will you be a healer?

A student of mine was studying the scriptures and came across 2 Nephi 13 (compare Isaiah 3). I'm going to quote a few verses of it. But first, some backstory: Isaiah is talking about the punishments the people will face for their disobedience to the Lord.

Examine:

5 And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour: the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honourable. 

6 When a man shall take hold of his brother of the house of his father, saying, Thou hast clothing, be thou our ruler, and let this ruin be under thy hand: 

7 In that day shall he swear, saying, I will not be an healer; for in my house is neither bread nor clothing: make me not a ruler of the people.

We're already living in the world of verse 5. The riots in Ferguson are just one example of the sweeping civil unrest that is prophesied to come upon our nation.

Christ is the true healer. Image here. 

But the next two verses were what stood out to my student, and then to me as I studied this after she pointed it out. When a man goes to his brother and begs him to be their ruler, to "let this ruin be under thy hand," the brother declines with the words: "I will not be a healer."

It is an interesting connection. When everything falls apart, the people who have resources, both material and mental/emotional, will be turned to in the hopes that they will be able to heal the situation. Healing and ruling go hand in hand in that time--but many people who would otherwise be capable of healing situations will decline the responsibility.

Being a healer is a responsibility. If you feel called to the work then you have a job to do. But with responsibilities come blessings. God doesn't call the qualified: He qualifies the called.

the power of gratitude in every circumstance

I didn't post a blog on Thanksgiving, but the good news is that gratitude never goes out of style.

I wanted to write about the power of gratitude. 

The Hidden Messages in Water by Masaru Emoto is an incredible book. Dr. Emoto takes photographs of ice crystals that have been exposed to different words or ideas. Enjoy the following examples:

Image here.

Image here.

And the one I particularly wanted to write about (image here): 

Water is highly responsive to intention and to its surroundings. It is a mirror of what it is near and what it is shown. 

And it turns out, the two most powerful words water can be exposed to are love and gratitude.

I don't think they tested "Jesus Christ," FYI. 

Love as a power word should not come as a surprise to anyone, but I personally was surprised at the immense power of gratitude to form complex and beautiful ice crystals. In the book, Dr. Emoto claims that gratitude crystals are even more complex than love crystals, which surprised him. From the book (page 78-79 of the 2005 edition):

I have mentioned that water shown the words love and gratitude forms the most beautiful crystals. Of course the word love alone as the ability to create wonderful crystals, but love and gratitude combine to give the crystals a unique depth and refinement, a diamond-like brilliance. 

I also discovered that the love and gratitude crystals actually look more like gratitude crystals than the love crystals. What this indicates is that the gratitude vibration is more powerful and has a greater influence. Love tends to be a more active energy, the act of giving oneself unconditionally. By contrast, gratitude is a more passive energy, a feeling that results from having been given something--knowing that you have been given the gift of life and reaching out to receive it joyously with both hands. 

The relationship between love and gratitude may be similar to the relationship between sun and shade. If love is the sun, gratitude is the moon. If love is man, gratitude is woman. 

He goes on: 

What is the relationship between love and gratitude? For an answer to this question, we can use water as a model. A water molecule consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, represented by H2O. If love and gratitude, like oxygen and hydrogen, were linked together in a ratio of 1 to 2, gratitude would be twice as large as love.  

I suggest that having twice the amount of gratitude as love is the balance we should strive for.  

There is sooo much in those few short paragraphs--did you catch the yin/yang references? Amazing. Just as the Tao Te Ching and the yogis teach, the feminine energy--the energy of gratitude--is the most powerful energy, despite being passive. 

Or perhaps because it is passive.

Gratitude used to be a very nebulous concept to me. I used to think I was grateful for stuff when I said a verbal thank-you to someone. But the reality is completely different. Gratitude is not words. Gratitude is a feeling. Now that I am more attuned to my body and how feelings feel in my body, I can tell you that for me, gratitude feels like this immense warm energy that rotates around my body in a clockwise direction: when I feel grateful, when gratitude energy is radiating from my soul into my aura, it feels almost like a wind of energy, like the area around my body is a whirlwind of joy and praises and thanks. This energetic whirlwind of light emanates from the heart chakra, which in turn is linked to the actual heart and the nervous ganglia in that region. Gratitude is a heart emotion which leads to an energetic shift.

