Unity Principles and the teachings from Unity ministers’ books and sermons are nothing if not practical tools for daily living. Becoming a dyed-in-the-wool “Unitic” has been a catalyst for me to expand my thoughts on what I am capable of doing and being. My willingness to let go of many limiting thoughts has resulted many serendipities in my life, including my stepping out in faith and allowing Spirit to use me for the good of this community and for my own spiritual growth. But every now and then, when I follow the voice of ego rather that the voice of God, I get stuck in thoughts of lack, limitation, and fear. Then I do things like avoid writing an article for this newsletter (more than once) to avoid the risk of being vulnerable. The idea of baring my thoughts to such a wide readership ties up my stomach in knots. Yet I proceed to write this because I know deep inside me, that I am the one who created this beast of self-judgment and the misery it causes, and only I can free myself from it by withdrawing my belief in it. “Breathing in, I observe letting go, Breathing out, I observe letting go.” Here comes Unity to the rescue with a denial: “Thoughts of lack and limitation have no power over me.
I really took to heart Rev. Jim’s sermon this Sunday about treating anger (which is actually fear at its root) with compassion. Rather than shaming it, hiding it, ignoring it, or berating it, Rev. Jim had a suggestion from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Anger. Hanh recommends that you care for your baby “Anger” as a loving mother would care for her baby. You would listen for its cries and stop what you are doing and go to comfort your Anger. You would embrace Anger tenderly as if you were a mother holding her sweet baby. Your motherly love would radiate and penetrate baby Anger, soothing and calming it. Baby Anger is relieved significantly just by your presence and attention to its discomfort. As a caring and concerned mother would try to find out the cause of Anger’s discomfort to eliminate it, so would we give mindful presence to our anger and allow its root cause of fear and confusion to surface and be dispelled. If Darkness is the absence of light, and Love is the absence of fear, according to the Course in Miracles, it makes perfect sense to me that Love’s presence can dissipate our fear and anger in the same way that turning on a light in a dark room dissipates the darkness.
This idea of treating anger with attention and compassion so grabbed my attention this Sunday that I began practicing treating any unwanted emotion or reaction using Thich Nhat Hanh’s prescription of compassionate presence. It is so easy for me to visualize loving and holding an innocent and vulnerable baby while calming it and tending to its needs. For my purposes, the unwanted reaction didn’t have to be named Anger for this compassion technique to work. It could be any of its manifestations such as moodiness, knots in my stomach, or self-judgment that I don’t initially recognize as being Anger. But tending to the unwanted reaction with the light and presence of compassion allowed it to show itself to me eventually as anger or fear, and then begin to dissipate it.. If the idea interests you, listen to the Rev. Jim’s sermon for Sept. 21 on Unity Church in Albany’s website.
Ah, Unity! You’ve just got to love it!