2004-06-20-Importance of Knowing Your Weakness

Session

Note

[you may find your weaknesses are similar to some of the ones mentioned by members of the Nashville group]

Opening

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.

Lesson

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dialogue

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.

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.

Amalain?

Q: My greatest weakness, as far as I know, is that I don’t know how to love, flat out period.

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.

Let us go in a circle.

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.

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?

Q: Yes it does.

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?

Q: Yes thank you

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.

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?

Q: Yes, is there an exercise for this to practice?

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.

Q: The ability to stay in the moment and struggle with learning on all levels and have an understanding.

Ham: And so your weakness is the inability to stay in the now?

Q: Yes, it has always been like that.

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?

Q: It feels so good to release that, to let go of it. I thank you so much.

Ham: Of course my son, you do very well.

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.

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?

Q: Yes, very much so, thank you.

Q: I think probably one of my very worst qualities is always selling myself all of the time to everybody, you know.

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?

Q: Yes, it is very interesting, thank you Ham.

Q: The only thing I am struggling with is my lack of faith in my worthiness and sense of value.

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.

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.

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?

Q: Yes, thank you very much.

Q: Do you have a personal message for Keri?

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.

Q: Do you have a personal message for Charlie B?

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.

Closing

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.