And whatever else you may be feeling about your world this day, in these times, love beloved, love. It is all you are and all you have. It is all that heals. Whatever you do with love will bring healing and goodness. Be kind. It is the action of loving.
Whether you believe yourself a success or a failure, either is meaningless. All that is true is that you are a child of God and therefore pure and Holy.
The Fruit of the Earth…Ancient and Strong: Redwoods
Hello to you my friends who read and share this blog,
I hope you are living a life filled with kindness, in both the giving and the receiving. The most important lesson I keep hearing from Our Friends and others is to be love. Kindness is love. I have control over my ability to be kind, with myself and with others. In my practice, I send kindness, and ask for protection and help, to those I am concerned about, not only those I love and agree with but especially to those I do not personally know and may very strongly disagree with. I hope whatever your practice, you are finding the nourishment so precious to your soul.
I am beginning to evolve this blog. I’ll begin sharing in a variety of ways rather than primarily posts from Our Friends. What has always seemed most important to me about this gift is integrating it. I don’t say I have done so with total success. I have made as many mistakes in my life as anyone makes, but that is because it is my life, and always, ultimately, the choices are mine to make, with or without guidance from this communion I call Our Friends.
I hope to include you more fully in the many ways I have been blessed by this communion. This is the integration. I will still share quotes and talks from Our Friends. I will also share my own stories, writing, poetry, and art. My focus will be on sharing communion experiences, as well as other mystical experiences, I’ve had. I will also share stories that give context to my life with this communion, things that are important to the whole picture.
My hope is to offer you an integrated, probably complex, and truthful picture of what it is like to be someone who carries this sort of gift through life. I believe this is a gift just as artistic talent, mathematical skill, musical ability, or athleticism is a gift. We all have our gifts, and no one is better or “more evolved” than anyone else because of any gift they possess. I believe this profoundly.
I hope to tell my story in such a way that you will see it as a human story. Perhaps unique. Aren’t we all? But I hope you will see it within the context of a very human life. I believe every human life includes a profound longing for and answers from the source of all Creation, the source of all Blessing, the One who lives in us and among us at all moments. Perhaps in sharing my stories, you will recognize some of your own?
I would love to hear from you if you have questions or comments, if there are places you would like to hear more. There is so much to share that I am likely to leave holes. My posts will be a sort of stream of consciousness sharing, though there is a book in progress that will organize it all more artistically and clearly (One hopes!). Please let me hear from you. Your notes are a source of joy and encouragement for me.
If you want to be sure you will see each post (I am not a power post-er, so have no fear that your inbox will be deluged), please go to my site www.innerteacher.net and sign up to follow the blog. Then each new post will come to your inbox automatically. It also helps me to know that people are interested.
With love, Stephanie
And below, my first share….
Cedar
This is a story of ice, cedar and blessings. It takes place in western Washington, a place ruled by trees and rain; it is ruled by trees because of rain. Douglas Fir, with its dark green spiky needles and tree trunk-size limbs, soar 150’ into the sky; Western Red Cedar, with its soft and broad lacy light-green “hands” and gently swaying limbs, Madrona who live near the water with their ever-shedding bark that reveals wine-red skin beneath. We lived in the country, with these as well as pine, cottonwood, maples trees.
I must detour for a moment to tell you that I was desperately ill at this time. I had been told I probably wouldn’t live. I was enduring many losses: my job, career, graduate school, and my nature pastimes of hiking, backpacking, canoeing, kayaking. If you know what it is to lack the energy to talk, when breathing is sometimes exhausting, when lifting your chest for the next breath requires all your focus and energy, then you know how sick I was. With the help of my beloved, I went from bed to the couch and back to bed each day.
From my place on the couch, I looked out a large plate glass window to a row of young cedars, whose gently swaying company in wind and rain became precious to me. In their beautiful presence, I felt accompanied in my long days alone. Above the cedars were the telephone and electric trunk lines that ran up our road and fed our rural area. Looking up and beyond them, across the road, was a thick stand of Douglas Fir reaching high in the sky as they competed for precious sunlight. Through another window, I looked out across our driveway to our old pine tree and beyond it an ancient cottonwood grew in a deep bog near the road. It was surrounded by a large family of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
We had an ice storm. Now, western Washington does not do ice. Two inches of rain on the road is nothing. With ice we have no skill. I looked out the window to see arrowed prisms shooting to earth, clinging to everything they hit, sheeting telephone and electric lines, trees, leaves, with a mirrored transparency that threw light like sparks. I watched in awe-filled horror — having grown up in New England and knowing the terrible danger — as ice lay itself down, layer by layer, to an inch and a half think around the power lines.
