2000-09-06-Family of Love, Discipline of Love

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Topic: Family of Love, Discipline of Love

Group: Costa Rica TeaM

Facilitators

Teacher: Legion, Alana

TR: S. Butterfield

Session 1

Lesson

Love

The greatest challenge is to love each individual member of the family uniquely, as you wish to be loved, and yet to include them as part of the commonality. There are some you can love easily. Your vibrations synchronize with their vibrations. Your unique sentiments and interests balance out their interests and sentiments, or mix well, and blend. But what about those who rub you the wrong way? Or simply do not show any interest in you? Or those you can not understand? How to love them? You do not grasp their unique loveable qualities and you find no hook to hang your love upon. Now you are faced with loving without reward.

The gift of love that is given to you by God allows you to love and therein lie all rewards. The birth family is unique because you are related to them throughout your life. You have the opportunity over a span of years to discover that your love runs deeper than surface disagreements or differences, and deeper than your inability to understand.

Suppose your brother is one who speaks, walks, dresses differently. Speaks, walks, dresses in a manner that irritates you, or causes you discomfort. You have customs in place to accommodate that: you can disown, disinherit, divorce, excommunicate. Exercising this right of association, or to disassociate when one chooses, is a vital option if you are to have free will. Yet you are enjoined to love one another as God loves you.

You can love from afar, but the real stretch is to love with acceptance. Love is a pattern of acceptance, contains within its many qualities, acceptance. Anything less is not love. You may not choose to live in the same manner or style, but you accept that they do. The subtle thing about acceptance is that love creeps in, and sometimes floods. Once you have given up your insistence that others must fit, you may discover that you love the mis-fit.

Now comes strength of character. If you have rejected someone, it is not surprising to discover that others do too. When you join others in this reaction, you entertain a certain camaraderie, albeit based on negative overtones. But if you go along practicing the stillness, practicing love, practicing acceptance, suddenly you find that you have slipped out of that club of rejection and must stand alone, accepting this odd person without company. It is even possible that this person shows no interest in you, offers no reward for all your acceptance and love. It is tempting then to retreat.

The true reward is the discovery that you have grown. You are no longer your self, you have expanded into the Self.

Now you turn toward your former club and discover that you have many criticisms of that group, that narrow-minded crowd. You may find that you need to move into new circles of friends and intimates in order to continue to grow. This is certainly all right. One does not stand still in life, although it is wise to move forward without burning the bridge behind you. There is only one bridge over troubled waters, and that is the bridge of love, God¹s love. The bridge of love remains intact no matter where you go. If it did not, you would not be able to go forward, there would be no bridge to stand on, to traverse. Now you discover mercy and grace. To leave one another with love, requires mercy and grace. Of course this must include forgiveness, for even the best of partings require some forgiveness to assure the loss is healed by love.

And so you traverse your bridge, you pass through life, with some close to you, physically, intellectually, emotionally. And some quite distant, in fact they may become only a memory. The true life, that is, the life dedicated to God¹s love and the Spirit of Truth, will carry those memories in your heart and mind with love.

Session 2

October 1, 2000

Opening

TR : I dedicate my words and this time to the doing of God's will. I dedicate myself to learning, to growing. I ask that God¹s love come through me and to all of us for the greater good of those we know and love. I welcome the teachers to help us.

Alana : And so, we are here to help you. We are glad to be here and once again. We welcome each one of you to our circle of love and bless each of you. I welcome you now into my Heart Room. This is Alana, and I presume you recognize me. Yes?

D : Yes. Welcome Alana.

