The following is an excerpt from Unity Magazine®.

By Paul John Roach
Paul John Roach is the senior minister at Unity Church of Fort Worth in Texas.

We have all experienced moments when we felt joyously and exuberantly free. Perhaps this feeling accompanied a particular success or achievement. Often it comes unexpectedly, for no apparent reason. … In this moment of freedom, our earthly worries and fears seem to suddenly fade into insignificance and a confidence arises, a sense that everything is possible. … Life is no longer finite. Instead, a great wave of magnanimity floods our being, a wave that rolls in on an ocean of generosity and compassion.

I remember … standing on a beautiful seashore on Sri Lanka watching the tropical sun set into the Indian Ocean. I felt a deep gratitude for being alive, and I knew that I was inherently free and everything was possible. The person with me was obviously feeling something similar [breaking] the silence with … “Will we ever be this free again?”

Looking back … I can attest that the bonds of fear and resentment, obsession and worry have indeed tightened many times upon my soul. But having felt freedom's joy and its overwhelming validity, I now have certainty that it is my birthright to be free.

The barriers to our freedom and to the blessings of the magnanimous heart are not, as might first appear, in the circumstances and conditions of our lives. … We cannot control the outer events and circumstances of our life experience. Therefore, if we are waiting for conditions to change, for people to see it our way, and for our ship to finally come in, we will be sorely disappointed.

The barriers to freedom are within our own consciousness, in how we receive and interpret experiences. And this is good news, because that which frees us must be within our own consciousness too.

Jesus … taught that what we lose on earth is lost in heaven and what we bind on earth is bound in heaven. In other words, what I choose to see as true in the earthly realm of my human experience conditions what I believe is possible in the consciousness of Spirit or heaven. If I see myself bound, limited or hurt, this is what I become. However, if I see myself free, unlimited and healed, I expand what is possible for me.

... Can it be this simple? Our sifting, sorting and separating human sense of self obviously doesn't think so. We may accept the truth of spiritual freedom intellectually … but then it's back to the business of protecting ourselves, hunkering down and holding out against a cruel and unfair world.

… There is a better way. It is in loosening the bonds of old and unproductive ways of thinking and setting ourselves free. … As the well-known adage puts it, “Resentment is like taking poison hoping that the other person will die.” Yes, we bind and poison ourselves, yet we have the ability to set ourselves free through the activity of the mind.

Traditional Christianity calls this transformation of consciousness, this renewal of mind, repentance. … Fundamentally ... it simply means to reconsider or to rethink. To repent is to entertain the possibility that there may be another way to approach a particular problem.

Charles Fillmore, cofounder of Unity, wrote in Mysteries of Genesis, “True repentance is always followed by forgiveness, which is a complete wiping out of the error thought from consciousness and a full deliverance from the inharmony that the error thought has produced.” When we have merely a glimpse of that moment of freedom beyond judging and deciding, the wave of large-heartedness and generosity rolls in. It is this magnanimous spirit that makes forgiveness possible, and harmony is naturally restored. 

… Beloved child of God, forgive yourself for holding on so tightly, for keeping yourself in bondage to fear, hurt and resentment. The time has come to arise, to expand into a higher recognition of who you are and what is possible for you. Let God help you. Spirit's healing presence is available in the form of divine qualities alive in our consciousness.

… Jesus, our Master Teacher and Way Shower, continually taught and embodied the magnanimous way of the forgiving and expansive heart. His simple commandment was that we “love one another.”

… The blissful moment of freedom and possibility that came to me on that beach in Sri Lanka … is one that I choose never to forget. I am certain that you have had those life-changing moments too. … Wherever that moment of breakthrough occurs, the message is always the same: “You are inherently free, and the power to demonstrate this lies within your own being. Loose the bonds of any lingering belief in the reality of separation. Come home to the One and in that wave of joy be all that you are created to be.”