we call affirmative prayer, it's our own special kind of prayer, and I'm enamored of this prayer. I just love this kind of prayer. I'm not much of a beseeching, oh God, please get me out of this one foxhole prayer kind of person. I'm just not that kind of person. But treatment, oh my god, I'm having so much fun with this series. And yeah, okay, my idea of fun might be a bit different than yours, but I can't think of anything more fun than to sink into one of the most powerful spiritual practices that we can use in this teaching. So before I get away, get carried away with the third step of treatment, which is my most favorite step of the five, let me do a brief recap. The first two steps are in the first two uh podcasts of this series, and you can go into great detail by listening to them. It's week one series treatment and week two series treatment. Again, the short version of the five steps. God is, I am, it's done. Thanks, bye. Just a tiny little bit longer version. Recognition, that's God is. Unification, that's I am realization, it's done. Thanksgiving and release, that's by. Thanks and by. The acronym is are you ready to receive? R U R T R. Again, listen to weeks one and two to get a full description of these steps. But basically, in the first step, we're moving ourselves into a place of recognition that God is. That's it. God is, and from that point on, your description can be whatever you want it to be, basically, because God's big enough to handle it all. In the second step, we move into that place of being at one with whatever it is you've described God is. These two steps form the foundation for the third step, and I'll speak about that in a little bit more. But first, I have a story for you. So the third step is where we speak our word. And remember in the Bible, in the very beginning, God spoke and stuff got created. Now I want you to be thinking about this as I tell you this story. God spoke and stuff got created. Well, we've just declared that we're one with God. So if we are truly one with God, if we really believe that, then wouldn't it also be true that when we speak, stuff gets created? Just think about that for a little bit while I tell you this story. So I do a lot of weddings, and I have a photographer that comes with me and works for me sometimes at these weddings. His name is Pete. And the other day I went and did a couple of weddings, and one of them, Pete, was there for the wedding, photographing it. So we did our thing and we went our separate ways. And Pete's a gearhead. What can I say? He's a gearhead. He shows up with two or three cameras hanging around his neck, lots of lighting equipment. I'm not gonna get on my soapbox about the photographers who don't use lighting equipment for this episode. Maybe one of these other days. I just it just drives me crazy. Anyway, Pete shows up with lighting equipment. That's why I use him. We do our thing, we head our separate ways home. I get home, I'm just starting to put together stuff for dinner, and he calls and he says, and he's panicked. I mean, I've never seen this man so out of sorts, and I've been working with him for about seven years now. He said he left a camera bag at the wedding site, and he was turning around to go back and see if it was still there, and he was very upset because he didn't think that camera bag would still be there. Now he had two lenses in this bag, one of them was a hassleblod lens. Now, if you're familiar with Hosselblod, you know it's very high-end. Um, he had a lens that is no longer made by Hosselblod in there, and the other lens he had was one he had never used before, is an icon fisheye lens, which is another really high-end lens. So these kinds of lenses are not replaceable easily. The hosselod is probably not gonna be replaceable. The fisheye, yeah, replaceable, but it's gonna cost some money. So Pete was beside himself. He was saying, Oh, I know it's not gonna be there. It's summertime, and it's afternoon, and I left it there, and oh, it's gonna be lost. And I reassured him and I said, Pete, I know you are going to get that bag back fully intact. And he said, What? And I said, You're gonna get the bag back. Well, I could hear the doubt in his voice. I could also hear that he was thinking, I was probably not being very supportive of his angst in leaving this bag behind. He's, you know, we don't go real deep with our conversations. I know enough to know about him to know that he's Catholic and he's got he's he's just a normal kind of a guy, he's a great guy. I love him because of his technical skill and his ability to work with people and his work ethic and his honesty and his loyalty, and that's enough. You know, that's enough. But we don't talk about spiritual stuff very much, and uh that's okay. And when I said that he would successfully retrieve the bag, I knew he was doubting that. He was like, Yeah, right, whatever, dude. So we ended our conversation, and I moved into prayer. I just moved into prayer, and I was already in steps one and two, I