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<DIV><FONT size=2>Thank you Ham and the Nashville TM,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>What a wonderful and powerful message. I can see myself and my
weaknesses clearly in this potent and moving dialog. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>I think it took courage for all of you to look for your
individual problems and be willing to share them. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Rick</FONT></DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr
style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=david.schlundt@vanderbilt.edu
href="mailto:david.schlundt@vanderbilt.edu">David G. Schlundt, Ph.D.</A>
</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A
title=tmtranscripts@circuit1.teamcircuits.com
href="mailto:tmtranscripts@circuit1.teamcircuits.com">tmtranscripts@circuit1.teamcircuits.com</A>
; <A title=tml@circuit1.teamcircuits.com
href="mailto:tml@circuit1.teamcircuits.com">tml@circuit1.teamcircuits.com</A>
</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Monday, June 21, 2004 11:56
AM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> [tmtranscripts] Ham on working
on your weaknesses</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV class=moz-text-html lang=x-western>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=+1>
<P>[you may find your weaknesses are similar to some of the ones mentioned by
members of the Nashville group]<BR></P>
<P>06/20/2004</P>
<P>Ham: Greetings, children, I am Ham and I am happy you have each chosen to
come this evening. For each of you, there are ups and downs, however, all of
you are steadily progressing in the kingdom. You are all finding progress and
finding a way forward where previously you have been stuck or stymied on your
path. </P>
<P>All of your being must traverse the path at once. It is not possible to get
too far ahead of yourselves for always must the weakest part of you catch up
to the strongest. There is no way to circumvent this law of the universe for
just when you feel yourself really making progress will you be tripped up and
embarrassed, perhaps, by a behavior or reaction you thought you had outgrown.
It is important to remember that you are only as strong as that most
vulnerable place. </P>
<P>Have courage, my friends, and do not be discouraged for wisdom comes in
knowing the weakness just as well as the strength. You must all understand
that every person, no matter how powerful or strong they seem to be, has his
weak points. But, you must also understand that those weak points must be
dealt with. They cannot be ignored and should you pretend they do not exist,
they will assert themselves during your most perilous times. </P>
<P>Each of you has a long journey ahead, an infinite destiny. You have a long
time to explore all the hidden corners and manifesting potentials of your
personalities. It is tempting to rush over those parts which are not so
flattering, those areas which cause embarrassment or regret. It is tempting to
do this, but unwise. It is important to know your vulnerabilities. It is
important to acknowledge these things to yourself. Only then can these
vulnerabilities, problems, or Achilles heels become mended and strengthened.
You must each understand that having understanding for yourselves is a great
strength in itself. It is those who deny their own weaknesses who are undone
by those weaknesses. </P>
<P>Character is built through the wise acceptance of failure. Character is
weakened by denial. Denial is like a termite infested foundation. It will
gradually undermine your entire character. And so, the way forward is always
found in seeking out those areas of weakness and denial, acknowledging these
problems, and once you accept something about yourself, it ceases to have the
power to undermine your success. </P>
<P>Let us now, beginning with Rebecca, each of you can state what you feel
your greatest weakness is. We will discuss it briefly and then move on. </P>
<P>Q: Mine is the inability to accept personal criticism, even if it is
constructive. If people mean well and give me criticism, I can barely stand
it. I know it is wrong, but I don’t know how to fix it. </P>
<P>Ham: Rebecca, you do well my dear. As a child, you had a great need for
acceptance which went unmet. Criticism is easier to accept if you don’t feel
you are being rejected completely. Without having established in your family
the acceptance your required, then criticism seemed like the final rejection
instead of something helpful. This emotional instability has followed you very
far, but you must begin to overcome it by truly receiving the acceptance of
Christ Michael and the Mother Spirit. Even now, you have trouble fully
accepting your daughtership probably because you have never received it
before. This week, in your quiet time, really work on receiving this gift.
Make it part of your being. Then you will find the criticism of others easier
to bear and rather than fleeing from yourself, you will stand fast instead.
