
Whether you believe yourself a success or a failure, either is meaningless. All that is true is that you are a child of God and therefore pure and Holy.

Whether you believe yourself a success or a failure, either is meaningless. All that is true is that you are a child of God and therefore pure and Holy.
I found this quote again today, and it describes perfectly how I feel about moving into writing two books related to Our Friends. One a book of quotes and art, with some quotes accompanied by two to four paragraphs of deeper discussion on the theme in the quote. The second, at least the beginning of my story with Our Friends in my life.
This turning toward what you deeply love saves you. Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

Photo by Stephanie K. Nead

“All fear is past and only love is here.” CIM Lesson 293
This is a most important lesson to practice today, when it seems that violence in your world has spiked, fear has spiked. It is as important as always to practice love, to know that in this moment, there is only love. In any moment, underneath the world you see, of chaos and pain and violence, as a vast ocean under an oil slick, lies Love. Whomever the deaths, they fall back into that ocean of Love.
It is not that it is not to be wished that you would live in peace and love with one another. It is. It is wished. It is that love would not be taken from you because you choose differently. Just as a child who slaps another is not really a bad child, but is generally one who is experimenting. A parent who removes her love from that child only reinforces a sense of badness. Whereas a parent may wrap her child in a hug of love, and say “Oh, that wasn’t kind. What can I do for you? You are feeling troubled or you would not have done that.” When one is responded to with love, there can be healing.
The other has to choose to accept the love and the healing. There are many still caught in chaos, confusion and struggle. They don’t know how to accept the love and the healing, even when it’s offered. But some do.
Responding to chaos, confusion and struggle with anger, vengefulness and righteousness is like throwing spears into a fight. You are going to hurt people, bloody them, and make them angry; it will only escalate the fight.
But to bring peace, to bring love, to remember and to hold in every moment that always there is Love, like the planet underneath you of whom you are so little aware. You walk upon earth, but you rarely realize that you walk upon a planet millions of times bigger than you are. So it is with God and with Love, just as you live and breath and are nourished within the atmosphere of this planet. You don’t live on this planet, you live in her. So too you live in God. And while you may do things that harm this planet, she will go on. She has resources far beyond yours, far beyond human knowing. So too does God.
There is loss in God when you hurt and fight. There are tears, but there is no real harm done, because you will return to God, like a scratch healing. And so, though it seems that you really hurt one another, all of you, all of you, every little thing, resides in, is born in, lives in, and if you die, dies in, God. You are all in the sea of Love, of the sea of Love, and will fall back into the sea of Love. There is nothing but Love, nothing but God, nothing but Creation, the Creator in it, of it, with it, as it.
And so, when you see the oil slick, the smear on the ocean of God’s Creation, you can bring peace and love to this by remembering that no matter what happens, everything, everything, returns to Love. There can be no response but Love. There can be no presence but Love. And so there can be no fear, because there is Love. There is Love always, and if you learn to feel it, in each moment, it will be there for you in every moment, in your awareness, your communion, your joining, your opening, and you will grow in Being Love.
(From Stephanie: I apologize for being away so long. As I was transcribing today, I came across this. I imagine many of you will find it supportive. I hope so. Many Blessings to you.)
Through your body, you are feeling happy. Receive that happiness, revel in your own feeling of happiness. From within your body, allow yourself to be rooted and grounded in your body and in your happiness. You have a right to your happiness. You don’t even have to have a reason for it. You have a right to happiness, beloved, an absolute, inalienable right to happiness, in your body, in your Being. You don’t have to explain or defend it. It is your birthright to be joyful. You can be happy in your body; you can feel happiness flowing throughout your body and Being.
When you have been raised on fear, your first reaction is fear…even to happiness. If you are in your body, happy and celebratory, experience says someone is going to want something from you; someone is going to want you to physically and emotionally give yourself up to them; you are going to be obligated to move into pain and away from happiness. Your happiness is someone else’s permission. When you are happy you no longer have a “No.” You are supposed to say “Yes” to everything.
