A Life of Trust

“When we learn to trust the Universe,
we shall be happy, prosperous and well.”
— Dr. Ernest Holmes

Well-known throughout Religious Science, Dr. Roger and Erica Teel offer living examples of walking in trust. The February issue of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine offers an in-depth look at how the lives and relationship of these two grew in trust across their years together.

“Sometimes you have to open up to serendipity,” Roger says. “I think that what confines people is getting caught up in trying to live out a design of life that isn’t in the natural flow of what wants to emerge for them, of what life really wants to become.”

Erica adds, “You risk more by never taking the chance of the opportunity, by allowing fear to get the best of you.”

Writer Trisha Gance describes the Teel’s relationship as “a true example of love based in Spirit.”

 “The only thing we can control is the direction and quality of our consciousness,” Roger says. “Trying to control conditions creates a difficult life based on fear. Higher consciousness paves the way for more harmonious conditions to evolve.”

“And,” Erica adds, “love is the flow. Trust then is built on the foundation of love.”

Podcasts Inspire Spiritual Activism

We each learn in different ways, with preferences for how we acquire and digest information. Some of those choices are natural learning methods; others can be based on schedule and activities.

For those dedicated to podcasts, we offer the following list of opportunities to be inspired to spiritual activism:

• The Gathering, produced monthly by Repairers of the Breach, focuses on themes from the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-gathering/id1248060448?mt=2
• The Rising: Spirituality for Revolution, produced and hosted by Rebekah Berndt and Chelsea MacMillan, covers spirituality, activism, anti-racism and other timely topics. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rising-spirituality-for-revolution/id1286866457?mt=2
• Healing Justice, produced and hosted weekly by organizer and healing practitioner Kate Werning, investigates collective healing and social change. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/healing-justice-podcast/id1308078502?mt=2
• Podcast for a Just World, produced by United Church of Christ and hosted by Rev. Tracy Howe Wispeley, gears its messages to churches and communities of faith. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/podcast-for-a-just-world/id1318092254?mt=2

WOOP: A Brain-Enhancing Strategy

Visualization is a key tenant of New Thought philosophy. What you visualize, you create.

But is it really so simple? In the February issue of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine, our columnists Mark Waldman and Andrew Newberg, M.D., offer “one of the most powerful brain-enhancing strategies we have” — WOOP. The initials stand for Wish-Outcome-Obstacle-Plan, and it works like this:

1. Visualize your wish, goal or desire in great detail.
2. Next, visualize all the benefits you would accrue if you were to achieve these wishes.
3. Then, in what the columnists describe as an essential step, “visualize all of the obstacles that are stopping you from attaining that goal. If you can’t imagine all those potential problems,” they write, “you can’t create a solution to overcome them if they arise.”
4. Finally, visualize a strategy that moves you toward your goal. And write it down.

The results? Waldman and Newberg describe how WOOP participants fared after four months. Some doubled the amount of exercise they did; others improved their diets. Chronic pain patients became more physically active. Others improved relationships or increased their levels of compassion.

“Imagine what we could all accomplish,” they suggest, “to manifest a better world, deeper spiritual connection, one WOOP at a time.”

The Whole Human Family

— Dr. Ernest Holmes

No two persons need think or act alike. Each is an individual. The rosebush is not a grapevine, nor is someone from China a New Englander. But the rosebush and the grapevine are rooted in one common soil — they draw their whole being from it.

And the Chinese and the New Englanders are rooted in one Divine Mind, which has seen fit to make each a little different while keeping them all in its own spirit.

There is plenty of room for variety in groups and in nations — different thoughts and ideas, different ways of living, different political, economic and cultural systems. We need this variety. But back of it all we need a sympathy and an understanding with each other, just because we are all human beings. It isn’t necessary in the immediate family life that each member think and act alike. There may be four sons and four daughters, and each may go into a different profession. And this is exactly as it should be, for this is the way God made us.

But there is a spirit of helpfulness and cooperation in a happy family that promotes the well-being of each member, permitting each to be a little different, while at the same time finding common purposes back of their united action.

So it is with the larger family of the human race. We are individuals wherever we go. …

So, you and I want to take our part in the building of a better world, a world where there is peace, prosperity and goodwill without coercion. A world where there is individual and collective security and freedom without fear. A world where there is unity without uniformity. A world where each may run as fast and as far as he wishes without interfering with somebody else.

— Excerpted from “The Whole Human Family,” as heard on Dr. Holmes’ radio show “This Thing Called Life” on Sunday, May 28, 1950, and as published in the February issue of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine.

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