Joyful Abundance

Welcome to the second week of the transformative series, "Joyful Abundance: New Revelations About the Good Life," with the insightful and inspirational Michelle Medrano. In this audio file, Michelle delves deeper into the exploration of what it truly means to live a life filled with joy and abundance.

Drawing from her wealth of knowledge and personal experiences, Michelle shares powerful insights and revelations that will challenge and expand your understanding of prosperity.

Transcript

Well,

Happy Mother's Day.

So happy to be with you today on our second week of our Adventure in Prosperity series.

It's an annual series that we get to do to celebrate and honor prosperity and deepen our walk with abundance in life.

And last week,

Just to do a little review,

We established in our Joyful Abundance series,

That's what we're talking about,

Making abundance joyful,

That abundance is defined as more of any good that we would desire.

Any place in life where we're experiencing a sense of lack,

A lack of opportunity,

A lack of friendships and connection,

A lack of health and well-being,

A lack of time,

A lack of money,

A lack of whatever it might be,

Is the opposite of abundance.

It's not just about finances,

It's also about all these places in our life that we want our life to be full and fulfilling.

And so we established that that's our definition and that we can be joyfully working in our lives to approach and manifest more of that kind of abundance in our living.

And we talked about last week,

Does God love abundance?

And my bottom line was absolutely,

That whatever it was that created this universe,

Whether you call it God or source or infinite intelligence or life,

It created abundance everywhere we look.

We can see it in nature,

We can see it in so many realms that the natural order of our universe is abundance.

And I invited everyone to practice welcoming abundance and courting abundance with the three G's as you left last week,

God,

Gratitude and generosity.

And so it was an invitation to put all that into practice.

This week I want to call attention to the reality that we've had small groups meeting.

They started the first part of May and they'll be continuing to meet.

You may,

If you're in one of those groups,

Great.

If you're not in one of those groups,

You can download the materials from the groups experience from our website.

You'll find the information that they're studying,

Lots of amazing quotes and really good questions to either have conversation with family and loved ones or to use as journal prompts for yourself to deepen your walk with abundance.

And one of the things that is in the group materials that I really like is the invitation to create a feng shui area of your life or an altar in your life that's dedicated to abundance or a portion of an altar that you already have established where you put symbols that represent abundance.

And when you came in the door today,

Hopefully you got handed a $1 bill.

Did you get a $1 bill?

The church gave you money today.

Have you ever had a church give you money?

Oh yeah.

It's different here.

This is one way.

It's different.

It's stamped with a little heart stamp.

I'm so grateful to our volunteers who did that.

We would hope that you would take this and use it in your altar or your abundance corner or your feng shui corner that's dedicated to abundance.

You might put photos or something there too,

But money does represent freedom.

I talked about this last week also.

It's the symbol of freedom.

Certainly if you have money,

The more money you have,

The freer you are to do what you want to do,

Go where you want to go,

Buy what you want to buy.

It's just one of the forms of abundance.

But we hope that you will use this,

Put it someplace where you'll see it frequently,

Put it in your altar and use it as a symbol of that freedom that we believe is the true nature of life and also as a recognition that here at Mile High Church,

We believe in your abundance and stand with you in your abundance.

And so my last request is please don't put this in the offering basket when it comes around.

Some of you are going to be tempted to do that.

I know you are.

You're going to be like,

A huge part of being an abundant person is receivership.

Receive this in your heart.

I'm sorry for those of you watching online that we could not give you a dollar bill too,

But we send you our love and we believe in your abundance also.

So put this on your altar.

And as we head into our message today,

We're talking about new revelations for about the good life.

Now this could have a couple of meanings,

New revelations.

Of course,

I believe that we ministers here are always attempting in our messages and in our classes and presentations to bring forth information that can create new revelations.

We always do our best to do that.

And ultimately,

The new revelations occur as the voice within you hears,

Sees,

And witnesses what's happening around here and you talk to yourself.

That's where the revelations really do occur.

So it could be me bringing information,

But it also could be what's happening inside you.

So it's both and today as we consider our topic.