That is not happiness, beloved. That is unhealthy boundaries. That is coercion and manipulation. To make someone believe that if they are happy and expressive and joyful and dancing, in love with their body and Being, that if in their own joy they have “turned on” someone else, then they owe that person something, is profoundly unkind, even cruel. No. You never owe. If you have given joy by your own experience of joy, of happiness and pleasure flowing through your body, that is enough. That is wonderful. If in the course of enjoying yourself, another is given pleasure, what a blessing to them…and to you. You owe nothing. You don’t owe to continue that. You don’t owe to expand it.
Feel happiness and know you deserve to be happy because it is your birthright. It is your body’s right to feel joy, to feel sensual, to feel sexual, to feel grief, to feel any way you feel. It is your sovereignty; it is your Being. You are never therefore required anything.
For your body, it is important to always know that you have a “No.” You have every right to go back to being a teenager, and give yourself the right you had, but were not allowed then, the right to say “No.” The fact that others talked you out of it, threatened you out of it, cajoled you out of it, manipulated you out of it, hurt you with the violence of their thoughts, their voices, their words, their manipulations, that is not your fault. It never ended your right to set your own limits. It never ended your right to be curious, to say “Well, in this moment that sounds interesting or exciting or attractive,” and to go one inch into it and decide “No, I’ve changed my mind, don’t like it, don’t want to do that,” and say “No.” Or to go a foot into it “Hmmm, no, feels icky, changed my mind, No.” Or to go ten feet or a hundred feet or a mile into it, or all the way through it and say “I don’t want to do that again.” You always have the right to your “No.” Your body always has the right to her “No.” Always, always, always. And you have the right, from within that space of choice, to own in every cell of your body, and every fiber and energy of your Being, your “Yes,” your joy and happiness.
Surrounding your joy and happiness, as expansive and beautiful as it feels, is a sovereign fire, and it has its boundaries, just as a fire within a fire pit has boundaries. It burns passionately, brightly and hot within itself, but it has a boundary of self. And so do you. Even in Creation there is a boundary to energy where it meets another energy. Tis very different from humans and bodies, but not completely different. The idea of bodies came from something similar. And so, your ecstasy, your passion, your joy, your happiness, however high it might rise, however deep it might be, however far it might extend, it is always contained within you; it exists because of you; it is fueled by you, and always you are the sovereign Being to say “Yes” or to say “No” how you move it, when and where. You own it. It’s always coming from the fuel at the base of you, in your soul, in your Being, in your heart, in your passion, just like the logs that fuel the fire are at the base of the fire. It is you, and so you say where you shall burn, when, with and for whom. Always for yourself.
Allow yourself to be happy beloved, to experience happiness fully embodied, to let loose those armors that have kept you from feeling happiness out of fear. Because anytime you felt happiness, someone took it away from you as though you had no right, and they very often did it by invading you with negative opinions, with criticism, or with manipulation that you had to give up who you are, what you want, and your felt “Yes” in your body. You never, ever, ever give up the yes in your body, in your soul, in your heart, in your Being; it is the you of you; it is the very core of the essence of your Being; it is your “Yes.” You surround it with the right to say “No,” and in that way you create the space within which the yes can burn and burn and burn, and ever replenish.
For private 1-1 time with Stephanie & Our Friends, please email sknp4710@aol.com
All sessions are recorded and emailed to you.
Couple & Group sessions are also available.
Stop by https://innerteacher.net/contact-and-session-information/
When you judge another you are giving to them what you believe you would deserve in the same situation, in doing the same thing, and in that it is always yourself you attack, your self-perception, your own sense of personal failure or inadequacy or lack of worthiness. The degree to which a human being attacks another is an expression of that human being’s sense of unworthiness to be loved. And so, it is always a wise thing to try to remember and stop, not only for another, but for yourself. To say, I am love and I come from love, and in this moment the only thing real and the only thing that I can give is love to myself or to this other.
For private 1-1 time with Stephanie & Our Friends, please email sknp4710@aol.com
All sessions are recorded and emailed to you.
Couple & Group sessions are also available.
Stop by https://innerteacher.net/contact-and-session-information/
Part 3
This post begins with the last line of Part 2 and continues from there…
Love is a living, moving Truth beyond any human ability to fully explain, understand or grasp in words. And so we use “creativity” and “Creation” to speak of God, because we feel it more accurately reflects, with language, a truer understanding, a truer connection; it allows you a more open conduit to experience what is true.
