We do healing prayer as a part of every Sunday service.  We do not currently do "laying on of hands" type of healing, although several of our members practice different forms of hands-on healing techniques, such as Reiki, Barbara Brennan Healing, Energy Balancing, EFT, etc.

Would those who do have this belief and practice be welcome as a part of your congregation?

Yes! We believe that Unity means accepting everyone. As Chad is fond of saying, "we don't allow anything that involves chicken blood - it's too hard to get the stains out of the carpet!" For us, Unity means learning to remember our oneness as we celebrate our diversity.

What is your view on mediums and spirit communication?

Unity Center in Mills River is committed to inclusiveness. We have a A Course in Miracles (a "channeled" work) study group that meets at our church. We have hosted workshops by a very wide variety of folks. We encourage people to remain open, yet wise and discriminating in their choices of where to put their time, attention, and belief. Most metaphysical systems of thought are interesting, the initial route to seeing life from a wider perspective, and no more harmful than being interested in other hobbies, like say, golf or gardening or stamp collecting.

Our essential message and teachings do not focus on channeling or spiritualism. We are more concerned with techniques for learning to live harmoniously and joyfully in the here-and-now, with watching the thought processes and belief systems that create our experience of reality.

Speaking for myself as an individual (not as a representative of our church), I feel "there are more things in heaven and earth" than we yet understand. I have long believed in reincarnation, but I also feel that a study of past lives has little bearing on my present life and could become a detour on the Spiritual Path.

One lesson we all need to remember is to keep our hearts open and loving toward others who do not believe as we do. Jesus challenged us to embrace this openness. "What is it you do if you love" only the people who think, look, and act like you? That's the easy stuff - "even the publicans" can do that! (That's "publicans", not "Republicans"!) Let's aspire to a higher way of being with each other. We each have a different Path and something we can teach each other.

I suspect that the treatment is a combination of traditional therapy (which depends on the skill and insight of the therapist) and drugs (effective for those with chemical imbalances, but simply mask the symptoms of many others.) I would explore all avenues of healing and use whatever works. I recommend you try to find a therapist who uses cognitive therapy, which is taught in Dr. David Burns book, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy ~ cognitive therapy is the important process of learning to watch your thoughts and separate truth from the fictions your ego tells you; a key to creating a happy, peaceful reality.

Each of us has a system of values and beliefs that we use to measure our reality. When we don't measure up, we feel guilty. When our world doesn't measure up, we feel angry. When we feel helpless to change our world, we feel depressed.

The way out is to really cop to the idea that we have absolute power over the way we choose to think and therefore react to the situations in our lives. Although we have some choices about where to be and who to be with, ultimately we have very limited choices over what situations we're going to find ourselves in. But we always have the choice of how to react, whether to resist and say, "God, you messed up... you made my life wrong!" or to accept and flow, "God, thank you for the gift of life, however it takes form. Help me to see the grace and wonder in it, and to learn the lessons you send me."

When I meditate, I get a strong sense that I am to "wait"; however, it is torturous for me many times, many days, many weeks. I still get a sense that I am to "understand" others; their illnesses; learn to wait and be patient to the umpth degree - yet it drives me crazy.

You drive YOURSELF crazy by wanting things to happen on YOUR timetable instead of God's. Although this might seem like just a semantic difference, it's actually an important step in taking responsibility for creating your own experience of life.

I am in 12-step recovery for many years, have a strong spiritual belief system and still, I get confused with what journey I am to be on. Yesterday, I got the sense to see that obviously I am on the struggling one cause this has been the way my mind ticks away and my relationships in the past have been. I don't think I am to walk away because I will probably re-create this again somehow, someway.

Perhaps. But perhaps you have learned enough to recreate a different version. Perhaps your lesson is to learn when to walk away. Perhaps your lesson is to learn to choose your relationships with different criteria. Perhaps your lesson is to learn to love your present moment before you can move on. Who knows?!

We all get confused about our journey. Sometimes we have the answer, but we keep asking the same question because we didn't like the first answer! Reminds me of a joke:

A person is wandering through a dense fog and falls off a cliff. Tumbling down and down, she manages to grab onto a branch to stop her descent. She yells for help, over and over, "Is anybody up there?" and finally someone answers, "Yes!"
"Can you help me?"
Pause. "Do you have faith?"
"Oh, yes. I have great faith!"
"OK. Then let go."
"Let go? Are you crazy?!"
"I can help you if you just let go."
Long pause.
"Is anybody ELSE up there?"

How do I get a true sense of my spiritual path? Is it to be patient, loving and kind towards my husband NO MATTER WHAT? He certainly has become verbally and emotionally abusive many, many, many times. If I keep my distance, he is a gentle soul. I think he cannot handle much input from the outside - he gets overwhelmed easily.

