What is Hell?

If we compare the dream of human society with the description of hell that religions all around the world have promulgated, we find they are exactly the same. Religions say that hell is a place of punishment, a place of fear, pain, and suffering, a place where the fire burns you. Fire is generated by emotions that come from fear. Whenever we feel the emotions of anger, jealousy, envy, or hate, we experience a fire burning within us. We are living in a dream of hell....

If you consider hell as a state of mind, then hell is all around us...

We are already in hell, including the people who tell us that. No human can condemn another to hell because we are already there. Others can put us into a deeper hell, true. But only if we allow this to happen...

Every human has his or her own personal dream, and just like the society dream, it is often ruled by fear. We learn to dream hell in our own life , in our personal dreams.....those are anger, jealousy, hate, envy, and other negative emotions...

Taken from The Four Agreements: A Toltec Wisdom Book P. 14

I spent many years in hell....the hell and insanity of alcoholism. Only I never knew it was hell and for a long time I thought it was normal and that everyone lived as I did. No longer do I want to be ruled by anger, fear, jealousy, hate, envy and the like.....Life is too short and there is way to much wonderful in it. I still fall short of that dream at times, but the difference today is that they are moments and they pass. I am making a new dream today, it's a work in progress, but it is already more than I ever dreamed possible and I know it's only gonna get better.

Truth, Justice & Beauty!

All of humanity is searching for the truth, justice and beauty.....

We don't see the truth because we are blind. What blinds us are all those false beliefs we have in our mind. We have the need to be right and to make others wrong. We trust what we believe, and our beliefs set us up for suffering....

We live in a fog that is not even real. This fog is a dream, your personal dream of life --- what you believe, all the concepts you have about what you are, all the agreements you have made with others, with yourself, and even with God....

That is why humans resist life. To be alive is the biggest fear humans have. Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive --- the risk to be alive and express what we really are. Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans. We have learned to live our life trying to satisfy other people's demands. We have learned to live by other by other people's demands. We have learned to live by other people's points of view because we fear not being accepted and of not being good enough for someone else...

Taken from The Four Agreements: A Toltec Wisdom Book by Don Miguel Ruiz p. 15-17

This was so very true for me for a long. I never wanted to take a risk and would rather stay in a miserable state of mind. Today I have learned that there is so much happiness out there in the world and by taking a few short risks I can experience that happiness. Being alive means living life on life's terms and with it there is sometimes pain and sorrow, but the joy and love you find on the journey is so much greater than the pain and sorrow.

Change Our Agreements

The most important agreements are the ones you made with yourself. In these agreements are the ones you made with yourself. In these agreements you tell yourself who you are, what you feel, what you believe, and how to behave. The result is, what you call your personality. In these agreements you say, "This is what I am. This is what I believe. I can do certain things, and some things I cannot do. This is reality, that is fantasy; that is possible, that is impossible."...

If you want to live a life of joy and fulfillment, you have to find the courage to break those agreements that are fear-based and claim your personal power. The agreements that come from fear require us to expend a lot of energy, but the agreements that come from love help us to conserve energy and even gain extra energy...

Each of us is born with a certain amount of personal power that we rebuild every day after we rest. Unfortunately, we spend all our personal power first to create all these agreements and then to keep these agreements. Our personal power is dissipated by all the agreements we have created, and the result is that we feel powerless. We have just enough power to survive each day...

If we can see it is our agreements which rule our life, and we don't like the dream of our life, we need to change the agreements...

There are four very powerful agreements that will help us break those agreements that come from fear and deplete our energy...

Each time you break an agreement, all the power you used to create it returns to you. If you adopt these four new agreements, they will create enough personal power for you to change the entire system of your old agreements...

If you can begin to live your life with these agreements, the transformation in your life will be amazing...

Instead of living a dream of hell, you will be creating a new dream --- your personal dream of heaven.

Taken from The Four Agreements : A Toltec Wisdom Book by Don Miguel Ruiz

This really hit home today. I am in a situation where I am allowing myself to be treated with less than respect by someone close to me. This is all being driven by fear.......fear of financial insecurity, abandonment and acceptance. All the very things that the 9th step promises assure me I will no longer have if I place my trust in my Higher Power and do the right things. So now that I have actually said that out loud I guess it is time to take some action. All my words are empty if I don't take the action to change things in my life. That said, it is not so easy. All I can do is pray for guidance and take one step and the rest will fall into place.....that's the plan anyway. No matter what the outcome is I have to have faith that everything will be alright, it will be just as my Higher Power intends it to be and I will be given the strength to get through it one day at a time. God Willing.....

