[tmtranscripts] Ham on working on your weaknesses

[David G. Schlundt, Ph.D.]

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

06/20/2004

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.

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.

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.

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.

-- 
*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*
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: David.Schlundt at Vanderbilt.edu
*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*
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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