When I feel myself radiating gratitude, I feel beautiful. It might sound dumb to say. It kind of feels dumb to write. But gratitude is the most beautifying emotion a person can create and experience.

Gratitude in Every Circumstance

And when I say it is an emotion you can create, I mean it. This conference talk from earlier this year is a great discussion of gratitude and its importance and the fact that it is possible to choose to feel that emotion in any circumstance.

So your life is falling apart. 

The good news is, it is still possible to experience the bliss of gratitude. From Elder Uchtdorf's talk linked above:

We can choose to be like the Prophet Joseph Smith, who, while a prisoner in miserable conditions in Liberty Jail, penned these inspired words: “Dearly beloved brethren, let us cheerfully do all things that lie in our power; and then may we stand still, with the utmost assurance, to see the salvation of God, and for his arm to be revealed.”7 

We can choose to be grateful, no matter what. 

This type of gratitude transcends whatever is happening around us. It surpasses disappointment, discouragement, and despair. It blooms just as beautifully in the icy landscape of winter as it does in the pleasant warmth of summer. 

When we are grateful to God in our circumstances, we can experience gentle peace in the midst of tribulation. In grief, we can still lift up our hearts in praise. In pain, we can glory in Christ’s Atonement. In the cold of bitter sorrow, we can experience the closeness and warmth of heaven’s embrace. 

We sometimes think that being grateful is what we do after our problems are solved, but how terribly shortsighted that is. How much of life do we miss by waiting to see the rainbow before thanking God that there is rain? 

Being grateful in times of distress does not mean that we are pleased with our circumstances. It does mean that through the eyes of faith we look beyond our present-day challenges. 

This is not a gratitude of the lips but of the soul. It is a gratitude that heals the heart and expands the mind.

Look at that: gratitude can heal the heart and expand the mind. Sounds like energy medicine to me!

And now I will leave you with an exercise to experience the flow of gratitude. If you have a lot of blocks, either conscious or subconscious, to feeling truly grateful, this might be harder for you, but I encourage you to try it anyway as you go about your day.

Gratitude Exercise

1. Take three deep, comfortable, relaxing breaths. The breath is long and slow. Close your eyes and focus on the feeling of breathing in and out. 

2. While continuing this long, slow, deep breathing, think of the number one thing you love most in the world. Allow yourself to focus that love energy--focus on the feelings in your heart that you feel when you think about this thing or person that you love. 

3. When your heart feels so full of love for this thing or person that it feels almost saturated with love, command yourself to double the feeling. Just think, "And now, I feel this love twice as strongly." And feel as that command goes through and as that love energy in your heart doubles in concentration and in strength.

4. Now, end your focus on the love energy and begin to appreciate what it is that you love. Consciously acknowledge all the good things about this thing that you love and allow yourself to appreciate those aspects of this thing in your heart. Feel it as the love-peace energy transforms into even higher vibration energy of gratitude. This sensation may be located in the heart region, either in the body or both in the body and directly outside of the body.  

5. Feel as this energy begins to flow around your body, breaking up any energetic blocks of anger, negativity, hatred, bitterness, and resentment. Spend a few minutes experiencing this as you continue the long deep breathing, breathing in everything good and breathing out everything that it is time to let go of. 

If you feel so inclined, start and end this exercise with prayer--ask for help in experiencing the powerful sensations of gratitude, and when you're done, express your gratitude in prayer for the experience of gratitude! Make the gratitude cycle one that keeps on going. 

Conclusion

Gratitude is the most powerful emotion we can experience--modern day prophets have said that it can literally heal the soul. Thanksgiving the day has passed for this year, but thanksgiving the experience can go on forever in any circumstance. Experience healing today: experience gratitude. 

pride the plug

Image here.

