Contents:
The Inner Life of the Counselor. Jesus for the Rest of Us. A Guide to Peace, Strength and Freedom. Spiritual Direction in Context. The Spirituality of Age. Much Ado About Something.
A Brief Introduction to the Psychology of Religion. Every Breath We Take. How to Pray With the Bible. The Science of Virtue. Ageing, Spirituality and Well-being. Aging, Spirituality, and Pastoral Care. A Mile in My Shoes. Embracing the Call to Spiritual Depth: Gifts for Contemplative Living. Getting Back in the River. Spiritual Competency in Psychotherapy. Scientific, Secular, and Sacred Perspectives.
The Golden Window of Silence.
Facing Feelings in Faith Communities. Slugs and snails and puppy dogs' tails. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Christian Clients. Contemplative Prayer for Christians with Chronic Worry.
The Power of Spirituality in Therapy. The Family, Spirituality, and Social Work. Time to Talk about Dying. Reforming the Broken Heart of Leadership.
Nurturing Your Hidden Spirit: Straight Talk about Spiritual and Psychological Development [Dorothy J. Steffler, Frank J. Steffler] on www.farmersmarketmusic.com *FREE*. Find great deals for Nurturing Your Hidden Spirit: Straight Talk about Spiritual and Psychological Development by Dorothy J. Steffler and Frank J. Steffler (, .
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You submitted the following rating and review. We'll publish them on our site once we've reviewed them. Item s unavailable for purchase. Please review your cart. You can remove the unavailable item s now or we'll automatically remove it at Checkout. Continue shopping Checkout Continue shopping. Chi ama i libri sceglie Kobo e inMondadori. Steffler , Dorothy J. Available in Russia Shop from Russia to buy this item. Or, get it for Kobo Super Points! How many masterpieces, inventions, and innovations are we repressing with our societal pressure to conform to certain norms of being good boys and girls?
Maybe you even repressed them out of fear, confusion, or a desire to fit in, be loved and accepted , or not rock the boat. As a kid, I had a strong desire to create, whether pinging out the boogie-woogie on our baby grand piano, shooting sci-fi movies on my Sears super-8 reflex camera, or lying under my covers with a flashlight, filling a sketchpad with utopian worlds. Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism—you name it, I was fascinated by it.
Likewise, you have a unique chance to revisit the aspects of your character that have been present since childhood and discover your true spiritual self. The signs of your true Self were there from the beginning. The truth—as the great spiritual masters have taught—is that all of life is conspiring for our awakening and fulfillment.
Just as there are certain plants that require rough soil to activate chemicals that make them heartier and better able to thrive in their environment, the challenges I faced created the perfect conditions for my growth, compelling me to push my roots deeper and strengthen my inner structures. Like certain seeds that need a forest fire to germinate, those early childhood experiences sparked a fire within me that cracked open the seed of my potential and allowed it to grow.
What I can now see is that all of these powerful promptings were my acorn or true Self guiding and directing me, creating opportunities for me to cultivate the inner and outer conditions necessary for its emergence. The same process is true for you.
Your soul is your soil, and if you generate the right inner conditions—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—your seed will have the right nutrients to thrive. No matter how thick the clouds may be outside or how dark the night, the light is always shining within, ready to illuminate the seed of your true Self and nourish its growth. God made man in His own image, and man has been trying to return the favor ever since! In other words, we keep trying to understand God in human, material terms, like some anthropomorphic being sitting on a cloud.
But this is an overly literal interpretation of ancient teachings. This divine inheritance includes our ability to decide what we focus our awareness on i. We have been born under a case of mistaken identity. And almost everything we see, hear, and experience—almost everything produced by society—keeps us in the dark about who and what we truly are. Our mistaken identity is that we are merely human beings having an occasional spiritual experience; that we are born in sin, circumscribed by our personality, a product of our culture and family, conceived on a certain date, destined to die.
We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Sin, as it turns out, is not some demonic quality of our soul; the word is an archery term that means to miss the mark. The only original sin we were born with is this false belief about who we are. This human incarnation is a magnificent thing, like a work of art, with the potential to reveal great beauty and meaning.
Your true Self is, as Genesis 1: Everything you need for your total fulfillment is already within you, constituted as a part of this essential Self. And when you are more identified with your true Self—and learn to depend on it for everything—all your needs will emerge without the effort and struggle so common to the human experience. I remember the first time this true self principle became real for me.
It was before I stood on that stage I spoke about in the beginning of this book, and before I had the words to explain it. It was an initiation, something we all have at a certain point—often many points—on the path of personal growth. At a certain point, I had gone through my savings, had no work or future prospects, and had exhausted all external means of support.
I was left with nothing but my spiritual insights—literally living on a prayer. As I was losing sight of my true self, I was also, to be honest, pretty pissed off at God. One day, after groveling for another rent extension from my landlord, I sat in my worn faux-leather meditation chair and laid down the gauntlet: God, either there really is a true spiritual Self with everything it needs to fulfill its purpose, or this is all a bunch of bull. I meditated and prayed and beseeched and surrendered, trying to reconnect to this essential Self I had touched in my brush-with-death experience in that coral reef.