was already feeling pretty good, which I usually am after our wedding. And uh I just moved right into that third step, that declaration step, that statement of intention, that knowingness, that feeling. And I stated my word, and I affirmed that that bag would be safe, and I felt it. And I affirmed that he would be reunited with that bag and that everything that was in it would be fully intact. And I visualized him being reunited with that bag, and I felt the feelings he would feel when that happened, the relief and the gratitude, and the joy. I did all that, I felt it. Then I gave thanks and I released it, and I went about my business of finishing out preparing my dinner. He called me back about an hour after his first call. He had been reunited with his bag, and all the stuff that was in it was intact. I was not surprised. He was. But that's how treatment works, folks. When we state our word with feeling, when we back up the power of our word up with the steps of recognition and unification with that thing that is, and we get the power from that, and we get the feeling, and we state our word with that. We state our word, we speak, and stuff gets created, and that's the way the third step works. Now, do I sometimes doubt it? You betcha. That's what prayer partners are for. I had a prayer request for a person, my prayer partner on Saturday. I couldn't know the truth for myself, but I knew that she was gonna know it. So I have this wonderful quote by Ernest Holmes. Oh my goodness. I love Ernest Holmes. Sometimes he's just a little, I think he had a sense of humor. I really do. Here's his quote in the Science Find textbook. He said, hence, it follows that if we believe it will not work, it really works by appearing to not work. When we believe that it cannot and will not, then according to the principle, it does not. But when it does not, it still does. Only it does according to our belief that it will not. I read that sentence and I just crack up every time I read it. Basically, what he's saying is done unto us as we believe. So if we believe it's not gonna work, it's not gonna work. And if we believe it's gonna work, it's gonna work, and that's how it works. Here's another little bit of wisdom about treatment and about that third step specifically. In treatment, the most important thing that treatment does, and the primary thing that it does, is it changes our minds. It changes the prayer. It doesn't change the stuff out there, it changes us from the inside out, and then because of the power that we have, because of our connection with God, then we get to change our outer stuff, but it begins within. Here's another Ernest Holmes quote. This one is a little less whimsical. He said, also in the Science of Mind textbook, treatment opens up the avenues of thought, expands the consciousness, and lets reality through. It clarifies the mentality, it removes the obstruction of thought, and it lets in the light. It removes doubt and fear in the realization of the presence of spirit and is necessary while we are confronted by obstructions or obstacles. So we treat to open up our avenues of thought, we treat to expand our own consciousness. I frequently ask for clarity in my treatments. I frequently ask for things like doubt and fear and low self-esteem and unworthiness to be replaced with conviction and love and honest humbleness and healthy confidence. Just this morning, I found myself treating for compassion instead of judgment, for love instead of fear, and for humbleness instead of arrogance. So I treat it. Compassion and love and humbleness. And guess what? Because I know this stuff works, I feel that now, and I've been relieved of all the it that I was feeling earlier. I love it the way this works. So treatment changes the mind of the one doing the praying. But treatment can do other things too. And here's where I'm gonna have a little bit of fun with you because I might be bumping up against some sacred cows. So Ernest Holmes wrote these statements way back in the early 1900s. He wrote them as I believe statements. They were basically statements of what he believed to be true about life and spirituality in this teaching. These statements have been since changed to the we believe statements, and there's something that are that is published every month in the Science of Mind magazine. And you can find them there, and you can find them all over the web. Do a search on the we believe statements of Science of Mind, and they'll come up for you. And I believe almost all of these statements. There's a couple I'm like, eh, maybe not, maybe not. That's okay. We don't have to believe them all. But here's one that I do believe in. Did you just put the brakes on? Did you just say what the hell does she just say? What? We don't have control of conditions. I believe that we have control of conditions. Now, I've heard all the objections. I can hear your objections right now, sitting here at my desk in my office in the back 40, looking out my window at the beautiful high