Dreams and The Book of Law

I'm starting off today with the Tag I was given by Inmatez Wife: Seven songs I'm into followed by seven people I will Tag....

1. Broken by Scott Stapp
2. Changes by 3 Doors Down
3. Making Love by Amos Lee
4. Do Right Woman, Do Right Man by Aretha Franklin
5. One Last Breath by Creed
6. What If I Stumble by DC Talk
7. How To Save A Life by The Fray

Seven bloggers to tag........Anna; Tab; Judith; Shannon; Cantellya; Grace; Kenny.......

Dreaming is the main function of the mind, and the mind dreams twenty-four hours a day. It dreams when the brain is awake, and it also dreams when the brain is asleep. The difference is that when the brain is a awake, there is a material frame that makes us perceive things in a linear way. When we go to sleep we do not have the frame, and the dream has the tendency to change constantly.....

Attention is the ability we have to discriminate and to focus only on that which we want to perceive. We can perceive millions of things simultaneously, but using our attention, we can hold whatever we want to perceive in the foreground of our mind...

By using our attention we learned a whole reality, a whole dream. We learned how to behave in society: What to believe and what not to believe; what is acceptable and what is not acceptable; what is good and what is God; what is beautiful and what is ugly; what is right and what is wrong...

As children, we didn't have the opportunity to choose our beliefs, but we agreed with the information that was passed to us from the dream of the planet via other humans. The only way to store information is by agreement. The outside dream may hook our attention, but if we don't agree, we don't store that information. As soon as we agree, we bekieve it, and this is called faith. To have faith is to believe unconditionally.....

We punish ourselves when we don't follow the rules according to our belief system...

The belief system is like a Book of Law that rules our mind. Without question, whatever is in the Book of Law, is our truth. We base all of our judgments according to the Book of Law, even if these judgements go against our inner nature....

Whatever goes against the book of Law will make you feel a funny sensation in your solar plexus, and it's called FEAR. Breaking the rules in the Book of Law opens your emotional wounds, and your reaction is to create emotional poison...

Even if the Book of Law is wrong, it makes you feel safe...

Taken from The 4 Agreements: A Toltec Wisdom Book by Don Miguel Ruiz p 1-11

The Right Path

Today's Thought

You are reading from the book Twenty Four Hours a Day Hardcover (24 Hours).

A.A. Thought for the Day

We come now to A.A. fellowship. It is partly group therapy. It is partly spiritual fellowship. But it is even more. It is based on a common illness, a common failure, a common problem. It goes deep down into our personal lives and our personal needs. It requires a full opening up to each other of our inmost thoughts and most secret problems. All barriers between us are swept aside. They have to be. Then we try to help each other get well. The A.A. fellowship is based on a sincere desire to help each other get well. The A.A. fellowship is based on a sincere desire to help the other person. In A.A. we can be sure of sympathy, understanding and real help. These things make the A.A. fellowship the best that we know. Do I fully appreciate the depth of the A.A. fellowship?

Meditation for the Day

The Higher Power can guide us to the right decisions if we pray about them. We can believe that many details of our lives are planned by God and planned with a wealth of forgiving love for the mistakes we have made. We can pray today to be shown the right way. We can choose the good, and when we choose it, we can feel that the whole power of the universe is behind us. We can achieve a real harmony with God's purpose for our lives.

Prayer for the Day

I pray that I may choose aright today. I pray that I may be shown the right way to live today.

I am experiencing growing pains right now. Lots of change is happening, more is being revealed, and the pains of moving toward healing are with me. It is difficult to see the path right now. I am relying on prayer and the guidance of a Higher Power and my fellowship right now. I have that knot in my stomach and that feeling that I want to run. They are not overwhelming me however. I have a sense of calm despite all that. I have a feeling this time that hasn't been there much in the past. That feeling is a sense of strength, of knowing that it will be okay and the path will appear eventually.....in the meantime I will have plenty of help along the way. It is strange to be here, as it is very unfamiliar, yet it is a relief to be able to make a choice to rely on my faith instead of letting fear be my guide.

The Journey

Today's Thought

You are reading from the book Each Day a New Beginning.

It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.--Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Most of us are on a long uphill climb at this moment. It is a climb we are making together, and yet a climb we can't do for each other. I can reach out my hand to you, and you can grasp my hand in return. But my steps are my own, just as you, too, can only take one-step at a time.

