Off To Oz Again And Thoughts About Fear

Well, I’m officially headed from England back to Australia again! I often think to myself, For a person who really prefers the addiction to the safety of staying in one place, I sure seem to move and travel really often. I actually counted a year or two ago and I think I’ve lived in about 20 different residences in the last 10 years!

My time in England with Perry will be coming to an end soon partly due to U.K. visa limits, after which I’ll be going back to Australia. My emotions are very mixed, as you might imagine: I’m feeling really sad about having to leave Perry yet again and also so excited and grateful to be taking another step towards my desires in learning about and helping to share Divine Truth and God’s Way of doing things.

The months Perry and I have had together in England this visit have been full of lessons and emotions, definitely for me and for both of us to an extent. While I’ve been here Perry and I received some more feedback from Mary and Jesus about our relationship after I’d asked for some; this time mostly about my addictions and fears in the relationship, which was challenging initially for me to receive, but I know I must deal with if I want to love Perry and myself in the way God loves. I want to share some of that feedback in a future blog focused just at those issues as they’re so important. So will save that for another blog at some point.

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Next Plans

Next I’ll be participating in the next Volunteer Selection Project as part participant, part behind the scenes with the facilitators to learn how things are run. My long term desire is to start a Learning Centre somewhere in the world, or to long-term be a part of the one in Queensland, and so, these programs will hopefully be run at other centres in the world someday as well, to take on volunteers there. During the V.S.P. and after I have the opportunity to learn and work towards that long term aim, and it is such an incredible opportunity from Jesus, Mary, the God’s Way Directors and Managers and others.

I have a lot of growth, learning, purification of my attitudes and desires, and more to do to be able to fulfill this desire of starting a Learning Centre and/or branch of the God’s Way Organization, and while often I feel daunted by the road from A to B both logistically and emotionally, I am also so excited to learn. The vision of Learning Centres all around the world makes me so excited and every God’s Way blog makes me feel so alive. If you haven’t read the God’s Way Constitution Jesus wrote, I highly recommend it–it is so beautiful! There are so many things I want to learn about about and understand about the process, and I can’t wait to observe all the things happening already with the God’s Way Organization and Learning Centre there.

Desire, Excuses And Fear

I wanted to share a bit about my thoughts about fear. I am still a fear-saturated person and I haven’t felt through any of my fears yet, and I can feel familiar ones coming up as the Australia trip draws near. So I wanted to write because I feel I’ve learning a few tidbits about fear in the last couple years that I could share, and also because I could really use my own reminder about it all too!

Recently, when I’ve caught up with others I know who listen to Divine Truth, and they’ve asked about my next plans, in response many have said, they also really want to do the V.S.P., or attend an Assistance Group, or engage more in some other way, or follow their own passions in harmony with God’s Way, but they feel they aren’t in a good enough condition of love or progressed enough to apply, or go or do whatever it is yet. Sometimes they “know” they won’t be accepted, “know” they would be asked to leave, that they won’t do it lovingly enough etc. That they should wait till later when they are “ready”. I know of some who have done what I did, and changed their mind about engaging/attending at the last minute, letting their fears dictate choices yet again.

On a mentor meeting in 2016 I once said to Jesus and Mary that while I wanted to volunteer, it hadn’t occurred to me that I would be the one to start a learning centre in the US because I felt like I was so far away from being progressed enough to do such a thing. In response, Jesus said: “It’s not about progression, it’s about desire.” and later Mary said, “It’s the desire that often leads you through so much progression.”

Obviously our condition in love is important and a factor; I’m not saying that doesn’t matter how loving we are. But these things above that I’ve always told myself in life and since finding Divine Truth, and which a lot of people also tell me, feel now more to me to be just excuses masked as a false humility that sounds virtuous but isn’t genuine.

These excuses are ones I’ve justified in myself for years. I often find myself defaulting back to thoughts like:

This is a bad idea to do this. I’ve got so much growth to do, look at all these areas I’m so out of harmony with love! I shouldn’t do this now. I’m just not ready yet. I’ll mess it all up anyway. I’ve got this problem and that problem. I shouldn’t do it with my condition as it currently is, I should wait till I’m more progressed. Yes, that’s the responsible thing to do.

I still do tell myself this, though I’m more apt to catch those thoughts now and give myself a side-eye when I notice them.

When I do tell myself I’m just not loving/progressed, enough, I first remind myself that if I’m genuine about growing in love, why wouldn’t I see that whatever issues which could cause me to not be in a good enough condition of love to do something, or which would cause me to be asked to leave, is something I could start changing–now, today? That could shift significantly sooner than I think, if I really wanted to? And then wouldn’t even be a factor anymore anyway. And if I’m not making any movement on my personal issues of love and truth, then am I really sincere about wanting to be more loving before participating? Is it true that I want to engage with that thing at all? Because maybe I just want to think I do because it makes me feel like a good person to say so but really the desire isn’t there.

I also think insisting we need to wait to be more loving or more “ready” can be to mask the fact that we just don’t want to put ourselves in position to receive more personal truth and feedback. We don’t desire personal truth, though we might want to tell ourselves we do, but our real desire is to avoid situations or interactions that might expose personal truth about ourselves. We would rather hide and not get exposed.

Additionally, for myself, when I tell myself I am not ready or progressed enough to take the action or follow the desire, or consider backing out, it is usually because I want an excuse to not face my fear of acting, my fear of emotion and other specific fears. This is when I can get heavily spirit influenced as well. Spirits amplify the fears I already am holding onto within myself, reinforce my bad feelings about myself and I can end up in a really bad spiral where I just want relief from all the fear and running away to a safe hiding place becomes very attractive.

It can sound virtuous to our facades to say we want to be more loving or more “ready” first, but I feel’ for myself this has not been true humility, rather it gives me a way out.

I’m learning it’s important not to then beat ourselves up, another addiction often choose when I realize I want to avoid fear. When I’ve been willing to face the truth of why I choose not to engage, and if I can also not judge myself for it, I can then look into the real reasons for it and have the chance to shift on those issues.

“The truth is that as we suppress fear we simultaneously strangle desire and most of us, most of the time, prize the avoidance of fear above the exploration of our wildest dreams and deepest passions.

We rarely pause to consider what we would be interested in or inspired by if fear was not a daily part of life.”

-Mary Magdalene

More About Deep Fears

In the last couple years, in the process of engaging more with Divine Truth, going to Australia the first time, making my own videos, my relationship with Perry and some other events/actions, some of my big fears (really terrors) that have been exposed are:

• Fear of making mistakes, messing up, getting it wrong
• Fear of being unloving (getting it wrong)
• Fear of the future being unknown, what may happen
• Fear of punishment
• Fear of personal feedback (due to my self judgment and terror of punishment)
• Fear of rejection
• Fear my desires are all impure and I’m just really bad

As I discussed in my 2017 blog Fear And How I Nearly Missed The DT Training, I’ve historically listened to these fears and unequivocally done exactly what they would dictate. I’ve hidden from life and avoided as much action as I possibly could. I’ve gone to great lengths to control as many factors as possible to prevent external things from going wrong and from me making a mistake. Making mistakes feels like utter doom. I’ve held onto my addiction self judgment and pulling myself down; I want to insist I’m deep down I’m abominable because that feels safer than any alternative. I’ve kept my heart closed and don’t share myself so as not to get rejected or attacked. If I can’t successfully hide and control by my own efforts, I’ve compulsively sought reassurance from whomever will give it to me. If there has been any chance of disaster, mistakes, or rejection by taking any action in my life, I’ve avoided doing that thing completely. A life where there’s been as minimal risk, decisions and action as possible has been my desire.

I have so many beliefs about fear that I’m learning intellectually from Jesus and Mary are incorrect and totally false from God’s Perspective. I’ve felt I shouldn’t have to feel fear, I shouldn’t have to deal with it. It’s too much of God to ask of me and it’s too much of others to ask for me. That love would takes away fear so I don’t have to feel it and be miserable. I’m not very prone to feeling angry about things generally except when a fear is confronted–then I can get angry. I feel like it’s not fair, that I’ve suffered enough and feeling fear is just more trauma I shouldn’t have to endure.

I feel so saturated with fear that it often feels like who I am, like a component of my personality and I feel intimidated, overwhelmed and at a loss as to how to get rid of it. I’m afraid of the sheer amount of fear I need to work through and afraid I can’t change. Again, these are not God’s Truths, but my own false beliefs and more fears about fear, I suppose.

When I’m told that God wants me to feel all my fear and won’t take it away for me and nor should anyone else, if I’m soft rather than angry, and can get into some emotion about how that makes me feel, I’ve been getting a particular visual:

It feels like I’ve been a homeless and lonely child out in the bitter cold, knocking on the doors to cozy, warmly lit houses all my life, desperately asking if I can please come in, but never being able to for long. Being told I must feel my fear feels like being suddenly thrust back outside, being told I must always live there and watching the door slam as darkness and cold surrounds me and I’m alone yet again. I feel like I’m being told I can never have belonging or joy or comfort or warmth: it is not for me.

And so I’ve used addictions all my life to avoid my terror and the terrible emotions underneath it. If I can’t ever go into those cozy houses, then at least I have some sugary thing I can huddle with to eat and temporarily forget how cold I feel. My food addictions have been feeble attempts at artificially creating comfort and joy when really I’ve felt spiritually homeless, destitute, and never excited about anything. I’ve hoped my relationships with men would give me the sense being wanted and good enough so I don’t have to feel rejection and how awfully I really feel about myself. Avoiding action and decisions gives me the false sense of safety and security I feel I absolutely need in order to emotionally cope with life and survive. I don’t want to have to cross the abyss of my fear with nothing to hold onto.

It seems I believe feeling fear means subscribing to a life of loneliness, sadness and coldness. It’s like I believe facing fear means I am finally signing on the dotted line and subscribing to permanent residency alone in the cold streets. But then kicking into my thoughts sometimes is what Jesus and Mary teach about fear, and I think how far off I must be in this false belief, how I must be forgetting that God is at the other end and GOD IS GOOD. How differently I might feel about the notion of feeling fear as an emotion if I believed God was good.

When I journal about these things or write even now, I get a sad feeling because I’ve had some experiences which suggest that these beliefs and my fears themselves, are not true, and which make me suspect I’m really causing my own suffering by continuing to avoid dealing with fear.

There are a few things I’ve done in the last few years, including attending the Assistance Groups and the Divine Truth Training, making my own videos and many other smaller examples, when I’ve been absolutely concrete in my certainty that my fears would come true in taking those actions, which then to my total shock, almost all of them didn’t happen. And often the precise opposite of what I “knew” would happen, happened in a positive direction, not a negative one. I indeed saw in those instances that F.E.A.Rs (False Expectations Appearing Real) were actually just “Paper Tigers” and not real at all.

Following some of these situations where my fear didn’t come true, and things were better, not worse, emotions have flowed about the truth of how my fear shackles and strangles me, how much I’ve done to pretend I’m not suffering by a life justifying fear, and how I’m avoiding so many emotions about how I was treated and what I was taught in my childhood to create so much terror, and faith only in a world and God that is cold, harsh, punishing, and oppressive.

“Fear when left unchallenged pervades our life.

By living in fear we are agreeing to the lie that we really do have things to be afraid of and that love is not the most powerful force in the Universe.”

