For a long stretch of my life, I forgot how to laugh.

Every day I’d forget it was even possible. I was so caught in struggle that lightness felt out of reach.  I’m grateful that’s gone for me now. But I remember it clearly, so I hold it gently when I meet it in others.

Here’s something I’ve come to know: I can learn through pain, or I can learn through joy.

Both teach. Both wake us up. The ego thought system insists that growth has to hurt, that the lessons only count if they’re heavy.

That isn’t true.

I’m interested in learning through joy. In remembering through joy. And because teaching and learning are the same thing in A Course in Miracles, joy is exactly what I’d like to teach.

Remembering to laugh matters to me more than I can say.

Not because laughter denies our pain, but because it reminds us the pain was never the whole truth. Underneath the heaviness, there’s a lightness that was here all along.

A Course in Miracles tells us teaching goes on every moment of the day, and even continues into our sleeping thoughts. The mind never stops. So the question becomes: what am I steeping in? What am I practicing?

If I practice dread, I get fluent in dread.
If I practice joy, joy becomes my native tongue.

None of us has to force this. We simply become willing to let the heaviness go.

That willingness is everything. We don’t manufacture joy through effort. We uncover it by releasing what’s been sitting on top of it.

If the weight you’ve been carrying feels ready to lift, our FREE Forgiveness Workshops are a beautiful, no-cost place to begin. Forgiveness is how we set down what’s been blocking the joy. You’ll find today’s workshop registration at powerofloveministry.net/forgive.

Come as you are. You’ll leave lighter.

Joy isn’t a reward for awakening. It’s one of the ways we awaken.

TODAY, FRIDAY If you’d like to take one step from studying to practicing, my FREE Forgiveness Workshop today is a beautiful place to begin. Free. Come as you are.  Please invite others.

Sometimes when we become overwhelmed and upset by what we think we see we find ways to drown out the intensity of our reactions.  We fall into various forms of self-medication and self-sabotage.  I know a lot about that.  And that’s why I created a program to rise up out of that pain.

End My Self-Sabotage 6-Week Program begins Sunday, July 26.  Self-sabotage is designed to slow down our spiritual growth. But what if I told you that we can dissolve that pattern?  When you recognize the pattern, you can interrupt it. And when you interrupt it with Love instead of willpower, everything changes.  I used to struggle with self-medication and other forms of self-sabotage, but that’s behind me now – if you can relate – let’s do it together!  Click here to learn more.

NEW PODCAST EPISODE:  Where the Love is Now What if what’s keeping us from love isn’t what happened to us, but where we keep looking for it? I’m just back from our counseling intensive in Asheville, and I opened A Course in Miracles to Chapter 13 to a line I still find astonishing. It doesn’t tell us to release the past. It tells us we can’t see it at all. So what are we looking at, every time we’re upset? I’ll be honest with you about the years I taught forgiveness before I was willing to forgive, and about the wall I kept hitting without understanding why. And I’ll share what I do now with the hardest seasons of my life. It asks almost nothing of us, and I didn’t believe it could work either.