desert and the mountains in the background, and I can hear the objections. Some of you are saying, Well, I've got major control issues. Well, I'm sorry you feel that way. But I'm here to tell you I don't believe in control of your conditions, just mine. Now, if those are control issues, so be it. You could be right. Some of the others of you are saying, oh no, that's blast blasphemy. I can't, I can't go there. I was born and raised Catholic. I cannot go there. It's God's will. I'm in a 12-step program. It's God's will for me. It's a dangerous place for me not to know, not no, I can't do that. No, I can hear the objections. And I always go within and do a silent treatment for those of you who are responding like this, because I know there's been a lifetime of indoctrination there, and all that does is limit us, really. Now, again, you're free to continue believing this. You don't have to believe this statement. This is what I believe, and this is what I bring into play when I do the third step of treatment. I also don't believe in blasphemy. I think it's a religious term that really doesn't have a lot of application in our everyday lives. I think it's wrapped up in ideas of a judgmental God and a God that makes rules for us and a God that keeps score, none of which I believe in. Here's what I do believe in. And I'd like you to imagine. Put all the objections aside for a minute, and imagine, if you will, a God that is simply a source of strength and power and nourishment for you in your life. Imagine living a life where you know that you truly have free will. It says so in the Bible, right? By the way, and that God is simply there to assist us in making good decisions for ourselves. Imagine living a life that way. And I encourage you to play with this. Yep, I said play. Play with this concept, playfully explore your feelings about it. Sit with them. This can be some fun stuff to play with. I know it's a very serious topic, it's all wrapped up in fundamental ways of thinking about God and the role of it in our lives, and what we were taught as kids, and just who's in charge anyway. And when you play with it, you can take away the fear and start to think with a little bit of clarity about these sorts of things. Because I know we've been taught our entire lives, it's in our very culture. There's a power greater than we are, and we can use it. There's a power greater than we are, and we're part of it. God's large and in charge. God's in the driver's seat. I'm just the co-pilot. God laughs while I make plans. Everything good I have in my life is because of God, and everything bad I have in my life is all my fault. Oh my God, really? Seriously, guys? Really? Here's another one that makes me just go off the rails. God doesn't give us any more we can handle. That's me growling. God does not give us more than we can handle? Really? Oh, geez, Louise, God doesn't give us stuff except strength, power, peace, nourishment, all that other stuff, it came from other sources. It didn't come from God. It's God's will, not my will. Okay, I'm gonna stop there because if I continue, I'm gonna have to put this recording on pause and go empty my stomach. Literally, guys. Those kinds of statements just I don't like them. I don't believe them. They set me on edge. They uh they're so limiting. They're so limiting, and to do a third step of treatment while believing all that stuff really takes all the power out of the treatment, unless you believe that you are one with God and that when you speak, stuff gets created because your word has all the power that God's words have. And yes, you do have the intelligence and the ability to make good decisions for yourself, as long as you're in touch with God. So then, of course, it becomes a practice to stay in touch with God 24-7, which is a whole nother topic. I'm gonna get back to the third step of prayer. All these statements I just said, and all these things I said that I believe and don't believe, there's evidence for those. I've always known these things on a deep fundamental level. I knew these things even before I was able to put them into words. But later on, I started doing research and then I got proof. I got support for my beliefs from people like Ernest Holmes, from people like Neil Donald Walsh, from the entire New Thought movement of movement that began in the early 1900s and was based on the work of many, many philosophers and scientists, and psychologists and spiritual people, mystics. This stuff is not. New guys. It's been in existence since forever. It's been in existence since forever. We just got off track because human beings got in the picture there and decided they didn't like humans having all that power. And so they said, you don't have any power at all. God has all the power, and the only way you can access God is to come to our church. So think about these things. Personally, I like having power. Because when we claim our power, we can't blame anybody else for anything or and we can't blame anything else. Can't