No human being is capable of fully receiving all of that quality of love so far beyond this creation without sort of burning up — in a kind of ecstasy, yes — yet burning up because it is so far beyond any conception, any words; it would wipe all that out. It would be like wiping a hard drive, because in a sense, in order to be human, in order to form these bodies and share this physical experience, this time and space creation, a sort of “hardware” and “software” had to be created and downloaded. Were you to meet that “Behind All Things” face to face, it would wipe the hard drive and erase the software, because It created the hardware and the software in order to experience this creation. It, the Creator, is so much vaster, deeper, more. You cannot download all the data off a huge computer onto a small one without blowing out the small one.
The reality is that something new is being created through this Creation. God is expressing God, always with love. And so, you are not mistaken in relying on God to be loving. You are never, ever mistaken in that, because that is what that One behind all things, within all things, expressing as all things, Is. You can always access that. You can always pray to that. You can always trust It.
For private 1-1 time with Stephanie & Our Friends, please email sknp4710@aol.com
All sessions are recorded and emailed to you.
Couple & Group sessions are also available.
Stop by https://innerteacher.net/contact-and-session-information/
Part I
When someone says that God (or Goddess or Spirit — whatever word is chosen) is not only love, that God is other things as well: anger, justice, etc. he is misunderstanding what love is in its pure form. And this is not his fault. It is the result of language and culture, using a human word that is applied in many contexts to name many different expressions, everything from kindness and affection or strong like, to passionate human sexual love, to joy and connection between a human and an animal, to the deepest and most profound communion of souls between any two Beings, with the Universe, or with all Creation.
Thus, all of the filters that go into the word “love” are projected onto the imagined God. Throughout all your world, God is always only imagined. While you touch It/God, your human mind cannot encompass It. It’s not that you do not experience God in that touch; it’s that your human mind cannot fully grasp or retain that experience. You retain it in your soul; you retain it as a beacon; you retain it as a felt-sense memory. But it is so very far beyond words that stories, poetry, art, music, dance are all you have to try to describe it: images, metaphor, motion these things make you feel the “Yes!” The “Yes!” is Love in its one true form.
For private 1-1 time with Stephanie & Our Friends, please email sknp4710@aol.com
All sessions are recorded and emailed to you.
Couple & Group sessions are also available.
Stop by https://innerteacher.net/contact-and-session-information/
As we move through solstice and into the lengthening light.
In the fall, seeds drop, burrowing into the Earth’s embracing soil, to nestle, be watered by early winter rains, to rot and thus open. As the dark of our northern hemisphere approaches, when all is most fallow, beneath the surface something akin to a miracle is occurring. In the deep dark cold soil, new life is rising. Out of the cracked skin of rotted seed, from within the nourishment at its core — built up, stored light of summer’s sun — new life presses forth and now pushes toward that light which is returning to our skies as the days lengthen. This is such a potent time!
What seed did you drop this fall? What seed needed to rot in cold, wet soil of winter; what needed to compost into new life? And what is being born? What new growth are you feeling under your skin, in your Holy heartbeat, beneath the soil of your life? Can you feel it? Can you speak of it at all? Perhaps not. Let us hold this rebirthing for one another over the next week and a half, during this most powerful time. Let us listen and vision deep within ourselves during this dark time; what is waiting and wanting our attention in order to be born? Listen for its guidance: how and what is the deepest you asking in support of this birthing?
Let us remember that on the other side of our Earth, in the southern hemisphere, we are balanced in our rebirthing by those who are celebrating the fulness and abundance of summer, when all they seeded half a year past is now pouring forth new and vibrant life.
Blessings to you on Solstice, as the Earth is reborn. Blessings on Christmas as so many celebrate a rebirth through a story that speaks to their imagination and soul. Blessings that your soul is always nourishes and held with love…
Stephanie
Our next Our Friends Circle Call will be Sunday, January 5th 2014.
Anyone is welcome on this call. Please feel free to forward this email to others.
