Good to Great to Grand

Karen is offering a 4-week class in July based on the book "When Fear Speaks, Listen" by Dennis Merritt Jones. The class will focus on learning to successfully deal with fear and get the messages that fear wants us to know about.

Karen discusses the Centers for Spiritual Living's global theme for May - "good to great to grand." She relates this to her own experience in sales, where she would offer 3 package options - good, better, best. She believes we all have the potential to live a "grand" life, and shares ideas on how to achieve that.

Karen explains her favorite spiritual principle, the "creative process", which involves self-awareness, mindfulness, contemplation, and gratitude. She emphasizes the importance of self-discovery and being willing to change our thinking in order to create the life we want.

Karen affirms a "good to great to grand" journey for the listener, and encourages them to support her "Fearlessly Feral Living" ministry through financial donations, which she says will come back to them multiplied.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:05

Well, hello, hello, hello. This is Reverend Karen coming at you at the end of the month of May. We've just had an absolutely wonderful Memorial Day weekend out here in northern Nevada. For the first time in recent in however long I can remember, it did not snow on Memorial Day weekend, and that's a big, huge deal. And before I get started on our little journey today from good to great to grand, I want to tell you about a class I'm offering. It's coming up in July. It's four weeks. It's based on a yummy, yummy book by Dennis Merritt Jones called When Fear Speaks, listen. And the premise behind the book, and by the way, the premise behind Fearlessly Feral Living is not that we can live fearlessly, in spite of my name. No, fear is always going to be there. But we could learn how to successfully deal with it. And not only that, we can get the messages that fear wants us to know about. So that's what the book is all about. When fear speaks, listen. If you want to register for the class, I'm going to be putting the link in the show notes. And it's going to be on July. Wednesday, July the 10th from 3 to 5 p.m. And every Wednesday in July after that. So it's Wednesday, July the 10th through Wednesday, July the 31st from 3 to 5 p.m. Pacific time via Zoom so you can attend wherever you wish. So I hope you will take advantage of that. This book just came out and I'm very excited about it. And it fits so well in with what fearlessly fair living is all about that I just simply had to take advantage of it. So onward to our topic today, and we are going to go on a little journey, and I'm very excited about that. This is a journey from good to great to grand. And in order to take that journey, we're going to talk about my favorite, my favorite principle in the entire world, except for maybe oneness, my favorite principle called the creative process. But first, I have to do the introduction. So here we go. Welcome to Fearlessly Feral Living, broadcasting to you from the Woogie Ranch out here in the back 40 of northwestern Nevada, where I'm a half an hour away from the nearest gas station and the nearest grocery store. Our mission here at Fearlessly Feral Living is to provide a strong and unshakable inner foundation that works for long-term successful 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 I got the title, Good to Great to Grand, from the Centers for Spiritual Living global theme for the month of May. I don't know if you're aware of this, but with Centers for Spiritual Living, every month there's a different theme, and we get to talk about that if we so choose. It's a bit like herding cats with Centers for Spiritual Living. You can do it if you want, but you don't have to. I usually love the topics. So good to great to grand is a grand topic. It's a grand topic. And when I saw the title, I was reminded of a sales thing that I learned way back in the days when I still owned and operated a photography studio. Now can I always considered myself to be a little weak in sales, and so I was constantly taking sales classes. Excuse me. And the sales gurus back then told us to design three packages. Any more choices, and our clients would get confused and go away because things were too complicated. Three seemed to be the perfect number. And they told us to design these packages with good, better, and best in mind. Well, then they threw in a kicker, which never made a lot of sense to me. They said best should be something we hardly ever sold. If we sold it, we were pricing it too cheaply. And, you know, somewhere along the journey in my 30-year career as a professional photographer, I picked up, I came back home to Science of Mine and I started learning about it. And that concept of not selling my biggest package because it was too cheap, that didn't make any sense to me. I wanted to sell that big package. I wanted to sell it. So I disagreed with them on that, but I usually had just three packages. And today I still think that way. You know, I own a wedding officiate business now, and I have three packages. And guess what? The best one, the top-tier level one, that's the one I sell the most of. And that's what I'm aiming for, and that's what I'm doing. And I'm very happy with what I'm charging for that package. So, what about good, better, and best in our personal lives? Or as the title says, good, great, grand. I believe that we have the potential to live a grand life. And if you're not living your grandest life ever, listen on. Because I have some ideas about how to go about doing just that. And I spoke earlier about the creative process, and that's the spiritual principle that I want to talk about today. And oh, I'm really excited today because I got a lot of stuff going on. My latest book, How to Live Fearlessly Feral, is done. It's been edited. It's going to get formatted. I'm talking with someone tomorrow about formatting the book. Once it's formatted, I'm going to design the cover and off it goes to being published. In my new book, scheduled to be out in fall of this year. There's a section on the creative process. Here's what I said. We use treatment, which is affirmative prayer, a continued practice of self-awareness with a little mindfulness and contemplation thrown in, and we mix it up with gratitude and voila. We've created something really good in our lives. In other words, something really grand. So that's what I'm going to talk about today: self-awareness, mindfulness, contemplation, gratitude, and we've got that creative process