</P>
<P>Amalain?</P>
<P>Q: My greatest weakness, as far as I know, is that I don’t know how to
love, flat out period. </P>
<P>Ham: My daughter, you also had a very difficult childhood, difficult in
that neither of your parents really new how to love you are each other. So you
had no real connection with love for many years. This has made you very
independent, but also confused about male-female pairing. You understood the
form of how this in enacted, but not the underlying bonding. Your parents had
the form without the bond and so you followed this pattern in your early life.
Once again, it is the acceptance of the Master’s love for you and also the
love of the Mother Spirit that will break down the wall you have unconsciously
erected between your heart and others. The Master’s love is more than the love
of a father. It is the tender love of a lover as well. It is the love of
someone who completely embraces you, not someone who holds you at a distance
or loves an idea of you. The acceptance of this love will lead you to fall in
love with the Master in a way that you have not loved before, in a way you
have not allowed yourself to love before. Do not hold back from his love, but
let it wash over you and through you, let it embrace you. In short, let him
teach you how to love him. You do very well my dear and you are doing better
every day. </P>
<P>Let us go in a circle.</P>
<P>Q: This is hard Ham, because I am pretty near perfect. But the first thing
that comes to mind is my mouth because that is pretty much what I have used to
sabotage my progress.</P>
<P>Ham: Yes my son, you do very well. One’s tongue is the hardest thing to
gain a measure of control over. It is difficult to find that middle road where
your comments are considered, yet spontaneous. It is also a point of rebellion
for you to not have to watch what you say or feel that you need to not be
yourself. Gradually, over time, you will find a way to be more in balance and
you will have less fear of being repressed or that your feelings will be
discounted by others. All human beings have more or less a fear of rejection
by their fellows. It is this fear of rejection which leads you to continually
seek acceptance and that is all it is. You are tending to seek more acceptance
after acceptance has been granted because you are not sure of it. Does that
make sense?</P>
<P>Q: Yes it does.</P>
<P>Ham: So, as you seek after acceptance, also remember to accept acceptance
rather than testing it. There was, in your family, a pressure toward
conformity and having rejected the conformity, you still continue to seek
acceptance and your refuse to accept rejection and so this has led you to
continually seek after approval, for approval or acceptance anyway, was given.
You distrusted it because in your house, acceptance was predicated on
conformity. Is this helping?</P>
<P>Q: Yes thank you</P>
<P>Q: I feel my greatest weakness is my persistence to attaching to fear
instead of allowing love to fill the void in my heart which is I guess my
resistance to accepting full sonship. </P>
<P>Ham: Yes, my son, for you fear has been a kind of friend. Fear is familiar
and almost comfortable for you. During times when you are not experiencing any
fear, you are apt to suddenly miss it and pull it back in. All human beings
have a relationship with fear. Fear is managed, but it is rarely vanquished.
You have come a long way with fear as your friend, with fear as even a refuge
and a familiar comforting presence. But my son, you will find that fear is not
a friend and fear is not in any sense helpful in your life. You have for too
long assumed that fear was something you should have. But fear is a fraud.
Fear is not real. It accomplishes nothing and it wreaks great havoc when it is
release. You must not continue to simply manage your fear more efficiently,
no. You must come to a parting of the ways, a point where you bid your old
friend goodbye and let it go. Yes, my son, you are afraid to let go of fear.
But, you must do so. Every time it tries to work its way back into your life,
you will have to vanquish it anew and defeat it time and again. But the more
you can push fear out, the more you can welcome happiness in. They can’t both
occupy the same space. Love must be the winner. Love must take over the space
fear has left. Continue to work on this. You are doing much better. Is this
helping?</P>
<P>Q: Yes, is there an exercise for this to practice?</P>
<P>Ham: Yes, when you are seized by a fearful thought or you feel your mind
tending toward fear, you must say to fear, "With the Master’s love I release
you. With the Master’s help I turn away from you and turn toward him". You
will find the Master’s spirit has no place for fear and as you welcome his
spirit more and more into your mind and heart, fear will be crowded out and
you will find you can gradually let it go. Yes, my son, you do well.</P>
<P>Q: The ability to stay in the moment and struggle with learning on all
levels and have an understanding. </P>
<P>Ham: And so your weakness is the inability to stay in the now?</P>
<P>Q: Yes, it has always been like that.</P>
<P>Ham: Yes my son, you have a very creative mind but an undisciplined mind.
