Hello? Is anybody out there?
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Getting Ahold of God
One night while lying in bed at the age of seven, I was fretting about the fact that other kids at school were starting to get the flu. One girl in my class had literally lost it all over her desk that day, and I was terribly upset. I hated the flu, and it was the only thing in life that I feared.
Every night, my mother would tuck me in and ask me to say my prayers out loud to her.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
God bless Mommy and Daddy, Markreta and Mary
Amen.
After my mother left the room that night, I had my very first request of God. I remember asking that he not let me get the flu that winter.
Please, please God, don't let me get the flu.
Every night throughout that winter I would pray the same prayer, and then curl up and go to sleep in peace. I did not get the flu again, until high school!
My favorite Sunday school songs were, Jesus Loves Me and When I Walk Through the Garden Alone. I was a very lonely child. My sister hated me and refused to play with me. We were both adopted. She came five years before me and was very displeased when our parents brought me home. Being a farm kid without someone to play with for miles and miles, I felt totally alone in my world since I could remember.
I don't have a memory of praying again until my mother almost died from complications with diabetes. I went to the hospital stairwell and asked God to please save her, that I wasn't ready for her to go. I was twenty-one and had just finished my college degree and was about to begin my first job.
Sitting in the stairwell, I didn't feel deserving, but my heart drove me to beg for my mother's life anyway. I guess that's what I always thought that prayer was: begging God to fix things and to do it quickly.
I was raised in a church-going family. My mother read her Bible every night, but I never really knew what it all meant to her. My understanding of prayer was that it was something that you did at the dinner table when the minister and his wife came over for dinner, or you saved it for really disastrous occasions as a last resort so as not to "bother" God too often.
One of my aunts used to say she wished she had God's phone number, because she had a few things she wanted to bend his ear about. Her interpretation translated into my mind that God didn't really want to hear any of my problems. He didn't have time, and if I asked for too much or called too often, he would shut off all communications. Or something like that!
To me it was all about the God being in the "great out there," and so I felt like I was living life alone. I would be fighting all of my battles by myself until, one day, I would finally collapse from total exhaustion. It never occurred to me that anything could be easy, and therefore, I undertook everything I wanted as if it had to be arduous and painstaking.
At age thirty, my life read like a disaster area in need of relief. It felt like someone running their fingernails down the blackboard of my soul and I just couldn't figure out how I could have tried so hard and failed so big.
In just a few short years I had lost my first born son at birth, after many years of infertility treatments, surgeries and fertility drugs; then I endured a terrorizing high-risk, but successful, pregnancy; I divorced my husband nine months later. I had migraine headaches since high school, and they had increased to where they were now daily, which caused a growing addiction to pain medication. It all caught up with me in professional and physical burnout, and now I was left alone to raise our son by myself. With the precious exception of my son, whom I love without reservation, I had somehow managed to get everything in life that I didn't want.
I had tried all my life to do everything the "right" way. I had worked hard and now I had minimal energy reserves left.
In absolute despair, I drove up to the mountain one day to try to find God and to once again beg. I begged for a man to come into my life that would make me happy. That's all I had ever really wanted since I was a little girl. And in the silence and stillness of my being, I knew I was not going to get what I wanted and what "I" thought would fix things for me, at least not for a long time to come. It was a sinking feeling because I didn't even begin to know what would fill me, if not a man.
A New Plan
I left the mountain that day feeling no better than when I went up. I had a sense that I had been told "no." The only thing I could do was to keep on keeping on, for the sake of my son.
Within a very short amount of time, I found myself drawn to move to Portland, Oregon, a move that made absolutely no logical sense, but I knew I had to go there. Through a "series of events" I found myself going back to church, but this time I immediately immersed myself in spiritual study. I had been drawn to books unlike anything I'd ever read before, and I was alive with newfound understanding and a developing foundation for spiritual growth.