Wave after wave of emotion rolled through me, threatening to drown me again, with no end in sight. And in that moment, it was like a pressure valve opened inside my body, draining me of all anxiety. I crawled into bed and fell asleep. For the next few days, I went about my business, actually forgetting that I had a problem. It was my former acting agent, calling me with an audition. I immediately knew it was the answer my true self had trusted would come and accepted the audition. There are a few key elements to this experience that I want to highlight.
I just reconnected to that part of me that was already whole, my true self, had a feeling of my innate completeness, and then surrendered my control of the outcome. By making this connection, I cultivated the conditions in consciousness that allowed it to naturally emerge.
Had I tried to visualize the outcome, I might have fantasized a variety of things, from getting a job as a spiritual teacher or writer for which I was unqualified , to winning the lottery or receiving an inheritance from a long-lost uncle one can always dream. At first, as in my case, doing so might help you pay your rent and put food on the table—meeting your basic survival needs is often one of the initial results of making this connection. But the underlying principle has more profound implications.
The realization of your essential Self, and the resulting activation of the Law of Emergence, can transform every aspect of your life—and those lives that touch you—ending conflict, dissolving fear, and creating a world that works for the highest good of everyone. We spin our wheels trying to come up with solutions to all of our social, political, personal, and professional problems.
We create new policies, more restrictive laws, bigger prisons, and more powerful weapons to attack the issues—or just twist ourselves into knots trying to solve things. Besides these broader implications, an understanding of our true Self versus our human self is a primary condition in the successful activation of the Law of Emergence.
To the extent you identify with the part of you that is changing—the human self—you create resistance to the part of you that is emerging—the true spiritual Self—much the way an acorn would if it identified with its shell instead of the oak. This prevents our evolution. We keep trying to solve the problems created by the human mind and its limited or distorted perceptions—problems such as separation, self-preservation, competition, and conflict—using the same mind-set that created them.
But you can never solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it. When, however, you identify more with your changeless, boundless True Self, you stay rooted in your core, even as your human incarnation and external world continue to change form and reveal your ever-expanding good.
You no longer live from the level on which the problems were created. You stop doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. You enter into a peace and fulfillment no longer dependent on external conditions, but supported and fueled by the whole universe. While this is a liberating truth for our true selves and a great step up the evolutionary ladder, it can also be an overwhelming realization. A lot of causes have been set in motion—how will we ever reverse all their effects? Mercifully, there is a higher law: From this consciousness, your past does not determine your future—neither past mistakes nor past lives.
Things are not linear or bound by space and time. This underlying intelligence seems to be simultaneously everywhere omnipresent , with a knowledge of everything omniscient , and is the only power there is omnipotent. In short, it could be described as an omni-active intelligence with infinite organizing power in a field of unbounded potentiality. That also happens to be how many mystics, prophets, and, to some extent, religions have described God—and how many cutting-edge scientists are describing consciousness. Rather than there being interactivity among all things—the basis of cause and effect—there is an omni-activity.
Here we arrive back at our central idea: Things are not unfolding by chance. You are not at the mercy of other causes—things are not happening to you; they are happening through you. There is an underlying order or pattern that is already perfect and is seeking to emerge from within your soul, just waiting for the right conditions. Grace is the realization that no matter what appears on the surface of life—no matter what has come before, or what appears to be lost, when you tap back into this perfect seed pattern, into your true self, it will emerge again, fresh, vital, overflowing with new possibilities.
Furthermore, whereas traditional thinking often dictates that the effects you experience are limited by the causes you can personally set in motion at a human level—usually determined by external conditions seemingly beyond your control—when you align with the perfect pattern seeking to emerge from within, it will not only move you personally into right action, but move your entire world if necessary to reveal your greater purpose.
A familiar Old Testament passage in Isaiah As we consider how Grace works, we arrive at an inescapable conclusion: In other words, you are this infinite, omnipresent something that is forever unfolding. Not the human you—who was born, has a history, and will eventually dissolve back into dust—but the real you, the true spiritual Self that is always emerging. This is the ultimate truth illuminated by all great religions, spiritual masters, and, in many ways, the laws of the physical world in which we live, but which has often, even with good intentions, been obscured by an overly literal, materialistic interpretation of these ancient teachings.
With this understanding of your true Self and the power of Grace, you are no longer beholden to external powers or authority; you are no longer a prisoner of past experience or present conditions. Combined with an understanding that you are not a limited, physical person, but part of the larger fabric of existence—like a wave upon the ocean, never separate—you are now equipped with a bold new picture of how reality works. You can release the struggle of true self-improvement, manifestation, and attraction. Instead, you can surrender to this deeper sense of harmony and order, and begin to consciously activate the Law of Emergence in powerful, life-changing ways.
He has trained top executives at Fortune companies from American Express to Disney in empowered leadership and communications, and has coached celebrities and media professionals, including Oscar and Emmy winners, on creating conscious entertainment.