Several times a year I pick up my Bible, and books that explain the moment, to revisit what once had deep meaning to me and to reframe what tends to be important in our culture. This blog is no exception. Utilizing the book, The Last Week by Marcus Borj and John Dominic Crossan, both scholars, I share with you and remind myself of the lead up to and the crucifixion/resurrection of Jesus.

Spirituality REQUIRES time alone. In order to develop spiritually, one MUST spend time in solitude, meditation, and prayer. It is a habit or practice which trains the mind from living circumstantially to living from purpose. It trains us from getting feedback to the many voices of the world to cultivating a reliance on one’s own. If you are someone who hasn’t spent much time alone, then it may be time for you to start.

Twenty year ago I interviewed a woman close to 100 years old who was a congregant of Dr. Ernest Holmes. She agreed to an interview as long as I would minister to her afterward. Her distress…her friend wouldn’t talk to her. I still to this day think about our conversation. She is near death, her body is failing her, and her focus is her friendship. Her angst was around a relationship that wasn’t functional in the moment.

The esthetician looks at my face and asks me what my areas of concern are. I tell her I have a list yet my face looks like my age and I’m happy with it. She shakes her young head. She can’t believe my age. She thinks I am twenty two years younger. She asks me my ‘hack’ to looking so young. Out of my mouth fly the words “my attitude.”

I lay on the facial lounge with a mister on my face and she says, “tell me about your attitude, how did you get it?”

“I trained my mind. I began in my 20s. It has really paid off.”

He says in his book Confessions that it was his daily prayer practice that brought him close to God. Other slaves took to calling him “Holy Boy.” He was changing. After six years in captivity he had two dreams. The first was about his upcoming freedom, the second was guidance to go to the sea. He traveled 200 miles to the sea to board a ship. It would be two years before he would make it home to Britain by ship and land.

Let me tell you what I know about forgiveness. Forgiveness includes an inner reconciliation that is beyond saying the words “I forgive you.” I found forgiveness hard to get to without looking at the benefits of the offense to my Soul, not my personality’s likes or dislikes. I call this part “Embracing”. Today then, became a day for me of forgiving (recognizing there is a bigger going on for my Soul’s benefit) and an embracing of what has been and is…looking at the gratitude within it and calling it forward.

This is what I chose to do:

This week was an odd one. Friday was the weirdest day of them all.

I am practicing loving everything that is and most particularly any emotional response to what is coming up from within me. This practice prompted me to be far more aware of daily transitions from one thought, emotion, task and interactions between them. I’ve been observing my insides, outsides, and perceptions. And this was what my Friday looked like:

I talk a lot about the place outside of the comfort zone where life is alive and beckoning. I loved reading about the comfort zone itself and this quote captures the energy of it well. Zing. I, like all of us, LOVE comfort. I do. And yet there is very little comfort in our external world right now and spiritual people since the beginning of time have learned that comfort or safety or peace is internal. And sitting in comfort is different than a living in its zone. The zone is saying that comfort over engagement, living, and risk has become a stuck place and contributed to smallness and entropy. For comfort is a known place, a static place, and NOTHING that is in physical form is known and static. Everything is always changing. And, I get it. I have also experienced times of little to no comfort and that too has its own issues.

That which is of God is real. That which comes from the teachings of Jesus and the inner Christhood, is real. That which is NOT of Love, is not of God, as God is Love. They are synonymous. John then says one of my favorite things. He says that love casts out fear AND fear is full of punishment.

Now, as our government is being torn apart, uncertainty is in the air, and craziness is happening, I find myself making another commitment, a different commitment, one of fortification. During Covid the commitment was to what was essential. My commitment now is to strengthening my multi-dimensional selfhood to be prepared to live through an unknown that is friendly — remember, God lives in the unknown.

AND, the understanding that Faith and fear are both found in the invisible realm. They both are inside jobs. So after each purge I rise again committing to my spiritual practice. I increase my Self talk and each morning I remind myself that Miracles happen everyday, they are plentiful and I look forward to seeing them. I continue to practice gratitude, and I made a list of 33 Things that Restore and Uplift our Vibration. Click here to receive your downloadable copy.

Reverend Bonnie takes a moment to contemplate Right Action and ensuring decisions are aligned with Spirit.

Join Reverend Bonnie as she engages in an interview with Mantz and Mitchell speaking about living your best life in 2025.

I can hear his voice in my ear saying”you don’t want to give your Power to worry, doubt and fear…Oh No, you don’t want to engage in circumstantial living.” I must have heard the phrase “circumstantial living” over one hundred times before I realized what it meant realizing simultaneously that was exactly what I was doing. When I was happy, life was GOOD. When I was having a bad day, life sucked and something was wrong with me, God, or someone/something else.

In every spiritual center I’ve led, I’ve brought the practice of Day of the Dead to the community building altars to the deceased and remembering the eternal nature of Love. This year I brought myself to Mazatlan to participate in the ritual first hand.

We were given one exercise in the Death and Dying class that I was unable to do. We were to take the names of the three people we were closest to, write them down, then turn them into the teacher. He would pronounce them dead. My parents had just divorced, and like all major emotional tsunamis I was left to figure it out and process myself. Adding death, even imagined, to the puzzle was too much for me and yet Life’s timing isn’t mine to control. Studying death head-on opened my curiosity aperture wider.

The advisors and I wanted to bring a spiritual practice to the Center that would be practiced daily so by the end of the year individuals can look at their lives and see how they have changed and grown.

I have never become complacent with the idea that everything is alive and moving and that everything begins with an idea. In the Judeo-Christian tradition it is said that God spoke things into being coming from thought. You and I do the same thing.