Pride is a plug.

I can't remember if I wrote on this blog about this before, but I had an experience a few months ago that taught me a lot about the perils of pride. I had a conversation that was pretty fine as far as conversations go, but I left the scenario feeling... off. I couldn't put my finger on it but I just felt like something was kind of wrong. It took me a day or two to realize that the off feeling had happened directly after this conversation, also; I hadn't made the connection at the time.

So I asked God if I had done something wrong in the conversation. Had I been offensive? Had I somehow said the wrong thing during this innocuous conversation?

I got the answer of no, but when I asked more directly if there was something I needed to repent of, I got the answer of yes.

I had to repent of my pride.

I was enlightened to see how, during that conversation, even though both of us were very civil, I had allowed myself to feel enmity towards the person I was conversing with. I had felt better than this person, had assumed that they thought I was stupid, and then resented them for it. Basically, I had been prideful.

Now, all of this happened without me even truly realizing it. Consciously, I shook those feelings off when I felt them, and told myself that I didn't really feel that way. I told myself I liked this person just fine and they liked me too, nothing to worry about. But when I prayed about it later and saw the situation more clearly, I realized that I had been privately harboring pride--without my conscious self even fully recognizing it. As soon as God explained this to me, I saw that it was true. I just hadn't seen it.

I told God, I don't know how to fix this. How do I repent of something I didn't even know that I did? I asked Him to just remove from me the part that was to blame.

And when I did that, it was the craziest thing: I felt like He reached into my left side, and pulled out a plug. Like a bathtub plug. And when the plug was removed, it felt like all this junk was just oozing out of my body.

And then I was fine. And I felt so much better.

Pride the Plug

Image here.

When I asked to understand what this meant, I had kind of a moment of clairsentience, where I saw the spirit as pumice. You know, pumice: the volcanic rock full of holes. Sometimes people use it to smooth out calluses on their feet and stuff.

Well, pumice is cool because it floats. It has all these tiny holes in it that water can move through, and when pumice is submerged in water, the water does fill those holes, and the water ends up buoying up the rock.

The rock can float--when the holes are all free and clear.

What I saw was the spirit as a piece of pumice, and every instance of pride, resentment, bitterness--opposition to the faith, hope, and charity we are supposed to embody instead--acted as a plug. One by one, the holes in the pumice I saw were plugged, until the rock sank.

But, in contrast, when those plugs of pride and anger and enmity were removed, the pumice began to float again.

In the moment, I understood that this mattered because the floating was a metaphor for moving with ease and grace through life. Pulling out our pride and other sins energetically enables the Holy Spirit to move through us, to guide us, to inspire us, to buoy us up in a way that we are simply not capable of when we are all plugged up.

The work of unplugging happens naturally during true repentance and forgiveness. Frequent repentance and forgiveness keep our spiritual pores open so that the Holy Ghost is free to move within us and keep us metaphorically floating through life.

Conclusion

Keeping ourselves free of sin is crucial to energetic, physical, and emotional health. My emotions were a wreck before I had this experience and realized what I had to repent of. As soon as I repented, my energy was fixed and my emotions were back to normal too. If you're feeling off, I invite you to consider praying for help realizing what you need to forgive or repent of. Ask to be led to the plugs that are the source of your spiritual or even physical discomfort. Consider praying for those energetic plugs to be removed. You may be surprised at what happens!

growing faith to heal

Emotional healing is both simple and difficult. Simple because it's easy to understand. Forgiveness. Repentance. Turning your burdens over to a higher power. These are things that are easy to conceptualize... but are often difficult to implement. Why is this?

Why is it so difficult to forgive? To repent? To let go of the burdens we grip with whitened knuckles? Why do we hold onto our grudges, our gripes, our pains, our complaints?

I believe it comes down to faith. "Letting go and letting God" takes an enormous amount of faith.

How do we develop enough faith to let go of the darkness in our hearts? How do we develop the faith necessary to trust that when we let go, something better will come into its place?