-Mary Magdalene

I don’t really understand fear and I couldn’t tell you how to get through it yet from experience. The main thing I wanted to share in this blog is that it seems that acting despite fear exposes it and other emotions and that acting despite fear is a good way to experiment with the belief that our fears are totally true. It exposes my false beliefs and errors in thinking, and is a good way to experiment with God’s Goodness. There’s a crack–though a tiny one–in my beliefs about fear which makes me a bit more likely to try things than I used to be.

In engaging with the VSP and otherwise in Australia, my usual fears and bad feelings about myself are already coming up again because I haven’t dealt with these issues yet. But I often think of the regret I’d feel at the end of this earth life if I never even tried to challenge any of them, only to find out I caused myself and others more unnecessarily suffering when I could have been happy and striving to create and support the sharing of Divine Truth in the world. The amount of opportunities available to all of us because we are alive while Jesus and Mary are back teaching God’s Truths is unbelievable. I’d be gutted to be hit with the magnitude of willingly foregoing those gifts available to me in favor of coveting my fear.

So anyway, I think that’s it for now and I hope to have some time to blog as the program goes on, or at least, I will after the VSP is finished. I am so grateful to Jesus and Mary, and the God’s Way Directors and Managers for offering this massive opportunity to me, and to others like Lena who are gifting various things to make it possible and easier for me to come. I have been given so, so, so much and I really want to learn how to be more sincere and effective in giving back as well, though I don’t know if I can ever repay Jesus and Mary for the gifts they’ve given me through all the means they have (though of course they don’t expect that!). I just feel so blown away by it all.

Here are some links before I wrap this blog up.

Divine Truth videos from Jesus and Mary that may help re: these issues:

Videos: Facing My Fear Of Action

Videos: Facing My Fear Of Emotion

Mary’s Blogs on Fear

Also, search “fear” within any of the 3 Divine Truth Youtube Channels for more.

To learn more and register interest in the next Volunteer Selection Project, click here.

To learn more and register interest in the next Assistance Groups, click here.

“If you just rely on yourself, having courage is very hard – how much courage you have is completely dependent on your own limitations.

Whereas God is an unlimited God, with unlimited Goodness. If I trust and have faith in God, now my courage will be dependent on God’s feelings, not my own. To me, that means I can do anything, no matter how afraid I am.

I don’t consider myself to have much personal courage. I simply have faith in God and God’s Goodness.”

-Jesus

Love,

Courtney

Thanks to the photographers from unsplash.com and pixabay.com for these images.

An Update: Sharing Myself, Biz, Volunteering, Soulmate Relationship

Hey Everyone,

I thought I’d share an update on me as I haven’t really since I got back from the DT Training in January. Thought I’d write one partly because many of you are sweet to email and ask me how I’ve been and what I’ve been up to. And so, in some ways it’s more efficient to write updates here, ha. But also, it’s to challenge fears I have about sharing myself, because I’m really uncomfortable writing a long post about me! Not because I want to hide my life or don’t want others to know what’s going on, but rather other fears of sharing myself. So here goes anyway…

Life since returning from Australia has been very up and down, but mostly down. However, reflecting back, I can see that there have been some changes in some of my emotions which is good. In January, I returned to Salt Lake City, Utah, where I’ve been living since early 2016, but which, though stunning in it’s natural landscape, has never really felt great to live in. SLC feels quite oppressive and spirit-saturated, more than elsewhere in the USA I’ve lived and traveled.

I had a few couple of months where I really struggled to re-integrate into life after doing the DT Training. In Australia I felt happier and more alive than I’d ever felt, and it was hard coming back. I struggled with feeling paralyzed, stuck, defeated, trapped, hopeless, angry, scared, lonely, desperate, doomed, sad…. I could keep going. Basically all the bummer emotions. As I talked about in my most recent video, I still sometimes have brief sinks into depression and even suicidal feelings–not that I want to go to the spirit world, just that I don’t want to exist. And those feelings arose occasionally during this time. I discovered how deeply embedded in me are feelings that God doesn’t want me to be happy, wants me to suffer, and will get mad at me if I ever ask for or want anything more in my life. That of course I was back in a sad life after being so happy for a few months, because who was I to think I could be happy? I felt like I’d been banished back into a dark corner because the joy was never really mine to have anyway, and like maybe it’s because God was punishing me and feels I am bad. I also felt all this stuff again when I returned from a trip to England in April (more on that later).

However, feedback I’d received from Jesus and Mary in Aus really pulled me through the collective 7 months I’ve been here, and helped me get into a few emotions (here’s one bit of that feedback). I’ve cried a lot, had a couple good anger releases, and faced some fears standing up to a super angry female housemate I attracted who really hated me (eep!). I’ve read a lot of Alice Miller, re-listened to my feedback over and over, and have tried to redirect myself into dealing with emotions about my childhood and my parents’ treatment of me when I got into those depressive and hopeless places emotionally. Overall, I feel I’ve been able to come to terms with more truth about what happened to me, which has helped, and I do think I’ve worked through some stuff since getting back from Australia. And so while I’ve been angry at/scared of the Law of Attraction a lot of this time, I can now see a lot of the circumstances were perfect for squeezing out of me emotions I needed to feel through.

Hiking outside Salt Lake City

I also tried to focus on a few goals I had for returning to the USA after the DT Training. They were:

Continue volunteering:

I had never volunteered for Divine Truth before going to Australia, despite having listened to it adamantly for years by that point. I think there were several reasons. First off, for most of of my DT listening years, I was with a partner who hated DT. It caused so many problems in our relationship just for me to watch it, and I can see I pandered to my ex-partner and lived in my fear of her attack and fear of what would happen to the relationship if I really engaged my passion for it beyond watching. It was significantly better in the relationship if Divine Truth was just a side hobby, and the more passionate I became about it, particularly over the last year of the relationship, the worse I was treated. It makes me sad to reflect on how I chose to suppress myself and my happiness so significantly just to avoid fears. All avoiding fear did was waste time and cause more damage.

Additionally, I’ve had a lot of feelings like I’m not in a good enough soul condition to do certain things for/with Divine Truth. This has been an excuse to avoid fear. I’ve realized it’s mostly about desire, and also that engaging desires pulls me through emotions which can improve my condition anyway if I am humble to them. So telling myself I needed to be in a better condition first was to justify my avoidance of fear and avoidance of taking action.

Lastly, I have a huge fear of making mistakes and messing things up. This fear is one that constantly smothers my passion, desire, excitement, and happiness in life and affects everything, and I suspect it won’t go until I take more actions, feel more of this fear that arises when I do, and grieve how I was treated by my parents which created such a huge fear of punishment and rejection for ever doing anything wrong.

So… I did some logging of FAQ questions and ended up really enjoying it a lot, though I did/do still have fears of making mistakes. I really like organization, documentation, data and spreadsheets!

Make changes to my business/challenge emotions through business changes:

Mary and Jesus gave me really awesome feedback on emotions that were affecting how I was doing my business. In short, I was (and still am to an extent), not sharing the full scope of what I’m passionate about regarding God and DT in my business, but rather keeping that private, and therefore suppressing myself and not being honest with everyone. I was also in fear of what certain groups of professional peers would think if I started saying the full truth about the topics I teach about in my business. And lastly, I was hiding sharing myself in all of it–the same issues I described at the start of this post. Some of these choices have been motivated by my fear of ruining my business and not making enough money, but mostly they’ve been about terror of others attacking me and not liking me if I share more of God’s Truth on issues, and most of all if I share more of myself and be myself.

Early morning work sessions.

This issue of changing my business was one that I had no humility about for a while. I was excited when I talked with them about it all in Australia, but when I got back, I had this total brick wall of fear up. Jesus and Mary suggested that if I shared myself, was more in harmony with God’s Principles, was more truthful etc., that things could get better, I’d enjoy it more, my business would probably do better, receive more donations, and would be helping more people. But I had this feeling like, “No, that is not true for me.” I had never quite felt like that about any of Jesus and Mary’s feedback before. Fear is so weird, y’all.

I was convinced if I did so, I would inevitably plunge into homelessness, bankruptcy and utter despair and desolation. I was convinced if I did what they suggested, it would ruin my business, my life, and that I would never be able to survive financially, as I barely was already, and that the domino effect would end in everything being much worse than it was. And because it was already not very happy, I couldn’t risk things getting even worse. I always joke with friends that they can give me any scenario whatsoever, and I will figure out how that could somehow end up in disaster. I’m an expert at the path from Anything Point A to Apocalypse Point B.

It took me about 3 months of feeling various emotions to go from JUST NO. to making my first video. Making videos–both on my business youtube channel and my God, Love and Truth one–has been quite interesting. I battle with fears that I’m arrogant and self absorbed every time I make one that includes more sharing of myself and isn’t just nutritional info. I worry that I’m saying the wrong things and going to make mistakes with what I say. Emotions have often been triggered while preparing the outlines and rehearsing for the video, partly in relation to the specific topic I’m sharing about, and partly generally just with sharing myself at all. And so I can see that I have benefitted also from facing my fear of putting myself out there. I don’t really know how to gauge how truly helpful the vids are to others, and most of the time feel like I’m shooting in the dark, but I hope to keep refining myself and dealing with emotions so they can be helpful for others.

So now I talk about Divine Truth in some of my business videos. I talk about Jesus and Mary (I did this before with my clients, just hadn’t much publicly). I’m not totally excluding God from discussions about veganism and food addiction and juicing because I’m afraid people will think I’m nuts or stupid as much as I was before. And guess what? My business hasn’t dissolved into nothing, and I’m not living next to a gutter or have had to take a job that made me more depressed. And I am enjoying operating my business so much more than I was. While the Law of Attraction is showing me I have a lot more emotional work to do in the areas of self worth and money, I have received a bit more donations since making these changes, not less or none like I was convinced I would.

I still have a lot of fear about many things with the videos, and I still feel apologetic about talking a lot about God, so I have a great deal more to work on. But what I’ve experienced so far is that my fear is not always true. That fact is still shocking to me! I am starting to see how important it is to take action despite my fear, to challenge the fear by action, and to not let fear dictate all my life decisions. I always wanted to think I could feel through and deal with my fear before taking action, but I’m not sure that’s actually possible. Taking action, though feels a lot more unstable, is feeling better than despair and flatness of inaction. I’m becoming more aware of the massive amounts of suffering I inflict on myself by justifying and avoiding my fear, and also more about how my fear affects others too.

Figure out how to see Perry:

I suppose this is my first time saying it more publicly and I’m feeling weird writing about it, but there’s a guy… his name is Perry and I feel he’s my soulmate… some of you may know him from videos and the former DT Forum.

His and my story is kind of long, but the short of it is we’ve known each other for nearly 9 years, but for the first 7.5 we were just friends with some sexual projection, of course mostly at a distance being in different countries. Our injuries were so compatible–if you could call it that–such that it never moved farther friends. I was always very drawn and attracted to Perry, but felt he’d never go for a girl like me, didn’t feel good enough for him, and was certain I’d be rejected, so I never said a word, essentially concluding there’d be no point in me doing so. His injuries were such that though he had some attraction and affection for me, I don’t have the emotional injuries he’s been most attracted to, and being around me has always triggered uncomfortable emotions in him, and so he never said anything either. There are also other emotions on both of our sides that contributed to that 7.5 years of mostly-avoidance, but at the moment those are some of the big ones we’re aware of.

