The Ripple Effect and Spirituality

By: Laura from Healing With Spirit 9/29/12  (From a lecture given at the First Spiritualist Church of RI)

How many of you liked to skip stones when you are a kid? How many of you still like to skip stones? How many still actually do it?

We are all here for a reason today in this wonderful church. But have you actually stopped to think what brought you here? Have you actually stopped to think about what is spirituality and what it means to you?

Spirituality is a belief that focuses on one’s understanding of natural law enabling the person to discover his/her inner path of being and it is an integral aspect of many religious experiences such as Spiritualism.

Wikipedia definition:  “Spirituality in this context may be a matter of nurturing thoughts, emotions, words, and actions that are in harmony with the belief that everything in the universe is mutually dependent; this stance has much in common with some versions of Buddhist spirituality. A modern definition is as follows: Spirituality exists wherever we struggle with the issues of how our lives fit into the greater scheme of things. This is true when our questions never give way to specific answers or give rise to specific practices such as prayer and meditation. We encounter spiritual issues every time we wonder where the universe comes from, why we are here, or what happens when we die. We also become spiritual when we become moved by values such as beauty, love, or creativity that seem to reveal a meaning or power beyond our visible world. An idea or practice is ‘spiritual’ when it reveals our personal desire to establish a felt-relationship with the deepest meanings of powers governing life.”

In Spiritualism, there is a fundamental belief in the continuation of life after the change called death as well as the personal responsibility for life’s circumstances.

With that said, in order to understand spirituality or spiritualism, you must first understand the human being and the ripple effects we create.

As human beings, we are energy in a physical body that creates energetic vibrations.

What allows your heart to pump blood throughout your body? Do you honestly know?

Think about it before you read on….

What actually triggers your heart to contract that enables it to pump blood throughout the human body to nourish every tissue and cell? Have you figured it out yet?

If not, that is ok. I will explain. Whether you call it God’s gift … the Universe’s Gift …Nature’s mastery…. you have two mini self generating electrical power plants in your heart called the SA node and AV node, otherwise known as the sinoatrial node and the atrial node. They self generate electrical impulses that stimulate the heart the contract and pump the blood throughout the human body. Now think about that. How amazing is that? You have a perfect natural machine like the engine in your car filtering and pumping the nutrient your body needs to stay alive. Have you ever wondered why we need two electrical paddles to stimulate the heart while jump starting the heart?

Everything we do, feel, see, hear, touch, happens due to an electrical impulse that triggered and sent to the brain for the interpretation of sight, sound, touch, etc.

When we understand the fundamental basis of our beings as energy and a one electrical conduction system, we can attune ourselves to be in vibrational alignment with the universe.
Remember I started off asking you about whether or not you like to skip stones? I am going to now explain why I asked that question.

 The Pond Analogy

Think dropping a pebble into the serene glasslike pond. What happens to the pebble? … It creates ripples.

Now what if your friend next to you drops a pebble into that same pond? It also creates a ripple.

What happens to your ripple? To their ripple? They eventually collide.

And depending on whose pebble that was dropped into the pond was larger will determine the magnitude and impact of the collision and whose ripple creates a greater effect. The vibrational alignment, just like sound can alter the tranquility of the water.

If our mind and body are as clear and smooth like glass on a lake, be careful what you toss in. Just like a pebble being tossed, you have the ability to create a small symmetrically balanced ripple effect with little disturbance to the overall lake. As it travels it magnifies in size the farther away it is from the original source but does so in a smooth fashion.

Now if you toss a boulder, the ripple can create what? An unbalanced volatile rocky big ripples in the lake that can take a much longer time for the lake to recover and restore itself to that quiet serene glass like appearance. So now these volatile ripples also magnify as it travels outward as well.

I challenge you to an experiment. Print this article out and keep with you when you do the experiment. Go out and toss the pebble into a lake. Watch what happens. Then toss a boulder into the lake and watch what happens. Then toss two pebbles similar in size and watch what happens. I encourage you to take notes on this experiment as to what you observe when you do this. I would be honored if you choose to write in the comments below your results and what you witnessed and what was revealed to you that you learned about yourself.

Just like the pebble or boulder, what you sent outward, goes out like ripples in the water and magnifies as it travels.

Your attitude – Creates ripples

Your body language – Creates ripples

Your actions and reactions – creates ripples

Your words – creates ripples

Your thoughts – Creates ripples

Your feelings – creates ripples

So be careful what ripples you allow in and be careful what ripples you put out or send out.

Are your ripples positive or negative?

Negative ripples can give you a feeling like your finger is stuck in an electrical outlet … a sense of being fried and exhausted that you feel you really cannot explain or do not know how to explain.

Positive ripples have more of a feeling of being in vibrational alignment with yourself and the universe … Like a free flowing balanced energy source.

If you are not in vibrational alignment, begin by building a sense of awareness.

What do I mean by that?

To build a sense of awareness, you need to become intimately aware of your inner self and your surroundings using all of your senses.

Understand you cannot change what you can not acknowledge so you must begin here.

When you begin to master the sense of awareness, you choose the vibrations you are sending out. By keeping your vibrations high, you begin to start to enjoy life and begin to understand that it is possible to achieve your goals that you have been struggling so hard to accomplish. You start to create a surge of positive energy affecting everything around you.

For everything to change in your life, it starts with the self. Just as in spiritualism, you must take responsibility for your own life. It is a matter of yin and yang and the natural laws.

If your vibrations are low or you are exhibiting negative ripples, an avalanche affect can occur causing you to tumble into lower forms of consciousness and inferior ways of thinking. In many cases, you may be subconsciously self-sabotaging everything good you strive in your life without even realizing you are doing it. Just stop and think about that for a moment and digest what that really means.

So if your life is filled with fear, anger, and negativity and you perpetually live in that environment, this will eventually lead to dis-ease of all areas in your mind, body, and spirit. Your life will continue to spiral down unless you make a conscious decision right here … right now to change. The past is the past and can breed depression. The future has not happened yet and can breed anxiety and stress. All you have is the now so just be happy.

If your life is surrounded by lower vibrations, meaning your environment, you are allowing yourself to have these negative lower vibrational ripples impact and collide with your energetic core and your life. As a result, you will eventually cease to see yourself in a self loving, self nurturing, and balanced way. Someone once told me that if you are told you “no good” for so long and it is drilled into you, you start to believe it. In abuse, they call that “gaslighting”.

By mastering the art of awareness, you can self-correct your patterns of thinking and behaviors. Hence changing the kind of ripple effect you are sending out and receiving.

As we think of ourselves and others, we send out vibrational ripples in frequencies. We must nurture our inner child with self love, appreciation and gratitude. By doing so, the ripples we create, send out are of… love, appreciation and gratitude.

Spirit is always around us, and with spirit’s guidance, you have the ability to create endless ripples with a positive impact in your life and the lives of others. The choice is yours to make.

So I will leave you with a few thoughts and questions to ponder.

What does spiritualism mean to you and how does spirituality fit in your life?

What ripples are you creating right now … during this very moment?

What thought just passed through your head? Were your thoughts loving, compassionate, nurturing, healing and positive vibrationally aligned? … Or not?

Begin with building a sense of awareness. Choose a path for a self discovery of your inner being and a journey to enlightenment. Connect with spirit for guidance and help along the journey. Keep your life filled with love and compassion. And remember the pebble in the pond and the impacts it creates.

“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.” ― Mother Teresa

How are you going to change the kind of ripples you are allowing to impact you as well as change the kind of ripples you send out?