I fell in love with all of Catherine Ponder's books, especially The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity. It was Napoleon Hill's Think & Grow Rich where I first learned about MasterMinding, and it wasn't long before I attended a workshop on MasterMinding given by Rev. Jack Boland from Church of Today out of Detroit, Michigan. It was somewhere in the middle of his presentation when he referenced what Jesus said in Matthew 18:19-20.
If two of you agree down here on earth concerning anything you
ask, my Father in heaven will do it for you.
For, where two or three gather together because they are mine,
I am there among them. (NLT)
The key phrase here for me was: my Father in heaven will do it for you. Now that is a clear promise I felt I could trust and work with! It not only got me to take the first step, but it remains with me, each and every time I'm in a MasterMinding session. What runs through my mind is that if even just two of us agree about whatever we are asking for, then it will be done, because when two or three minds join and are in agreement than what I am requesting will be given to me in some form.
It just so happened that on the night of the workshop, I had walked in and found my friend Connie! We had sat together through the workshop and when it was over, Connie and I looked at each other with wide eyed excitement, and at the same time we said, "Do you want to be my MasterMind partner?" With that, we scheduled our first official MasterMinding session, and I've been MasterMinding since.
The MasterMind Principle
MasterMinding is based on the ancient premise that the combined energies of two or more like-minded persons is many, many times greater than the sum of the individual energies involved. The MasterMind Principle states: "When two or more people coordinate in a spirit of harmony and work toward a definite objective or purpose, they place themselves in position, through that alliance, to absorb power directly from the great storehouse of Infinite Intelligence coming through the creative mechanism of each contributing mind."
MasterMinding calls for no "hard labor." It calls for no sacrifice. It does not require one to become ridiculous, or incredulous. To apply it calls for no great amount of education. But it does call for sufficient imagination and approval to enable one to see for another, and to understand for another, that accumulation of money cannot be left to chance, good fortune or luck. As Napoleon Hill put it in Think & Grow Rich, "One must realize that all who have accumulated great fortunes first did a certain amount of dreaming, hoping, wishing, desiring and planning before they acquired money."
The Dream Unfolds
When I look at the dreams that have come true for me, I'm amazed at how many of them have occurred since a critical moment in 1989 when I embraced MasterMinding as my way to connect with God without this idea that to do so would be begging.
What MasterMinding really did for me is create a most profound and instant connection between me and God. Certainly we all have the power to be, do and have all that our hearts desires and, I was exhausted from trying to do it all alone and by myself. There is a spiritual solution for every problem and sometimes, in order to open to receiving new and easier solutions, it takes someone else believing and knowing with us.
You may be thinking, well isn't MasterMinding really just having a prayer partner without calling it prayer?
Of course it's prayer. Goal achieving, intentional prayer. And, at the stage of my life that I learned about MasterMinding, I simply could not accept prayer as a viable alternative because of my previous misconceptions about God.
Right after my divorce, a youth minister was in my office discussing some of the teens we were both working with and he could see how much pain I was in. He prayed for me right then and there. I felt stupid and ashamed that I even needed prayer. I felt like he was wasting his time on me. That nothing would be any better for me because of his prayers. I didn't know how to feel God. I didn't know how to feel God's presence, peace and love come through me. It may have happened on that day, but I didn't recognize it because I didn't expect to receive any special attention from God.
MasterMinding began to bridge an old ideology with a new methodology. One that my mind, my heart and my soul could accept. I could accept the idea that I could set weekly goals and take them to God. Asking my partners support in knowing that my requests were being fulfilled.
I could use it with my girlfriends or at work by saying to an associate, "Hey, MasterMind with me that ____," when I would have never felt comfortable saying, "Hey pray with me that ____."
I began to see things unfold for me each week. I began to feel peace at the end of each MasterMinding session, not really knowing why or how any of this would all come to be. I began to trust and know that I was being heard and that it wasn't about trying to bend God's ear.
I could also begin understanding when I was making requests that I didn't really want, but thought I should want, that they were being answered by not being answered! Setting goals that I didn't really want, and seeing them dissipate because they simply weren't right for me. I began to learn to listen to my soul. I began to trust my spirit as it would direct and guide me and my requests. I found myself making requests for the first time that "I" of myself did not think were possible, but because my partners had no problem believing for me, I could feel the absolute comfort that my requests were going to be fulfilled.
