Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Lesson 41: “God goes with me wherever I go.”
What we want to do is be at peace with God so we can enjoy His presence always since it is magnificent. But we may be rejecting God at any level consciously or unconsciously, in big ways or small ways. We want to find our way to peace. But, how do we do that?
Doing the Course is a very interesting experience because it is a simple unblocking of a lot of areas in which we have been stuck. Our wounds very commonly come to the surface constantly or occasionally. And these are something we often have to deal with in order to make the Course’s philosophy our own from the mind training. This is the arena where often our raw wounds from the world’s or the ego’s seeming injury just completely flies in our face. Then we must take steps back now and then in our minds and then have a conversation with our areas of wounding and find out what they need to be healed.
When I have some area that I realize really triggers me when I read about it or think about it- like the idea of “God” for example- I have to accept that it is really hard for me. Or, it may really seem to be far more challenging to resolve than I can possibly imagine. I know that we all have triggers about words that have been commonly misused in our society. We grow up with very dysfunctional relationships with even simply the word or the word and concept combined. We all are bombarded with pain and ill-ease at what this is supposed to mean to us. Sometimes we simply become at a loss at how to proceed because we just can’t set down, erase, and declare this as “unreal” in undoing the disturb.
This is when we can rely on the Holy Spirit to helps us find an answer about how to free our minds from the insanity of the emotional trigger- which keeps us bound to the belief that we keep getting attacked by this word. When we get down on our knees, then we implore the Holy Spirit to heal our hearts. We aren’t being asked to be more humble, because we still can rest in our certainty that the Holy Spirit will answer us.
But when we are simply so stuck we can’t move emotionally and energetically beyond reacting with pain from a word trigger then we can ask with a continued greater awareness of our humility. We know even more and more that we are stuck enough and want to move enough that we just surrender completely, surrender more fully. We surrender into nothingness so we can be born again into an awakened self unencumbered by this trigger.
This is the way I have found works for me to just have this deep honesty with God about whatever it is that is totally blocking me and keeping me in the cycle of pain. This honesty is a way to simply be authentic with ourselves and come to terms with whatever is holding us back. And we just keep doing this when it feels appropriate. Apply it, maybe give yourself a rest, and do it again when it comes up for you. I think the key is to get to that place of total honesty with God and total willingness to surrender and you may also have the discomfort of knowing you have been suffering over the issue.
The other thing is to be gentle with ourselves and the process. I can’t stress this enough. Our ego’s are often harsh and pushy and stress-inducing. We often don’t know how to be gentle because we are out of practice or never learned. Let’s visualize or pray about it or breathe fully to bring us into a gentle mindset. What we want to do is be ever so kind with our hearts. When we are stuck about something, it is important to be vigilant with our minds and take away unreal thoughts that don’t serve us, but ask for guidance about how to approach every day- especially the triggers- with a gentleness.
And we have to be willing to forgive. We can forgive the word “God” for being triggering. We can forgive society as a whole for being an element in what feels like our wounding. We need to forgive ourselves for getting stuck. When we forgive everything, this is a way to get to our serenity because we get in touch with all the resentment we are holding about whatever is triggering us. When you think about forgiving everything, notice when it seems hard to do so and ask God to teach us how to forgive.