And the revelations that I want to invite us into are all about our mental health and well-being,

Our sense of well-being in the world and beliefs about abundance.

And a lot of those,

Interestingly enough,

Synchronistically enough,

Are tied back to how we were raised,

To our family of origins,

And to our moms.

And the truth is,

We all have moms.

And so on Mother's Day,

I always think it's very helpful not only to celebrate my mother,

Which I do,

But to also go deeper in my healing and my relationship with my childhood and the issues from my childhood.

It's an opportunity to let go of more of the ideas that are in my way.

And that can prove to be a challenge in our life in general,

But especially in our ideas about abundance.

I love the story about three mothers who are comparing notes about their children.

And they're one-upping each other about how wonderful their sons are.

And the first mother says,

Well,

My son,

Last year for my birthday,

Threw me a huge party and he paid for it and he flew my friends in for it.

Isn't that amazing?

And the second mother says,

Well,

That's nothing compared to my son.

My son sent me on an all-expense paid trip to Greece last year,

First class.

He paid for everything.

And the third mother says,

Oh,

That's nothing.

My son goes three times a week,

Pays $150 to see his therapist,

And all he talks about is me.

And yeah,

That can be what we experience in these relationships,

These family of origin relationships.

The need,

The desire,

The impetus to heal and get past and move beyond them.

And that's a huge part of the new revelations that have to occur in life.

Because we all got messages.

We all inherited beliefs.

We all took on ideas about abundance in every area.

And ultimately,

An abundant person feels and courts and embraces and embodies freedom in every area of their life.

And so my suggestion today is that if there's an area in life where you might be feeling lack or limitation,

There may be a connection to a belief or an idea or a pattern that was brought forth to you,

Shown to you,

Told to you as a child.

As children,

We're little sponges and we just sponge it all up.

And then we try to live it out and we can find ourselves challenged.

And the greatest mistake that we can make is we can think,

Well,

It's about the world out there.

If the government,

If the economy,

If people would just,

If there was more opportunity.

And yeah,

There's conditions out there that are impactful.

And yet we have a consciousness that can allow us to walk forward into certain conditions or not.

Last week I shared that my favorite line from our founder,

Ernest Holmes,

Is that God can only do for us what it can do through us.

So we establish a sense of universal freedom in approaching abundance first.

That's the first thing we talk about.

That sense that the universe is giving to us and is for us having freedom.

And our consciousness,

Belief systems,

Experiences,

Decisions,

Ideas about what's possible present the mold for it.

The universe is broadcasting to humanity constantly the highest,

The best good in the universe.

But we have taken on ideas that often obfuscate it,

That make it come out sideways because we believe,

Well,

That's not possible.

It's impossible to blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Whatever our story is.

And for those of us who love to be right and love our righteousness,

The good news is you get to be right.

But I don't know that we always want to be right about those places that we keep believing that there's just not enough.

What would it take to be open to receiving our good,

To accepting our good from the universe?

In my favorite book by Ernest Holmes,

This Thing Called You,

He says,

You rob no person when you discover your own good.

You limit no person when you express a greater degree of livingness.

You harm no one by being happy.

You steal from no one by being prosperous.

You hinder no person's evolution when you consciously enter into the kingdom of your good and possess it today.

And so as each one of us steps into alignment with the good that God is,

With the universal freedom that is ours to claim and own and be one with,

There's an opening that can occur for us.

And we can see the mold that we are providing for it.

I have studied people.

I have in my life as I've been moving through life out of curiosity,

In my ministry as I look for interesting biographies to study,

As I look for inspiration myself,

I can see the genesis of people's early life.

And I can see how most everyone I've ever encountered has had some difficulty in the beginning of their life,

Has some obstacles,

Has had some thing or things that they'd need to push past,

Has had people in their life who were for them and cheered them on and people who appeared to be obstacles holding them back.

And the only difference between the successful ones and the ones who have perpetrated more lack and limitation onto the world are the ones who stopped and said,

Enough.

I'm not going to take what I was given,

What I was taught,

What I was shown and continue to perpetuate it.

And that becomes the difference between a person of increase who makes a positive difference in people's lives and a person who harms and hurts other people.