The call will run approximately an hour and a half and will start promptly at 4:00. After a short introduction, Our Friends will share a short talk, then the call will open to questions & answers. I will record the call. If you would like a copy of the recording, send me an email after the call at sknp4710@aol.com.
A suggested donation for the call is $25-$50. I am happy to receive PayPal. You can log in using my sknp4710@aol.com email. Or, my snail mail is Stephanie Nead, POB 923, Talent, OR 97540.
The call-in number for Our Friends’ Circle is 218-632-0244. The access code is 363636#.
Call for a private Our Friends’ Circle for you and friends (generally $20/person for a 90 minute call-session with a $100 minimum,) as well as individual and couple sessions (generally $125/$175 for a 60-75 minute call-session.) Please contact me to make arrangements. Email or phone is welcome. 541-292-9390.

We are lit by a light we may struggle to see, yet in the dark we see what cannot otherwise be seen. Walk with eyes closed and inner feeling alive!
This Sunday, December 15th at 4:00 p.m. will be our next Circle call with Our Friends. Please see the end of this post for details.
Entering the Dark of the Year
First bring yourself, with whatever tension you have, to this very moment. Breathe it, feel it, accept it, have loving kindness and compassion for yourself in your nervousness, in your tension, in your holding. Simply love yourself and breathe: naturally, fully, and deeply. Feel what is there, ask if it can let go a little. Let yourself be with you in integrity, in honesty, in love, in kindness and gentle accepting presence. Hold yourself. This is the path of learning, Being and doing. It is for you to hold.
Next, leave off the small things, the petty things, leave off your past, leave off your friends, go to the core and stay only with the core that is you with you.
These are the important things: releasing the past, the familial linkages, the lineages, the bindings, the agreements. You let go.
You can only do this work for yourself. You cannot do it for others. Only they can find this place of release for themselves. They are much more likely to seek it and find it when they see, feel, and experience it in you. So, your letting go is wholly healing.
Now, open your gates. Open your inner sanctum of self. You are asking to step forward into the fullness of your own soul embodied. You are asking to be en-souled, in voice, in thought, in feeling, in body. You are asking, in this life, to be fully present in your highest essence, in this body, in each moment. You are asking to walk in this life fully awakened, aware, in each step finding and creating the true path of your unique essence. You both offer yourself and invite your Self.
Prepared now, you call upon G-d, G-oddess, life force, essence, Being. You call upon what is the IS; you call upon your G-d, ultimate essence. You invite, you ask, you call with your whole open heart for the Light of G-d to reside with you, in you, through you, to teach you, to guide you, to protect you, to hold you, to nourish you, to nurture you, to provide for you, to clear the path before you and make your steps strong and firms, to guide your thoughts, your feelings, your voice. You invite all of this into your body, into your heart, into your life, and you surrender yourself to that Divine flow that all will become true and strong. You ask G-d into your life fully, completely, embodied in every cell, thought, feeling, moment, and breath.
You hold loving space for yourself.
This Sunday, November 10, 2013 at 4:00p.m PST will be Circle with Our Friends. Anyone is welcome on this call. Please feel free to forward this email to others, whether or not they already know Our Friends.
The call will run approximately an hour and a half and will start promptly at 4:00. You can come on the call as early as you wish. The line will be available. I will check in to see who is new to Our Friends, do a short introduction of myself and Our Friends then bring Our Friends in for the bulk of the call. They will offer a short talk and then the call will open to questions & answers. I will be recording the call. If you would like to receive a copy of the recording, send me an email after the call at sknp4710@aol.com.
A suggested donation for the call is $25-$50. I am happy to receive PayPal. You can do so by logging in using my sknp4710@aol.com email. Or, my snail mail is Stephanie Nead, POB 923, Talent, OR 97540.
The call-in number for Our Friends’ Circle is 218-632-0244. You will be asked for an access code. It is 363636#.
I am also available to provide private Our Friends’ Circle sessions for you and friends (generally $20/person for a 90 minute call-session with a $100 minimum,) as well as individual and couple sessions (generally $125/$175 for a 60-75 minute call-session.) Please contact me to make arrangements. Email or phone is welcome. 541-292-9390.
I hope to meet you on the call this Sunday, December 15th at 4:00p.m. PST
Love, Stephanie