Arizona in 2010.

After 7.5 years, I was terrified to, but confessed some of my feelings, found out to my total surprise that he’d had feelings for me too (I had no clue before then), and then we’ve been trying to figure out our relationship ever since then. We’ve been gifted lots of feedback from Jesus and Mary and have tons and tons to work through. I often feel I’d like to share a bit more about what what’s happened in our relationship and particularly the feedback we’ve received, in case it could help others with various soulmate emotions and relationship issues, particularly for couples with similar injuries/dynamics as we have, but also I don’t feel confident sharing about relationships as I’ve got so much stuff there. So we’ll see.

I went to England and spent the month of April with Perry, and am now planning to go back for a longer period of time next month. Jesus told me that Perry and I both have emotions of being content with a certain distance, with Perry being in England and me being in America, and if we get too close we’ll get triggered, and if we get too far away we’ll get triggered, so we feel comfortable with a certain distance between us. I am discovering just how true that us for me! I often feel so much warmth and love for him, but I’m also scared of actually engaging a soulmate relationship. So I would like to challenge those fears, and I just feel there’s a heap of stuff in me that simply never gets triggered when I’m on my own as I’ve mostly been recently, and stuff that seems to not be triggered except by Perry specifically. So while I have fears, I’m also really excited to go back to England and also excited to hopefully get through some more stuff.

London in 2017.

And after England (because there’s a limit on how long I can stay there), I’m really wanting to go back to Australia to volunteer as I just loved the DT Training and my time in Oz so, so, so much. I look back on it and am still blown away I got to do it; I can’t believe how lucky I am to have. And would just love so much to help in any way I can. I adore it!

So that’s me for now.

Love,

Courtney

P.S. If anyone discovers how to transport instantly, please let me know because that would help immensely in the juggling of three continents. 😉

Fear and How I Nearly Missed the DT Training

If you’ve read my last blog about the The Divine Truth Training Program, you may have been able to garner how much I loved it. It was the best experience of my life and the biggest gift I’ve ever received. Every time I recall any part of it, I find myself staring off at nothing, lost in an incredulous feeling that I got to do it. I could gush about it endlessly.

Sometimes though, when lost in that grateful and stunned feeling, the recollection of something else makes my stomach knot in an instant. And that is remembering how I very nearly missed the entire experience–by my own choice.

To explain, I’ll need to backtrack a bit. For about three months before my arrival in Australia, I had been really lucky to participate in monthly mentoring groups for those desiring to assist in sharing Divine Truth with the world. Sharing DT has been my #1 desire for years; but something I’d not dared to let my heart run with–due to fears, feelings I have about desires, and feelings about myself. It was really generous on Jesus and Mary’s part to invite me along as I’d not actually acted on that desire yet.

Jesus and Mary had extended the invitation for the Training Program to a few people, but asked me in particular to please consider whether sharing Divine Truth was really my passion as I had not shown that through any actions thus far. I thought I’d considered it; going was all I could really think about and I wanted to do it so much, so I emailed to say I’d like to do it. I was accepted and booked my plane tickets.

Shortly after, we had another mentor meeting, and some of my questions regarding the upcoming experience and how I was not sure what I’d do after I got back home revealed that I hadn’t been as sincere as I was telling myself I had been in my examining my desires in the way that Jesus and Mary asked me to, and which needed to be the basis of going. They reminded me that a lot of resources and time from a lot of people would be going into the training and asked me that by the time I came, to have a definite feeling that sharing Divine Truth is what I want to do with my life, otherwise training me would not be a good use of resources. They were so very kind and loving as they are in every instance, and they are perfectly reasonable things to have asked of me–and I did feel that then–but I took things and twisted it in my own mind, and spiraled. Even listening back to that mentor meeting now, I marvel at how I missed all the encouraging things they said and fixed on just a couple things, and then twisted them completely. Spirits then took hold of those things and exploited them as well.

I spiraled in terror, and bad feelings about myself, and got very spirit attacked. I’ve never experienced anything like it: for weeks I couldn’t eat because I felt constantly like I could throw up. I had insomnia for the first time in my life, and when I did sleep, I’d often jolt awake violently in the middle of the night feeling choked or with a stabbing feeling in my stomach. I couldn’t concentrate or think straight; I was in a fog and struggled to work or get anything done. I spent entire days in bed crying and shaking and having no clue what to do about it or often why I even was. I would sometimes be walking around trying to do something in the house, suddenly have this dread come over me and my legs would physically lose their strength and I’d just have to lay down for a long time.

My head was going a million miles a minute at all times and here’s what it looked like on repeat. Many of these I wrote in my journal at the time:

This is the worst idea ever. You shouldn’t be going. You’re not sincere at all. Who do you think you are anyway? It’s going to be a disaster if you go. It’d be a miracle if you made it through without being kicked out; in fact it’s pretty much guaranteed you would be. You’re being selfish even considering going when you’ve done nothing helpful with Divine Truth. You have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re not ready and you’re arrogant to even think you might be. You can’t get to where you need to be within six weeks, it’s impossible. You’re clearly delusional about your supposed desire to share DT. You’re just going to disappoint Jesus and Mary and waste their time.

I’m terrible at taking action on anything, so what’s the point of getting trained? And what about the person I think is my soulmate? Am I just going to make plans for after the training without him? It’s an awful idea to go, it’s better if I wait longer, then maybe I’ll be ready at some point. Besides, the customs agents might not like that I’m doing something with Jesus and Mary for several months; they might not even let me through. And if I do get through the whole experience, I might ruin myself financially by not working for that long. It’s just too risky; one thing goes wrong and I’m screwed in so many ways. The whole thing is too risky and I’m not ready.

And so… after a few weeks in this place, I changed my plane tickets to only come for the Assistance Group and not for the training after. I had a brief thought before I did, “Maybe I should email J&M first before I change them, about my considering doing so?” but then had the thought You’ve wasted enough of their time, don’t bother them even more. Just make your own decision for once and be done with it.

And so, I paid the money to change my tickets. For a day and a half, I was like a sick person that’d become miraculously healthy again. I felt back to normal: I could focus again, work again, sleep again, eat again. It all felt much “better”. Then I emailed Jesus and Mary about the update, why I did it and how I wanted to come still, but later when I was more ready. I was fully convinced they’d agree I made the responsible choice and that my assessments were right.

To my surprise–though maybe not to yours reading this–that did not happen. (wink) Jesus and Mary gifted me feedback on the emotional injuries that had motivated my rational in not coming to the training. Fears had motivated my decision: fears of not being good enough, inadequate, making a mistake, not being able to cope (Not surprisingly, many of these are the exact same fears that have caused me to not take action in sharing Divine Truth). In this place, I convinced myself I was being logical and rational when I was actually being the opposite. And that’s what living in fear does: it makes us think we’re being reasonable when we’re not.

I then paid the money to change the plane tickets back for the longer stay. So in the end I got to go after all, though the money lost was one of the compensations of my acting in fear. As soon as I changed them back, I was right back to how I felt before changing them. Though it wasn’t quite as bad, most of those feelings I’d mentioned above came back and I had a lot more sleepless nights, unproductive days and nausea. In fact, right up to the minute I got on the plane, I had an inevitable doom feeling like I was convinced somehow wasn’t going to make it there and really shouldn’t be going anyway. On the plane I had a meltdown, and even when I got to Noosaville I had a meltdown as soon as I checked into the accommodation. I took one look around, felt a nervous breakdown coming on, and thought:

This is the dumbest move you’ve ever made. You’re not going to make it through these whole 9.5 weeks, what are you even doing here? What’s the point? And now you’ve wasted money on your plane changes, too. You can’t do anything right. Always living in fear, always fucking up.

I cried for hours though probably not productively but rather in the same stuff as before. The severity of these feelings subsided a lot when I saw Jesus and Mary and felt their love and care for me, felt the atmosphere of love that bobbles around like a lovely cloud around them all the time, and when I started to work through some  emotions about how I’ve been treated in my life that have caused a lot of the injuries that drive these apocalyptic, obsessive terror spirals. And within about a week of being in Noosaville, I was starting to feel a kind of joy and desire I’ve never felt before, which grew over the time I was in Australia.

Later, during the weeks in the countryside, I chatted with Jesus and Mary a few more times about it. Mary said to me about my returning home after the training,

“The problem will be if you just go back and go ‘It’s all too hard, I can’t, there’s too much to do, I’m not good enough, I’ll stuff it up anyway’–kinda similar to that state you went into before you came of just like ‘No!’ And tell yourself it’s not a real desire and it’s not valid from God’s Perspective and then just bow out… You avoided the fear so much that you got to the point where you ended up rationalizing your inaction.”

That last line has stuck with me almost daily since being back. I often ask myself now, “Am I avoiding my fear and rationalizing inaction?”

And here’s the thing: while J&M gifted me the feedback in response to my initial changed plans, they didn’t have to. The reality is, it was my decision to back out of the training, and my (terror and error-based) desire, and they were under no obligation to inform me of what was going on with me even though they could see it clearly. They were extremely clear in all their ample feedback to me; it was me who made a series of decisions based on my own injuries. They said they’d considered leaving me with my desire and choice without saying too much, but felt perhaps it’d be an opportunity to learn about what happens when I avoid and live in my fear. And has it ever been! I don’t even know how to say how grateful I am they replied to my email with the gift more extensive feedback. I feel like they saved my life. Well, for realz–how many times have they and their teachings saved my life?! I would have assumed I made the right choice for the right reasons, left after the AG back home, and it may have been years or decades, or maybe not till being in the spirit world before I thought, “Hang on a sec, was that the right choice?” And then imagine the regret!! I could have easily missed out on the biggest opportunity and gift I’ve ever been offered in my life, and who knows what I would have missed out on as a flow-on effect of skipping the training. It makes me a bit nauseous to even think about how close I was to affecting my life for so long with just one decision made in the honoring of fear.

I wanted to share this story in case it might help others recognize how the avoidance of fear and living in fear–as well as bad feelings about ourselves–can cause us to rationalize decisions that are illogical, out of harmony with love, and aren’t beneficial for us. How justifying the fear can mean we miss major opportunities which would have been beneficial for our growth.

I still have enough fear that I am in danger of making similar big fear-based choices in the future again. I am still driven by fear in almost every situation. But I’m desiring more to see the truth of how justifying my fears has affected my life in the past, is affecting my life now, and how it could affect it in the future if I don’t begin dealing with some. In the weeks when I was booked in for the longer training, my fears were being triggered, but I was not dealing with them, but rather living in them. But during those few days in which my tickets were no longer for the training, I felt great, but it wasn’t because I’d done the good thing. It was because I’d completely put the lid on something that was triggering terror for me. I had entirely shut the whole process down, the spirits lifted, and that’s why I felt so much better. Looking back, this is what I’ve done continuously in my life: gone through periods–years–in a particular situation, stagnant, coasting, rarely feeling afraid of much. Rarely triggered, because my life was so set up with addictions, I’d controlled enough circumstances as possible, and most of all, was constantly turning away from any triggering situations. So, I felt “good” most of the time. But it is sobering to see what this prison we create for ourselves with our fear is really like.