A Just God and 2,000 Stripling Warriors

A famous Book of Mormon story involves 2,000 "stripling warriors." These stripling warriors were young men whose parents had covenanted with God never to shed blood--so when their land was attacked, the parents could not defend themselves. These boys agreed to fight instead. The story is well-known because of its tribute to mothers: every single one of the 2,000 stripling warriors survived their major battle, even as their counterparts from neighboring towns--other believers in Christ--died around them, and these boys attributed their miraculous unanimous survival to the teachings of their mothers.

But what did their mothers teach them that the mothers of the other believers didn't?

The answer is in Alma 57:26:

26 And now, their preservation was astonishing to our whole army, yea, that they should be spared while there was a thousand of our brethren who were slain. And we do justly ascribe it to the miraculous power of God, because of their exceeding faith in that which they had been taught to believe—that there was a just God, and whosoever did not doubt, that they should be preserved by his marvelous power. 

There is a just God. Whosoever does not doubt, will be preserved by his marvelous power.

This doubtless faith saved the life of every single one of those 2,000 boys.

What a Having a Just God Means Today

Why is it important to have faith in a just God? Why does that matter?

Knowing there is a just God makes forgiveness easy.

It is easy to forgive when we have a knowledge of the justness of God, because we know that by forgiving a person of their sins against us, they are not off the hook. We can take comfort in knowing that even the most abhorrent of wrongs will be avenged in complete perfection by a perfectly just God; we do not have to worry about taking revenge ourselves.

We can let it go, because God does not let it go. That's why the Atonement has to come in.

At the same time, knowing that there is a just God helps us to understand that our unforgiveness counts as a sin against us, and that a just God will hold us accountable for the trespasses against us that we did not forgive. Faith in a just God is both a carrot and a stick when it comes to repentance and forgiveness. We can rejoice in the knowledge that those who have wronged us will eventually pay in the way God deems fit, and we can take a lot of motivation from the fact that we, too, will pay for the things we don't repent of and/or forgive.

When you know there is a just God, it is easy to turn burdens over to Him, because you can trust with 100% certainty that He will take care of it in the most ultimately fair way possible.


How do we build faith in a just God?

Where does faith come from? How can we develop the faith in God's justice that we need in order to fully heal?

Faith is a gift of the Spirit. The first thing to do in the search for faith is ask for it in prayer. Even if you're not sure God exists, the act of praying to Him in the name of Jesus Christ is an act of faith that will be rewarded.

Faith is a principle of action. This means that faith IS action, that action grows faith, that action and faith go hand in hand. If you want more faith, you have to ACT!

What kind of actions build faith in a just God?

- daily scripture reading exercises faith in the promise that searching God's word will bless our lives
- daily prayer exercises faith in the reality of God and His ability to answer prayer
- paying tithing exercises faith in God's ability to provide for us financially and temporally

Basically, what we used to call "the seminary answers" in my seminary class. Pray. Read your scriptures. Keep the commandments. These things build our faith in God. If we don't have enough faith to do the little things, we're not going to have enough faith to do the big things.

Forgiving someone who has truly, deeply hurt you is a big thing.

It takes a lot of faith.

 Do you know there is a just God? 

Did you grow your faith in Him today?

Growing Faith Every Day

I have been coming to the conclusion that one of the most important things we can do in life is commit to build our faith in a just God every day. Theoretically we make that commitment at baptism. It's part of enduring to the end. In order to endure the end, one's faith has to grow every day. Stagnant faith simply cannot survive. If faith doesn't grow, it dies instead.

So, here is a challenge.

You may have already committed to grow your faith every day; maybe you've committed and forgotten. Maybe you've never committed.

Maybe you don't even believe in faith.

I challenge you to grow your faith. And not just to grow it, but to work to grow it every day.

Take a "leap of faith." Do something that requires some courage and trust in God's work. Trust your intuitions today. Do something illogical that just feels right and see what happens.

Pay your tithing.

Read your scriptures.

Pray.

Grow your faith today. Make it a part of your life. Commit to grow that faith every single day.

If your faith isn't growing, it's dying.