HEALING PAIN
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HEALING PAIN
There are times we all wonder if the pain and suffering in our life is some form of punishment, sent by a higher power to “teach us a lesson” or perhaps we think it’s karmic payback for past mistakes. We wonder why we’re going through such drama, deprivation, turmoil, and physical and emotional pain. We want an explanation as to why these things are happening to us.
And yet, A Course In Miracles tells us that all perceived suffering is but at our own hand. Suffering is never punishment. It is but a reflection of what we are extending from our mind, and to change the reflection, we have only to change our mind.
This sounds easier said than done!
A Course In Miracles states, “The secret of salvation is but this: that you are doing this unto yourself. No matter what the form of the attack, this still is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, still is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is still true. For you could not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that you were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they could have no effect on you unless you failed to recognize it is your dream.” (ACIM CH27 VIII.10:1-6)
Where do our minds go wrong if suffering is not what we want, yet we still seem to be bringing it upon ourselves? How do we change our mind, to change our experience?
It all comes down to our buried, unacknowledged guilt. We are unaware of our guilty projections and do not recognize the stages of our “fallen thinking” as we go down the dark, deep hole of guilt. And therefore, we do not know how we can reverse the process and heal our pain.
Let me make one definition very clear before I begin to explain anything more. The word “guilt” as the world understands it, means: a feeling of shame or regret. Basically, it’s a bad feeling we get in our gut in response to a person or situation and we know we don’t like it.
Now, I have come to a deeper understanding of this word through my intense study of A Course In Miracles. The world “guilt” is interchangeable with the word “body” – and everything associated with it. Everything that causes us pain and suffering, is centered around the body. Think about this for a moment. Is there one form of pain that does not in some way, involve a body?
And so, if we can let go of the idea we are bodies, we release all our pain and suffering – all our guilt.
Why does letting go of the idea we are a body relieve our guilt? How does this heal our pain? Because the body is the symbol of the ego’s desire to experience separation from God. And secretly, deep down, we feel guilty for trying to do so. With this understanding, the solution to our guilt then becomes clear; in order to heal the idea of separation (being a body), we have to remember our Unity. We have to think in the opposite direction of the ego.
Again, this sounds easier said than done!
However, guilt is easy to disassemble once we understand the stages our thoughts go through that lead in the wrong direction. We then can correct our thoughts as soon as we recognize when we are listening to the ego and move in the direction of light and love. So, let’s go through the stages of guilt and then we will understand the one small corrective thought you must remember, to undo all guilt and for all time, healing both yourself and every relationship you have ever had with anybody’s body, including your own: past, present, and future.
The first stage of guilt is to deny blame. The ego refuses any claim against it that it is responsible for your suffering and has wronged no one. In relationships, this is where you tally up the “good” versus “bad” points; you take stock of the damage done to you by another, and generally deny you meant any harm in return. If you’re in physical pain from an ailment or injury, it is the same idea. You’ve done nothing to hurt your body, but somehow, it is insisting on hurting you. In both cases, you feel resentment and often even hate towards either someone else’s body or your own, for what it’s doing to you.
The second stage of guilt is to carry out the sentencing. Your ego openly reverses the blame and lays it on the “accused bodies.” You do your best to make them well aware they are in the wrong and have no grounds for accusations against you. Your ego will say, “Look how wonderful I have been to them and how they’ve mistreated me!” Your ego doesn’t consider how your own ego-reaction to them triggered their ego-reaction towards you.
The third stage of guilt is being the martyr. If you don’t get the reaction your ego wants through projecting your guilt onto someone else, you decide to blame yourself. You decide you deserve whatever “punishment” you get. Your ego admits it’s wrong, and now seeks to make itself feel better by making others feel guilty that you’re suffering. This stage is also a stage of self-pity. Now the ego makes the attempt to project your guilt through making the other person feel sorry for you. You are better than they are because you are owning your part in the situation. And now their punishment is that they should feel guilty for what they’ve done to you.
