Sending Joy

“Forgiveness is the key to happiness.” A Course In Miracles

“I will see everyone through forgiving eyes today.”

We feel a wave of anger wash over us. They’re doing it again, we think. And with a whip of righteous justice we lash out to defend ourselves. The rage that fills us leaves a terrible taste. Tension twists our muscles into knots. We turn to others we call friends and spew to them the injustices we perceive and bask in their pity. See, we tell ourselves triumphantly, I’m right and others see it too. But somehow the triumph doesn’t last and before long the angry knots are back and our heart is a heavy weight inside our chest. We may find comfort in joining with others who also feel the world is out to get them, but the comfort is fleeting.

However, though our tolerance for pain is strong, there is a limit. In between the sad, dark moments of our life we see glimmers of light and even laugh out loud in pure joy at times. These moments give us a hint, a tiny thought more like a wisp, a breath of sweetness that suggests that even though we have chosen mild to moderate to deep dark fear and judgment for our main existence, there could just possibly be something else.

One day our enemies poke us with their sharp sticks into our wounded spots and push our pain buttons and we begin to react without thinking as we always do, when something stops us. A voice inside our head, a feeling – something. Instead of lashing out, we look at these brothers or sisters who are the bane of our existence and we wonder for an instant, why are they doing this?  Why do they want to hurt me? Why do I accept it?

And with these questions comes full blown, a light inside our mind, a dawning like a new day has been offered and we see as clearly as though someone had just washed the window of our heart that these sisters or these brothers are not trying to hurt us.  They are simply trying to ease their own pain and we just happen to be there. We whisper to ourselves, “Why it’s not about me at all.”  And now we know without a doubt that unconsciously they are calling out to us in fear, in sorrow and in hurt. They unconsciously are crying out for help.  Each time before when they had asked, instead of helping we chose to join them in their suffering. But this time it is different. Something has shifted inside of us. It’s just a thought, a tiny spark of willingness, a small surge of hope.   

“I’m sorry,” we whisper to our adversaries, or we may only say it silently inside our head, “I’m sorry you are hurting so.  How can I help?”  God hears our silent question as a prayer and answers with deep gratitude. His Holy presence, powerful and limitless, changeless and eternal fills us up and lifts us to a place where we are at home. Its familiarity reminds us that it was always there. With tears of joy we whisper, “Thank you,” knowing in this moment that our life has changed forever.

When we don’t react in the old familiar way, when we refuse to join in the sick battle of poking sticks into open wounds, the other ones may be startled for a moment. Or not believing that the relationship has transformed, they may push and poke a while longer. But each time we respond with gentleness and in a calm and quiet manner, lovingly detached. In time they recognize that we are no longer playing our part. If their pain is too great they may find another partner who will agree to dance this dance with them. Or if they are ready, they may take our hand and follow us upon our path to healing. Either way we will be at peace.

We will understand what we didn’t know before. There is a key we have overlooked that opens the door to a whole new world for us. It is called FORGIVENESS. And when we put this key into the heart we have kept locked for so long, it will be clear to us that forgiveness is just another word for HAPPINESS and LOVE.

“I will rest in God today.”

It is time to take our power back.  When we feel unhappy, resentful or our peace is lacking in any form, the first instinct of the ego is to project these feelings on to someone or something else.  I am afraid or angry or sad because of the economy, what I’m hearing on the news, what my parents, wife, husband, partner, sister, co-worker, friend said or did to me.  True we cannot control the news, the economy or the behavior and words of others, but we can empower ourselves by understanding that it is not these things that disturb our peace, but how we choose to see them. 

It is important that we ask God to show us how to be at peace even in the face of everything that is happening around us and to us.  It is this peace, this alignment with the Divine within us, that will bring all correction into our experience and into our line of vision.  We can’t seek peace to change the world, but we can and must seek peace for its own sake. 

The corrections in our world will fall into place when we want peace with no expectations of how that should happen.  This means to simply allow the world to do and be what it is.  Allow the people in our lives to learn their lessons as they feel they must without our interference. Or if there is an immediate danger to ourselves or someone else, ask God to show us how to be helpful.  “Help me, God,” is the quickest prayer. It’s like dialing 911 from the highest place within us.

In this way we take ourselves out of the fray.  Now are we allowing ourselves to be lifted above the insanity and into sanity. Our prayer is “Show me how to be at peace here.”  

Let’s rest in Him as we walk quietly in perfect Holiness through the noisy nonsense of the world.

“I will follow my heart today and listen along the way.” 