It's a key difference of taking one's own power for good and beginning to turn it around.

We can see the power in that.

And each one of us has a place and can own that for ourselves,

Can step fully into being willing to be a mold for good so that we can be happier,

Healthier,

And more abundant.

And so that we can be a shining example to other people and especially to the children in our life.

Often on Mother's Day I reflect and sometimes if I get to speak here,

I like to share words from one of my favorite songs by singer songwriter,

Melissa Etheridge.

She says very powerfully,

Mothers,

Tell your children,

Be quick,

You must be strong.

Life is full of wonder.

Love is never wrong.

Be careful what they taught you.

How much of it was fear?

Refuse to hand it down.

The legacy stops here.

Yes.

Thank you,

Melissa.

My question,

My invitation into a new revelation today,

Are you willing to let the legacy of lack stop right where you are?

Is it time?

And if it is,

What it's going to take will be new,

Deeper revelations.

It's about the universal revelation that the good that God is,

Is always available to me,

Through me,

And as me,

Not withholding itself from me for any reason other than the mold that I provided.

And then it becomes a matter of deepening into the inner verse within us.

That's the work that sometimes we don't want to do.

We're all good about God is good,

God is good.

Oh,

I have to work on myself.

Yeah.

To stop that legacy,

To make that shift,

I've got to be willing to ferret that out.

And that often requires us to pay attention to the traumatic,

Dramatic,

Challenging experiences,

Actions,

Circumstances,

And conditions that we faced as young ones.

It requires a willingness to do the work to let that go.

Psychologists,

Philosophers,

People of all walks of faith have talked for years about an understanding that drama and trauma and those places where we felt unheard,

Unsupported,

Unloved,

Where we were taught things that didn't really serve us,

Often have at the deeper core of us a belief that we weren't worthy.

An idea that if we were more lovable or we were more worthy or we were better than we were as kids,

That those adults or those people wouldn't have done or said or perpetuated upon us whatever occurred.

And at the core of non-abundance,

Of lack,

Is often a persistent sense of a lack of worthiness.

A lack of being worth being strong and healthy and vibrant.

A lack of being worth having good opportunities in my career path.

A lack of unworthiness about money and all that it can bring.

A lack of unworthiness about friendships and relationships.

And so we ourselves have to understand that that connection between some of our trauma creates triggers for us.

And yes,

We then get triggered and we can be triggered over and over until we start to decide to do the inner work necessary to smooth out those triggers and begin to reclaim our inherent value and worth that is transcendent of anything that has ever happened to us or been said to us.

It might require work on our personal relationships.

It might require change and transformation within us.

But it is worth it.

It is absolutely worth it.

Christian philosopher Alan Kightley says,

Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they've been told to.

Very basic but true.

I don't have to live the way that my father lived.

I don't have to live out the financial beliefs my father had or the health beliefs that my mother had.

I don't have to live that out.

I don't even have to live who they told me I was or what they told me was possible or what they said I was worth.

I can make choices for myself about my life and my path and my journey.

This is often referred to as self-parenting.

Here's the truth.

We can't go back and change what happened with our family of origin.

We can wish it all we want but we can't change it.

What we can do is accept it.

We can do our inner work and our emotional work to move through it.

And then there comes a point when part of ending the legacy of that pattern is beginning to parent ourselves in the way we wished our parents would have parented us.

Sometimes when I make mistakes or do things I hear this voice in me that is so mean and demeaning to me.

And lately I've stopped and said,

Whose voice is that?

It's always my father.

Back when I was a little kid he was very hard on us and very angry and very demanding.

That's his voice.

That's not Michelle.

And so I just give him back his voice.

Yeah,

That's your voice dad.

It's not my voice.

How am I going to treat myself instead?

I'm going to talk to myself as lovingly as I can,

As kindly as I can,

As encouragingly as I can,

As honestly as I can.

Yes,

You really messed that up.

What are we going to do about it?

Very kind and caring.

I can,

You can,

We can lovingly self-parent ourselves powerfully.

John Demartini says,

When we subordinate to another,

We live in their values and not our own.