Lesson

Security

Alana : Thank you. We were very interested in your discussion. You spoke, among other things, of your sense of invulnerability, of being protected. This I would assure you is very real. We do not, of course, ask you therefore to drop your awareness, your sensitivity to who you are and who others present themselves to be. We ask you always to co-operate with us in the effort to bring God¹s love and the power of God¹s love into your world. As you do this you grow increasingly strong, and you grow in your sense of our strength and our power to be with you in time of need. You begin to understand that we do indeed have great powers of protection. Those who surrender to God¹s love always experience an unquestioned sense, or faith, in all being well. Nevertheless, it is still your task to practice the stillness, to enter into daily prayer for the well-being of all. And that includes, of course, your individual selves. You meet from time to time those who have not yet opened their hearts or their minds to allow God¹s light and love to be a guiding force in their lives. They often choose different directions from the path of love. It is their fear that misguides them. You can not expect to escape the need to pay attention. It is a co-operative effort between ourselves and your individual selves to allow us to protect you from harm¹s way.

It is also a co-operative effort between each of you to not allow negativity to go pell mell down the path of life¹s ventures. It takes your concerted effort to substitute negative thoughts with gratitude and love. There are times when your negative thoughts become so repetitive, that you can not even imagine something positive, loving, or new, to replace those thoughts. When that happens I ask you please to remember me and the Heart Room. Step in immediately wherever you are and pray with all your heart for God¹s love to pour within you. Your negative thoughts, I promise you, are of a different construction and they do not belong in your legacy. Do not place them on another¹s head. Each of you has great enough difficulty making it through life with confidence and joy, without being blessed by one another¹s presumptions and negativity. Legion would speak with you now.

Discipline

Legion : I would speak to you again about the Discipline of Love. It is comparable to the man on the watch when a ship is at sea in the darkness, perhaps a storm threatens nearby. The image of a storm is my attempt to express what it is for each of you to live a life in which, for God¹s joy to be fully brought to realization, you are required to discipline yourselves in the handling of fear, doubt, and emotion.

The discipline of love requires strengthening your body, strengthening your mind, and strengthening your respect for yourselves and one another. We are on watch all the time. We have the continual, glorious, unbounded light and love of God showered upon us at all times in such a way that we do not need to wrestle with fear, doubt, and emotion. You live on a different planet, in a different way. We endeavor to contribute to your lives so that you truly may experience the surety and confidence of God¹s love and guidance, at least to some measure in kind as we.

It is a discipline for you to meet together as now. It is a discipline for you to practice re-creating within your minds, and in your practice of the stillness, the reality of the Heart Room. It is a discipline for you to be tender, speak tenderly to one another. I understand this is difficult sometimes, for you find yourself needing to express an emotion, a belief, a suspicion, a dissertation that you have created, and you feel the need to do this with great force. Or you feel that you need to speak in such a way that you cannot be questioned, nor allow doubt that you speak the truth. You must understand that the truth has more than one voice, and the truth comes embraced with God¹s love. It is the discipline of your tongue that I speak about today, as tenderly as I, Legion, am capable of speaking. We understand the difficulties of growth. You do not always know your self, much less do you know another. And so to learn the discipline of voice, tongue, mind and body, we continue to emphasize bringing you into the Heart Room. We shall do that now.

Exercise

I ask you, if you have not already, please step into Alana¹s heart room now. See those lines of loving energy, of God¹s love and light, growing from your heads, from your sides. Open you back, open those holes, let them be safely opened for us to breathe our love into your bodies to heal them. Let our love pour in through your bodies to pass through across to the other. Feel those lines of energy pour through the holes, into your feet, straight through your toes into the toes of those across from you. Now sit inside this Heart Room with Alana and me embracing all of you. Now bring into the Heart Room those you wish to love, those who need your love. See your selves in here. See your loved ones in here. See those you have difficulty with in here. Shake your negative thoughts inside this Heart Room and let me blow my love through them. Open your mouths and allow Alana¹s and my love to pour through. Let Devina tenderly touch your tongue with her magnificent poetry. Alana : I am Alana, welcoming you to speak, if you wish, for we are here.