I have MasterMinded for money, health: relief from chronic head-ache pain, pre-menstrual syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome. I have MasterMinded for weight reduction and a reduced interests in excess eating and sweets. I MasterMinded for my second husband, the well-being of our children, the alignment of joining two families and peace, harmony, love and good will with our previous spouses. I have MasterMinded for everything from my "to do lists" to the restoration of my business, what car to buy, requesting to easily find a place to live in a new city and work to come in.
After building a foundation for my business, I decided one year to take a quantum leap in my income and I MasterMinded and received easily my first 6-figure income. The next year, I requested the ability to write two books in one year and wrote both in under seven months.
We write everything down and MasterMind for every single thing on we have decided on. We MasterMind for the well-being of family members and people in our community that are having a rough time. We MasterMind for the "good of the whole," always ending our MasterMind sessions with "this or something better" as our final request.
We turn every immediate or long range concern into a request and then we ask our partners support in "seeing" for us what we may not be able to "see" and "believe" for ourselves. And with that, comes a peace that passes all understanding.
What is in front of me to do is most often bigger than I am and so I just bring it to my partners asking them for their support. Sometimes, what I ask for is bigger than they can believe, and so we all agree to remain committed to the process, realizing that it's not about us knowing "how" today. We all know that with commitment, Providence moves too.
Here's why You need MasterMinding.
You do, in fact, have the power within you to actualize whatever is at the heart of your deepest desire, and you can in fact do it all by yourself with enough focused effort. It's true, and it's proven every day a in "gazillion" places throughout the world.
Your mind is an incredible goal seeking mechanism. But you and I have had an extensive education, with reinforcing experiences, about not listening to our soul's desires, because we have believed that we can't have what we really want, therefore we shouldn't want it, or let our feelings out, or know what we know. Because, if we do this, we'll just get ourselves hurt and disappointed, again.
We tend to only set goals that we "think" are possible, which means we are most likely still trying hard not to hear the whisperings of our soul. Our inner spirit is speaking to us and if it's guidance is bigger than what we currently see as "realistic" we tend to dismiss it rather than bring it in and turn it into a request.
So for every positive thought and soul desire that we have, we then have a contradicting thought and fear. We do have the internal resources to deal with this, and we can in fact ultimately do it all for ourselves. Or we can partner up with one or more other individuals who also are exhausted with doing it all by themselves, and begin to learn how incredibly awesome the energy of combined Mind-Soul Power is.
You can be helping each other experience one hundred percent unconditional approval, which will launch each of you with new energy and a sense of ease to pursue your deepest passions and dissipate your biggest dragons.
And here's something you can look forward to. As you learn to be unconditionally approving with your partner's soul desires, you will be able to hear your own more brilliantly.
I suggest, you jump in and get started, now.
MasterMinding works for the person who doesn't know if they can make it one more day, as well as for the person wanting to achieve higher levels of prosperity: responsibility, rank and remuneration. So let's start the new millennium off with something that works!
Learn more about how the MasterMind Principle program works at makeadifference.com/pages/mastermind.htm
©2002 Mary Robinson Reynolds, Heart Productions & Publishing
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|  Mary Robinson Reynolds, M.S., Educational Psychologist, Author and Producer of the world renowned Internet videos, MakeADifferenceMovie.com and AcknowledgmentMovie.com - both amassing over 10 million views within a few short months of their releases - spent many years as a classroom teacher K-8 and then as a counselor K-12. She parlayed her phenomenal success with youth at-risk into her programs for business leaders, entrepreneurs and managers on how to be energetically effective in leading improvement in their organizations through the power of Team Synergy and MasterMinding. She has written eight books, developed UTrain&Coach programs that anyone can take into their place of work to build organization wide Team Synergy, and has presented to over 20,000 people in two year period in every major city in the U.S. To learn more go to: maryreynolds.com
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