And that's important to me.

I have a high value of treating people with love and compassion.

I have to give myself that same value or I'm not really living that value out.

It's not enough to give it to you all.

It's just as important that I give it to myself.

And so this is a huge part of how we begin to claim our good and our worth once again.

And so I have some steps to the good life for us to consider today.

Just like last week,

Things we can practice to live this out.

First of all,

It's important to transcend denial.

Sometimes we don't want to believe that our parents,

The parent we have now could have been the challenging one in our life.

Here's how that plays out.

So I have a mother who had me when she was very young and she is now much older.

She has worked very much on herself spiritually,

Emotionally,

In every way possible.

The way I sort of hold her right now is the mom I have today is like mom version 7.

0.

The mom I had when I was a kid is like mom version 2.

0.

When she was kind of lost,

She didn't know what she was doing.

I don't even think she ever babysit kids and here she is with a little child trying to help raise me.

And so when I think about the things that happened that have impacted me and that I'm hurt about or that are negative or that are belief systems that I took on or saw for her or my father,

I realize that I'm going back to the version that I had then of them to work on that.

And that the mother I have now may not be anything at all like that mother.

She's not really.

She's always been a very loving mother,

But she was absent.

She was in a violent relationship.

I can't blame her for trying to keep everybody safe.

There were so many things that impacted her and that's the mom that I have to work on sometimes.

And I can't be in denial just because the one I have now is so much more mature and easygoing and does not hurt my feelings,

Does not do anything really that upsets me.

And so I can't just go,

Well,

You know,

I don't want her to feel guilty so I'm not going to work on myself.

I have to work on myself.

I have to work on that mom.

So that's an important thing to get over that denial and understand that that past can be handled,

Can be smoothed out,

That we can get past those trigger points.

And how we do that then once we're willing to go past that denial is forgive and then forgive and then forgive some more.

Forgiveness.

It's interesting that every faith tradition on the world pretty much agrees on one thing.

We can't agree on a lot,

But we do agree on forgiveness.

That forgiveness is important and vital for our health and well-being because it frees us to get back on our path.

It doesn't free them.

It doesn't do anything to mom 2.

0.

Doesn't change anything about what happened or what occurred,

But it frees me to be strong and more peaceful,

To be more centered,

To claim my worth and value.

My friend Derek Raymond posted on Facebook this last week and I really loved his post.

He said,

May you find so much peace that it becomes almost impossible to trigger you.

That's a new mental equivalent that I am going for and that I can know the degree of my peace when I'm not triggered by things anymore or people anymore.

That's a sign.

That's an indication of abundance for me that I am at greater peace.

And the last one is be more intentional about resources.

I often feel sad when I hear people say,

Well,

I've got these problems or these issues or these challenges,

But there's just no help out there.

I'm sorry.

There is help everywhere available for any problem condition situation that you or I might be going through.

There's help.

There's help in the form of other people in our circle of friends.

There is help in the form of government agencies and social workers and programs that we maybe just haven't even looked into.

There's help in the form of organizations like churches and groups.

There are practitioner prayer partners here at Mile High Church,

Spiritual directors and churches all over the place.

There are addiction groups.

There are support groups and you and I can get into them,

Can find the help that we need if we're intentional about it.

But what happens many times is we get victim about it.

No one can help me through my problem.

And I'm here to say every problem,

Challenge that we might have,

There is something somewhere that can support us to smooth it out and become a greater sense of power and strength for ourselves,

For our world,

For our children.

As one of Jamie's songs says,

Look,

We here can open the door wide and say,

Walk through this door.

Walk through the door of classes.

Walk through the door of support groups.

Walk through the door of church.

Walk through the door of the prayer and care center.

But we can't do it for you.

You and I have to walk across that threshold.

Take full responsibility and accountability for who we are right now,

Today,

And do the work to heal and let go of any past that is binding us to lack and limitation and unworthiness.

These are the revelations of an abundant person.

These are the revelations of one who claims they're good and walks forward in it.

And I am accepting and affirming for each one of us that we're doing that now.

Reviews

Powerful!