Shall we take a walk through the woods? Which path shall we follow? There are so many. Some lead to dead ends and make us turn and go the other way. Some lead to streams and brooks allowing us resting places where we can renew our spirit and quench our thirst. Some paths lead to other paths that curve and wind intriguingly and we have no choice but to follow them with joyous anticipation.

Some of the paths lead to clearings where wild flowers, lilies of the valley, may apples, patches of purple violets, shooting stars, trilliums and columbine grow in abundance. The smallest flower, the tiny white lilies of the valley have the sweetest smell. This teaches us that our experiences don’t have to be big and dramatic to have a strong effect.

Maybe a fallen log or a huge flat rock will block our path. We can climb over it and carelessly move on, or we can sit quietly upon it for a time and contemplate our blessings and the miracles in our life.

We have the choice to follow one path or another or to sit quietly or forge ahead. In this way we choose the life we want.

One thing is for certain, if we follow our heart and take time to be still along the way, the life we create for ourselves will be just the right one.

“Today I will let God carry my burdens.”

If we listen closely we can hear God’s voice saying, “Smile and remember I am with you always. Give Me your fears and all that disturbs you. What is a heavy weight to you is weightless to me.  Let me carry your burdens so that once and for all, you can have the peace you crave.”

By listening and allowing God to be in charge we are, at last, giving ourselves the opportunity to forgive the past and surrender the future. He will solve every problem and free us from all need to make decisions alone. But He can only do this with our permission.

God speaks to our hearts, these loving words, “I can make the corrections that balance and harmonize your experience, but only if you will let me. It must be your will. Again, TRUST ME.  I LOVE YOU!  You are a loving and delightful spirit whose light shines everywhere you go.  I recognize your holiness and so now you must as well. The only thing holding you back is you have forgotten to take My hand.  Trust.  Trust.  Trust.  All is well, I tell you.  Trust.  Be still and trust.” 

In this way, we will see that every moment given to God is a gift to us.

“I am ready to change my mind and be at peace.”

The time for change has come. Change only means giving up all those things we don’t want. Fear. Sickness. Scarcity. Hatred. War. Violence. Pain. Suffering. And opening our hearts to God’s gifts of healing and holy Oneness.  The only change we can effect is to change our minds.

To begin the change we need to open our minds to seeing ourselves as powerful and beloved creations of a Loving God and to decide that since God loves us so much, it is absolutely time for us to value and love ourselves. To love ourselves is the first step in healing the world. First we heal our personal world and then we allow our inward healing to ripple out through time and space and heal all our brothers.

Let’s let God’s Light shine upon us as we walk through His world, while we remember once and for all Who we are.  Now we can let the power of our loving thoughts do their work. Just as the sun and rain nourish the soil from which a flower grows, we can let our happy thoughts work through the soil of our mind so love can bloom.  Change is harmless. Staying as we are is dangerous.

My prayer today is simply “help me.”

Let’s take a quiet walk with God and allow our conversation to be a simple, “Help me.”

“Help me to see the world through Your eyes.”
“Help me to know the lesson here.”
“Help me to find peace in this.”
“Help me to see the miracles in all things.”
“Help me to recognize my Holiness.”
“Help me to see the Holiness in others.”
“Help me to see that all I search for is right inside of me.”
“Help me to see that all I fear is my own happiness.”
“Help me see that my lack of peace is my choice for war in some form.”
“Help me to not wage war with myself and others.”
“Help me to be grateful for everything, knowing every experience is here to help me in some way.”
“Help me to listen, hear and trust in You and Your Love and to see there really is nothing else.”

Each “help me” is a prayer to be used to serve you throughout your days. Then design your own “help me” prayers to fit your specific life’s needs and experiences. After each help me, don’t forget to take a quiet moment to walk with God and listen for His answer.  And then say “Thank you.”

“I will accept God’s gifts for me today.”

Would we refuse a gift from a loved one, a dear friend?  So why would we push away God’s gifts of loving thoughts and healing experiences?  Why would we say, “Sorry, God, I don’t want your miracles and I choose not to be the beautiful and glorious Me that you created.  I would much rather judge my brothers and sisters and heap guilt upon myself than to allow Your love to fill me and govern my life.  I prefer sickness, war and death, suffering and hunger and despair to your abundance, your peace, your health and well being and your eternal life.  So thanks, but no thanks to miracles and wondrous joy.”  This may seem ridiculous and yet it’s what we do each time we choose pain instead of happiness and suffering instead of joy. It’s what we do whenever we judge ourselves and others or allow guilt to govern our thoughts.

Now, let’s join together in this eternal moment and pick ourselves a lovely flower from God’s holy garden and thank Him for His unlimited and eternal Love. Our gratitude will overflow when we at last open our eyes to the truth. 