I'm guessing that your husband finds it very difficult to live up to your demands and expectations, or to what HE THINKS your demands/expectations are for him (which may bear little resemblance to your actual demands/expectations). Do your best to give him as much space and freedom as possible.

Whatever our path, everyone has the same spiritual destination - to be a beacon of Light to all who come our way, to be unconditionally loving to everything and everyone, all the time, no matter what! Whew! So, yes, your path is to be patient, loving, and kind towards your husband... but obviously, this is Graduate Level work in the School of Life. It ain't easy, and we're not the Buddha yet or we would have ascended by now! The process is one of remembering and forgetting, remembering and forgetting, over and over, hopefully remembering longer (and more) and forgetting shorter (and less) as we go along. So we each do our best, but cut yourself some slack too!

I don't believe God believes in divorce.

God does not "believe" or "disbelieve" - God "is".   YOU don't believe in divorce. Nobody on earth really has a clue what God does or does not believe, so don't try to pin that one on God!

I think that Jesus (or Buddha, or Lao Tsu, or...) could have walked through fields of poop while praising God and enjoying the smell, but that doesn't mean He would necessarily choose to, or choose to continue to. The decision is yours; both paths have merit.

I cannot leave. I love him too much. I remember the other side of him also. I want my husband healed and my marriage back.

People, relationships, life... all are a PROCESS, in constant change. When relationships change, we make the choice to accept and flow with the new, or to make another change - to change its form, to alter the nature of the relationship (which usually means to divorce/separate from daily contact). You will most likely have a relationship with this man for the rest of your life, but the form will change drastically over time. It is quite possible to still love someone, yet choose not to live with them in a married relationship, especially if you have radically different ideas of what you want from a marriage, of what marriage means.

One of the best books I ever read on relationships is Ken Keyes' Your Heart's Desire: A Loving Relationship. It helped me gain clarity through some tough times, to examine what I wanted to get out of the relationship, what I was willing to put into it, and how to change it while keeping my heart open.

Your husband is the only one who can heal your husband. Recognize that healing takes many different forms. Your love and acceptance can help in the process, but the first step is to stop resisting who he is right NOW. I hear you saying you love your memory of him, rather than what he is now; you love what he used to be, or what you thought he was, and the relationship you once had. Change has come upon you! The hands of time do not turn backward.

As the Rolling Stones used to say, "You can't always get what you want.... but you just might find, you get what you need." Every crisis is also an opportunity. Sometimes it helps to remember that "this, too, shall pass."

I am not a trained counselor. Consider the ideas I've shared, but then look within for whatever resonates in your own heart. I wish you well on your path and hope that I have perhaps opened up a few new avenues of possibility for you to examine.

Unity has a great diversity of thought on most any topic (which is one of the reasons I was attracted to Unity). A friend of mine used to say that Unity had to have something for everyone, from the folks who just stick their toe in the water of Truth for the first time, all the way to those who dive in deeply after years of study.

Unity can seem very Pollyanna-ish and many folks practice it in that way. Some folks tend to mouth positive affirmations while their life is crumbling around their ears. Lots of people are attracted to the idea that you can change your material reality by the power of your mind, that you can manifest whatever you desire. But these ideas do not go deep enough for me; they do not reach the reality that I've experienced in my life.

God's purpose for you is not to make your life comfortable or to satisfy your ego desires. It has been said that spending all your energy making yourself comfortable is the mentality of the pig-sty! Surely we have a higher purpose in life. I believe that we are put on earth to learn and grow, and that ALL the situations that come our way are our curriculum.

And what are we to learn? To love unconditionally - everybody and all the time - and to celebrate the gift of our existence - and no matter what form our life happens to be taking. Tough course of study, eh? Jesus told us we could do it, and even said He had to go so that we would ("I go that your comforter might come") instead of just getting dependent on Him. There's hope for each of us to go a little further down that path each day, and we are rewarded when we do, by experiencing ever deeper levels of peace and joy in our lives.

I watched the movie "Pollyanna" with my kids not long ago, and it was a revelation. Why in the world do we call something "pollyanna" and mean it as an insult?! It's a cosmic story of a child who was able to transform a whole town by her insistently positive attitude. Pollyanna saw the good in every situation and every person; she recognized God's gifts were all around her whenever we have the eyes to see them. With the eyes of a Spiritual Master, she was able to see the handiwork of God within every person and every situation.

The real spiritual work is not in manifesting what you want, but in wanting what you get. Do we say, "Thank you, God, for every part of my life today!" or "You messed up again, God, and sent me the wrong thing!" The attitude of gratitude is a powerful transformative force.