blame anyone or anything. When we claim our power, we take responsibility for ourselves. And when we take responsibility for ourselves, we are empowered. So here's another story for you. I grew up around a lot of different people. Oh my god. I was a little confused there for a while. There was my mom who was also confused and basically told me you can't rely on anyone, including God, for anything. Lots of swear words interspersed in there from my mom. That's the way she talked. You want something done, you better do it yourself. Then she sent me to live with a Catholic family who confused the living shit out of me. They preached one thing and definitely did not live what they preached. In fact, it was just the opposite. I never understood that. That just I never got that. And then there was my dad. My parents got divorced when I was three, by the way. My dad, who became a practitioner when I was about six years old, and he married a woman who was a member of Christian science. Now, Christian science has a lot of dogma, and Ernest Holmes distanced himself from Christian science pretty early on. But the teaching is basically the same. The woman he married, by the way, was Stepmother Dujour number five, and she was my favorite. She gave me love and acceptance for the first time in my life. For the first time in my life from this woman, she was the only human being that I felt loved and accepted by fully, completely. Now, don't get me wrong, I love my parents. They loved me. They just didn't know how to show it in ways that I could grab hold of. This woman did. So there you have it. She was my favorite. Stepmother number five. I think she was number five. Fast forward, I grow up, I'm pretty confused. I get to be 32, I'm very confused. I'm drunk. And then I sober up and I get introduced to the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. And there's all that outer male pronoun God language. And I'm like, oh shit, what the hell am I gonna do now? I can't hang with this language. I even called my sponsor up in tears one day early on and said, I'm never gonna be able to stay sober. She reassured me. My first sponsor was a lady named Kay. She was from Dallas, Texas, and she had this weather, wonderful, soothing southern accent. And she said, Honey, tell me what you do every day. And I said, Well, I go to a meeting every day, and I work my steps every day, the way you've been telling me to work them, and I call you regularly, and I'm in service at the meeting. She said, Honey, don't you worry about that God stuff. You're gonna be just fine. And I went, Okay, I trusted her, which is another new thing for me, by the way. I trusted her. So I start doing the steps and I start studying the literature, and I get to my out. I found an out in the literature, a place in the AA textbook where it says, We found the great reality capitalized deep within us. And that was my out. Here was this thing, this 12-step thing that literally saved my life, telling me that God was within me, deep within me. It also went on to say, it's only there that it can be found. And I'm like, okay, fine, I'm good with this. I'm good with this. So I was able to stick around and stay sober, and I'm ever so grateful for that. By the way, Ernest Holmes uses the same phrase in the Science of Mind textbook, The Great Reality Deep Within. I don't know who came up with it first, but that's evidence to me that those two at least had a chat here, one chat, at least one chat somewhere along the line. There's no proof of that, no evidence of it, but same phrase, two different books. To me, that's evidence enough. So I'm into sobriety about 10 years, and one of those life things happens, and I'm suffering, and I start studying. And I knew because 11 steps as we seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood it. And I always replace him with it. And I knew I needed a closer connection with God and my understanding, and so I started studying and I went back to home. I went back to science of mind. And yeah, that book one, Conversations with God, book one by Neil Donald Walsh, somehow found its way into my lap. This was before Kindle. The real physical book somehow found its way into my lap. And I moved away from giving away my power to claiming my power. I moved away from being a professional victim to being an empowered person. And my life changed radically from that point onward. And here I am today at 38 years sobriety, telling you when I speak, stuff gets created because I am one with God. That great reality is deep within me. We are one, there is no separation there. So I do a treatment and I get into that realization step, that third step, and I say that we believe in control of conditions, and I have all the power of all of my belief systems and everything I've been taught and everything that has been written about this stuff behind me when I speak my word. And when I speak my word, I feel it. I feel it. Sometimes when I speak my word, I get the chills. Sometimes when I speak my