I have to–and we all have to–be careful about getting into judgment about fear. I’ve gotten very self-punishing and judgmental about how fear-driven I am, but that’s also not going to help any of us deal with the fear. I’m tentative to say much of anything about how to process fear, but what I’m focusing on right now is taking more actions which trigger my fears, feeling a little more of them, and rather than blaming and judging myself for my having so much fear, instead seeing the fears my parents had themselves that were forced upon me and taught to me as truths about life and God, and also how their bad treatment of me created other fears and bad feelings about myself, and feeling the grief of all that.

Resources for learning about fear

Full length DT videos on fear

DT FAQ videos on fear

DT Clips on fear

Mary’s blogs on fear (my fave is “Living In Fear & the Freedom to Choose Differently“)

This particular mediumship on fear is also a favorite for me: 04 Aug 11 Mediumship with Mary & Jesus–Jesus Speaks with Cynthia–Helping A Group Of Fearful Women

Love,

Courtney

The Divine Truth Training Program

I’ve now been back in the US for coming up on 2 weeks after an amazing 9.5 weeks in Australia, during which time I attended the Understanding God’s Loving Laws 3.2 Assistance Group presented by Jesus and Mary Magdalene, followed by the Divine Truth Training Program.

As I gaze out my window at the snow outside here in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA–a stark contrast to the near 100-degree F Aussie summer I just came from–and feel about writing this blog, I realize I could write a book about what I learned in education and about myself while there. It’s hard to know where to start! I can always write more later about particular specific topics, but still, I feel like I will be reflecting on everything for years and still not have digested it all. How do I do the experience justice via writing? And when I think about the magnitude of the gift I was given, I feel like I’ve been one of the luckiest people of the last 2000 years. And so with that in my heart, I think, well, I’ll try to share as much as I possibly can in the case it might also benefit others for me to do so.

This is probably a good place to recommend Mary’s blog post which discusses the groups, training program and more, as well as a couple blogs Eloisa has written mentioning it as well. Mary’s blog discusses criteria and the process for the upcoming New Volunteer Induction Program, so check that out if you find the idea of volunteering appealing. Some great pics of our stay to be seen on their blogs too!

Mary’s January Newsletter

Eloisa’s God’s Way Update

Eloisa and Pete’s Personal Update

I’d been to one weekend seminar Jesus and Mary gave in November 2013–almost exactly three years earlier–in San Diego, California, so this was my first Assistance Group and first time to Australia. It was so wonderful to see Jesus and Mary again after so long, and to meet the volunteer team and others who I’d seen on videos or who I’d interacted with before via email or forums. It was incredible to be able to get a glimpse into just how much preparation goes into each group and how much love, care, and time is taken in creating the material. I was also amazed to witness the full technical operations for the group: it is truly massive. There is so much work that goes into it prior to it happening (apparently over 500 hours by Jesus and Mary!), and then there’s all that goes into the live recording hours of the group itself, and then J&M and Lena and other volunteers are often working still when most of us have a day off during the AG and they often don’t have days off. I just came to appreciate it all so much more.

Assistance Group Homework!

A dawn walk along the water.

I loved the material in the Assistance Group and I loved watching Jesus and Mary’s love and enthusiasm for the subjects. The material itself many times touched my heart and brought me to tears, and at other times, I was quite shut down and struggled to pay full attention. It makes me sad that I missed fully absorbing as much as possible while physically there, which happens when we have resistance to what’s being taught and are suppressing our own emotions about it. Spirit influence can shut us down too, though that also only happens through our suppressing our own feelings. It’s such a gift to be able to watch the groups again on youtube later; I’ve been looking forward to them so much. I highly recommend watching all of this third group. As Jesus and Mary say, it contains some of the most important information for our entire existence both here and later in the spirit world. Who am I kidding… I highly recommend watching every minute of every subject of their material! Nothing is better!!

Jesus cracked my heart open! Sometimes there’s no escaping.

After the group, I helped a bit in the packing up day (holy equipment!) and then my friend Nicky from the UK and I headed off to the countryside with Tristan, where we would begin the Training Program along with the third overseas participant from Barbados, David, as well as several local participants.

In my first weeks, I stayed with Tristan for a week followed by Catherine for a week, and was so grateful to have been able to spend extensive time with both of them in their homes. Thank you both so much for hosting me!

Our first task was to deep-clean the Learning Center house which the three of us would eventually stay on. I like cleaning and so this day was, while long and physically taxing, mostly enjoyable for me. I’ll never forget my first longer chat with Eloisa–about soulmates–while I chipped off hardened mud wasp nests from the toilet with a knife on all fours and she stood in the shower scrubbing it top to bottom.

Cleaning is as important of a task to have a good attitude about as learning software or shoveling things outside. We had another cleaning day as part of the training towards the end of our trip of the studio and Jesus and Mary’s home which we all utilized during the training.

Catherine, Tristan and Nicky hit the sponges!

It was incredible to learn about all the technology and software used for DT from Jesus and Lena, as well as Igor and Mary. In the first weeks our other activities and education included unpacking all the equipment from the Assistance Groups and organizing and labeling what was to be stored till the next group, learning about the particular cameras that are used for both groups and studio recording, and how those cameras are all connected with other aspects of the recording and an overview of the entire recording flow. Lena and Igor gave presentations on attitudes to service and what loving volunteering really is about. Mary gave us a talk with additions and amendments to their presentation, as well as a talk called “Good Practices for Presentations”. I really enjoyed hearing about how to, non-addictively and with love, give good talks from her.

Lena setting up cameras

Lena, Igor, Nicky, Eloisa, Tristan when we learned studio setup

I also got out in nature and went with groups led by Cornelius twice to the Bunya National Forest, a subtropical rainforest with incredible plant and animal life which Jesus said that long ago, was how a lot of Queensland was, over a much larger area, even as far away as Wilkesdale where the Learning Center is and where Jesus and Mary live, though it’s an hour’s drive away. A lot of Australia’s countryside has been depleted by agriculture–primarily animal agriculture. Cornelius invited us to consider how God created an ecosystem like that to work and where God’s Principles could be seen in it, and how that kind of terrain could potentially be restored long-term in depleted areas nearby.

The Bunyas!

Lena and I playing Tarzan

We had several sessions of being taught and having Q&A’s about sound editing from Jesus and it was so cool to watch him work and hear him talk about it. Of course, he’s got decades and decades of expertise in computer technology and so many other areas in technology; I just got a glimpse really into the incredible amount he knows. I personally didn’t even know what a hertz was a few months ago (when I told Jesus this, he joked, “A rental car company!”), much less about decibels and how to remove “clicks” in audio and what compression and timestamps are for, so it was a steep learning curve for me. But, over the course of the weeks I started to really enjoy it. Fixing things–audio included–is fun! There’s something crazy satisfying about seeing a problem and then clicking a few buttons and BAM–it’s vanished!

Jesus explained to us that sound is the most important part and so that is why so much time is spent on it–a lot more time than the video editing. And basically the whole time I was there, Jesus was putting in massive amounts of hours doing that editing on the computer, day in and day out, usually for 12-hour days. Yet another of the countless things I was able to see which made me that much more astounded at the work that goes into producing every youtube video and downloadable audio file. It’s so easy in our world of entitlement and instant gratification to just go watch the DT videos on youtube, which are provided for free, and not even think of the amount of effort and time that goes into not only producing them, but producing them at such a high quality. I really can’t say enough about what really goes on behind the scenes. We also got to learn some about the mixer and switcher from Jesus as well.

Jesus teaching sound editing in the studio.

Another part of our training was to give a ten-minute presentation in the studio discussing some aspects of love and using at least one of six Bible verse options Jesus and Mary picked for us, which we’d then get feedback from them on our structure, delivery, content, and our personal emotions that affected them. Soon after, Jesus gave a wonderful talk on how to give good public presentations. I was still living in a lot of fear of doing one myself (more on that later), but I really just adored hearing him talk about it. I was like, “OMG I’m learning about teaching from the ultimate master teacher ever!” We learned about flow of material, audience considerations, delivery, structure, preparation, emotions and addictions, and so much more. It gave me such good stuff to consider when creating my own presentation.

My own presentation preparation was one of the more emotional sagas of my time there. When I first got the assignment, I just felt terror. I put off developing my presentation for a little while. When I finally desired to feel about what I might want to talk about, I had some ideas come and began creating a structure for it. I started to feel a bit better as I wrote things out; enjoying playing around with the organization of it and prioritizing what I wanted to say. I rehearsed it by myself a number of times and felt pretty good about it. Then, my Learning Center housemates Nicky and Dave and I decided to rehearse all of ours with each other. When I got up to do mine, I completely disconnected from myself and somehow my 10-12 minute talk went to 5 minutes. Every second of it I wanted to run away. Afterwards, huge emotions for me came up about not wanting anyone to look at me or watch me, feeling like everything I say is a waste of time, and I have nothing of value to give–ever. I went away and had a sob for a couple hours about it.

When presentation day came around, compared to how I was in my first rehearsal, it was miles better! I didn’t forget half of what I wanted to say and I was more connected to myself than the first time. However, I have a such long way to go with those fears and feelings about myself, and so Jesus told me I was very nervous still and wasn’t being myself in my talk, and gifted me with some reasons emotionally why that was. But I also had this weird feeling like, hmm, I have such terror about this and yet I can kind of feel like if I get through some emotions I might actually really enjoy public speaking! Jesus also gave me a really great explanation about one of the verses that I’d misinterpreted (*facepalm*: misinterpreting Jesus’ quote to Jesus), so that was awesome to learn about as well. Note to self: feel about the real meaning Bible verses thoroughly!

Can I just say that almost everything I write here I feel like could be its own long blog post. This blog ended up being about 8 hours to do and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. It’s ok y’all, I’ll eventually recap it all in detail over like five years time…

But yes, the presentation days were awesome. Eight or nine of us did them, and I just loved watching everyone’s talks and learning from the feedback Jesus and Mary gave all of us afterwards. I learned heaps and heaps from those days and it was just such a gift to have that opportunity to practice sharing Divine Truth with an audience and then be given feedback and direction about how to do it better next time. I also got to try out switching the video live during one of the presentations, which takes lots of attention and practice to know what camera angles to choose when and why, but I thought it was really fun.

Mary & Tristan doing camera switching while Eloisa sets up her talk.

Jesus and Mary giving feedback on talks. They’re THE BEST.

Another major aspect of the training was about environmental restoration. Jesus gave another stellar talk (I feel like I’m needing a thesaurus now so I don’t have too many “awesome”‘s and “amazing”‘s in this blog) on restoring land and eco systems. We have all impacted the environment severely, primarily through eating animal products and also through various other addictions we have in our lifestyles and consumerism. Because most of us have consumed so much meat, dairy, eggs, leather, etc., we have compensation for that. What Jesus was wanting to hit home with us was that it is no easy task–in fact it is extremely difficult and it takes incredibly long–to restore an environment that’s been decimated. In his presentation we learned about how certain plants play certain roles in the recovery of an area, and how to foster that recovery with various methods. We talked seeds, water, soil, how insects and animals help restore land, and tons more. I personally have such a passion for educating people on the main way we destroy the planet–through consuming animal products–and also I love nature and eco restoration, so this all really excited me.