We live in a very materialistic culture. We have assigned great value to certain things: a comfortable lifestyle (housing, food, income); a fulfilling relationship; good health; some way to be "special." When we get them, we feel worthy and happy, and usually start looking for the next level to climb to! But I'm not so sure that God cares whether you live in a condo or a cave, as long as you can appreciate whatever you have. I don't think there's any harm in enjoying whatever level of materialism we live in, but let's try not to get caught up in it, or define it as spiritual work, or confuse it with self worth. Our happiness in life ultimately depends on our attitude, not on our situation.

Actually, I do believe some people have "powers" ("siddhis" in the Eastern tradition) to manipulate their physical world. I think the reason that more of us don't manifest these powers is that they can so easily become detours on the spiritual path, feeding our ego instead of our growth... just another way to feel "special" or "superior" or "righteous".

The other reason we don't manifest things is that we don't deep down believe ourselves - our mouth says "every little cell of my body is healthy" and our subconscious mind say, "yeah, right, sucker, get a life! Who writes this bull? I'm sick as a dog!" People with unshakeable faith often do experience "miracles," but most of us have trouble keeping our conscious and subconscious attuned to that level of belief. There are certainly more things going on than we can explain, and I know I've experienced synchronicities and little miracles from time to time, especially when I was in a space that was tuned in to Oneness.

In every situation there is some kind of "gift" for our growth and spiritual development. I think we are "realistically positive" when we look for and recognize the gifts in our life, and trust that they're there even when we can't see them. We can realistically be positive because life is a giggle, a gift, a gas, and the best game in town when we remember to enjoy it!

I'm sure you're not alone in your feelings. But I would encourage you to re-examine them frequently.

I, too, have had some mixed feelings on the subject. I am very comfortable in my own heterosexuality, and on some levels, I don't comprehend the "turn-on" in homosexuality... I'm just not attracted to women.  But then again, I don't comprehend how anyone can enjoy eating raw oysters either! And in some ways, the two questions are just about as important. And I certainly don't believe that people who get sick from eating oysters are being "punished" by God for doing something "unnatural." (Though it's always SO tempting to look for ways that I can feel "righteous" or "superior.")

Most recent scientific research supports the view that people are "born" into their sexual preference identity. I have some dear friends who are gay or lesbian, and for the most part, it doesn't seem so much a "choice" on their part as it is a biological imperative for them. There was a time in my life when I thought I might be interested in becoming lesbian, when the men around seemed untrustworthy or unappealing, but I never explored it, because it wasn't my soul's true calling. And I think there is a real difference between truly lesbian women (at a deep, soul's choice level) and those who want to be with only women because they have been hurt by men (a transitory, situational level). In our present world, those who "come out" have so much to risk and to lose that I think they usually must be following a deeper calling.

On the other hand, homosexuality is not really the way we were "constructed" to be... or is it? (Monkeys do it with everyone.) But things change, and in a world that's so overpopulated, perhaps it's actually an "evolution" for sex to be taken out of the procreation realm in many ways, first from the use of birth control, and also from the practice of homosexuality. And in a world that's 51% female and 49% male, perhaps it is "natural" for at least 2% of the women!

As to what is defined as a perversion, I think that has a lot more to do with the SPIRIT of what you do than the form it takes. We keep focusing on the wrong issue. It's not WHO you do it with, it's HOW you do it. Lots of heterosexuality is a perversion, especially when sex is based on power over another, such as married heterosexual rape.  Loving homosexuality between two consenting adults is an expression of love. When sex is an expression of love, the form does not matter. The true "perversion" is when sex is used for power over another, whether homosexual or heterosexual. 

It seems to me that the folks who are most against the "form" of homosexuality are also the folks who focus on the "form" in their religion. As Rajneesh said, they crucified Christ twice - first in Jerusalem, later in Rome - by losing the spirit in favor of the form.

Jesus did not throw stones at the adulterer, and I don't believe he would throw them at the homosexual either. He preached love for EVERYONE, which includes giving them the right to choose the "form" in which they love another, as long as it does no harm to the other.

I really don't know what is "right" in any absolute sense, but I do know that I don't have the ability to know what's in the hearts and minds of others that compels them to follow a different road than I do. Jesus did NOT preach a social or ethical gospel, a system of rules and judgments; He taught a spiritual gospel, in which we are challenged to "judge not" and to look for the spiritual Truth that is greater than our little prejudices and opinions and pronouncements of what is "right."

In issues like this, I always support the right for the individual to choose their own path, with equal rights and freedoms, even if it is not a path I would choose for myself.