Oneness- God Is, I Am

A basic tenet of our teaching is that God is everything and God is also being me right now, expressing as me.  God cannot be outside of me because God is everything.  We integrate this teaching for children into the spirit body with moving affirmative prayer.  Ernest Holmes, author of the Science of Mind and the founder of Religious Science, called the 5-step prayer, Spiritual Mind Treatment.

EXERCISE: God Is, I Am

With the first two steps of affirmative prayer, children can grasp intimately and experience that when God is me, God is also you, and she and he, and this and that and also experience Oneness with all things.  For the first step, arms overhead, reaching skyward, "God Is." We play with our prayer by putting in all the children's names, "God is Adam, God is Sarah, God is Karen, God is Janie, etc."  Then we add the second step, arms at right angles, shoulder height, "I Am." "I am Adam, I am Sarah, I am Karen, I am Janie."  This produces lots of laughs.  We also add other words that God is, such as "God is trees, God is love, God is cats, God is ice cream, God is trash cans" and follow with "I am trees, I am love, I am cats, I am ice cream, I am trash cans."  More laughs. With repetition of this process, we glimpse ourselves beyond our bodies, as something much greater, something much more wonderful, as everything we see and don't see, as the Universal One Life.

To make it accessible to kids, we love the book, All I See is Part of Me, by Chara M. Kurtis.

Going deeper for adults

We are the Unified Field of creation, Chaos, and Shiva and Shakti and quite literally, we are everything we see. Our mind interprets for us the sensations that are presented to us based largely on our beliefs. Our bodies are a holographic projection of Consciousness. Our awareness or belief about what we are and what form to take creates the form as we shift back into form at the quantum level. Rabia Erduman, says it like so, “I am not inside my body, my body is within me.” The wording in the affirmative prayer takes us out of the physical body and the limited self and into One Mind, the spiritual body which is all.  Ernest Holmes in How to Give Spiritual Mind Treatment, gives the first two steps as, "There is One Life that Life is God, that Life is perfect that Life is my Life now.” “My body is a manifestation of the Living Spirit. It is created and sustained by the One Presence and the One Power."

See also Affirmative Prayer with Kids

💗Karen