And then, it was time to take it from the classroom to the outdoors, and we had several days of long manual labor, which included shoveling and moving softwood and hardwood chips, some days for eight hours in the heat. I really enjoy manual labor as I’ve always been into physical fitness, though often heat/humidity makes me feel oppressed, and so there were times that, because I didn’t want to feel how I felt about it, I instead went out of body and wasn’t connected to myself but rather just doing the rote movements of shoveling and physical labor but not feeling. Circumstances like hard manual labor in heat can trigger us into emotions we have that are good for us to feel through if we’re humble to them–I wasn’t.

Jesus, Mary and the softwood we moved a lot of. Photo by Eloisa L-H.

After a couple days of this labor, I thought to myself, “If every person had to do an equivalent amount of compensation via manual labor eco restoration immediately after having a burger or a glass of milk, a lot more people would be vegan!”

We got some great tours from Mary and Jesus around their property about what the land used to look like, how it’s progressed so far and how they’ve done it, and shown various methods and experiments they’ve done on their property. One of my favorite parts was Mary showing us a huge trench they’d had dug uphill from where their fruit trees are. This ditch was originally very deep, and it was also quite long, and she explained how they’re throwing in organic material which retains water so the water soaks in the ground rather than sliding off the surface of the hardened dirt terrain. Despite how dry it is there, the fruit trees downhill from this trench were green. They were “happy little trees” as famed American artist Bob Ross would say.

Mary showing us the soil experiment. Photo by Eloisa L-H.

Cornelius also gave us a tour of his property, which is adjacent to Jesus and Mary’s, and what he’s working on there to restore it. He taught us a great deal about human manure and how it can be used to help restore land as well. Pete also gave us a cool presentation on waterless container gardening. There are so many cool ideas to try out and it’s such a gift a lot of the guys there in Queensland have been experimenting with so many things so we can learn what hasn’t worked and what’s worked better. And hopefully come up with our own experiments!

Corny and his fully decomposed soil/human manure mix!

Some of Corny’s orchard

Eloisa and Tristan gave a really interesting talk on education and how God’s Way of Education for both children and parents might look like and the experiments in education they’re already doing in that area with Eloisa and Pete’s three kids. I’m so excited to see what these guys continue to create. We got a digital tour also by Barb, who heads up the transcription and translation teams–another massive volunteer undertaking.

I just absolutely loved learning everything. I felt like I was soaking up all this new information and every single part of it mattered so much for such a bigger important purpose. No learning was superfluous, every morsel was vital and interesting. Sometimes, I struggled to understand the full scope of things, particularly the technological side, though I realized that was mostly about my own feelings about not being capable and my fear of making mistakes, particularly since technology is an area I usually feel comfortable with and enjoy. But I started putting pressure on myself to understand everything perfectly, yesterday, and so that’s where I stumbled and in the end actually prevented absorption of new information at times. Overall I felt a bit like I was in college again, trucking my notebook in every day to learn totally new things to me. It was great.

I also got to attend in-person the mentor meetings for those desiring to share Divine Truth with the world that I’ve been so lucky to be a part of for the last six months. Mary led two great ones while there, one primarily about self-responsibility (following off what we began to learn about it in the AG) and another primarily about unloving attitudes towards Jesus. All so important for any of us to effectively and lovingly share God’s Way, because how can we share God’s Way when we’re still majorly opposing living it ourselves?

Post-mentor meeting chatting

And of course, it was wonderful to hang out with everyone in various casual settings at shared meals and informal hangouts of various kinds, whether swimming in dams or hiking some great little mountains. Speaking of shared meals though, I gotta be real here: if I felt like wouldn’t be disproportionate for me to post 30 photos of the incredible food I ate there, well, I would. It’s like there’s this secret little grove of incredible vegan chefs hiding away in rural Queensland. They’re like a delicious pot of gold at the end of a rainbow and my waistline by the end of the trip proved it!

The delicious farewell meal Jesus and Mary hosted for us

At this point in the blog, I’m thinking to myself, wow, I feel like I just recapped the activities themselves in about 1% of the detail I could, and I haven’t really even gotten to the emotional part of it, the how did I feel part of it, and really, as we were reminded often during the program, our attitudes and emotions are far more important than how much we know skill-wise.

I am tentative to share about how I felt about things, which is partly because I feel again daunted how to write that all out, as that could hypothetically be a really long blog post too. But also, I have a set of emotions which makes me not want to share how I personally felt and rather just hide behind a recap of the events themselves and then sign off. I want to share the info with you, but not myself. However, this is one area I was gifted a lot of feedback on from Jesus and Mary and others while there, and is a big area of growth for me to come. And that is: I want to hide from the world, I want to not be taken notice of, I want to not be known.

It only took a few days for several people to point out I was not showing my nature, was not opening up and being myself. At first this was a surprise to me. I knew I’d been really shy most of my life but I didn’t realize it was such an issue; I was just being how I was all the time, but others were sensitive to it immediately–more sensitive to it than I was even with myself. I learned that when I am subdued in fear and want to hide, it actually places a demand on the environment to work to get to know me, and it makes others have to put quite an effort forth to know what I really think and feel about things, which is unloving to them and myself. I also keep my heart closed to others until I’m sure they’re trustworthy, which sadly is something I did even with the most trustworthy and loving people in the world–Jesus and Mary. I missed a lot of opportunities to connect with them and others and to enjoy myself both in personal interactions as well as in the learning and activities themselves. On one hand I feel quite sad and regretful about that missed opportunity, but on the other hand given how suppressed and oppressed I’ve been in my life, I was the most open and the most myself I’ve ever been while there.

Bridges in Noosaville

But of course, everyone was only impossibly kind and gentle in their helping me see these issues. Recalling the love and care it took to not only notice, but the fact they desired to know the real me… well, I get really emotional every time I feel about it. I received such immense gifts of friendship, love and care–I daresay the first experiences of real friendship, love and care that I’ve ever experienced in my life from other people. Jesus and Mary helped me see why I’ve felt apologetic for everything about myself, like I’m a bother and an imposition to everyone, bad about myself and terrified of connecting to myself.

My avoidance of and living in fears of various kinds also dictated many of my experience and choices. I was afraid of sharing myself with others, and also another of my biggest fears–making mistakes and doing things wrong–affected things heavily at times. When I live in this fear, I defer to others who may or may not know better than me, and then in that process I in fact made more mistakes and contributed to more problems, which is precisely what I was trying to avoid. Even if a person does know more than me, deferring to them out of fear can mean I lean on them in an addictive way to tell me what to do and spell things out in a way they shouldn’t have to, which is a form of demand on the person who knows more and an avoidance of my own self-responsibility. This terror of getting it wrong also causes me to not take action, and not experiment, which affects everything in my life and affected how I behaved in pressured environments during the training.

Sunset at Tristan’s house

There were also instances where my fears of various kinds–some which I’ve mentioned above as well as others–caused me to not be generous and to force others to serve me because I was too busy living in my own desire to hide, engage minimally, not stand out, defer to others. In this way my fear makes me very selfish and self-centered and at times oblivious to others. I realized that truthfully, fear always makes me self-centered, every time. It causes me to think only of how to protect myself from my fear and how to serve it as my god, not how to love and serve others.

As I mentioned before, I will be digesting and absorbing the experience for a long while to come, and all the emotions I need to work on in order to get closer to God and share God’s Truth will also take a long while to come. But the experience for me helped me to connect to the fact that yes, sharing Divine Truth is what I want to do! It was the best 9.5 weeks of my life. In my heart and soul I can feel all I want to do is contribute in any way I can for others to know that God’s truth–and a relationship with God–is available to them if they want it. I don’t know God really yet and I don’t know much about love either, but I know Jesus and Mary’s teachings of God’s Truth have changed my life and are continuing to change it and I’m so passionate about it when I bypass some of my fear and bad feelings about myself.

Nicky, David, me

So, my desires are these: I want to return to Australia to continue training and learning how to help share Divine Truth. There’s a visa for those still under a certain age bracket which would allow me to go back for 1-2 years, which will largely just depend on my having the funds/donations to do so. In the meantime, I’m wanting to face some of my fears about sharing myself and the full scope of what I’m passionate about with God’s Truth. This is something I want to do in general, as well as in my current work as a nutritionist, where I assist people with going vegan and dealing with food addictions and eating disorders. I’ll also keep writing on this blog, and, though the idea makes me so nervous, I’m thinking perhaps to create some video “vlogs” as well, potentially both with my health/nutrition/food addiction work but also regarding anything else about Divine Truth.

Thank you to God, Jesus, and Mary for the massive gift of this experience. Thank you Jesus and Mary, for everything they do for all of us–I don’t know how to begin to express how grateful I feel for their gifts to us, for who they are, for what they’ve discovered and are now teaching us. Thank you to everyone who gifted me the experience with training, hosting me at your homes, hosting me at the Learning Center, and so much more. Thank you Lena, Catherine, Eloisa, Peter, Cornelius, Igor, Tristan and everyone else who gifted their resources, time, love and care to me. I love you all so much.

Love,

Courtney

Veganism, Ethics, and Love

“Few of us are aware that the act of eating can be a powerful statement of commitment to our own well-being, and at the same time the creation of a healthier habitat. Your health, happiness, and the future of life on earth are rarely so much in your own hands as when you sit down to eat.”  

-John Robbins

At the time of this blog, it was about 11 years ago that I decided to go vegan. Going vegan has been one of the best things I’ve done in my life and I’m really grateful that I came across truth about it at such a young age, and I’m so passionate about how it can impact the world in such a massive and positive way.

I’ve written lots about veganism on my other blog associated with my work as a vegan nutritionist, including a post last year for my 10-year “veganniversary” last year, which you can read here. So, I was thinking to myself, Well, how would I want to write about being vegan here on my Divine Truth blog? My work blog is primarily about vegan nutrition advice, juicing and recipes, so I thought it would be really great to talk in this post more about being vegan from the emotional, moral and ethical perspectives.

I’ve decided not to make this blog a list of facts and truths about animal agriculture, because there are so many fantastic resources already out there on that. I’ll mention some of my favorite books and other resources throughout the blog, and also a list at the end so you have plenty of options for looking into the details.

How I Went Vegan

Growing up, I was nowhere near vegan. As a competitive swimmer and water polo player throughout school, I ate lots of meat, eggs, dairy, and sea creatures, just as my teammates did and my family did. I had never considered any kind of deviation from eating lots of animal products, nor was I one of those people who “never really ate much growing up anyway.”

When I learned the truth about animal agriculture, through a book I read when I was 18 called The Food Revolution by John Robbins, my heart broke open. To this day I think it’s one of the best books on veganism out there. Mr. Robbins writes this book in a compassionate tone, meanwhile citing incredible amounts of studies and well-researched facts. He never downplays or shies away from the truth about animal agriculture, but he also is warm and understanding with the (likely not vegan yet) reader. His book is full of inspiring invitations to see moving into veganism as a part of personal growth, being loving to animals, loving to oneself, loving to the environment, and loving to other humans in the world, and indeed, even a potentially spiritual choice.

This book found me at a time when I felt like my life had no meaning at all, and I had no ability to do any good in the world. The truths cracked through my numbness, and deep amounts of sorrow–that I had never known all this and hadn’t known the damage these things caused in the world–surged through me. For the first time in my life, I connected with grief about the state of the world and the colossal amount of pain and destruction in it. At the same time, I felt more optimistic than I had in many, many years. Realizing the impact I personally could have on the world through just this one area was probably the first time since being a young child that I felt much inspiration about anything.

