When I was studying this teaching with my mentor, the class would sometimes get rowdy over a question or a heated discussion. Our teacher would simply speak over the rumble: “Back to me.” He knew who he was, and he knew who was in charge of that class.

When life gets noisy and rowdy, when you bump into the things that disturb you, where do you turn? I know only one place to turn, and that is back to me. Not the small me, but the large me: the One that is intuiting, breathing me, and living through me as a higher authority. I can call it my true self, my higher self, God. It doesn’t really need a name. It is Life itself, and it knows exactly what to do in every single moment. It knows Itself beyond our problems, our smallness, and our everyday challenges.

Two Questions Worth Asking

Recently, I read a blog that raised two points about our teaching that I want to address.

The first was that manifestation and the use of our principles must take into account that we are not all beginning on the same playing field. The writer was referring to the challenges some of us are born into: racial prejudice, poverty, abuse, and other seemingly insurmountable circumstances.

The second was the idea that our teaching is, at its core, about manifestation.

Let me take each in turn.

Same Power, Different Fields

The writer is right: the fields are not level. Some of us are born into hardship that others can scarcely imagine, and some seem to arrive with a silver spoon in their mouths. A steeper climb is real, and struggling on it is not a spiritual failure. I want to say that clearly.

Where I differ is this: we may not have been born on the same playing field, but we were all born with the same Power. That Power doesn’t erase our conditions, but it lives within every one of us, whatever those conditions are.

We see it in people like Oprah Winfrey, Dolly Parton, and Edwene Gaines, the beloved New Thought minister and prosperity teacher.  Each of these people rose above difficult beginnings to become healers in the world. These are well-known examples, and I am sure many of us could tell our own version of the same story. We rose, sometimes slowly and sometimes painfully, to become the best possible version of ourselves.

My husband is a living example. He rose from an abusive childhood, refusing to repeat the patterns of his family, and he recognizes the power of the inner child who saw him through those years by way of intuition.

Our recent hurricane showed us this, too. We all weathered the same storm, but we were not all in the same boat. Some of us lost far more than others. And yet the peace of mind each of us found came from within. We can’t always predict what will happen to us, but we can choose how we respond. I watched people facing the hardest conditions draw on a resilience that could only come from Spirit.

Not About Getting Things

Now to the second point, that this teaching is about manifestation. I have seen this happen. People come to our teaching and either get a manifestation right away and disappear, or they get frustrated and leave, saying the whole thing is a bunch of malarkey. I could easily have become one of those people.

What I have come to learn, and the way I work as a healer and practitioner, is that I am not here to teach you to manifest. Manifestation is the outcome of something far greater: the return home to your true essence, your divinity. What happens after that is where the miracles occur. May I repeat… after that.

We have a saying as spiritual practitioners: “We are here to walk our clients home, back to themselves.” It is there that all peace, love, and joy are found.

So let me say it plainly. This teaching is about remembering who you are. It is about proving to yourself that spiritual thought force is greater than material existence. It is not about getting things. It is about getting yourself.

Not About Blame

There is one more misunderstanding I want to address, because it is where so much hurt occurs: the idea that we are to blame for our illnesses and our circumstances. New Thought is often criticized for teaching that we create our own illnesses, and people have turned away from our centers in shame and anger. Let me correct this according to my understanding.

We do not create our cancer or our diabetes. Illness is not a punishment, and it is not a sign that someone has failed spiritually. What we do create is stress, anger, and other emotions that can wreak havoc on our bodies. Science increasingly confirms that chronic stress takes a real toll on our health.

I recently heard the Dalai Lama speak about this. He talked about the harm anger does to our bodies, and he offered kindness and compassion toward others as the antidote. What struck me is that he blamed no one for anything. He simply pointed to what each of us can tend to within ourselves.

So, this is not about blame. It is about care. It is one more reason to turn to self-love and to our higher power, and to project that love outward. And when illness does come, our spiritual practice walks hand in hand with good medical care.

Getting Real

Let’s get real with this. I bump into many of life’s challenges on a daily basis: bills, balancing the church finances, crude remarks, and backhanded compliments. If I didn’t have the ability to center within myself and remind myself of who I am, I wouldn’t have lasted in ministry for the last fifteen years.

I just completed a Sondheim concert that many of you saw. Funny enough, the compliment I heard most was amazement that I could memorize all those words. Yes, I practiced. Yes, I had the will to do it. But beyond all that was the Spirit within me that made the decision to do it and stuck to it every day. And on the days I doubted, I simply went back to that place in meditation and treatment.

Each morning, I practice something I learned from Michael Beckwith. I sip a warm cup of lemon water, and as I do, I repeat an affirmation: “All my needs are met. I am supplied to overflowing.” To anyone watching, it may look like I’m simply drinking lemon water. But I am going back to me, and to the Power I know resides as me.

Back to Basics, Back to You

This finishes out our month of “Back to Basics” perfectly, because everything starts with ourselves. As I tell my clients, everything we could possibly require is already within us. Our job is to stay connected to that place within that holds the answers. We are the living embodiment of God and nothing else.

Ernest Holmes put it this way, in the language of his time:

“Man is evolved from the Universe as a self-conscious, thinking, center of Living Spirit.”  — Ernest Holmes

That is our truth, and whenever we are challenged, I invite us to remember it. Even when we stumble, Holmes reminds us:

“We may stumble, but always there is that Eternal Voice, forever whispering within our ear, that thing which causes the eternal quest, that thing which forever sings and sings.”  — Ernest Holmes

And so, as he wrote, “We should daily feel a deeper union with Life, a greater sense of that Indwelling God – the God of the seen and of the unseen within us.”

This teaching is about waking up to our God-Self and then acting from that place. As Dr. Holmes put it: “The Power of the Universe is with you. Feel it, know it, and then act as though it were true.”

So, the next time life gets noisy and rowdy, do what my teacher did. Speak over the rumble with quiet authority: Back to me.

Aloha from,

Rita Andriello-Feren, Author, Co-Founding Spiritual Director CSL Kaua’i

Join me on TikTok @thereddress1 – live twice everyday.