word, it's like, oh, and I can feel it. Sometimes when I speak my word, I get all emotional. Those are evidence of feelings. When we have those feelings, when we speak our word, that's where the power comes from. When I teach treatment in classes, we always have a segment where we talk about how thought plus feeling equals power. So I have a thought. My word, when I speak, stuff gets created. I have a feeling. Yes, I can feel that power within me because I'm one with God and I speak my word. Thought plus feeling equals power. So in this third step, this is not just some willy-nilly, just something light that we say by rote. I have a friend who's Catholic and he likes to say, Hey, all Mary, full of grace, 40 chickens had a race. And I'm like, what the hell does that mean? And I'm reminded of they say all these prayers that can be quite beautiful and meaningful and profound, but they don't mean anything to them because they just repeat them. And if they can't remember the words, they come up with a rhyme: Hail Mary, full of graze 40 chickens at a race. I don't know. Doesn't mean anything. We have to have the feelings in order to have the power. We are as we believe. Ernest Holmes didn't just say that. Jesus Christ said it. It is done unto you as you believe. So in the third step of treatment, if we're getting stuff we don't like, we got to change our beliefs. And that is what we're treating for in treatment. So of course, when you go into this third step of treatment, absolutely explore and play with your beliefs about God and God's will for you and your own sense of empowerment and all that other wonderful stuff. Check it all out. See what's up for you there. Have fun with it. Play with it. See what happens. The double dog dare you to begin incorporating treatment into your spiritual practice. Listen to the first two episodes of this podcast. Listen to this one. The last one is going to incorporate steps four and five. Listen to them. Take notes. Just try it. See what happens. One last little technical tidbit about treatment. They're always done in the first person, and they're always done in the present tense. Now, if you're like me and you were drunk when they passed out the English rules in class, what that means is first person, I. I say this, I mean that. I do this. First person is I statements. Present tense, it's happening now. Not it's gonna happen in the future, not it happened in the past, it is happening right now. Present tense. So I'm gonna close with a treatment here. And yeah, I'm gonna treat for compassion and love and being right-sized, which is what I mean by humbleness. And I'm gonna know go into that place where I'm I'm there already, but I'm gonna repeat it just for educational purposes. That I know that God is everywhere present. I recognize this God, I see it everywhere I look, I see it in the wind dancing in the trees outside my window. I hear it in the hum of my air conditioning in the background. God is truly present. God is this all-powerful force, this beautiful energy that simply is there, providing me with strength and source and comfort, because I am one with it. I was created in the image and likeness of God. The great reality is deep within me. I am one with that energy, I am one with that power, I am one with that source. And so I speak my word now for myself and for anyone who is listening to this podcast who might be willing to believe this as well. I speak my word that in all of my affairs, in all of my relationships, in all of my dealings with people, I am loving and compassionate. I have absolute, unconditional, profound, and deep love for everybody in my life, for all of the people who show up in their fear and their imperfection. And I love them all anyway. And I feel compassion for them in that fear. I feel compassion in the pain that they must be feeling right now. And a humbleness makes me feel and remember to be right-sized, and so I declare that for myself, knowing that I am neither better than anyone else nor less than anybody else, and no one can ever take that away from me, knowing that I am this sweet, beautiful, loving, compassionate, powerful emanation of spirit, and that is how I show up in the world, and so I do give great thanks for this thing called treatment, for the power in my words. I am so grateful for all of it, and I release it into that law that we'll talk about in the next episode, knowing that the law always answers in the affirmative, and I anchor, and so it is, and so I thank you very much for listening and for your support. I am knowing Fearlessly Feral Living for me and for you. Fearlessly Feral Living is a focus ministry of Centers for Spiritual Living. Your financial support is fully appreciated and very much fully tax deductible. You can find ways to support on our podcast at BuzzSprout, on our PayPal page, and you can find all these links on our website at fearlesslyferal.org. And so, once again, I do thank you for listening, and I am knowing Fearlessly Feral Living for me and for you.