I realized self-love would dictate I be vegan for the health of my body. If that wasn’t enough, then I learned about what happens to animals in the animal agriculture industry and how awfully they are abused and tortured, and indeed, how no matter how they are treated, exploiting them and/or killing them is wrong. And if that wasn’t enough, then I learned that the single most environmentally destructive thing on our planet is the production of meat, dairy, eggs, seafood, leather, etc.  They contribute to climate change, deforestation, water monopolization and contamination, and ocean destruction more any other factor. The consumerism of animal agriculture is absolutely annihilating our planet.

And if that wasn’t enough, I learned that my not being vegan directly affected the quality of life and dictated the very life or death of other people in the world–Oh. My. Goodness. I was blown away. No other industry, no other cause, has a bigger impact on malnutrition on this planet. No other factor contributes to deaths from malnutrition more than our choices to eat dairy, eggs, meat, etc. Animal agriculture robs thirsty populations of clean water, robs them of good land that could be used for crops to feed humans, destroys topsoil that’s essential for growing plants of any kind. It is an established fact, by the U.N. and other top organizations, that if the entire world were vegan, there could be no malnutrition nor deaths from malnutrition anywhere in the world. If we were all vegan, we could feed the world several times over. Think about that! People suffer and die because we don’t want to be vegan. They may be able to live if we make the choice to be vegan. It’s incredible to me.

“There is a great loneliness of spirit today. We’re trying to live, we’re trying to cope in the face of what seems to be overwhelming evidence that who we are doesn’t matter, that there is no real hope for enough change, that the environment and human experience is deteriorating so rapidly and increasingly and massively. This is the context, psychically and spiritually, in which we are working today. This is how our lives are reflected to us. Meanwhile, we’re yearning for connection with each other, with ourselves, with the powers of nature, the possibilities of being alive.

When that tension arises, we feel pain, we feel anguish at the very root of ourselves, and then we cover that over, that grief, that horror, with all kinds of distraction – with consumerism, with addictions, with anything that we can use to disconnect and to go away.

We’ve been opening ourselves to the grief, to the knowing of what’s taking place, the loss of species, the destruction of the natural world, the unimaginable levels of social injustice and economic injustice that deprive so many human beings of basic opportunities.

And as we open to the pain of that, there’s a possibility of embracing that pain and that grief in a way that it becomes a strength, a power to respond. There is the possibility that the energy that has been bound in the repression of it can now flow through us and energize us, make us clearer, more alive, more passionate, committed, courageous, determined people.”

― John Robbins

Needless to say, I cried all the way through this book, and felt like I’d taken the pill in The Matrix. It felt surreal, and like I’d been taught so wrongly all my life without having known it, by my parents, by the media, by the entire world. How did nobody know the truth? How can it be that nearly everyone on the planet believes in such huge lies? Why are we not aware of how much good we can do in this area?

It took me a month or so to give up all meat and fish, and then about another year to get to a place where I wasn’t willing to eat anything with even a small amount of dairy or eggs. At the same time as I gave up meat, I had stopped buying things with dairy or eggs, and was eating vegan the vast majority of the time, but I made compromises here and there for pre-made stuff that might have contained some, such as a non-vegan cookie.

I’m tempted to make this blog a big list of facts about animal agriculture and how powerful being vegan can be for world change because I find it so inspiring, but I’ll leave that for other books and documentaries. Now, I’d like to bring the discussion to the day-to-day in an individual’s life and heart, and about the biggest blocks I’ve seen over the years in people going vegan staying vegan.

Getting Adequate Nutrition As a Vegan

As I mentioned before, I won’t make this a nutritional blog, though I have lots of that info over on my other site. What I wanted to say here is that it is certainly possible to be a junk-food vegan these days, but it is important to be a healthy vegan. While I still have the draw to a vegan muffin or slice of pizza here and there myself, to be a healthy vegan you do need to have a varied, unprocessed, whole foods diet that is primarily raw food.

Additionally, Jesus has said that if a person has deficiencies or other issues going vegan, it is always due to emotions they haven’t released. This is discussed in more detail in this awesome email response from Jesus that has been published. The link to the entire response is below as well as an excerpt from his letter:

Jesus Answers Questions About A Vegan Diet

“Most people eat a heavy meat and carbohydrate based diet in order to suppress their emotions relating to how they feel about themselves.

When a person becomes a vegetarian, and then a vegan, this addiction to suppress these emotions is not met as easily through food. Since the addiction’s cause has not been addressed (which are the deeply held emotions of a lack of self-worth, and related similar feelings), the body begins to reject the food (because the emotions are demanding another food be consumed that will assist in the suppression of the terrible feeling of low self-worth).

The body is demanding what the emotion demands, and that is food that will assist in the suppression of the painful emotions of self worth, rather than feeling those emotions.”

-Jesus

If you find you have issues digesting a mostly-raw vegan diet, or any other issues, including deficiencies or not feeling good, it’s good to look at what emotions may be causing the body’s reactions to eating in a more loving way.

Family and Societal Judgments

I always tell people that I feel that going vegan and staying vegan is like taking an academic course in the subject of Not People-Pleasing. I see so many people willing to compromise their ethics in their eating or other consumer choices because of what other people think. And I don’t mean to make out that I’m very good at the not people-pleasing thing overall, because veganism is probably the only area that I’ve got that down and in other areas I have major problems with compromising for what others might think.

But back to veganism: There will probably always be some people who judge you for it. Granted, when you’ve worked through your own emotional holes that cause others to sense there is a chance for them to sway you, judgment happens significantly less. But the judgements don’t necessarily stop completely.

When I first went vegan, none of my family accepted it. One of my brothers said it was just a crazy, unhealthy diet I was going on that was no different than having an eating disorder. Some of my family were less judgmental but worried I wouldn’t be healthy if I was vegan. To this day, my dad thinks I’m only vegan because “food normal people eat isn’t good enough for me”and intentionally tries to make sure there is no vegan food available whenever I visit him (which I don’t anymore, for numerous other reasons than that). But positive things can happen too: my mom was one of the people worried about whether veganism was healthy at the beginning, but has gone vegetarian in the last couple years herself and aspires to be vegan.

Even though it hurt to see how unsupportive my family was at the beginning, I had already had such a huge emotional shift about the truth that veganism was the loving way to go and how much sin there was in eating and using animal products, that none of their projections swayed me into eating animal products. It really is true that when you’ve had a shift in your heart and soul about something, nothing will sway you and nothing will cause you to compromise. I think to be successfully vegan long-term, that is where you have to get to: you simply have to not care what people think about it.

To get there, that can be a very emotional process, and it requires us feeling the fear of and the pain about the projections that we receive from other people about going vegan. How does it feel when someone thinks you’re crazy? When they tell you you’re going to hurt yourself and create health problems for yourself? When you’ve lost their approval? When they’re condescending and critical? When they’re angry or even rageful? When they reject you from events or dinners now that you are?

“Vegan living, like love, is not about getting something for myself; it’s about giving: giving mercy and kindness to others who are vulnerable in our hands. Going vegan to get health is like getting married to get wealth: it’s typically not a lasting motivation and corrodes the integrity of our commitment.

If we don’t deepen our motivation beyond personal health, it’s easy to fall prey to the “cravings” fro an adverse affair of some kind – the bacon smells so enticing, the neighbor is so attractive. Motivation is at the heart of both love and veganism, as well as of our spiritual evolution.”

-Dr. Will Tuttle

Taking Personal Responsibility

While people-pleasing is one of the biggest blocks to being vegan, on the other hand, I feel there are a lot of lessons of self-responsibility we have to learn in going vegan.

When I went vegan, I realized just how easy things had been before to get food–in every scenario. I could go into any restaurant and order anything I liked, stop at any gas station on a road trip and find something quick and convenient to eat. When I went to visit family, food was often made for me and I could take my pick of many options. After going vegan, I quickly realized that things were not going to be that easy anymore.

I find that a great deal of demands, expectations, and lack of personal responsibility are revealed in a person when they try going vegan. People often get angry about the lack of availability of vegan options in restaurants where they live or mope about not being able to eat their aunt’s pudding at Christmas. They complain about not having the time or knowledge to make vegan food at home. It’s always worth getting back to what the emotional factors in childhood may have created this anger or demand or lack of responsibility as there are always reasons we have them–but we do need to resolve them.

Being vegan requires a great deal of self-responsibility. We have to learn how to prepare tasty vegan food, and that takes an investment of time and effort. And I have compassion for how much of a learning curve that can be: it can practically be like re-learning how to cook and re-learning how to eat. But it can also be a fun learning curve! The key though, is you have to take responsibility for your own meals and food. For some people, this means having come from a life of quick and convenient food options to now having to be a person who spends a fair amount of time in the kitchen. But in my opinion, spending time in the kitchen making yourself good food is a part of self-love and self-responsibility.

When it comes to friends and family: we cannot expect that others now adapt to our new vegan diet. People don’t have to make anything for us–even our parents. They don’t have to have groceries ready for us when we stay for an extended time. If they do, that’s a gift, but no one has to conform to how we are now eating. This was a big shift for me also. Before being vegan, when I visited family, I didn’t do much of my own grocery shopping or preparing my meals. When I was invited to a dinner party, I didn’t think twice about what food might be there for me to have. But after going vegan, I did a lot of my own grocery shopping and pretty much all my own meal preparation when I visited family. Now my mom and my other brother have learned a couple great vegan dishes and have gifted me with some of them, but that wasn’t the case for the first 9 or 10 years of my being vegan.

If you are invited to a dinner party, don’t expect the host to make food specially for you. While vegan inclusions are awesome, no one has to do it for us. When I’m invited to an event involving food, I always let the hosts know ahead of time I’m vegan and let them know I’ll take care of my own food and bring it along–even if it’s not a potluck. Many times, the host has offered to adapt something to being vegan for me, but it’s not an expectation I have of them and I consider it a cool surprise and a gift anytime a person makes or adapts anything vegan for me.

Vegetarianism and Every-Circumstance Veganism

I say this with the deepest understanding of how challenging it can be for some to go fully vegan: vegetarianism is not enough. While meat has a slightly larger impact on the environment and natural resources and on other humans, dairy and eggs and seafood etc. are not far behind meat in their impact on the environment, animals and populations of people in the world. Dairy, eggs, and seafood are massively destructive in their own right, and actually, the commercial industries of both dairy and eggs directly feed the meat industry. Most commercial egg and dairy farms are responsible for killing as many animals as meat operations are, so to many well-researched vegans, it feels no different morally and ethically to eat something with milk in it than to eat meat.

When we haven’t had a soul-based shift yet, we will try to do the bare minimum when it comes to the ethics about our diet and animal agriculture. Many people would like to go vegetarian and not any further, wanting to tell themselves meat is significantly worse than dairy and eggs and that being vegetarian is almost the same as being vegan, even though this is not true. There are also many who are staying in the mostly-vegan phase (just as I also went through), where they make exceptions for the occasional item that has dairy or eggs, and this will also stop when we’ve had a true emotional shift. We make exceptions for animal products–even small amounts–when we still have addictions to them, as well as other emotions driving us to not want to make the full shift into a loving way of eating and living. When there is a soul-based shift, there won’t be a desire to stay in the dark about any aspect of animal agriculture, and no matter how inconvenient it makes life to learn the truth, we’ll still want the truth.