You have great creative potential, but your weakness is the focusing and
completing (following through) on one thing before you move to something else.
You have stamina, but you have a lack of the discipline to focus that energy
and to maintain that energy in one direction. So the question is, how to
create greater self-discipline? Remember, always, that you have a higher
nature as well as a lower one. Your lower nature will naturally obey your
higher nature. You have simply been at a loss to identify and follow the
higher nature. You have wanted to figure it out yourself. You have wanted to
see every option at every step. You have wanted to know every single problem
and all its ramifications in order to make a decision. But you are making
things too hard, too complicated. Very simply, your higher nature knows what
is best. It’s not up to you to figure it out for yourself as so much to find
the higher nature and to consent to his over control. You have seen the
example of others and tried to do what they did. But that is not your road.
Your road is more directly spiritual. Your road will be found in seeking inner
guidance and then allowing that guidance to guide. Do not be afraid of
mistakes for once a human being asks for divine guidance and gives consent for
that guidance to be manifest, you will be led through many situations, many
relationships, and each of these will help you, not so much in the material
world, but in the spirit realm, the realm of character, the realm of morality.
Do not worry so much. The Master said, "Let not your heart be troubled,
neither let it be afraid". Let go of worry and you will find your way forward
without it. Is this helping?</P>
<P>Q: It feels so good to release that, to let go of it. I thank you so
much.</P>
<P>Ham: Of course my son, you do very well.</P>
<P>Q: I guess my weakest thing is that my first response to most situations is
negative and I look at most situations as a stressful pain in the butt.</P>
<P>Ham: My son, you are doing very well. You have trained yourself to be
cautious and you are also quite practical in wanting to see the negative
first. This is also a way to stave off disappointment. But it is also a way to
allow yourself the ease of pessimism. It is easier to not allow hopes to rise
than it is to have those hopes crash. You have experienced some great
disappointments in your life and you have seen the error of unwise optimism.
But do not allow this easy road to dominate your life. For the future is
created by those who have a vision not always shared by many others. You must
allow yourself to have that spiritual insight, that vision of the future,
without worrying about disappointment to the exclusion of dreaming at all. You
don’t need to be a "dreamer" in order to have vision. It is the hope of the
future that creates future. If you are to be the architect of your own life,
you must have a vision of how you want your life to be. Step cautiously my
son, but do not allow your caution to prevent you from stepping at all. Is
this heping?</P>
<P>Q: Yes, very much so, thank you.</P>
<P>Q: I think probably one of my very worst qualities is always selling myself
all of the time to everybody, you know. </P>
<P>Ham: Yes, my son, you understand this quite well and yet it is a compulsion
borne out of insecurity and an essential kind of self-rejection. You seek to
sell a vision of yourself, not your self per se. So you are trying to create
an unreal you to replace the real you in the minds of others as though the
real you is not worthwhile, only the vision is worth anything. It is time now
to bring the two together and to be secure in your present self. As a child,
you were rejected in the home and this led you to feel you were not worthwhile
as your self and this led you to mistakenly assume that all others were
rejecting of you as well but perhaps they might accept the unreal self. You
have been many years coming into a self-acceptance and yet that fear of
rejection continues to pop up and be an Achilles heel. It is as though you
have been unable to accept your acceptance and even though you intellectually
understand the Master’s great love for you, and you intellectually accept the
Spirit Mother’s love, still you have not accepted this completely and you even
pass off their acceptance of you as some kind of acceptance of your task
instead. You have found the value in the task, but now you must find value in
yourself. Is this helping?</P>
<P>Q: Yes, it is very interesting, thank you Ham.</P>
<P>Q: The only thing I am struggling with is my lack of faith in my worthiness
and sense of value. </P>
<P>Ham: Yes my dear, you are doing well. Many people have trouble with
self-worth. The dynamic in your home life created a very damaging situation
for you. This then has played out over the years in that you have sought out
some situations where rejection would be part of your relationship. My dear,
you have unconsciously found rejection time and time again, even set up the
scenario yourself at times. And this kind of schizophrenic feeling your have
toward yourself, of alternately valuing and rejecting who you are, brings you
in to situations where this will be part of the dynamic, going from one to the
