10-25-11 Taos Retreat Bill Cooper
“Cultivating a Value” is a Joyful Living exercise for personal spiritual growth. It was developed by Sharon Porter and Kaye Cooper. This is an example of what following the instructions for Cultivating a Value might produce. This exercise was done on the value of “adventure” but the pattern is applicable to any value. The person who did this was impressed with the apparent responsiveness of spirit and with the benefits to him of the insights. The effect was to make him more enthusiastic about adventure and more likely to pursue it (with the spirit). Keep in mind that the objective here is not to teach about adventure. It is to teach how to cultivate a spiritual value and how to conduct an inner dialog which intentionally invites spiritual input.
Instructions:
Choose a Value to Cultivate: “Adventure”
Go to your heart: Relax, breathe, and feel gratitude. Focus your attention on your heart area and on the feelings of love, compassion, and gratitude.
Open to love and feel your heart respond.
Let your soul fill with the feeling of affection for everything.
Ask spirit to give you understanding of “adventure.”
Imagine yourself experiencing this inner dialog:
Your Question: What is the meaning of “adventure?”
Spirit’s answer: Ultimately the great adventure is self-mastery. Each increment of self-mastery is itself an adventure of discovery, excitement and commitment to good habits and good character. Self-mastery is creating one’s self by one’s own choices. It is indeed a great adventure. Adventure has elements of risk, courage, fear, faith, and optimism. Adventure involves being attracted sufficiently by the opportunity for discovery to make the effort, take the risk, and explore the experience and its value and meaning. The adventurer loves action and trusts change and progress sufficiently to pursue a string of events or impressions with enthusiasm and expectation.
Q: What does “adventure” look like?
A: It looks like curiosity, action, risking failure but most often only risking looking and feeling silly. But persisted in, adventure eventually brings maturity and wisdom.
Q: How does it feel to be having an “adventure?”
A: It can be frightening at first, like a roller coaster ride. Eventually though, you realize the roller coaster is safe and the ride becomes thrilling and even sought after for the thrill. The thrill of adventure is a plus but the victory to be achieved is the discovery of new truth and that discovery can be blocked or bypassed by your avoidance response to fear, if you permit it.
Q: What insights should I take from this cultivation of the value “adventure”?
A: Your comfort with adventure should grow because adventure will deliver new truth regarding self-mastery, sense of cosmic safety, sense of worth, love, trust, and service destiny.
Q: Does spirit really relate to me in my inner life?
A: Have faith that I am active in your inner life. Allow me to lead you into adventure. Spiritually all roads lead home to me. Often-times apparent failure gets you where you didn’t know you wanted to be and faster than success would have. Adventure and grow. Trust me. Follow me.
Bill’s Book of Values at BillsBooks”N”Beyond.com has lengthy lists of values you can cultivate.