Dialogue

S : I, personally, am incredibly grateful for the sense of protection that I have been feeling in every part of my life. Something that I find helps me, when I am tempted to feel fear, is knowing that you are with me, but also remembering the statement that "the outcome is assured" no matter what happens here. I find that extremely comforting. I am much less fearful. I thank you from the bottom of my heart (there were difficulties with the tape)

Alana : Yes, I do wish to respond to you, my beloved. Your growing lack of fear is something so beautiful to behold that it would be very difficult for me to resist being around you. It is much like those beautiful images your cameras create that show the blossoming of a rose, petal upon petal, darkening shades of color revealing themselves, opening fragrance moving from the center to the world, to those who pass by, to those who pause to contemplate. It is a blessing that you, who has so long felt the captive of fear, should now captivate others with your blessings of love, blessings brought to you by sincerity of seeking, and that you should now be so willing to share your joy at such liberation.

It is my pleasure to be grateful to you, S, that you, in spite of many questions, doubts, and even my beloved, your need for temporary secrecy, nevertheless you welcomed me. These co-operative ventures between God¹s love, our spiritual efforts, and your spiritual work, bring gratitude into everyone¹s heart. Thank you.

I am pleased to speak to everyone, yes? (Yes.)

D: I¹d love to talk, but we have three other shy people here and I¹d love to give them a chance. Is that ok, Alana?

Alana : You might like to share with them your vulnerability with me, yes?

D : Oh. I¹ll give it a try. Let me see if I caught it right, you are suggesting the possibility that I share with this group my vulnerability with you? (Yes.) I was afraid of that. (laughter) I¹m not sure what Alana is getting at, except for me to share with you what I mentioned earlier in our weather report, which is that my usual inner dialog, or talk with God, has been with Father, or to my elder brother, Jesus. I sometimes feel in touch with my thought adjuster, the inner spirit of Father, and when I speak to Father it is a very intimate experience. My usual discourse with Father has to do with the beauty that I observe. I am saying, Thank you, Father, Thank you, Father, Thank you, Father, when I see beautiful things. And then sometimes when I am very disturbed emotionally, I am also talking with a great deal of intensity with Father. But something happened when these teachers came on, Alana, at first, was very much in the background, she didn¹t seem to be as vivid. Legion came on very strongly, and Suzi had some adjustments to make to the nature of his vibration. Alana came gradually to the forefront for me, I began to see her beauty, and I began to hear the way she spoke, and I began to see it¹s like telling about a love affair, this is making me feel shy in a way...the first thing I did with Alana was when I was having trouble quitting smoking. I talked to Alana, and I said, "I¹d like to smoke you, Alana!" Like Legion said today, "be in this heart room and open your toes, and open the holes in your back, and open your mouths and let us breathe in this love." Alana said to me at this time, "Breathe me. Breathe me."

Breath

I¹ve had experiences when I breathe in the Mother¹s love, the Divine Mother¹s love, because it is my paradigm that she is everywhere present, so that she¹s here and we can breathe her love if we wish to. And so I began to breathe Alana when I would have those experiences when I wanted a nicotine hit. Instead of going for that, I¹d stop, and I¹d think I need something to satisfy that urge. I just began to breathe Alana, is what¹s happened. And it is this marvelous experience where I just let her love me. I just breathed her in, her spirit. It seemed like an outrageous thing to do, to breathe your teacher, but I did, and she helped me a lot. She centered me, and gave me loving energy instead of nicotine, and I made it through a lot of difficult places with her.

When I was in my experience of emotional difficulty this week, I immediately said, "Alana, Alana, what is happening here? Is everything all right?" She didn¹t speak to me, but I was enveloped in peace, that everything was well, is well, and all will be well. Apparently I can transmit Alana even when I don¹t know about it, and she gave me this incredible peace. I also know that she knows everything I do, everything I think, and every emotional blow-up I go through, she is right there watching the whole thing. The point of this is, it allows me to be myself. I don¹t need to deny my humanness. I am being taught constantly that my humanness is divine, that that separation is pretty much a false one, that all this part of me, that manifests, that I usually put on a negative scale, she is helping me just to say, " OK. It just is. It just is." She accepts me in such a loving way that it helps me to accept myself a great deal. Perhaps I¹ve talked too long when our teachers are here from such a great distance. I hope I have expressed some of my heart feelings for you Alana, and the place that you have in my life at the present moment, and my willingness to learn from you, because I feel your love so steadfastly. Amen.