happening. Yeah, the creative process is really sort of a combo pack of principle and practice. And that might be why I love it so much. And I'm sorry about the doggy noises in the background. The cat is not doing what she wants him to do. Any me, hush. So I love the creative process so much that I used to do three-day retreats on this thing. I live the creative process. I think it. After personal self-awareness, it's my most favorite spiritual practice. So let's look at these beginning steps on this journey from good to grand and see what this is all about. The journey begins really not with treatment, affirmative prayer, but with self-observation. We observe what is happening in our lives without judgment to cultivate our inner self-awareness that is so essential to successful living. Hear me when I say that, guys. Inner self-awareness is essential to living successfully. So there you have it. I could stop there, but I won't. There's more. Ernest Holmes said this there is an inner life into which we may plunge, an inner consciousness in which we may bathe. As water purifies itself by flowing, so our inner realization of the flow of life through us purifies the stagnant pools. Isn't that a wonderful quote? I really can't stress enough the importance of knowing oneself. As Ernest Holmes said, we plunge into this inner consciousness and we bathe there. Like sitting in a hot tub or a warm mountain spring pool. It's actually quite comforting to take that inner plunge. Although I know it doesn't seem that way at first. I talk to people about going within. I ask them what they're feeling. They go, What? What is that? No, I don't know what I'm feeling. And not only that, I don't want to know. They consider their inner consciousness a dangerous neighborhood and they avoid going there at all costs. But guess what? The truth is that we don't go there alone. We have this thing, this source, this energy, this spirit, this God, whatever you want to call it, that is always with us. So we're not alone when we're going into that inner neighborhood of our minds. We're not alone when we're exploring what it is we're feeling at any given moment. We're not alone when we ask ourselves those sometimes difficult questions. I guarantee it. Once there, you will find that it's not such a bad place. Because remember, we're always going there without judgment. Here's what Ernest Holmes had to say about that. The road to self-discovery often calls for the clearing away of the underbrush of ignorance, fear, superstition, and a sense of isolation, which has made us feel that we were unworthy, unheld, and lost. In the divine providence of good, salvation is unnecessary, but self-discovery is essential. See, he says it too. We do not save that which was lost. We merely discover that which needs to be found. Sometimes I just want to squish Ernest Holmes. If he were alive, I'd hunt him down and squish him because the way he puts things is so wonderful. So we go in, not with an eye towards saving ourselves from bad things, but with an eye of curiosity to discover what wants to be discovered within ourselves. Guys, we have to know ourselves in order to make good decisions about our lives. We have to know ourselves in order to respond thoughtfully and positively rather than react, sometimes not so positively when things happen. In other words, it is in knowing ourselves that we are able to take responsibility for ourselves and our lives. And in taking responsibility for our lives, we then get to create our lives. So, with a regular, consistent, and persistent practice of self-observation comes an entrance into the creative process. Because honestly, one doesn't usually go meandering about in the inner recesses of one's thoughts and beliefs unless something has happened to force one to go there, at least at first. You know, I started self-introspection, self-awareness practice when I was forced to do so. In the process of learning how to live life without drinking, when I was getting sober, they said, you gotta go within and do this thing called an inventory, and you've got to explore inside of you. And I went, ooh. Now, the only feelings I could identify when I first got sober were anger and rage. So you can understand how going within was not on my list of things to do, but I wanted to stay sober more than anything else in the entire universe, so I did it anyway. And I soon became to realize what a gift the practice of introspection was. I came to realize what a gift knowing myself was, because from the principle of oneness, you know, God is everywhere present, also and especially in us, within, in us, as us. And by going within, I got to know that God pretty well because it's in me. So, and I got to appreciate my own unique manifestation of that God. Going within is a wonderful practice, like I say, and like Ernest Holmes says, it's essential, but it's oh so beautiful and oh so wonderful. So do go within. And again, I lost my place, I went off script there, guys. We go into this creative process, and yeah, it's uncomfortable at first. And honestly, our choices are you know not to do it, and then we don't have empowerment, we don't have freedom, we don't be able to live, we can't live free from the the way that fear limits us. We can't do any of that stuff if we don't go within. So we go within, we discover some things about ourselves, we discover some wonderful things about ourselves, and then we might discover some things about ourselves that we don't really appreciate very much. We become aware of this. So let's say we go within and we found a self-imposed limitation, something that we do in life, some way that we react in life, some pattern that we repeat over and over and over again, and we become aware of it. What then? Well, I happen to know that there are people in this world who stop there, they look at it and they say, Okay, I'm aware. I'm aware of it. Yep, I'm aware. But then they stop. I don't understand that because they stop dead in the water, and I'm like, no, that's not the way this teaching works, dudes. There's a reason for that phrase, change your thinking, change your life. If you're in science of mind, you know this. If you're in science of mind and you're aware of a limitation that you've got in your life, whether it's a pattern or a way of thinking that's limiting you, and you don't do anything to change it, you are arguing for your own self-imposed limitations. If you're new to science of mind, here's the kicker. When we change our thinking, we change our life. You know, that phrase is kind of a cliche now. The advertisers got a hold