AUGUST 2017: Radiant Heart

Don't shine to be seen, Shine so that others can see the way. ~ Unknown

Do you know the deeper, higher truth of who you are? Have you dared to acknowledge that there may be parts of yourself that you barely know or understand? Are you willing to allow yourself the leeway to grow, change and evolve? Do you have the courage to shine the light on your own inner being, as well as cosmic forces that are available to you? Do you ask and answer questions like these often? If you said, yes - Great! Self inquiry is an absolute necessity to begin to shine that light of yours from within.

Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light?  ~Maurice Freehill 

If you see the Light, in its most practical nature, as the Truth, then you understand that enlightenment is the means by which we reveal the truth to ourselves and to the world. Yet, enlightenment is about far more than simply being honest. True enlightenment strips away all the illusions about life itself, including people, places and things, parts of our own personality and belief systems and anything else at all that is keeping us from the truth of love. It inspires us to open to our soul and it allows us to see the light in everyone and everything.

When you possess light within, you see it externally. ~Anaïs Nin

Many people try to shine a spotlight onto themselves from without, competing for attention and living in a perpetual state of lack, forgetting all about power versus force and the power of their true light.  When you absolutely know who you are, what you have to offer to the world and the importance of anchoring your God self onto this planet, then you know it's not really that much about you shining at all. It's about you becoming in alignment with your radiant God Self, so that the unique aspects of this creation that you are resonant with, can find you and we can all be re-united with the Light.

People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within. ~Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

We are here now in a dance of shadow and light. This is a dance that we must come to enjoy. For even though we all know that the life giving light of the sun is what keeps our body and mind alive and well. It is under the cover of the night, and in the void of our own soul, where all possibility exists and the deep lake of our inner being, reflects the light of God and refracts it out into the world in a way that allows us to reveal, share and receive God's Love. This is the means by which the omnipotent forces of creation can experience itself in the material world, where we can play and have fun, creating our dreams and manifesting love without "blinding" each other with our Light. This is how we all come to shine our Light from within and live as one.

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.' We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." ~ Marianne Williamson

Sunday Talks with Rev. Renee Bledsoe
August 06 - Radiant Heart: Inner Illumination (Church in Circle)
August 13 - Tools for Enlightenment
August 20 - Working with Light
August 27 - Dance of Shadow & Light

LIGHT AFFIRMATIONS
I am guided by the Light.
I am filled with the Light of the Creator.
I meditate with the Light.
As I shine the light and reflect on my life, I look for the love.
I ask what would love do?
My life is alive with the truth of my existence.
Life is Light.
I am a being of light.
I am evolving into the full realization and becoming my soul.
My soul will set my spirit free.
My light must come through the depths of my soul.
The Light is in service to my soul.
In the darkness of my soul, all things are possible and I choose according to the desires of my heart what I will create.
I use reflection and contemplation to know myself.
I allow myself to shine.
I allow others to shine, and bask in the gifts they freely give.
I see the inner beauty of all those who surround me.
I receive the gifts of life, through all the people, places and things on my journey.
The Light destroys all illusions of love.
The Light leads me to divine love.
I am inspiring, when I am inspired.
I live an illuminated life.
I dance with shadow and light, understanding that this is how I am able to choose with my free will.
It is within the darkness, that I find the true light within.
I order to access the darkness, I turn toward my problems and issues, not away.
I face the power of my own Light within and actively work with it to dispell illusion.
Once I see the Light, I have faith that my innate wisdom will guide me to the choices that will free my soul.
As I free my mind, I free my body. As I free my heart, I free my soul.
I am a radiant Light unto the world.
What I love inspired and enlightens the world.

Addiction Alchemy: Inner Journey

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." - T. S. Eliot

The Addiction Alchemy Universal Medicine Wheel can help bring your body, mind and spirit back into a state of harmony, reconnecting you to parts of your SELF that have been forgotten or are evolving, re-establishing the knowledge of your interconnection to all that is. Using the process of life itself, people, animals, the earth and all our relationships we rediscover who and what we truly are.

In this monthly INNER JOURNEY gathering you "Become The Tracker" in your own life, learning how to read spiritual messages that are all around you, tap into the power of animal guides and archetypes, learn about Sacred Ceremony, Prayer, Meditation and Intention, Music, Energy Work, Creativity and what is required to bring your consciousness into wholeness, through the map of the Universal Medicine Wheel.