Then things began snapping. Over the next several hours the weight of the ice proved too much for just about everything. The power lines broke with sparks and sizzle. Then the phone line. Our tall, elegant, ancient cottonwood’s thin, graceful limbs snapped like matchsticks. The fir trees dropped limbs the size of trees with a crack like lightening and a shake like an earthquake. That night we awakened to a resounding crash as the house shook. Our beautiful “flowering pine,” with its antique rose that had climbed to its top, turned around and grown back down, so when it bloomed its pale pink blossoms, smelling like apples, burst right at eye level — friends would marvel and my sweetheart would say “Yes, it’s our flowering pine. Very, very rare” — was lost. It’s shallow root ball was sucked from the ground by the weight of the ice in its branches; it lay destroyed in our driveway, just missing our car.
And the cedars? How did my beloved cedars do?
Well, this is the heart of my story.
As the hours past and the whip cracks and jarring crashes of trees tearing apart shook my house, I lay fascinated by the cedars. They took the ice to their bodies like a blanket or a lover, surrendering themselves to layer upon layer of ice as they simply, gently, and oh so quietly, bowed down, until they were no longer the graceful swaying green dancers I consorted with daily, but had become cones of white ice pointing to earth and sky.
And there they stayed, still and waiting. I felt their presence, so patient and accepting, cocooned in their center beneath the ice, like a monk in deep meditation, perfectly aware yet perfectly still.
It took four or five dazzling days of sun to melt all this ice. We lived inside a kaleidoscope world, light thrown from 10 billion prisms in constant motion. It was glorious and humbling as we lived with only a wood stove and strove for warmth and food.
I waited, as a child to unwrap a gift, for the cedars’ ice to melt. Were they ok, my lovely friends?
As the ice slowly melted and the weight lessened, the cedars simply rose, as though on springs. When it was done, they had lost only a lacy leaf here and there. They stood again as pure and whole and beautiful as ever, while around them the results of rigidity stood in devastation.
Trees can’t help how they’re made, and maybe neither can we. But we have choice. When I looked at the cedar’s rebirth, I saw my own path as well. I could not control what was happening in my bone marrow, but I could bow down, and in that surrender, that quiet, deep inner cocoon, I could listen carefully, oh so carefully, and wait. So when the ice of illness melted, whatever came, I would rise again ready to meet the sun and wind with my heart lifted and whole.
I have never forgotten this lesson. I carry it with infinite gratitude to cedar. It has served and saved me again and again. I share it with you now as a blessing from the trees.
Stephanie K. Nead
2017
From Our Friends this morning…
I have crocuses opening their sunny faces in my garden. Whatever else happens in our world, the earth turns, the seasons change, and there is always beauty. And blessings. Love, Stephanie
May we be the voices that speak Peace to the future through everything that lies in front of us now.
An audio sharing from Our Friends: 
I found this quote again today, and it describes perfectly how I feel about moving into writing two books related to Our Friends. One a book of quotes and art, with some quotes accompanied by two to four paragraphs of deeper discussion on the theme in the quote. The second, at least the beginning of my story with Our Friends in my life.
This turning toward what you deeply love saves you. Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks
Photo by Stephanie K. Nead
By Stephanie K. Nead
What opens you, this is the most important thing. What leaves you feeling like a well-nourished tree able to bear fruit. This is what is most important.
A thought for the day. Blessings, Stephanie
“All fear is past and only love is here.” CIM Lesson 293
This is a most important lesson to practice today, when it seems that violence in your world has spiked, fear has spiked. It is as important as always to practice love, to know that in this moment, there is only love. In any moment, underneath the world you see, of chaos and pain and violence, as a vast ocean under an oil slick, lies Love. Whomever the deaths, they fall back into that ocean of Love.
It is not that it is not to be wished that you would live in peace and love with one another. It is. It is wished. It is that love would not be taken from you because you choose differently. Just as a child who slaps another is not really a bad child, but is generally one who is experimenting. A parent who removes her love from that child only reinforces a sense of badness. Whereas a parent may wrap her child in a hug of love, and say “Oh, that wasn’t kind. What can I do for you? You are feeling troubled or you would not have done that.” When one is responded to with love, there can be healing.
The other has to choose to accept the love and the healing. There are many still caught in chaos, confusion and struggle. They don’t know how to accept the love and the healing, even when it’s offered. But some do.
Responding to chaos, confusion and struggle with anger, vengefulness and righteousness is like throwing spears into a fight. You are going to hurt people, bloody them, and make them angry; it will only escalate the fight.
But to bring peace, to bring love, to remember and to hold in every moment that always there is Love, like the planet underneath you of whom you are so little aware. You walk upon earth, but you rarely realize that you walk upon a planet millions of times bigger than you are. So it is with God and with Love, just as you live and breath and are nourished within the atmosphere of this planet. You don’t live on this planet, you live in her. So too you live in God. And while you may do things that harm this planet, she will go on. She has resources far beyond yours, far beyond human knowing. So too does God.