of it, the commercials use it, and it's not very flattering the way that they use it, but I still love that. You know, set change of thinking, change your life. It's been a tagline for centers for spiritual living for a long time. And it's true because this teaching called Science of Mind is all about personal empowerment. This teaching is a liberation theology, and it means, folks, that by using the tools given us in this teaching, we can become liberated from our self-imposed weaknesses, and we empower ourselves to live grander than ever. And we do so by changing our thinking, and we change our thinking by becoming aware of what we're thinking. So we start there, we become aware of what we're thinking, we become aware of a pattern that might be limiting us or a way of reacting that might be limiting us, and we go, okay, we got this thing, I got this thing here. It's limiting me. I don't want it anymore. And so we make a decision to get rid of it. We say, no more of that. We're done with that. Okay, what then? Well, here's where the creative process starts. Here is where things get really yummy and beautiful because we've just created a void in ourselves. We've decided we're no longer going to think that way, we're no longer going to act that way, we're no longer going to continue on engaging in this self-imposed limitation of a pattern we've been doing. We've created a void. Now, when we create a void, here's where choice comes in. Because we don't just sit back and wait for the void to fill. No, we've got a little bit more work to do. We get to choose what we want to fill that void with. So we choose it. And we get to play and envision and vision and do all those wonderful, yummy spiritual practices like contemplation and meditation, and we open ourselves up to something new. We might play a game, I call in my book, What If. Others call it curiosity. I like what if better. We might ask ourselves, what if? What if I went there? What if I did that? What if this happened or that happened? And I reacted or responded in a different way. And perhaps even more important, we can say to ourselves, well, that happened. And we pause when agitated and we ask ourselves, what if I responded this way instead of that way? Do you see what I'm getting at here? When we decide to change our thinking, when we decide to stop doing something that's limiting us, we create a hole within ourselves, and now we get to choose what we're going to fill that hole up with. We get to choose. And so we practice some observation and some curiosity, and we begin to see. Okay, I can now start thinking like this instead of that. I can now start acting like this instead of that. I can now do this new pattern instead of that one. We enter this place where we embrace all that transformative potential that lies within each and every one of us. And then we discover that life is good and very good. When we do that, we are well on the way from good to great to grand. And we get to grand by using more spiritual tools such as visioning and contemplation and curiosity and meditation. And when we are engaged in these practices, we open ourselves up to what wants to be born within us. We open ourselves up to a new way of showing up in the world. We might not consciously know what that is just yet in the beginning of this process, but through the power of oneness, there's a part of us that does know. And we access that part of us and we ask for clarity and we ask for what new wants to be born or what new wants to be known here. And believe me, when we do that, the ideas come. And I always like to say the yes is in the idea. We come up with how we want to show up in the world, and so we become aware and we decide no more of that, and we create a void, and then we are a choice as to what to place in that void. That's the creative process in a nutshell. We choose, we decide to eliminate parts of us that limit us in our lives, and we release with gratitude. We vision and we meditate and we ask for answers. And when the answers come, we then decide how we want to install that new way of being in our lives. And in most cases, it will require conscious effort. Like changing any other habit, it requires conscious effort. Regular reminders that we are not thinking that way anymore. Instead, we're thinking this way. Now you can use whatever little things you want to use to remind you that you've changed your thinking and you want to keep it changed. Some people like to take post-it notes and stick them everywhere. I like memes, and I have memes on my phone, and I have memes on my wall, and I have little meme, little things that are posted on my everywhere, like they're on my fridge, they're they're everywhere. I have daily affirmations. This is how we can do this stuff. We have little reminders. We might have a prayer partner or a support system and have someone text us a reminder every day. Remember, you're changing your thinking. So we do that. It doesn't take very long. It starts out like that. Once we get the get into a new habit, then it becomes habit. We don't have to think about it so much. So that's how we enter the creative process, which is so wonderfully described by Ernest Holmes. We become aware of something that isn't working for us, we decide to change it, we decide what we want to change it to, and then we change it. That's it in a nutshell. So I am affirming a good to great to grand, hugely, way successful journey for you. The results in living a new life and in showing up in new ways that support you in your best and highest vision. And I do thank you very much for your listening and your support. And I know that any support that you provide comes back to you multiplied. And I am knowing fearlessly feral living for you and for me. And fearlessly Feral Living is a focus ministry of Centers for Spiritual Living. And your financial support not only comes back to you multiplied, but it is so much appreciated and fully tax deductible. So there's links in the show notes, the ways you can support us, but basically you can see all those ways at my website at fearlesslyferal.org. You can support the podcast in Buzzsprout, which is my hosting platform. There's a little button that says support the podcast. It's pretty simple. Support the podcast. You click that button and you can enter a monthly amount in there, like $2, even $2 helps. Or you can donate on our PayPal page. And the link again is in the show notes. So thank you very much for listening. I very much appreciate your time and your presence on this earth. And I am knowing fearlessly fair a living for me and for you.