Chosen to Be Ourselves

Rev. Cynthia James, well known throughout Centers for Spiritual Living and other New Thought communities, invites each of us into inquiry, introspection and integration. In the February 2023 Science of Mind magazine she says, “I believe my mission is to support the awakening of humanity. I get to be open to how Spirit uses my creativity in that process. The question, for me, became how I can be open.”

Her premise seems simple: “We are all chosen to be ourselves,” she says, “to see ourselves, to dare to be bold.”

She admits to the emotional toll of writing her most recent book, Does My Voice Matter? A Journey of Self-Discovery, Authenticity and Empowerment. In it, she tells the stories of her life, a life that unfolded just six blocks from where George Floyd was killed, where, as she says, “He wasn't the first but one of so many.” She says she had “lots of moments of tears” while writing the book, “tears of my history, tears of how it resonates now.

“I had to let out the tears to reveal what was underneath,” she explains. “If you feel those feelings, then something beautiful emerges. And that's where the healing happens.”

As Michael Bernard Beckwith says, “Pain pushes until the vision pulls.” James describes this as a “both-and” situation: We each live within our small bubble, integrated into the big bubble. We all have gifts to deliver, but first we must find our authentic selves before we can stop hiding our gifts within that structure. We must embrace the knowledge that we are, indeed, chosen to be ourselves.

Life in the Spirit:

One Woman's Quest for Self-Recovery

By bell hooks

Lately, when I am asked to talk about what has sustained me in my struggle for self-recovery, I have been more willing to talk openly about a life lived in the Spirit than in the past. …

Living a life in the Spirit, a life where our habits of being enable us to hear our inner voices, to comprehend reality with both our hearts and our minds, puts us in touch with divine essence. Practicing the art of loving is one way we sustain contact with our higher self. …

Living a life in the Spirit, whatever our practices, can help Black women sustain ourselves as we chart new life journeys. Many of us have lives different from those any other generation of Black women have known. Nurturing our spiritual selves, we can find within the courage to sustain new journeys and the will to invent new ways to live and view the world. …

I gain courage from my spiritual life, from a sense that I am called in writing to give testimony. That it is my spiritual vocation. …

When we heal the woundedness inside us, when we attend to the inner, love-seeking, love-starved child, we make ourselves ready to enter more fully into community. We can experience the totality of life because we have become fully life-affirming. Like our ancestors, using our powers to the fullest, we share the secrets of healing and come to know sustained joy.

—Excerpted from the February 2023 Science of Mind magazine, originally printed in Science of Mind magazine, November 1995, by arrangement with South End Press from bell hooks' book Sisters of the Yam, copyright 1993.

The Prayer That Gets Results

By Ernest Holmes

The best way is to approach the matter simply and directly, and see what we can do to convince our own inner thoughts. If we can arrive at the assurance that when our thought is changed, something good will happen, we are on the right track. We shall have the courage to go on.

If our prayers today do not reach a place of complete faith, we can know this: that every right affirmation we have made, every meditation of our heart and mind that tends to bring us to a more complete acceptance is storing up within us a growing sense of certainty that must and finally will overcome every obstruction. For, you see, the obstructions are within us. They are not outside. If they were outside, we couldn't cope with them.

But since they are within and since they are things of thought, we can handle them. Perhaps it would be good for us then to formulate a program that we know we can carry out and for us to take definite time each day to get away from the pressure of the conditions around us and get quiet and become peaceful, and in the solitude of our own thought, quietly affirm the presence of the good we desire.

—Excerpted from the February 2023 Science of Mind magazine.