“Until we are willing and able to make the connections between what we are eating and what was required to get it on our plate, and how it affects us to buy, serve, and eat it, we will be unable to make the connections that will allow us to live wisely and harmoniously on this earth. When we cannot make connections, we cannot understand, and we are less free, less intelligent, less loving, and less happy.”

― Will Tuttle, Ph.D.

Additionally, the traditional definition of veganism has never been only about diet. While diet is the daily and largest component in our participation and support of animal agriculture, there are numerous other areas of ethics to look at. We have to shift as many parts of our lifestyle and consumerism away from animal agriculture as we can. This means not buying new leather, suede or wool in our clothing, shoes, car seats, furniture, and household products. We have to read supplement and food labels to make sure they don’t have gelatin and whey and casein. We’ll check hair and body products for whether they are tested on lab animals, not buy hair brushes and artist’s painting brushes that require killing animals for their hair. Our awareness about it will extend to everything. And while there is simply no way at this point to live on earth and have zero negative impact on animals, the environment, and other people, we simply have to do our best. We have to choose the loving choice in every scenario that we have the opportunity to.

The Emotions of Lack and Deprivation

Many feel their life will be much more limited and that they’ll feel deprived if they go fully vegan in both their diets and in their other consumer choices. But I feel this goes back to the same principles Jesus teaches us about everything: that in the end, living in harmony with love always brings more freedom and joy, not restriction. That choosing the loving option will always be expansive for the soul. I feel that if we can identify the emotions that cause us to fear that living vegan will be limiting for us and work through those feelings, we’ll find being completely vegan to give more meaning to our lives and connect us to more love and joy. The soul-based knowledge of the positive and loving impact on the world that we’re now having will feel really good. To know we’re no longer contributing to destruction, death and no longer sinning in this particular way is an awesome thing.

“I do feel that spiritual progress does demand at some stage that we should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodily wants.”

-Mahatma Gandhi

Addictions and Soul Change

For us to feel, in our soul, a passionate desire to go vegan and a steadfast commitment to stay vegan in every circumstance, a big emotional shift has to take place. There has to be a major inner revolution, where you feel in your soul that going completely vegan is the moral, ethical, and loving thing to do–indeed, that it is the only option. In people who have had this shift, there is a feeling from them that no matter how hard it might be, they can’t not do it.

When the awakening to the truth about veganism happens in our soul, it feels like no matter the consequences, there is no other way forward. It becomes a shift we want to make, we are eager to make, and the desire for it outweighs the challenges that might come with doing it. We are willing to stay completely vegan in every circumstance without compromising for anything or anyone. And when we’re there, it will never once feel restrictive or difficult. It will feel like freedom, it will feel effortless and it will feel enjoyable.

“Your life does matter. It always matters whether you reach out in friendship or lash out in anger. It always matters whether you live with compassion and awareness or whether you succumb to distractions and trivia. It always matters how you treat other people, how you treat animals, and how you treat yourself. It always matters what you do. It always matters what you say. And it always matters what you eat.”

-John Robbins

Resources

Now I’d love to give you some resources for learning more about all this. I’m so passionate about how everyone going vegan would transform the world in so many ways!

Divine Truth videos on veganism:

Eating Meat and Being Vegan

Making Loving Food Choices

Justifying Our Unloving Actions Towards Animals

Why Animals Eat Other Animals

Soul Damage of Eating Meat

Foods and Drinks That Prevent Spiritual Growth

Soul Causes of Physical Illness

Books on the ethics/scientific facts/emotions about veganism:

• The Food Revolution by John Robbins (and many of his other books)
• The World Peace Diet by Will Tuttle, Ph.D.

Books on vegan nutrition (the physical side):

• The China Study by T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D and Thomas Campbell, M.D.
• How Not To Die by Michael Greger, M.D.
• Crazy Sexy Diet by Kris Carr

Documentaries:

• Cowspiracy (environment-focused)
• Forks Over Knives (health-focused)
• Earthlings (online only; animal-focused)
• Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead (health and juicing focused)

Raw Vegan & Vegan Recipe Books/Blogs:

• Raw Food Made Easy for 1 or 2 People by Jennifer Cornbleet
• Crazy Sexy Juice by Kris Carr
• Appetite For Reduction by Isa Chandra Moskowitz
• www.OhSheGlows.com
• www.TheRawFoodKitchen.com
• www.CourtneyPool.com

Happy vegan-ing!

Courtney

Lessons in Change and a Steep Dropoff

“It is wonderful what God can do with a broken heart, if He gets all the pieces.”

-Samuel Chadwick

My life has changed more in the last 6 months or so than it has in a very, very long time. I ended a 5.5-year relationship, figured out I’m actually straight, not gay (I know, I know–that’s whopper of a blog post in itself), moved houses and states, and realized that my biggest passion in life is to share divine truth. Additionally, since being back from London, everything has completely fallen apart with my family and now I’ve chosen not to be in communication with all but one of my six adult immediate family members, something that’s unlikely to change soon.

Every month of this year has felt emotionally totally different than the month before, and at times that’s felt amazing and exciting and at other times scary and painful. Since being back in these last few weeks in particular, I’ve felt at the least, disoriented every day, and depending on the day, there’s a varied buffet of panic, confusion, restlessness, and sadness. On some days after I’ve felt through some fear or had a really good cry, that day I tend to feel still a little disoriented, but have a lot more faith. Overall though, I feel like I’ve been thrown in a tumble dryer and I still haven’t figured out which way is up, and though my faith is slowly building, it’s been an intensely emotional process that feels far from over.

I feel like I’m at a pretty significant fork in the road in my life. Even though I want so badly the next positive changes that will lead to more happiness for me, I feel afraid I won’t know how to make them or God won’t guide me. I have always had huge injuries about my passions being absolutely impossible to have, and since being introduced to Divine Truth, the way I could describe it is that I have almost no faith in the Law of Desire or that my desires and passions, even if in harmony with love, will be something I’m allowed to have or that will have any power at all. I’m still working through that big, lifelong aloneness feeling I mentioned in a recent blog, and sorting out the differences between God reliance and self reliance and self responsibility and what’s just plain fear. And of course, the family stuff is really hard as I still get worried that what they say about me is true, and I know that inclination to believe them covers some final layers of resistance to feeling the truth about their treatment of me and resistance to the gravity of how that would feel to accept. A lot of days feel like desperation and I’m holding on to every moment I’ve had with God, every teaching from Jesus and Mary that’s stuck in my heart and I know by memory, every song that reminds me of God’s goodness, all my favorite Padgett messages and quotes from Robert James Lees‘ channelled books. Also a great help is that I’m spending more time in the mountains than Julie Andrews as Maria von Trapp (the hills really are alive with the sound of music, y’all).

Things have happened faster than they ever have for me and I can feel the momentum of it, and I feel like I have to be super careful about what I choose to do in this phase right now. And I’m struggling with that. I’ve been so tempted to fall back into physical addictions–food, social media, TV–to calm my anxiety. And some days, I’ve chosen the addictions instead of to love, and other days are definitely better in that regard. And yet I have this sense that if I do avoid my emotions and numb things out, just how destructive it will be at this point in my life, even more so than it ever has been. It’s not that I don’t think I’m allowed to make mistakes, but I also have moments where I can acutely feel that it matters very much whether I go for that chocolate, spend my night watching (non-triggering) movies, or choose to go surround myself with people instead of feeling my aloneness. It feels like I’m walking on a narrow ledge and there is a fatally steep dropoff on either side. I’ve never quite felt the truth about this path being a “narrow way” quite so much as I do right now.

It feels like once real change on this path has started happening for any of us, things will then happen faster and faster, and it becomes that much more dangerous and destructive to try and slow or stop it. It’s like the train has left the station, picked up speed, and jumping off of it would be catastrophic. And the ways we jump off of it are numerous: engaging in addictions, controlling things, justifying avoiding the next set of fears in front of us. And maybe, it’s not necessarily more dangerous or destructive than before to choose avoidance and addictions, but rather we just become more sensitive to and aware of the implications of sin than we were before–I’m not quite sure.

I’m reminding myself that just because I’ve allowed a lot of change already and made a lot of progress in my resistance to change, this is no time to rest on my laurels. Fears will come up in the face of change, I’ll work through those fears and make the changes, and then more fears will come up in the face of the next changes, etc. I can’t try to control things and say, “Ok that was really intense, I need things to slow down so I can breathe for a bit and adjust to what’s changed.” Sounds reasonable, right? Except slowing it down is just fear, plain and simple.

I have had a few more Law of Attraction events that have helped encourage me to keep on keeping on. One day recently I came across a picture with the text again, “You are not alone.” Then after that, my LOA brought me the quote below.

I’m also learning some lessons about emotional overwhelm. It seems that if we’re really sincere on this path, the emotional overwhelm is going to be very frequent, and maybe during certain phases, constant. What I’m finding is that my bar for what I consider the extent of overwhelm to be is being challenged to a new level. It’s like right when I think I’ve got the overwhelm thing down (and maybe I did for where I was in my progression), deeper and bigger emotions are exposed, and more things happen all at once, and so now the scope of emotional overwhelm is going to be deeper and wider. I remind myself a lot that God made me to handle all my emotions, in their full intensity, even if tons of them are happening all at once.

I also get the sense there are spirits who are rooting for me to fail right now. I can feel them encouraging my self-judgement injuries, fueling my fears and urging me to engage in the physical addictions. I had a terrifying nightmare in the last couple weeks, one that I woke up from feeling total dread, short of breath and tight in my throat, jolted awake when my physical body sort of spasmed and I woke up, as if I came back to my body somewhat violently and suddenly. Of course, dark spirits can only fan the flames of my own emotions I haven’t dealt with yet, so I’m not a victim to them. It doesn’t help that one of my biggest fears is dark spirits–another thing hopefully I’ll start facing soon.

The overarching imperative in all of this is that I must keep seeking to move out of self-reliance and into God-reliance, to build my faith and to pray to God, and most of all, to seek God’s love in the process. To ask for God’s love and grace not to lessen the pain I need to feel through, but rather to love me while I feel it. Jesus’ urge to ask us all to consider, “God is good” has pulled me through so many tough days recently. One of Mary’s older but absolutely golden blogs, found here, has also been treasure for me lately.

So I thought I’d write this blog partly to challenge my belief that if I’m struggling and don’t have much profundity to share, I’d just be wasting time by writing because it’ll be self-indulgent and depressing and won’t help anyone. And yet, if I only post on the blog when I’m through the other side of something and never when things are messy, then I’d just be in facade with this blog anyway. And also, if some of these quotes, songs, thoughts–any of the bits that are helping me right now might help someone else, then I’ll be very happy about that.

With that, I’ll end with this song I stumbled across recently (cheers for God’s LOA again) that I had never heard. Some of the lyrics have helped me connect with some of my own feelings of a lack of faith and brokenness and get into some good tears about it.

*Edit 7/22/16 – I thought to clarify that while parts of the lyrics of this song have helped me many times into sadness and hopelessness and still does, God does not plan broken hearts, and God does not want us to give over our will to Her. I tend to think of those particular lyrics as coming from an error in understanding about God driven by brokenness, when we in error think God has created our pain (which I have indeed had the false belief about). I have thought of the Thy Will lyrics as pertaining to God’s larger will for us all to grow in love. Other lyrics in this song have also moved me deeply, but it felt important to clarify all this.