This transitions into the fourth and final stage some reach if their ego still is not satisfied with the response to the situation. And I promise, it never is. Here the ego seems to take the “high road” in that it attempts to deny feeling harmed at all. The idea here is to forcibly let go of pain without addressing the real problem. In this stage, you may find yourself saying something along the lines of, “Well I can’t help what someone else feels and I can’t help what I feel. It is what it is. I just don’t care anymore. It’s not worth my time or effort to rectify anything in this situation.” This is an unhealthy form of ego self-denial because deep down, you do care or else you wouldn’t be trying to eliminate your painful feelings. If you truly didn’t care, you wouldn’t even have such painful feelings to begin with. If you truly believed such thoughts, you would feel deep, loving peace towards the bodies involved – whether it be someone else’s or your own.
Let us take a moment here to see how unevenly the scales of the ego’s judgment are stacked. One misdeed by someone else’s body (or your own body) can outweigh a lifetime of kindness and generosity. The ego is insane, and its judgement is skewed at best. Its scales are not a fair measure of a person’s weight in goodness, for it weighs only the actions that it judges to be unfair to it. The good weighs as nothing.
You may say, “Well I have had a bad relationship with this person my entire life. There is no good in it.” Or “I have had ill health my entire life. There is no time I can remember when my health was good. My body will never be healed.”
Well, what of it? There is some measure of good that came of the situation, I assure you. All things are lessons carefully presented to us, for our own learning benefit. Nothing happens without this as the goal.
However, the ego obscures the benefits of such lessons, in that each person has their own set of ego-calibrated scales for use in weighing the actions of everyone else. And none of these scales will ever agree. For what one sees as kindness, another can misinterpret as attack.
So how should one respond to any form of hurt meted out from another? How should you respond to your own body when it’s in pain? What reaction will bring you peace?
It all comes down to reversing the steps that led you downward into pain to begin with. In summary those steps were:
The first stage of guilt which is the first step away from peace: To simply deny your part in the painful situation altogether, which never results in healing.
The second stage of guilt which is the second step away from peace: To reverse blame by placing it on another, which never results in healing.
The third stage of guilt which is the third step away from peace: To move into martyrdom or self-pity, which never results in healing.
The fourth stage of guilt which is the fourth step away from peace: To deny your feelings or pretending you don’t care, which never results in healing. This is the final rung on the descent away from peace. Here you have reached the bottom of where you can go. You have become the ostrich with your head in the sand – and here is where many mental illnesses take hold, to cope with these repressed feelings.
So, what can be done? How does one climb back up out of the deep dark hole of guilt to a healed and healthy state of inner peace?
I will first explain this to you through an example of my own.
There was a time when my teenage daughter and I would have some serious, angry verbal fights. It was always a situation of each of us wanting the other to say or do the things we each thought was right. You can fill in the blank here – anything goes. It was truly a “You said or did this, and now I’m upset” situation. Or “I expected this out of you, and you don’t seem to care,” and so on and so forth. In hindsight, it’s obvious to me now, that our conflict always came down to our expectations for each other not being met. This caused our egos to flare!
And it always ended in my blowing up and acting insanely. I would unleash my full volume as a parent, and threaten some form of punishment upon my daughter, thus driving her to tears. It would always end in hysterics.
And one day, after such a blow-up, I wondered how to resolve the hurt, post-fight, and how to prevent such fights to begin with. Why did they occur?
The Holy Spirit guided my next words and actions.
