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     “There is no real happiness for those on the wrong side. The greatest pleasure in life is the security of the true side. You can vainly try to win over the world or you can nicely be over the world. Your task is to change your operating center from strained imagination to relaxed reality.”

Special Spiritual Exercises

     Below are spiritual exercises and special lessons taken from classroom lectures by Vernon Howard. They are marvelous tools that can be applied to your life and will help you better understand what these teachings are
all about. Use them and gain the wonderful rewards and benefits which they can give you.

  • Breathing Exercise

         How many of you breathe? Live and breathe? Some of you could have fooled me. (Laughter)
         I’m going to give you a very classic exercise which must be thousands of years old. An exercise in breathing. You say you already know how? Your unconscious parts know how to breathe.
         When is the last time you ever consciously thought of the fact that you inhale and exhale? Twenty years? Have you ever thought of it? You’ll do it now as a start with this exercise. You will now be conscious of your breathing.
         You breathe in and you breathe out. And in a moment you’re probably going to forget all about it. But bring yourself back to the fact that you breathe.
         Now what’s spiritual about learning to breathe? You just see ― because you’re going to take this breathing exercise home with you. When you’re conscious that you’re breathing, that doesn’t mean that you’re thinking about it. You’re not counting “in breath, out breath, in breath, out breath.” You don’t have to gasp. You are quietly, consciously knowing that you’re breathing.
         What an exercise! It’s with you all the time. You can refer to it and practice it any time you want. There it is, right there. You simply know that the breath is going in. You know that the breath is going out. What’s spiritual about that? Because it’s the first stage in you getting a higher understanding of you being conscious of something. Not thinking about it, not frantically worrying about it, but you just know what is happening with your breath.
         Next step. “Oh, that’s pretty good. I’ve been trying that for a few days, and I just know I’m breathing. I don’t have to think about it. It’s just happening and there’s a consciousness in me. It is not thought. It just knows that it is happening.”
         Now take this exercise into your mind. Don’t think about your thinking. Just know that you’re thinking. And when that first thought comes up, know it was there and let it go, just as you let your breath go when you exhaled. Then you watched the next inhale, the next exhale.
         Thoughts are the same. All kinds of thoughts, thousands a minute, colliding inside your mind. What you want to do now, because you’ve learned with your breathing exercise, is to be able to single out that one thought out of the thousands a minute. And you can do that. You can do that because you’re only thinking one thought at a time. It may go so fast (like a millionth of a second) that you think you’re thinking ten things at a time, but you’re not.
         You can, by continuing with this exercise, isolate that one thought. You must do this to separate it from all others, so that it does not become the first domino that you knock over which starts the next domino, the next domino — dominos in a row falling down. That process is cancelled because you did not go into agitation, worry, over the first thought that you became conscious of. Not thinking about it, you simply know it is there. And when you know it is there, you’re able to let it go. Like the breath comes in, you’re conscious of that and it goes out. It’s really one double process, isn’t it? The breath goes out and it’s gone.
         That bothersome, worrisome, self-centered, painful scary thought — when you can become aware of it, conscious of it then that consciousness is stronger than that one thought. And your awareness of it is what allows it to go out as it should go out in a healthy mind. It will go away.
         All right, evil is persistent. Of course it is. It’s always shooting harmful bullets. So, the next one comes in. What? A different kind of worry. You’ve run out of the first thing to worry about, so you invent something else to worry about.
         But regardless of the nature of the harmful thought, the kingdom of Heaven is eternal, and it is all-powerful. And a clear conscious awareness is one of the parts of the kingdom of Heaven. When a wolf-thought tries to trick you to bring it in and be your friend, your awareness makes it clear to you. And then the very awareness that it is a wolf-thought is also what makes you want to let it go away, trot away, of course, and leave you alone.
         It’s not you handling evil anymore. It’s allowing Heaven itself to be your strength, to tell you what to do.

  • Who Are You Trying to Kid?
  • Spiritual Indifference
  • A Facial Exercise
  • Understand the Problem
  • Don't Die Asleep
  • Just Do It
  • A Sense of Urgency
  • The Witness Self
  • Spiritual Regeneration
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     “Thank you so very much. I love Vernon Howard. He was a great prophet that I continue to enjoy reading, watching his videos and listening to his
great sayings.
   He continues to inspire and lift our souls to the highest levels of our being. He is truly
a master in contacting the divine within to inspire us all.”

— CJL

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     “Vernon Howard was always and forever living proof that there is something else.”

— Regina N., Retired Teacher

All of the above exercises were transcribed by Sally Forrest or Regina Netherton from a class lecture.

Home   Open Doors   More Tidbits   Spiritual Exercises   Exercises 2   Exercises 3   Exercises 4   Exercises 5 

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