By Rev. Cindy Senarighi R.N,
The Scripture ~ Do not cling to events of the past or dwell on what happened long ago. Watch for the new thing I am going to do. It is happening already—you can see it now! I will make a road through the wilderness and give you streams of water there. Isaiah 43: 18b-19 Good News Translation
The Spiritual Focus ~ Good friends will stick with you until you become unstuck. ~ Winnie the Pooh
The Breath Prayer ~ Inhale ~ God is leading, Exhale ~ I am free
The Devotion ~Being stuck conjures up images that challenge our desire to move freely forward. Imagine a car with its rear wheels stuck and spinning in snow or sand while the front wheels try to pull the car forward. Some of you might remember the movie, “A Christmas Story,” when the boy sticks his tongue to a frozen metal flag pole. Perhaps a sweeter image is of Winnie the Pooh with his paw stuck in the honey pot! Each of these images gives us a picture of what it feels like to be stuck somewhere when we want to become unstuck and to be free. Some solutions for getting unstuck require simple mechanics, but getting unstuck in our lives requires us to become unstuck in our thinking. This is much more difficult. Becoming unstuck in our thinking is challenging because it requires us to revisit and reevaluate our core beliefs.
A recent study suggests that core beliefs have a lot to do with our ability to change. Even when we are presented with new evidence that the way we think might not be right, we might deny the evidence because it smacks up against long-held core beliefs around which we have built our lives. It is hard to become unstuck from certain thoughts, but scripture helps us to think differently. If our core beliefs align with God’s core belief in love, especially love for each other, we are freed to move with God, as God continually does a new thing. God leads us on a new path, out of the wilderness of being stuck.
Yoga philosophy acknowledges that we can become stuck in our physical practice, in our thinking, and in our spirituality. A common teaching is that we are stuck until we have learned what we need to know. One definition of karma yoga is that we keep coming back to the same stuck place on the karmic wheel of life until we decide to take a different path. On our own we may stay stuck, but with God leading, we can become unstuck and who knows the places we will go!