Finding and opening to your personal medicine means that you are stepping into your purpose. Nothing restores power like knowing who you are and being in right relationship with yourself and all that is. The Universal Medicine Wheel provides the forum and the framework to draw together true communities and raise up the Medicine People of those communities to become empowered in a humble and good way to take their rightful place as spiritual stewards.

Addiction Alchemy and the Universal Recovery Medicine Wheel doesn't directly approach addictions per se, but rather acknowledges the process of addiction within all of our lives, focusing on the remembrance of all the parts of the self to restore wholeness. On some level we all have addictions, attachments, belief systems, patterns and imprints, as well as  ancient, ancestral or karmic ties. We believe that all recovery is a recovery of the True Self... and it is from this place that true healing and growth occur. Soul Recovery is Soul Retrieval.

On the 1st & 3rd Sunday of every month we are also now offering Addiction Alchemy Field Guide training. You can lead your own Addiction Alchemy: Inner Journey gatherings. Help us bring this powerful tool to people everywhere, as a grassroots movement to help people go Beyond Sobriety and Beyond Anonymity. Click here to learn more about the Training.

For more information please visit www.AddictionAlchemy.com or call Rev. Renee Bledsoe at 239-560-6314.

MUST RSVP to reneebledsoe@gmail.com  or send text.

When: Every first & third Sunday - 3-6pm
Cost: $10 per class
Facilitators: Rev. Renee Bledsoe & Barbara Kesler

Church of Spiritual Light 1939 Park Meadows Dr. #1, Fort Myers, FL 33907

JULY 2017: One for All & All for One

“Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.”  ― D.H. Lawrence

No one is an island. We are all in this together. We are connected. Yet, even if we understand these things to be true from a spiritual perspective, as well as the physical, how do we reconcile our loneliness in a world full of 7 billion people? There is a big difference in "knowing" that we are interconnected, and living as if we are. That is where the rubber meets the road.

"And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people as one of many hoops that made one circle." - Black Elk

We are all craving something we cannot name in our relationships, a warmth, a closeness, an intimacy. Yet, often when we have made ourselves vulnerable in this way, we were hurt, abused or ignored. This had the effect of closing our hearts down for a time, until the pain of a closed heart became more painful than opening up again and risking letting others in. Or, when others opened up to us we hurt them, even inadvertently because we didn't understand how vulnerable they felt. In relationships where people are not taking responsibility for their own feelings either way, this leads to the inevitable shutdown, because we do not know what true intimacy looks like, and certainly do not yet possess a healthy sense of self. After all part of our journey here is to learn how to love.

“One can acquire everything in solitude except character.” ― Stendhal

Conversely enough, since we exist relationally, we cannot get a sense of self without the contrast of each other. So as we go into pseudo relationship, pretending to be connected, but truly not we still do not learn how to love.  We get lost in blaming other people and forgetting that we are the common denominator in every single one of our relationships. Sometimes we are fortunate, with enough practice, to see a pattern emerging. When that happens we have the opportunity to understand that our whole process in relationship has not been some random propensity for isolation and suffering, but to introduce us to lost parts of our psyche. When we can clearly see this and make these connections there is a true softening of the heart and a coming to compassion for what has been at work in our lives.

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

We must remember that what occurs in the 3 dimensional/physical aspect of our lives is said to be only 1% of reality, as Grandfather Black Elk has said that this world is like a shadow of the real. Yet, it is giving us clues about what is going on in that mysterious 99% of our existence. If we are to bring heaven to earth in our relationships, we must realize that there is a great unknown that wants to be revealed here through the mystery of our relationships. For, we did not come here to get lost in a one on one relationship and never experience the depths of love that comes from loving humanity, this creation and the creator as passionately as we do our lover.

Our soul will not let us rest until we love God/dess and have a real relationship with our divinity and our creator. Therefore apparent separation has been a part of our soul's evolution... and could be thought of at this stage as more of an involution, or the inward enfolding of the heart becoming centered from within, as we come to realize that there is a perfect equilibrium that is possible if only we will keep working towards it, one for all and all for one.

“Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another "until death," are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could join them. Lovers, then, "die" into their union with one another as a soul "dies" into its union with God. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing...” ― Wendell Berry

Even as we come into community and truly connect with all our relations, we must connect not only spiritually, but also emotionally, mentally and physically. We must connect socially. We must connect from within, and from our heart fields unfolding. We must also connect etherically. Yet, we will not do this until we are ready for a kind of intimacy that outstrips anything we have heretofor known. This comes through a series of initiations. These are initiations of the soul and hearts readiness to truly love. But it is not just a readiness of desire, for their are certain structures and measures of character that must be present and whole enough to truly love, and to be a strong container for divine love, or agape to be held on earth.

"And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people as one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father." - Black Elk

The subtleties of tribal community in the modern world are being forged behind the scenes right now within our very own community, and within our hearts. For we are practicing the art of true community every day here. Tribal community is about much more than getting together and banging on drums... or even doing sacred ceremony. It is not just about anything we could physically "do" together. It is about the spirit and consciousness with which we gather. it is about an understanding that even when we are not physically gathered that we are still connected. This makes the gathering times that much more meaningful. It is about Cosmic universal Truth, that is abiding, and a reverence for the sanctity of life and this whole creation, including the unseen worlds.

“A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members - among them the need to need one another.” ― Wendell Berry

True tribal community is about resonance and a harmonic convergence of souls. It is about absolute abundance of all things needful both spiritual and material. When we are ready to be on the path of love and release ourselves from the severity and the suffering path, we will come into true community. For it is here that life lessons are no longer learned through unconsciousness and malevolent shennanigans. Lessons are learned through true love. We live by the golden rule, and that is to treat one another as we would like to be treated. But the jewel in the crown is that the members of the community have and understanding of their own divinity and they have or are rapidly abolishing any distortions around the way they want to be treated.

“Without God man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is... One of the deepest forms of poverty a person can experience is isolation... Poverty is often produced by a rejection of God's love, by man's basic and tragic tendency to close in on himself, thinking himself to be self-sufficient or merely an insignificant and ephemeral fact, a "stranger" in a random universe...The human being develops when ... his soul comes to know itself and the truths that God has implanted deep within, when he enters into dialogue with himself and his Creator... It is not by isolation that man establishes his worth, but by placing himself in relation with others and with God.”  ― Pope Benedict XVI

True tribal community must emerge... naturally and organically, as a result of a recognition of a deep common ground in complete wholeness. Any one of the aspects missing will not build true community. We may not be an island, but we are certainly asked to go deep within, to make friends with solitude and to learn how to love and relate from the inside out. It is our community, these faces of God/dess that have helped us to defy gravity from within and allowed our individual souls to soar for all to see, experience and delight in. As this outpictures, the true community is not only there to support... but the real story is that they have been a part of the midwiving of each of us as a soul, all along.

"The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us."  -Black Elk

Sunday Talks with Rev. Renee Bledsoe
July 02 - One for All & All for One
July 09 - Leadership through Spiritual Partnership
July 16 - On Solitude and Inner Silence
July 23 - Vulnerability, Trust & Intimacy
July 30 -  Soul to Soul

ALL FOR ONE & ONE FOR ALL
I am free to be myself.
In being myself, I am free to Love.
I have the courage and strength to claim my free will.
I align my will with the will of my higher self.
My soul has been set free.
I practice freedom, by tending to my soul.
I love life and life loves me.
I am free to fulfill my destiny.
My boundaries and clear communication create a safe space.
I am a force for good to be reckoned with.
I am free to make mistakes.
The universe is conspiring on my behalf.
It is by my purified and unified will that I set my mind in motion.
I gladly pay the price for freedom through the eternal vigilance of the desires of my soul.
I set myself free.
I am free to express from the deepest parts of my being.
I surrender to my soul which leads me to the light.
I allow the phoenix within me to rise up out of the ashes.
I step into my highest calling.
I remember who and what I am.
I give myself permission to re-enter the garden.
My body is a vehicle for freedom and the actualization of my dreams.
I dream myself awake to all that I am.
I choose life and I honor that choice.
I take great delight in Life.
The will of my mind, the will of my body, the will of my soul are one with the will of God.
As freedom rings I embrace the joy of true interdepence.
I am all for one and one for all.