For brief periods we skip, even run, along the uphill path. The rocks and the occasional boulder momentarily trip us up. We need patience and trust that the summit is still achievable. We can help one another have patience. We can remind one another to trust.

We look back at the periods that devastated us so long ago. And now we are here. We have climbed this far. We are stronger, saner, and more secure. Each step makes easier the next step--each step puts us on more solid ground.

I may run into some rocks or even a boulder today. I have stepped around them in the past. I will do so again.

This was a good reminder for me today. I must remember that I have used the tools in the program in the past when I have had obstacles and they worked. The fear of facing the unknown is not real.....if I simply apply the tools I have been given light will come to the darkness. If I let fear overwhelm me then I will be too confused to let the light in.

The Past

It is human nature to assess what we can do according to what we have done. When I didn't do so well yesterday, I have been afraid of making the same mistake again. At this point in my life, however, I realize that if I don't remember what I did, I cannot do anything differently. If I don't pay attention to the details of my actions, I will do the same thing over and over out of habit. I don't want to do that anymore. If that means that I must search every little corner of my life until I understand what I do that gets me into places I don't want to be.

Taken From "Yesterday, I Cried" by Iyanla Vanzant

This program has taught me to not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. I have learned that by fixing the past the future can be so much better. In the beginning of my recovery I could see no use for the past and tried my best to bury it. All that did was bring me more pain. It wasn't until I went back and madepeace with every little thing from the past that I could find a place of happy, joyous and free.

Love and Spirituality

Children often learn about spirituality and things of a spiritual nature under a cloud of suspence and fear....They are definitely taught they are sinners. They are taught what not to do. They are also taught that if they commit the forbidden acts, God will get them. They are taught about a cruel and punishing God. A God who is displeased with you and most of what you do unless you follow certain "prescriptions." Few children are taught that they are not separate from God, or that it is possible to develop an intimate relationship with God. They believe that God is somewhere "out there," separate and apart from you, waiting for you to make a wrong move...She figured out very early in life that she was bad, and something bad was gonna happen to her...Bad children expect bad things to happen to them. They expect to be punished...She learned about love through pain, abusively, neglegently inflicted, and unnecessary pain. She learned about God in the midst of fear. She learned to expect pain as an ingredient to being loved. She learned that people who claimed to love you can cause, and will ignor, your pain. She learned through the action of her "loved ones" to expect that an act of love would be preceded by the impostion of pain...She learned that if you do the wrong thing, those who love you will hurt you. And no matter how badly you hurt, or what you have done, if you bear the pain of love silently, you can hope against hope that someone will, one day, love you enough to hurt you again.

Taken from "Yesterday I Cried" by Iyanla Vanzant

I have been struggling lately with love and spirituality. I never got clear messages about either growing up. I really identified with what this book said. That is exactly the message I grew up with. When I got to AA I began to learn a new way. I began to understand that God is not like that at all. I came to learn what love was suppose to look like. It has been so easy for me to have that love and for my spirituality to grow in the rooms of AA. Where it got tough was the part about practicing these principles in "all our affairs" , as step 12 suggests we do. The hardest place of all has proven to be at home. After some struggle, some reading and some inventory I have come to the realization that I have allowed my relationships at home to be driven by self-centered fear. I have forgotten that my only job is to give love freely and be of service. I have forgotten that kind of love that overlooks shortcomings at home, and have allowed my fear to keep me focused on the faults of others. In just one evening of remebering that love and that giving without the expectation of anything in return, relationships have already improved. The problems are no where near being all solved, but at least I feel like the war is over. Thanks so much for holding that mirror up and pointing me in the right direction (you know who you are, chickie). Love ya the mostest!

See It Through

See It Through
By Edgar A. Guest

When you're up against a trouble,
Meet it squarely, face to face;
Lift your chin and set your shoulders,
Plant your feet and take a brace.
When it's vain to try to dodge it,
Do the best that you can do;
You may fail, but you may conquer,
See it through!

Black may be the clouds about you
And your future may seem grim,
But don't let your nerve desert you;
Keep yourself in fighting trim.
If the worst is bound to happen,
Spite of all that you can do,
Running from it will not save you,
See it through!

Even hope may seem but futile,
When with troubles you're beset,
But remember you are facing
Just what other men have met.
You may fail, but fall still fighting;
Don't give up, what've you do;
Eyes front, head high to the finish.
See it through!

