Lesson 190 of A Course in Miracles opens with a line that helped me decide how to move through every upset.
“Pain is a wrong perspective.”
For so long, I thought the pain was caused by what happened to me. By what they did. By what they said. By what they never did.
That’s not the cause.
Whenever we have the slightest upset of any kind, there’s a miracle looking to break through.
The upset isn’t the problem.
The upset is a doorway.
Sometimes it’s a dull dissonance in the mind. Sometimes it’s an ache of sadness and self-recrimination. Sometimes it’s waking up with dread and despair. Underneath every one of those is a miracle waiting to be invited in.
Here’s where the cycle of self-sabotage takes hold: we feel helpless to interrupt it, so we start managing it and coping with it – sometimes we even decide to just settle.
That is a slippery slope.
We’re coping with the very thing that was meant to be our doorway to liberation. Here’s what made a difference for me: I stopped trying to make the pain go away, and I started letting it point me toward where to look.
When I notice the upset now, I don’t ask how do I make this stop? I ask what’s trying to break through here?
There’s another piece to this that took me years to accept. If we’re trying to make the healing happen, we’re not allowing it to happen. We’re getting in the way. Our job is willingness, not force. Trust is the skill that opens the doorway to faith. Lean not on your own perspective.
Pain is a wrong perspective.
Yet a perspective can be corrected. The miracle is right there.
If you’re feeling helpless to interrupt your own patterns, that’s exactly the work of my Finding Freedom From Fear Bootcamp which starts next month.
We’re inviting the miracle now.
My Finding Freedom From Fear Bootcamp is 90 days of moving out of coping and into real trust, faith and listening to the higher wisdom, together.
If you missed my Deep Dive Workshop, Why Am I So Hard On Myself? You can get it now on Instant Download. If self-attack and criticism is your struggle, this will give you a practice to lead you out of the pain. This is a habit that can be dissolved.
My next FREE Forgiveness Workshops is Saturday August 29. Come as you are, however you can. You don’t have to feel ready. You don’t have to have done any prep work. Your willingness is all that’s required. Click for more info: powerofloveministry.net/forgive
NEW PODCAST EPISODE: The Decision to Forget One ordinary morning, Leon Joel Russell opened A Course in Miracles and hit a single paragraph that stopped him cold for six days. This week Jennifer Hadley sits down with her fellow ACIM teacher to follow where that paragraph led them, into a question most of us spend a lifetime avoiding: what are we actually afraid of, underneath all of it? Where they take it is lighter than the question sounds. Two friends who love the truth, going somewhere worth following.
