A Day With Neale Donald Walsch

I attended the Celebrate Your Life conference this weekend in Chicago. Today I had a day-long workshop with Neale Donald Walsch. What an interesting day! He spoke and answered questions and we stayed with a topic until we could get a deeper understanding. The discussion was so deep and profound that it will take me a long time to digest it all. As part of the process of sorting through all the information, I am sharing some of my notes here. I know that some of these are just snippets of thoughts, but I would still love to know what you think. Please comment and/or post your own article in the Conversations With God Gather Group. I would love to continue a conversation about all of this.

1. My life isn't about me. If I can remember this and focus on what IS important (i.e. helping others), everything in my life will change. Everything I need will come to me.
2. I am not my body. My body is something I have, but not something I am.
3. If I give away that which I think I need, I will receive what I need. The act of giving results in a receiving. Since we are all one, in the act of giving, I'm giving to another part of myself (humanity), so whatever I give will always come back. If I am willing to be the source of whatever it is I want in my life, opportunities will present themselves that allow me to give that which I want.
   
4. Health is seeing that the body I have is perfect just the way it currently functions. If I want more health, I can cause another to have more health.
5. I cannot change something by opposing it. Whatever I resist, persists. Instead, I can embrace the condition as it is right now and help others to embrace it to. This is true with health as wells as work, life, world situations.
6. Whenever I experience something I disagree with...or something that angers me or causes negative emotion, my first step should be to move to gratitude. Gratitude heals anger and opposition. I can change my reality around something by looking at it clearly and by being grateful for the opportunity to express who I really am.
7. No matter what happens to me, it can only enhance who I am but not change who I am.
8. Choices are made moment by moment.
9. We come to this life with a broad general agenda of what we want to learn -- not information about specific events.

Our longest conversation came up about creating our own realities. That's a hard one to understand, especially when it comes to kids and childhood abuse. Several adults in the group were able to identify why they may have created abuse or tragedy in their childhood. We spoke at length about the fact that identifying this doesn't made the abuse acceptable, we still need to protect children from this. But the outcome of the abuse was something good -- something the person may have even come into this life to learn.

Accepting that I create everything, justification for anger, resentment, revenge, attack, abuse all fall away. Forgiveness is also no longer required as there is no one to forgive.

Neale suggested that if one remains in victimhood, he/she will never be healed. The wound can be covered up with blame, but that wound will always be a sore spot. For full healing, we need to get to a point where we can identify (or make up) a cause for the event. If you "make up" or imagine a cause, you are tapping into your subconscious so that you are likely identifying the true cause...the cause that you came into this life to learn. Once you have decided on a cause, you can choose something to do over the next several years to enrich the story...to make the cause meaningful...do something out of your own painful experience to help yourself and to help the world.