I found this poem sometime ago. It made no sense to me but I kept it around. As I have begun clearing away all the wreckage of the pastand facing my fears it is making perfect sense. The key to life is to always get back up and to keep fighting. I have found that what once was my worst fear, my biggest battle, was placed in my path for a reason. I may not know what that reason is for quite sometime, maybe never, but as time goes by situations have presented themselves where I can be of service to another because I have made it to the finish line. Now I know that those are the reasons I have had to walk this path and face the struggles that I have. I am not in charge, a power greater than myself is running the show and nothing happens in my HP's world by accident. Thanks to a very special person who told me that my worst problems would one day be my biggest assest and for supportig me until the day arrived until I could see that for myself. I love ya!

Fear

Tonights meeting was about facing fear. That is a subject I have been emersed in a lot this month. I heard a lot of great things tonight. Several things I've learned thus far are that when we face our fears and work through them they lose their power, their hold on me. I have also learned that fear cannot exist in the face of faith. My program teaches me to trust in my Higher Power and when I do that I find that I have strength to overcome all that life brings my way. All I have to do is reach for the outstretched hand of my Higher Power and I can face anything.

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."--- Frank Herbert, Dune - Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear

The wise man in the storm prays God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1833

William Allen White:
I am not afraid of tomorrow, for I have seen yesterday and I love today.

Feed your faith and your fears will starve to death. Author: Unknown

Smile

Today's thought is:

When they take your smile away they might just as well shoot you.--Violet Hensley

Violet is one big smile. And it's not the result of having an easy life. On the contrary, she has worked doubly hard all her life to support her family. However, she has a joyful attitude, and it has made the difference in her life. Now in old age, she still works hard making fiddles for sale and performing music; but she loves every minute of life, and when you're with her, you love it too.

Why aren't we more like Violet? The answer always rests within us. We have decided how to respond to life's trials. We were never forced to dread, hate, or appreciate our experiences. We were, and still are, solely responsible for our interpretation. The Violets of the world opted to have more fun.

How do we begin having more fun? The first step is deciding to leave the past behind. No matter what our experiences were last year or in our childhood or even this morning, they don't have to determine what our experiences will be in this next hour. Having more fun is clearly a decision that is coupled with action. Any one of us can do it as well as we want to.

Smiling at myself in the mirror is good practice. Offering one to the first person I encounter strengthens my desire to offer more.

I'm learning to move beyond those experiences that have held me captive for so long. Finding happiness is the natural consequence of doing so. Facing fears, moving through them, and being released from their bondage has given me hope and strength that I can offer to others. If not for the hope and strengths of those who have walked the path before me this would not be possible. Thanks to the many who have walked the path and have show me the way.

Karma

How can we stop a spiraling descent into fear and violence?

Forgiveness is the first step. We see that all of us are capable of acting from greed, anger, and ignorance, and then we forgive the sinner, not the act.

Just one act of forgiveness can change our lives and prevade the whole universe.

Taken from Heart of Forgiveness by Madeline Ko-I Bastis

Today's Thought

Today's thought is:

To avoid pain at all costs forces us to reject half the lessons life can teach. --Jan Pishok

If we could remember that every experience we'll ever have is unique and offers us a lesson we will grow from, we'd accept them all with far greater ease. What's there to be afraid of anyway? God is never absent. In fact, God is present during every experience. Remembering this makes us courageous as we walk through the turmoil that interrupts the peaceful times.

Before coming to this program, we feared most of the situations that called to us, and understandably so. We were often trying to do the improbable without the wisdom or the guidance that might have guaranteed success. By taking the Third Step every morning of our lives, as has been suggested, we can positively influence the outcome of every experience we'll have. Hallelujah!

I will not avoid any experience today. I'll simply remember that God is present and that I need to know what calls to me.

I'm trying to stay with my pain these days and remember I am not alone. I have gotten many experiences form painful experiences thus far. I always ran but they got up with me. I'm trying to stay here and now and know that if G.O.D. brought me to this place, than I'm ready for it, because I was told early on that when the student is ready the teacher will appear...

Dawna Markova

"I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance; to live so that which comes to me as seed goes to the next as blossom and that which comes to me as blossom, goes on as fruit." Dawna Markova

Our Greatest Fear

This poem is the inspiration of this site. I try everyday to overcome my greatest fear.


Our Greatest Fear by Marianne Williamson from her book A Return to Love.

Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinkingso that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some; it is in everyone. And, as we let our own light shine, we consciously giveother people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

What is Your Greatest Fear?

We all experience fear in our journey through life. What we do with that fear determines the course of our journey. Fear has many accronyms but two of my favorite are: Face Everything And Recover and False Events Appearing Real. Will fear keep my light covered today or will I face the fear and allow the light to shine through?