other. You have also felt distrustful toward God because you could not have a
trusting relationship with your earthly parents. You have been afraid to trust
in the Father. In other words, when you have trusted, right behind it has come
an undermining self doubt, as though you can’t believe God would value you
enough to be a trustworthy partner for you. This, my daughter, will gradually
abate as time goes by. You have a great inner resilience and a great ability
to reach out in faith. Gradually, your trust will develop and strengthen as
you come to accept and value who you are, why you were created. Gradually, my
dear, you will find your purpose. You will find your balance in this life. Do
not be in a hurry, for you are going through a healing and this will take some
time. Continue to bring the Master’s spirit into your heart ever deeper. Allow
him to be your brother, your father, friend, and lover. He will guide you into
all that you need and you will learn to increasingly trust him as time goes
on. Don’t worry my dear, you do well. </P>
<P>Q: I think I am holding on to a lot of old hurts and resentments from times
when I felt like I was being unfairly treated or unjustly punished. I bring
these feelings into present situations and it causes me to misread what other
people are feeling and overreact, or avoid, or withdraw, or act in ways that
are dishonest or unfair to others. I think this also leads me to do things
that build walls between me and the people I say I love and it gives me the
occasion to seek ways of escape or self-comfort that are destructive and
self-isolating. </P>
<P>Ham: Yes, my son, you are a person with a very active inner life and this
inner life can be a refuge and an easy place to withdraw to when you feel
wronged. It is also a childish reaction, a kind of an I’ll show you response.
And, of course, all people have this to some degree. It is easier to withdraw,
to nurse your wounded pride, that it is to work through the problem directly.
Your parents, especially your father, exhibited the same pattern and he was
very unapproachable for you unavailable emotionally. You must resist the
impulse to punish others by your withdrawal the way he did. Sometimes people
are just frightened and they lash out in fear without thinking. So you must
understand that you should not punish them for their fears the way you were
punished for your fears as a child. If you would follow the Master’s
footsteps, and allow him to influence you and how you react to others. There
are times when pride must be decisively put away for often it is pride which
leads to a disaster down the road and it is often the most foolish mistakes
that are caused by wounded pride. Pride is kind of a childish over
dramatization which should not be allowed to have free reign. The Master was
free from these errors, but human beings are not. Be aware that others will
act foolishly prompted by their own pride and all of this compounds a problem
which probably is not that serious. It is always harder to stay and fight than
it is to break and run when the going gets tough. This is how character is
made or lost. Is this helping?</P>
<P>Q: Yes, thank you very much.</P>
<P>Q: Do you have a personal message for Keri?</P>
<P>Ham: Yes my dear, you are doing better than you think you are. You have a
great deal of inner strength, a great deal of integrity learned the hard way.
When you are faced with a difficulty, open your heart to the Master’s
guidance. Pray that his hand will grasp your hand and reach out to him
completely and sincerely. You way will be opened so long as you follow his
guidance. Sometimes, that guidance is simply to stay and do nothing. You must
be willing to do this too. Be at peace my dear. </P>
<P>Q: Do you have a personal message for Charlie B?</P>
<P>Ham: Certainly, welcome the tests of faith my son. Do not be lazy about
exercising your faith. Demonstrate to the Master the depth and breadth of your
faith. There is no turning back from the faith journey you have embarked upon.
Therefore, take each struggle as a promise of victory. But, do not be overly
concerned with each temporary outcome. Look instead to the overall direction.
Plot your course and then with prayer and steadfast faith move forward. </P>
<P>Are there any further questions at this time? Very well then, until next
week my love and prayers are with you each. Go in peace,
farewell.</P></FONT></DIV></DIV><PRE class=moz-signature cols="72"><FONT size=+1>--
*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*
David G. Schlundt, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
Vanderbilt University
301 Wilson Hall
Nashville, TN 37203
Phone: (615)322-7800
Fax: (615) 343-8449
Email: <A class=moz-txt-link-abbreviated href="mailto:David.Schlundt@Vanderbilt.edu">David.Schlundt@Vanderbilt.edu</A>
*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*
To science God is a possibility, to psychology
a desirability, to philosopy a probability, to
religion a certainty, an actuality of religious
experience
The Urantia Book, page 1125
*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*
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