September 10, 2006

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Meditation

Reading

Message

 

Martin Luther King, Jr., in being asked to publish some of his sermons, wrote in the preface to his book, ““. . . a sermon is directed toward the listening ear rather than the reading eye. . . I offer these discourses in the hope that a message may come to life for readers of the printed words.”” This is my hope for you, dear reader.
——Rev. Linda

September 10, 2006

TAKING FLIGHT:
MENDING WINGS

So you’re at the airport, sitting at your gate, waiting to get on your plane to go to wherever, and an announcement comes over the intercom that your plane is being delayed. Suddenly there are lots of angry people around. Maybe you’re one of them. Then you find out that the problem was mechanical, something about a wing. Would you really have wanted to get on the plane and fly with a broken wing?

And yet, that’s exactly what many of us are doing all the time—flying with a wing that needs mending. How can we take flight with a broken wing?

In preparing for this talk, I got interested in the idea of molting, and I learned some very interesting things about it. Birds have to spend a lot of time caring for their feathers. Their lives depend on them. But all the preening, bathing, dusting, and other feather-care operations can’t prevent the feathers from wearing out because feathers, like our fingernails, are actually lifeless, incapable of being repaired. So worn-out feathers have to be replaced. Birds have to molt.

And you know what? So do we. We molt physically by sloughing off old cells and growing new ones. I’m sure you all know we replace most of the cells in our bodies every year. But if we’re wise, we also molt mentally, as well—we replace old thoughts that no longer serve us in any positive way with new thoughts that help us take flight from our plight.

Now as birds molt, the way it works is that the old, worn feathers are loosened in their follicles by the growth of new intruding feathers, which eventually push the old feathers out. And that’s how it can work for us mentally replacing old thoughts—the new ones just push the old ones out.

All this thinking about wings and feathers and molting really got me considering how it is for us as we fly through our lives. Reading Joan Borysenko’s book Guilt Is the Teacher, Love Is the Lesson, I’ve been doing some “molting” myself, letting go of some of the old beliefs I’ve been carrying around since childhood that just don’t serve me well anymore—that keep me from soaring to the heights I want to.

How many of us felt completely safe as children? Think about what it must have been like to be a baby. You had no way to take care of yourself. You were completely dependent on others for your survival. What if you’re hungry? What could you do? Your belly hurts with hunger pains, and that’s causing a reactionary instinct in you to cry. You ’re crying, but nothing’s happening. No one’s coming to give you something to eat. Now you’re not only hungry, you’re scared. You feel very separate and alone.

You’re frightened. But no one is coming to rescue you. Maybe your mother believes it’s good to let a baby cry by itself sometimes. She’s been told it makes them strong. If no one comes to comfort you in your fear, what do you suppose happens? What kinds of beliefs do you think you might have come up with in that little baby thinking?
And what if your caretaker got angry at you? How safe do you think you would have felt?

In her book, Joan Borysenko tells of one of her patients, “a woman named Martha [who] got into bed one afternoon with a bad bellyache—a symptom of the spastic colon she’d had for years. Martha had been doing inner child work for a few weeks and decided to find and comfort her little ‘Martie’—usually a four-year-old. When Martha went into her imagination, she was surprised to find a baby of 10 or 11 months sitting on the floor, all alone and crying inconsolably. She instinctively scooped up the baby, sat down in a rocking chair, and began to nurse her. Resting in this image for several minutes, Martha gradually became aware that, as she was comforting the baby, her gut was relaxing and the pain was going away.”

“The next time Martha’s gut went into spasm, she went right back inside and found the baby. Once again, nursing her for several minutes cured the pain. There was a very young part of Martha—a preverbal part of her—that was frightened about not getting her most basic needs of love and sustenance met. So for several months, Martha visited the baby regularly and cared for her with love and affection. Gradually her colon condition disappeared, and one day so did the baby, replaced by the four-year-old with whom Martha had begun her inner child work months before.” (p. 75-76)

So many of us were raised by parents who themselves never received their most basic needs of love and sustenance. It’s not necessarily that their parents were mean and hateful. So often they just didn’t know how to do it better. But even so, even though we can reason it out logically, and forgive them intellectually, we can still end up with an empty place inside, or with reactionary beliefs formed by those traumatic childhood experiences.

Combining inner child work with spiritual mind treatment is obviously one way to uncover some of those beliefs and heal them. Journaling about them is another. There was a revealing experimental study done by Drs. James Pennebaker and Sandra Beall on journaling. They wanted to look at the relationship between expressed emotion and illness. So they had 46 college students journal for 4 consecutive evenings, and physiological measures of fight-or-flight, such as blood pressure and heart rate were taken for the following 6 months.

One group was a control group who were assigned to write about trivial things like an essay about their shoes. Another group wrote about their traumas, but only the facts, not about their feelings. The rest wrote about their traumas and their feelings.

The third group who wrote about their feelings of trauma responded with fight-or-flight and higher blood pressures directly after the writing, and they felt more distressed the next day. But six months later, these emotional disclosers reported significantly fewer symptoms and fewer visits to their doctors for illness than students in the other groups. This group also reported long-lasting effects from the writing. They felt they had greater insight, less tension, more peace of mind, and an ability to think about things that were previously too painful to accept. (p. 77)

If we want to mend our broken wings, repair our feathers, and grow new ones, we must get in touch with those feelings that have formed our beliefs, many of which have been with us since childhood.

I’m sure you’ve all noticed that you have some feathers in your program today. And you’ve probably been wondering what they’re for. Well, it’s time to find out.

So I invite you to take one of your feathers and hold it in your hand. Now as you allow yourself to become still, and focus your eyes on the feather.

Now really zero in on what you’re feeling right now, some feeling that may be keeping your from flying. Question yourself about it. Ask yourself why am I feeling this? Keep questioning yourself until you come up with some possible answers.

And then accept your feelings. In other words, don’t judge them. You don’t have to do anything about them. Just focus your awareness on the feeling and then notice where it takes you. It may take you into your body where you notice fear or tension. It may take you back to old memories. Just accept it and trust it.

And now comfort yourself by taking a few deep sighs of relief and let go of mental tension, by directing it right into that feather in your hand. Let it all go right into that feather. And when you feel like all the tension has been released into the feather, just blow the feather right up into the air out of your hand, completely releasing it.
Now take the remaining feather and let it comfort you. Feel its softness against your skin. Close your eyes and imagine that it’s the Presence comforting you. “He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust:” (Psalm 91:4) Direct a flow of loving feelings toward yourself. You may see yourself as a little child that you can comfort.

Our founder Ernst Holmes said, “As the soaring bird opens her wings to the sky’s embrace, so we must open our hearts and minds to the influx of Spirit and receive Its Love that we may, in turn, express It to all whom we meet. We must embrace the essence of Love that we may transmit It, giving loveliness to all events.” (365 Science of Mind, p. 186.1)

Let this feather stay with you as a reminder of what you’ve experienced here today, a reminder to mend our broken wings so that we can take flight.