Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!

Oh, what a beautiful morning, oh, what a beautiful day... I've got a beautiful feeling. Everything's going my way!

How delicious is it to kick off a sunny Sunday with such a happy song? Can you hear it? How much joy can one song fill you with?

That's exactly how we kicked off Easter Sunday — with Guy Nelson and friends setting a cheerful tone for our April theme, The Practice of Becoming.

A Micro-practice to Start

Rev. Jim Boone, our Sunday speaker, always opens with a micro-practice. This one came from YouTube content creator Rational Raymond: Take just two deep breaths. Simple. Doable. It's almost too small to matter until you do it and notice how effective it is.

I had a version of this I'd forgotten about - even though I wrote about it for a health blog years ago. Inspired by an Eckhart Tolle recording, I started a mindfulness practice: a 60-second meditation every time I got into my car. Micro-practices can make a big difference in challenging or stressful times, or really, any time that requires focus and grounding.

Bunnies, Boiled Eggs, and Being Present

Rev. Jim's talk, Living with Presence and Deep Awareness, impressively connected Easter candy statistics to spiritual practice and made it feel completely relevant.

He shared a few statistics, like how many chocolate bunnies are sold in the US every Easter (nearly 100 million!), and how many pounds of chocolate are consumed each Easter season (over 73 million!), with spending on Easter candy exceeding $1 billion every year... And in the US, 180 million eggs change hands over Easter. Why? Partly, because eggs were traditionally banned during Lent, and partly because they've long symbolized fertility and new life.

Rev. Jim also gave us a little history. The Easter Bunny itself has roots in German Lutheran folklore, similar in spirit to Santa Claus, with Martin Luther originating the egg hunt. Colored eggs were delivered to well-behaved children, with rabbits, or hares in this case, symbolizing new life and spring renewal. Eggs, forbidden during Lent, were a celebratory treat, symbolizing the resurrection.

All of it — the bunnies, the eggs, the chocolate — points to the same thing: return.

Renewal. Come back to your principles. Come back to yourself.

The Counselors in Your Head

Rev. Jim gave some other useful ideas, as he always does: the idea of a benevolent inner council, made up of all the voices that play roles in our psyche, some useful, some not. We all have them. Some of those counselors are calm and reasonable. Some are hysterical. Some are deeply loved. Some are like the canary in the coal mine, trying to get your attention before something goes wrong.

Ideally, we're mindful of these and don't silence them. Instead, how can we be present and make a conscious choice about which voice we most need to hear?

What Do You Believe, and Does it Serve You?

Rev. Jim referenced a book called Beyond Beliefs, The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results by Nir Eyal, suggesting our limiting beliefs aren't fixed but are forces we can manage and reframe. The author sorts our inner world into three categories:

• Fact — verifiable, measurable things

• Faith — conviction without the need for objective proof; things like universal consciousness

• Belief — firmly held opinions that are open to revision as we gather new information

That last one is interesting. Our beliefs are shortcuts; they're working models of reality built without perfect information. And here's the brain science piece: if you believe something, you're more likely to see it. Our stories shape our perception — not just what we think, but what we notice. And they aren't fixed. They can change with new information.

Self-examination means listening to all the beliefs we hold, and which of our inner voices help us be more of who we are?

Rev. Jim also mentioned Byron Katie's The Work as one tool for self-examination, asking simple questions like: Is this true? Is this really who I am? In Science of Mind, we don't have commandments. Instead, SOM asks us to do science. To explore and experiment. It asks, as Jim cleverly inserted into little plastic Easter eggs as a gift to us: What do our beliefs help us become?

A Beautiful Morning: The Gift of This Season

Rev. Jim closed by referencing the Gospel of John — the story of Doubting Thomas — and brought it back to presence. Be present with yourself, even when something's uncertain, or it's hard to believe. Especially then.

We are, as Rev. Jim put it, scientists running experiments all day long. Sometimes we're aware of it, but we often aren't. Some experiments are helpful. Some aren't. The invitation is to pay attention. To observe. To choose the story we tell ourselves with a little more intention.

That's the practice of becoming.

With gratitude,

Laura

And of course, if you missed it, you can watch it here (and subscribe to our YouTube channel).