Love,

Courtney

Taking Action, Following Desires, and London

Hi Everyone,

I began this blog post writing from a quaint coffee shop in London, one many Americans like me find so novel and exotic, with a view out the windows of old, quintessentially european buildings, climbing vines, and small, charming shops. I finished this blog where I currently live in Salt Lake City, Utah, after a week of reflection on what was quite an epic trip.

I went to visit my longtime friend Perry, meet my new-to-be longtime friend Nicky, attend their first public Divine Truth talk, which they gave along with Nicky’s cousin Peter, and otherwise engage in any Divine Truth related happenings and conversations in which I was able to shoehorn myself into (which luckily, since these guys are amazing, was tons).

Hanging out with Perry, Nicky and Peter, and attending their talk, was so inspiring for me not only in the content itself that they presented, but also in witnessing examples of what a person does when they’re really in their passions. These three guys are exercising their desires and passions for teaching divine truth and taking action on them. I started writing this blog soon after their talk and was attempting to illustrate all that I observed behind the scenes, though they just published an awesome blog about all that detail you can read by clicking here.

But to reiterate and expand on some of what I was privy to, in order to create the seminar, they had to take so many actions–similar processes I’d imagine Jesus and Mary likely go through to set their seminars up. In observing them for a few days prior, I watched them discuss the venue hire, how to transport equipment back and forth, plan out the topics and the overall flow of the presentation, and go through a huge amount of testing to make sure all the video and audio equipment worked. And as far as I know, all the equipment stuff was pretty much completely new to them, so it was a steep learning curve they had to go through. Then there’s setting up the room, breaking down the room, deconstructing all the equipment, and then of course all the editing of the videos and creating a youtube-compatible presentation after the fact.

It’s not like the understanding of all of this is entirely new to me as I’ve heard Jesus and Mary discuss the details of presenting and recording seminars before, but perhaps there’s something about the fact that I’ve known Perry for 7+ years and am getting to see him follow his passions, and also all the guys are around my age and have been listening to Divine Truth for a similar amount of time as myself, which feels so relatable, and also, it’s different seeing the process immediately in front of me. It’s like, with Jesus and Mary, it can be easy to perpetuate some excuses with myself: they’re so much farther ahead than I am in their development, I’m not there yet, I’m just lil ole’ me.

And this is also only talking about the logistical aspects involved in making their first seminar happen. There’s also the emotions around it they had to go through to do it all, and it made me reflect on many that I know I’ll personally need to go through as I have a passion to share Divine Truth in similar ways as they are: concern that I’m not far enough along to share anything of value, fear of bumbling and blubbering incoherently in front of a group of people live and on video, fear that I wouldn’t be able to figure out all the technology involved, fear of human and spirit attack, concerns about if nobody showed up and I looked like a fool. For me, I imagine it’d be about worth and fear of others’ opinions of me more so than fear of handling logistical aspects or tech, but the bottom line is there are always emotions triggered when we start following our passions.

Witnessing all the gifts these guys give as an expression of their passion and love–not just their main seminar but also a more informal (but with a larger audience!) talk that Perry and Nicky did, and also seeing Nicky put so much work into managing the forum, and what went into creating a video for their Divine Truth Experience channel (I did one with Perry–watch out for it!)–reminded me that when we are really passionate, we will do whatever it takes, both in regards to taking logistical action and also in regards to feeling emotions that come up before, during and after taking those actions. It reminded me that following our passions is a resolved exercise of our will in so many directions. These guys don’t need hand-holding to follow their passions, they don’t have a demand people listen and appreciate, or require validation in order to exercise them, and yet at the same time are so humble in desiring guidance from their guides and God along the whole way.

It reminds me that if we are truly desirous of living in our passions–whatever they may be–we would start acting now, and start feeling our emotional blocks now. We wouldn’t wait till next week, or in a year or exist in irresolution until some nebulous point in time that we’re not even sure what the criteria would be to start. We actually wouldn’t even be able to wait, because the passion and excitement would propel us through even if we had to go through a lot of hurdles and a lot of emotions in order to make it happen. I’ve begun to feel how following our passions is a significant part of self-love, and how not following our soul’s passions in line with who God designed us to be is actually a very damaging use of our will against ourselves, our soulmate, and keeps us from being closer with God. Expressing our soul is about being in harmony with love, and we are choosing to remain disconnected from our own souls when we hold off from following our passions and desires in harmony with love.

So with that, I really recommend watching their presentation. The main seminar, “Intro to Divine Truth” can be found here, and the subsequent Q&A can be found here.

I also love this quote from Jesus, from which the content could be an entire other blog post I’d adore writing about my feelings on, but that may be for another time:

“Most of us have suppressed our true, personality-based passions due to external, injury-based influences in our childhood which we took on that have now morphed into fears and addictions in our adulthood.

That is why so many people feel ‘lost’ when it comes to what they are passionate about – internally they are resisting humility to their fear and grief about potential rejection and/or financial lack and therefore become quite disconnected from their childlike feelings of enthusiasm for things.”

To finish this blog post, I thought I’d share a few photos from my trip to London, which was filled with amazing discussions about God and God’s Way, wonderful friends, delicious vegan food, gorgeous parks, and a slew of new english slang (“Pop your clogs” and other delightful vernacular) that I’m joyfully confusing my American friends with.

Perry, Nicky and Peter — photo courtesy of divinetruthhub.com

Nicky, Perry and I at Kensington Gardens

Swans in a pond in a park in the foreground of a sculpture. You know, the typical sight. 😉

The guys at their second talk–everyone was new to Divine Truth!

Vegan pistachio cake at Wild Food Cafe: Game over, London.

You know a blog post is good when it finishes with an english rose photo!

Love,

Courtney

 

On Spirit Influence and Self-Worth

Hi Everyone,

I’m back about 5 weeks after creating this blog, and already some interesting things have happened in relation to it. I was so excited to set up the blog and write about my experiences with Divine Truth, and I logged in a good 5 hours of blog-forging (wink) and writing the About Me page, and I really loved doing all of it. As you’ll know if you’ve read it, I share mostly about my journey with God in that post.

An interesting thing happened for me emotionally after I finished setting up the blog and finished writing the About Me page about God. I’ve never had much of a block to writing, being it’s one of my passions, but after I wrote it, I just felt weird and suddenly not inspired to write more. I kept having these thoughts like, “This was a dumb idea. Why would I write about myself? That’s probably narcissistic. You’re not developed, so probably won’t really be of help to anyone.” And some fears along those same lines; mainly, “What if I’m just being self-important?” And so I hadn’t written any more. And what’s weird is, I have written about myself before in a different way. I’ve been working as a nutritionist since 2008 and specialize in helping people heal eating disorders and food addiction, and over on that blog, I’ve been quite open with my struggles with disordered eating and shared how I healed that. So why the block with this blog, these topics?

About a week and a half ago, I was catching up with my friend Nicky, who created the Divine Truth Forum, and shared that I’d been feeling these things. He suggested that “my” thoughts about it were likely the thoughts of dark spirits who were attempting to stop me expressing myself in order to hinder my creations and slow the spreading of Divine Truth on the planet.

This is a good place to briefly recommend some resources to watch if the topic of spirits is new to you. I recommend this FAQ playlist on what spirits are and how they (both benevolent and malevolent ones) can influence us. After the FAQ’s, check out some of the full length presentations on that topic. Lastly, Perry and Nicky did a great video on some of their recent experiences with spirit influence here.

Well, Nicky’s suggestion made sense to me, even though somehow that hadn’t occurred to me yet. I’m only now increasing my sensitivity to spirit influence, but I typically only notice it when it’s a full-on spirit attack by what feels like lots of spirits. In the instance of full-on spirit attack, it tends to feel like there’s a cloud of dense darkness around me, and I will have sensations physically of attack or of feeling extremely weighed down, sometimes very mentally foggy, and the thoughts that happen in my head become critical and mean. But in instances where it’s not such a dramatic attack but rather a spirit dropping thoughts into my head that seem more benign, I tend to assume they are all my own thoughts and I’m not quick to see what’s happening.

I’ve received some feedback on how dark spirits are able to influence me from Mary before, a bit over 2 years ago. Here are some of the excerpts from her email that I feel still apply to me now:

What is interesting is how devious spirits can be. For example, you have obviously done some work on not placing yourself in situations that are extremely unloving towards yourself (this is good) but some of the causal reasons that you allowed such treatment in the past are still within you. One of these causal reasons relates to your feeling that you deserve to be treated badly and your low self worth.

You have the feeling that you deserve to be treated badly. These emotions still within you creates a tendency in you to be drawn back to abusive situations now.

At the moment spirits are manipulating these feelings within you. They are pushing you towards blame of self, and re-engagement with abusers, rather than have you begin to work through your feelings of low self worth which will actually help you see the past and present much more clearly, and reduce spirit influence in your life.

Sometimes you can get stuck around these first two sets of emotions i.e. feelings of poor self worth and fear of attack. Its like –  if you grieve some of the bad feelings you have about yourself then you will feel better about yourself, then you will be more sensitive to poor treatment of you.

At the time the situation was a little different; then they were manipulating my worth-based emotions in order to make me feel guilt and get back in touch with abusers, and recently it’s been them manipulating my worth-based emotions to stop me writing and sharing myself and my journey on this path so far. And while I know I have more self-worth than I did 2 years ago, what’s remaining of the worth-based emotions are still allowing influence from dark spirits.

Spirits can only influence us when we choose not to heal certain emotions. And though I am currently not mediumistic and don’t have too much sensitivity to spirits, I’m starting to get a visceral awareness that my worth-based emotions are, in me, one of the very best ways, if not the best way, for spirits to influence me. It’s been a pretty reliable entry point for them and I am starting to notice how they’ll use it in almost any area of my growth if they can.

This is not to say I blame these spirits or feel like a victim. They’re brothers and sisters also, and anger towards them or blame or fear of them isn’t loving them. Spirits, in the same way as people on earth, cannot have any influence whatsoever if there aren’t holes in us emotionally that they can exploit. So while it’s extremely important to be aware of their potential influence and eventually be able to discern what is their influence and what is our own thoughts and feelings, it always comes back to taking personal responsibility for the emotions inside us. I have to heal more of my feelings of low-self worth, and that’s up to me, though of course God can help me through all those emotions.

A crucial understanding I have learned is that low self-worth is not a causal emotion. It is not a core emotion wherein when we get to those feelings, we are at the end. Low worth is actually an effect emotion, a result of situations and dynamics in our childhoods that created the feeling that we had less worth than God feels we do. In other words, someone, or several someones, created the feelings of low worth in us when we were children through their treatment of us.

For myself, while I have come to terms with and worked through a lot of pain from my childhood, there clearly is more in me, evidenced to me through this most recent experience with spirits. I have had the feeling I have less worth than both women and men, so it’s a both-genders emotional injury for me that comes from my parents in my childhood. When I, with God’s help, can heal all of those emotions, self-worth will no longer be an area spirits can influence me through. Worth issues always end up being a block to God as well, and so the more of causal emotions–which are under low self-worth–that we can release, the closer relationship we can have with God.

So the journey continues, and hopefully with less spirit involvement! I’ll post another update at some point on that particular aspect of things–hopefully after I’ve made some progress with it.

Love,

Courtney