Alana : You will discover, each of you, this lack of privacy to which he refers. It is always in the process of growth that the human being must go through certain difficulties, some of which they would prefer not to be known. Our friend is telling you truthfully that he was on his knees begging for my help. Begging is not something that human beings are generally very proud of, but this was true. I in turn begged him to breathe with me, to allow him to feel, to allow us to feel (tape blurs) S..for you can not do it alone. I know that in many cultures it is a goal, a statue to be emulated, that you can make it alone. But it is indeed just that, a statue, not alive, for no live being makes it alone. You have always God¹s love and companionship available to you. It is simply a matter of opening your mind to that possibility and then allowing all those negative fears and doubts to spill out upon the floor.

It has been a very gracious pleasure to breathe with D as he scrapes off some of the tar, shall we say, that has accumulated about his person in the seventy some years that he has been playing upon this planet. With each of you, I will come. With each of you, Legion will stand ready. And each of you is profoundly loved. Is there anyone who wishes to speak to Legion, now?

Discipline

D : Yes, I do. Legion, the discipline of love is your major theme, you brought it up again today. You spoke of the various disciplines, of the body, of the emotions, and of the mind. Would you give us a little more guidance on the discipline of the mind. What has come up for me, particularly during times of emotional disturbance, the mind seems to go into a period of turbulence. It appears as if thoughts arise in our minds, unasked for, on their own, etc. Would you please help me on the matter of the discipline of the mind? And, secondly, what is this traffic that arises in our minds, is it automatic? Where does all this stuff come from?

Legion : Discipline is practice. Discipline is holding the wheel steady even when all the turbulent forces would seduce you into thinking you should turn it another way, or let it go entirely. Discipline is the willingness to practice again, and again, regardless of failure, or lack of understanding. With discipline comes the transformation, or that inexplicable change from hoping, wanting, seeking into simply being. A disciple, you might say, becomes one with the discipline. The turbulent thoughts, these unpleasant behaviors, come from the many shapes and diagrams and beliefs that are created over time, by fear. When it appears that your mind is on a rampage, which you would indulge yourself in believing is beyond your control, your first step must always be, my favorite word, discipline. You must step into the heart room, if you will. You must step into prayer, if you prefer. You must stand before yourself and whatever precious fear you are nursing and feeding in that moment; through the process of being willing to confront yourself, to ask about, to look at, to study, but primarily to acknowledge your fears, you will be led back to love, security, truth, and God. For your security lies within, where we and all God¹s messengers reside, waiting to speak to you in tender words of loving guidance.

D : Thank you.

S : No fear. The outcome is assured.

Legion : I can not tell you often enough how irrelevant your fears are to the outcome. Your fears, let us say this with a certain amount of humor, your fears simply make the journey more interesting. (laughter)

D : Like the "banquet" you were advertising several weeks ago, yes?

Closing

Legion : Yes. (laughter) I do not wish to present the idea that where I reside, or that the journey within, lacks entertainment. There is one message that I would pass on to you about discipline. It takes focus. Single minded dedication. We are not asking you to turn your lives inside out and to become miserable with your hard work. We are asking you to open your hearts and your minds to love, and faith, and God¹s will. We ask you to do this tenderly. Tenderly with your self, and tenderly with others. You are in a unique situation, allowing your lives to become everything that your lives are meant to be. Your lives are in a body, and on a planet, Urantia/Earth, but the truth of your lives is spiritual, is love. This opening to the reality of God¹s love is demanding. It is an experience that the human being, child or adult, goes through, yes, the TR is trying to give you words to describe what she feels as I give her my description. She feels great compassion for each one of you and for every human being whose growth into the knowledge of God¹s love requires the relinquishment of secrets, of shame, of fear, of hidden compartments. You relinquish these one at a time to God. You surrender all of your life-long privacy to God. The rewards, of course, are great, for God¹s joy, God¹s love, God¹s compassion, is not any longer hidden from you. Every small and great experience is welcomed. We give you love. We give you strength. God be with you.