abundance – Aspirational Adventures

My dog’s biggest decision/resolution for any day of the week is what toy shall he play with from his two new ones. And each decision is “new every morning”

On a Facebook group I’m part of my QEC practitioner suggested instead of feeling like we are being forced into New year resolutions – that most of us feel guilty about breaking by mid-January – why not QEC a vision of Peace, Joy and Plenty for 2024. This is working with that principle that what we believe will come to pass will come to pass. This isn’t a “pollyanna” “pie in the sky” way of thinking. This isn’t saying that we will be protected from bad things happening. But it is saying that we will ride through them with peace, with deep joy [not the silly giggles but something deep and fundamental] and that we will know we will have plenty/enough of whatever we need to see us through.

All this is what God says to us through the Bible – that “the joy of the Lord is our strength” [Nehemiah 8:10], “my peace I give to you” [John 14:27] and Matthew 6:25-34 which tells us not to worry about anything because God has it all for us. God has what we need in abundance. Though too often we do not see Christians living this out so find it hard to believe. But it is there!

But I realised as I was free writing around this that there is an order to have this happens. I felt that one couldn’t just dive into believing there is plenty/enough/an abundance because it is so hard to believe. It is why we have to QEC things and put in new beliefs so we can start on that journey.

But that QEC journey starts, I think, with us having peace with our past, with our upbringing, with our mistakes.
From this place comes deep joy that we are such amazing people, even if that has been lost in things that have been said to us as children.
Then once we are at this place of deep joy and gratitude, then we can believe we have plenty for what lies ahead each and every single day.

To succeed with this we need to be like those who go to Alcoholics Anonymous believe, that what we have this for each day and we rejoice in the dailiness of it and not have to stake it up for longer than today.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
…
Amen.
The Serenity Prayer

Note the “living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at at time” or as Lamentations 3:23 says God’s blessings are “new every morning” because “great is your faithfulness”

By not trying to put it in resolutions – that we aren’t doing at the moment anyway and so won’t stick to because there are reasons why we didn’t start now – but listening to our hearts and going day by day doing our best to live in peace, from which follows joy and gratitude, givings us the hope of living in plenty/enough then we can move in harmony with ourselves, with God, with The Universe, and with each other.

Pruning

Look closely by the hedge and you can see my drastically pruned rose bushes.

I was pruning my roses this morning and got thinking of how pruning roses is like healing. At first there is a bundle of vicious stems with dead flowers on the end, but as we work through them it is easier to see where to cut and also how to get the stems out without being hurt too much. But then every so often there, as the rose bush being comes more sparse, a thorn gets us without being prepared for it.

I was more careful with the bush that has loads of little spikes on it than the one with sparsely placed larger thorns. And yet it was the larger thorns that caused more damage to my hands then the little ones because I was not taking so much notice. Again I think a great analogy with healing. We can often be more careful with the issues we think are going to be painful and then get side-winded by the ones that we thought would be easy to deal with.

So I would say to anyone who is starting on the journey of dealing with their trauma, issues, hurts and pains, that to being with it will be hard, and you will get side-winded at times when you thought you could deal with this, but it does get easier as time goes on.

Also come the summer, because I have pruned now, I will have a lovely flowering of the most gorgeous roses. I am noticing as I do more QEC, both with my practitioner and on my own, the “flowers” that are blooming in my “garden” are so much better than the ones I had without the pruning.

Oh and another analogy – I didn’t plant the roses in my garden. They were planted by the previous occupiers, or even before them. Lots of the traumas and issues we have to deal with are not necessarily ones we planted but were planted by our parents, by their parents into their soil, by people who passed through our early lives, things that happened to us. But it is us that have to deal with them now so our garden grows more fully.

The tools are in our “sheds”. We can do this.