A message channeled during a group session on December 7, 2025, by Rev. Jeff Munnis to help us understand how to overcome ignorance and suffering, as well as the importance of our relationships and being able to ask for help.

Transcript 

Each of you understands that life in this realm is going to include suffering. And each of us understands that we can find suffering or suffering can find us—that we have a role to play in how we experience suffering. And we know that there are things like attachments or fear, that there are attempts to control our lives. Many of these are filled with good intentions. If the attachments remain, we know that the suffering continues. But also, you know that at the heart of all attachments, at the heart of anxiety and fear, sits our relationship with the Divine, and it is ignorance of that relationship, ignorance of our spiritual nature that helps perpetuate our suffering. And we can talk about a lot of things, like how suffering makes it hard to believe in the goodness of God or the goodness of creation, or about how suffering is necessary for us to have freedom. But there is a different way of pursuing the resolution of our suffering within ourselves. And that different way is an understanding that we have been shown that suffering is not the final word in this life; that death is not the final word about life; that there are ways to overcome this suffering, and that we can do this individually, but also with the help of others around us. And in this choosing of a different way, this way of knowing that we can overcome things, this is where we learn how important relationship is to us. It is our relationship with each other that pulls us out of that spiral down to feeling sorry for ourselves or where there is low self-esteem that emerges. We need each other’s spoken words. We need each other’s presence. And like many things, there is not something that must be done in the form of taking an action or solving a problem. There is simply the need to sit and listen, to bear witness, to learn to trust that we don’t own the truth. The truth is owning us in those moments. And that we have to learn to trust the healing and love that comes with truth, even if we can’t see it and feel it in the moment. And it’s in this space of sitting and waiting for the transformation to occur that we most frequently find ourselves when we recognize that we are on a spiritual path. That we are spiritual beings. 

There is the help that we give to others through this witnessing, through this listening, but it is inside of ourselves with the patience for our own process that we listen to ourselves, and we bear witness to ourselves. It’s where we learn to understand that being in a place of ambiguity is okay. That sometimes what feels like certainty actually carries us away from God or away from our faith and trust in that when we move toward uncertainty, we actually move into the presence of God because in God is the potential for all things, and so when we enter into that soup of potential, that is the potential for miracles as well as potential for harming ourselves. Our wisdom and our knowing guide us. Our prayers guide us. We have to actively ask for the protection knowing that we’re entering into spiritual realms with our prayers, and it is in those realms that we receive the healing necessary to continue on our journey.

Even though our brokenness is not the limitation we sometimes think, we’re not meant to only experience the brokenness. We’re meant to experience the joy, the security, the love and truth, the strength, not only in ourselves alone, but the strength we find in each other’s support and company.

So, this way out of the suffering, we need to say yes, we can’t have inappropriate attachments. We can’t have unchecked desire. We can’t satisfy our needs through lust or greed. So, we have to learn, and we learn over and over again so that the lesson of our overcoming suffering is built on a foundation of knowing the depth of who we are. That we are essentially connected to God, and that God can rise up in us and give us strength. That we can call on God through our prayer and through our meditation to create that opening through which our healing comes.

Our holding of ourselves as well as each other in this realm of patience is where the transformation begins. And it spreads from there throughout the whole system of our being, throughout the consciousness that is not only within us, but that surrounds us. And we’re able to have the perspective we need. We’re able to call on the power of our own ability to heal, not just others but ourselves. And it is in this consciousness that we have of our spiritual nature, that we overcome the ignorance that leads to suffering.

The road before us is not always an easy road, and there are things that we do that joins together our desire for growth with our greatest need to overcome. So sometimes the higher the obstacle, the greater the indication of our growth and the opportunity that sits before us. Everything can require patience of one kind or another. Patience with ourselves, but everything can also be helped by our relationship and our shared responsibility and care for each other. We are at the same time injured and healed. We are at the same time tender and vulnerable, as well as strong, and we have authority. All of these exist within us, and the greater part of our being is able to access the wisdom that comes from the experience of all those states of being.

We become a servant to others with our help. We also become a servant to our own needs, and in so doing, we become balanced in our ability to give. And then, finally, we know that we have to ask. We have to ask for the things that we know we need, and sometimes we have to ask not knowing what we need, but simply to say that we need help. To simply say that we need love. To say that sometimes when things are hard, we need some grace to sustain us while we gather ourselves for the effort that we must give, not only to our own healing but to the world. 

(S.G. - I don’t know if this is necessarily a question, maybe it is. That was so beautiful, Jeff. You know that asking for help part contained within all the rest of that beauty. I was reading an article the other day written by a priest who had gone through a cancer journey, and she was expected to pass, but she survived obviously, and she’s 10 years out, but she’s still very much in need of a lot of help and has all these residual illnesses and conditions as a result of all the massive treatment she went through. And she was talking about how hard it is to need help for so long, and how that feels to still be in a place of needing so much help. I think maybe what I’m saying is more of a comment, but something I can relate to. In the context of what you were saying is comforting.)

It might be that part of our ignorance that leads to suffering is understanding that we all need so much continuous help. That this is part of what living for each other is. And that, that cycle of giving and receiving sometimes looks different. Sometimes in the giving, we receive, and sometimes, in the receiving, we give. And that is perhaps a mystery of how love and truth work together—the giving of the truth, the love that puts it in action, and then the love that comes and then helps reveal more truth. We keep moving along. And as we open ourselves, we find that we can give the truth and receive it. And it all requires a great deal of humility. But we must understand, I believe, that we need to ask for so much more than we think we need to ask for.

(M.C. - Thank you, Jeff. That was so beautiful. Thank you, the channeling. It was definitely a lesson that I had to learn after being a giver all of my life, which was not good, learning to receive, and having humility about it. Although there were many things that you said that really struck me, but the one about that we all need love. I have love in my life, of course. I have sisters and siblings and friends, but I’ve always been back and forth about being in a relationship. I have this wish list for 2025, and the part-time partner keeps going on and off the list. I can’t even remember, and of course it has to be part-time. It’s always had to be that way for me. I’ve always had to have someone involved in something else artistic or something else. Maybe it doesn’t. I can’t remember if it’s back on, but I think after your comment, I think I need to put it back on, and especially witnessing you and Stelli. Thank you for that. Thank you for everything. It was an amazing session.)