“Today I will remember the power of my thoughts and choose Love.”

What stops peace is when we plug the flow of God’s Love with our muddy thoughts and judgments. It doesn’t mean that our peace no longer exists. It only means that we have plugged the flow of God’s loving energy with our fear. 

There was a time we knew all this. Long ago when God first Created us as Spirit in His Likeness.  Before we re-created Him in ours.  And yet no matter how dense our misperceptions of ourselves and God, still He is as He always was … and, in God’s Eyes, so are We.

We can bring clarity and the pure stream of joy and understanding back into our conscious awareness by simply choosing Love instead of fear at all times. A Course In Miracles teaches that we are far too tolerant of our mind wanderings. We think our ego thoughts have the power and so we let them run rampant and cause us sadness, anxiety, sickness and insanity which translates into nature’s imbalance and the world’s suffering. We really don’t believe there is another way to live. And we certainly don’t have a clue as to how powerful our thoughts are. If God stood right in front of us and told us the truth, we wouldn’t believe Him. And yet this is exactly what He does as He speaks to the heart of each of us constantly answering our prayers for peace and happiness. These are the answers we ignore or refuse to hear because they aren’t coming in exactly the form that our ego’s expect and understand.

So let’s begin today to unplug from fear and plug into our truth and let our light shine and our peace and God’s abundant Love flow free.

Let’s surrender our preconceived ideas of what Happiness is and what Healing is.  Instead, let’s place all our trust in God.

And then let’s wait and see what happens.

“I will look at my mistakes so I can choose again.”

What if we stop monitoring what everyone else is doing and instead, spend our time in monitoring ourselves? Could it be that the reason we watch each other so closely is because we don’t want to face our own fears? Our own errors in thinking? Our own imperfections?

Let’s open our minds a tiny bit and look for just a moment.

Do certain things in the world and certain people cause our breath to become shallow, our mouths to dry?  Do we feel a clenching in our guts and a tightening around our shoulders?  Does heaviness and discomfort wash over us at certain times?  Does our heart pound sometimes for no reason that we can see?

Those are the times to monitor our thoughts.
Who is it that is making us angry? What are they saying? Or doing?
What is it that is filling us with fear?
Is something happening?  Is nothing happening?
Could it be from the forgotten past?
What’s on TV? What’s on the internet?

What’s the time of day?
Do we awake with fear?
Do we go to bed with fear?

And then we should ask this very important question:

WHY ARE WE ALLOWING IT?

We think it’s that person outside of us.
We think it’s that thing going on.
We believe anything negative someone tells us.
We believe the news.
We believe the internet.
We don’t even question it.
We just believe bad news.

What if we let go of all that and believe God instead?

We have very set and limited ideas of how things should be.  How people should behave.  We may even believe that those set and limited ideas are God’s own laws.  No wonder we’re uncomfortable. We’re trying to force the ocean of our Holy Truth into that tiny drop we call our worldly experience.

But God only has One Law: “Love One Another.”

God tells us, If you’re not at peace; if you’re not happy; if you’re fighting and judging and feeling anything other than LOVE, IT’S NOT ME!!!!  You can’t change the world, Beloved Child, but you can change your mind about how you see the world.  Let Me see all things for you and allow Me to change the world.

It’s true.  God will transform and transcend all the laws of this world if we place our trust in Him.

You don’t have to believe me, but simply choose Him in all things and see for yourself.  Every time we try to think or judge alone, we feel angry or fearful or sad.  Every time we grow quiet and give Him our thoughts and our troubles, we calm down.  It’s simple so why not try it? 

“God, I give this to you.  Show me the world through Your eyes.”

Then rest quietly in Him and see the world transformed.

“I choose to forgive and surrender everything today.”

We feel a zing of worry, a zap of fear, a smack of judgment and then we use a projector to share that with our sisters and our brothers.  With some, we talk about our hurt and our anger toward others.  Some we attack directly to try and get that bad stuff away from us.  Unconsciously, we believe if it’s on them, it can no longer be on us.

If a spider crawls on us, would we grab it mindlessly and throw it off paying no attention onto whom it may be landing? That is what we do when we project our fears onto the world. The trouble with fear is, unlike a spider, it doesn’t go away when we try to shove it onto someone else.  Instead it becomes stronger in us and compounds itself with guilt.

We don’t understand that there is a better way to handle all the negatives that come into our lives.  We don’t have to use each other as scapegoats or as sounding boards.  Instead we can lift everything up to God and let Him sort it out. 

A prayer:

“I will not project my pain and judgments upon my loved ones and the world. 
Instead I choose to forgive their cause and surrender them to God.
In this way, I am extending peace and love and joy to everyone.”