There is loss in God when you hurt and fight. There are tears, but there is no real harm done, because you will return to God, like a scratch healing. And so, though it seems that you really hurt one another, all of you, all of you, every little thing, resides in, is born in, lives in, and if you die, dies in, God. You are all in the sea of Love, of the sea of Love, and will fall back into the sea of Love. There is nothing but Love, nothing but God, nothing but Creation, the Creator in it, of it, with it, as it.
And so, when you see the oil slick, the smear on the ocean of God’s Creation, you can bring peace and love to this by remembering that no matter what happens, everything, everything, returns to Love. There can be no response but Love. There can be no presence but Love. And so there can be no fear, because there is Love. There is Love always, and if you learn to feel it, in each moment, it will be there for you in every moment, in your awareness, your communion, your joining, your opening, and you will grow in Being Love.
(From Stephanie: I apologize for being away so long. As I was transcribing today, I came across this. I imagine many of you will find it supportive. I hope so. Many Blessings to you.)
By Stephanie K. Nead
Photo by Stephanie K. Nead
Through your body, you are feeling happy. Receive that happiness, revel in your own feeling of happiness. From within your body, allow yourself to be rooted and grounded in your body and in your happiness. You have a right to your happiness. You don’t even have to have a reason for it. You have a right to happiness, beloved, an absolute, inalienable right to happiness, in your body, in your Being. You don’t have to explain or defend it. It is your birthright to be joyful. You can be happy in your body; you can feel happiness flowing throughout your body and Being.
When you have been raised on fear, your first reaction is fear…even to happiness. If you are in your body, happy and celebratory, experience says someone is going to want something from you; someone is going to want you to physically and emotionally give yourself up to them; you are going to be obligated to move into pain and away from happiness. Your happiness is someone else’s permission. When you are happy you no longer have a “No.” You are supposed to say “Yes” to everything.
That is not happiness, beloved. That is unhealthy boundaries. That is coercion and manipulation. To make someone believe that if they are happy and expressive and joyful and dancing, in love with their body and Being, that if in their own joy they have “turned on” someone else, then they owe that person something, is profoundly unkind, even cruel. No. You never owe. If you have given joy by your own experience of joy, of happiness and pleasure flowing through your body, that is enough. That is wonderful. If in the course of enjoying yourself, another is given pleasure, what a blessing to them…and to you. You owe nothing. You don’t owe to continue that. You don’t owe to expand it.
Feel happiness and know you deserve to be happy because it is your birthright. It is your body’s right to feel joy, to feel sensual, to feel sexual, to feel grief, to feel any way you feel. It is your sovereignty; it is your Being. You are never therefore required anything.
For your body, it is important to always know that you have a “No.” You have every right to go back to being a teenager, and give yourself the right you had, but were not allowed then, the right to say “No.” The fact that others talked you out of it, threatened you out of it, cajoled you out of it, manipulated you out of it, hurt you with the violence of their thoughts, their voices, their words, their manipulations, that is not your fault. It never ended your right to set your own limits. It never ended your right to be curious, to say “Well, in this moment that sounds interesting or exciting or attractive,” and to go one inch into it and decide “No, I’ve changed my mind, don’t like it, don’t want to do that,” and say “No.” Or to go a foot into it “Hmmm, no, feels icky, changed my mind, No.” Or to go ten feet or a hundred feet or a mile into it, or all the way through it and say “I don’t want to do that again.” You always have the right to your “No.” Your body always has the right to her “No.” Always, always, always. And you have the right, from within that space of choice, to own in every cell of your body, and every fiber and energy of your Being, your “Yes,” your joy and happiness.
Surrounding your joy and happiness, as expansive and beautiful as it feels, is a sovereign fire, and it has its boundaries, just as a fire within a fire pit has boundaries. It burns passionately, brightly and hot within itself, but it has a boundary of self. And so do you. Even in Creation there is a boundary to energy where it meets another energy. Tis very different from humans and bodies, but not completely different. The idea of bodies came from something similar. And so, your ecstasy, your passion, your joy, your happiness, however high it might rise, however deep it might be, however far it might extend, it is always contained within you; it exists because of you; it is fueled by you, and always you are the sovereign Being to say “Yes” or to say “No” how you move it, when and where. You own it. It’s always coming from the fuel at the base of you, in your soul, in your Being, in your heart, in your passion, just like the logs that fuel the fire are at the base of the fire. It is you, and so you say where you shall burn, when, with and for whom. Always for yourself.
Allow yourself to be happy beloved, to experience happiness fully embodied, to let loose those armors that have kept you from feeling happiness out of fear. Because anytime you felt happiness, someone took it away from you as though you had no right, and they very often did it by invading you with negative opinions, with criticism, or with manipulation that you had to give up who you are, what you want, and your felt “Yes” in your body. You never, ever, ever give up the yes in your body, in your soul, in your heart, in your Being; it is the you of you; it is the very core of the essence of your Being; it is your “Yes.” You surround it with the right to say “No,” and in that way you create the space within which the yes can burn and burn and burn, and ever replenish.
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Our Friends: Sacred Counsel 