It is in our surrendering all things to God that we are opened to a new way of handling our problems. And as we open ourselves to a new way of thinking, God’s Angels swoop in and lift us above the fray, praise us highly and then show us something different.  Something we have not yet discovered for ourselves.

That
… surrender is not weakness, but strength and power of the highest degree.
… surrender is not danger, but safety in the highest measure.
… surrender is not painful, but joy and peace at the highest pinnacle.

Surrender is forgiveness. 
Surrender is letting go and letting God.
Surrender is our only chance for peace.

LOVING THOUGHTS TO LIFT OUR SPIRITS

. Hot chocolate and chamomile tea, warm and soothing to the soul.
. A smile as bright as sunlight shining upon a calm and healed world.
. Fresh baked banana bread, aromatic and delicious.
. Quiet thoughts tiptoeing soundlessly not wanting to disturb.
. A child’s happy laughter; a small hand grasping yours in perfect trust.
. A jolt of joy striking like a bolt of lightning leaving falling miracles around.
. A kitten batting playfully at a puppy’s wagging tail.
. The silent sound of hearts joining one by one in prayer.
.  A dragonfly dancing lightly among the tiger lilies on a summer day.
. The safe and wondrous feeling of trusting in a higher power.
. A friend’s voice on the phone, warm with positive support.
. Knowing absolutely that all your problems have been solved.
. Splashing happily in a cool and cleansing rain.
. Dancing lightly on a rainbow hand in hand with all the world.
. Laughing so hard your stomach hurts.
. Living your truth with confidence and love.
. Flying across the crisp and pristine countryside on skis.
. Being in a constant state of oneness with the Universe and knowing nothing else.

 “I will turn each fear thought into a loving thought today.”

“I will no longer let the past be my teacher.”

In order to balance and harmonize whatever is out of balance within us, we must first forgive ourselves for what is causing our problems. It isn’t the “bad” habits that are our problem.  They are only symptoms and what we mistakenly use to measure our value and our worth. And there are dozens of these symptoms, from overeating to smoking to being bad tempered and on and on. Trying to change these symptoms alone is like trying to fix a leaky faucet at the point of the drip. We must first go inward to the point of origin of the leak and correct that.

The origin of our habits is not our bodies, other people or the world, it is our minds. Unless the changes are made in our mind first, it is almost impossible to change those things in our life that block our peace.

But changing our minds is very difficult for most of us.  We believe what we believe with determination and stubborn will. No one can tell us a thing and have us believe it without some pretty convincing evidence or a brick falling on our head.

It doesn’t need drama or trauma, but a simple prayer to God, “Help me.” And He is there ready and waiting to See for us and then to show us what He wants us to see.  Our nature is not fear, our nature is joy and peace and compromise and connection.  We got off kilter from all of the experiences in our past.  We let our past be our teacher instead of God.  We can turn that around by affirming, “God is the Love with which I experience this moment.” Again and again until it becomes clear.

Once we begin having those miracle moments or flashes of clarity, we will want them more and more.  And the more we are mindful in the moment and see how it changes our lives, we will begin to believe.  And with belief comes trust.  We may still experience fear and have lessons from our past, but we will no longer believe in them the way we did.  Now we will be able to stand back and say to ourselves, “Oh, that’s from the past. God, show me what I should know NOW.”

And He will.

“I cannot judge another without first judging me.”

We spend a lot of time in other people’s lives and in other people’s business. It is one of the great games that we invest in and one of the ways that we join with others against someone else. We feel justified and righteous pointing out other people’s mistakes to each other. We analyze their behavior and talk incessantly about how they should be doing things differently. It’s almost comforting in a way to see the errors in the ways of others, because when we do so, we do not have to look at our own mistakes.

The problem with this thinking is that we don’t realize how our judgments are hurting us. A Course In Miracles teaches that “to give and receive are the same.”  We cannot judge another without attacking ourselves.  Our peace comes from forgiveness and sending loving energy into the world. As soon as we judge another we slam the door to healing upon ourselves.  But when we love and hold everyone in the light of their own truth, this healing energy will naturally fall upon us.  If we can’t find something good about someone, we can still surrender them and all our judgment thoughts to God.

Today, instead of comforting ourselves with other people’s problems; instead of masking our own pain by looking outward at the world’s great mistakes, let’s go inward and look at the sadness, the guilt, every form of fear that we harbor and the wounded self that we are hiding from. Look at it and then allow God’s healing light to shine upon that dark place inside of us and show us that what we thought was so terrible about us is really nothing but a mistaken thought that can be replaced by choosing God and His peace instead of this.

“Forgiveness is the key to happiness.” ACIM