I went to my daughter’s bedroom (one day post-fight) and said, “I know I have acted lovelessly in the past. I can’t change that, or take it back. The past is gone. But I am loving you now, in the present. I have always loved you and will love you forever. It can be difficult to be in this body, with all its big emotions and ego-judgments. And sometimes I let it rule my mind, and because the ego is insane, I behave insanely. This only activates your own ego and then we’re two crazy people together, being insane. I don’t like the person I am when I listen to my ego. I am going to do my best to catch myself in the future, before allowing its voice to be my guide. I am sorry for listening to it, and the words it produced. All I want us to have is peace. You are entitled to your feelings, and I will not judge them as “good” or “bad.” No one is a bad person here. The ego simply wants others to feel what it thinks it wants them to feel. It does this through trying to control others through making them feel wrong or guilty. This is wrong – I am not your jailer, and I don’t think you want to be mine. I will no longer try to control how you feel towards me. I can only control what I feel towards you. And all I want to feel towards you, is love.”
After this talk, my daughter and I have been making steady positive progress in our relationship ever since. I know we will make it through these tumultuous teen years, with love triumphing in the end.
And so, bottom line, do not fall for the temptation to react to “the figures in your dream.” Do not take that first step down the ladder into guilt! This dream is yours, and how it plays out is determined by whether or not you will listen to your ego or awaken to its shenanigans. Always remember to pause a moment to regain your holy Center and listen to the Holy Spirit instead – Who will always speak lovingly.
A Course In Miracles says, “Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they could have no effect on you unless you failed to recognize it is your dream.” (ACIM CH27 VIII.10:6)
Do not fail then, to recognize everything you experience is part of your dream. Choose only love as your reaction to the dream, and everyone involved will be healed. This single idea has become the bedrock of all confrontations with not only my daughter, but everyone else I encounter.
To see beyond the body and what your ego judges it as, is to forgive the body. Forgiveness is to overlook the madness and see only Love’s Presence. This will prevent conflict between your body and anyone else’s as well as with your own. Illnesses and injuries are spontaneously healed once the body is truly forgiven for the guilt you’ve projected onto it.
Through forgiveness you can bypass all the stages of guilt and bring your heart into love towards any “body” you are struggling with. Can you let go of the feelings of being accused? Can you let go of the feeling of accusing others? Can you let go of feeling self-pity, victimization, and self-accusation? Can you let go of resentment towards others for how they appear to be mistreating you?” Can you forgive yourself and them – can you overlook the body and understand you know it isn’t who anyone is, and so you really don’t know who they are at all. Can you extend true forgiveness – the forgiveness the Holy Spirit teaches, which says, “I forgive us both for what never happened in this dream. I relinquish all ego-thoughts unto God and allow Him to replace them with His peace. I release us both from all guilt; from the idea we are bodies.”
In its essence, forgiveness is really a deep state of stillness – the stillness of all thoughts about what bodies have ever said or done. True forgiveness has nothing to do with the past! It does not mean you agree or disagree with anything. It does not mean anyone “gets by” with anything. It does not mean you like or agree with what’s happened in the past.
Forgiveness simply sees no “right” or “wrong” at all. It merely judges not and lets all thoughts rest in the peace of knowing we know nothing as it is in truth.
In truth, we are great beings created as part of God’s Light and Love; all equal parts of His One Son.
Can you see this? The ego cannot. Therefore, do not believe a word it says in your head. Do not listen to something that doesn’t know the truth. Search instead for the feeling of your interconnectedness with loved ones and your perceived “enemies” alike. For in doing so, you search only for the Truth, and God will show it to you.
When I am truly distraught by something, and seem to have forgotten all I know about the truth, several phrases from chapter 31 of the text of A Course In Miracles come to mind as my safety net. I return to these phrases time and again, to help pull me back to sanity, and they are:
“I do not know the thing I am, and therefore do not know what I am doing, where I am, or how to look upon the world or on myself.
Yet in this learning is salvation born. And what you are will tell you of Itself.” (ACIM CH31 V.17:7-9)
“You see the flesh or recognize the spirit. There is no compromise between the two.” (ACIM CH31 VI.1:1-2)
“What you decide in this determines all you see and think is real and hold as true.” (ACIM CH31 1:5)
“If you choose flesh, you never will escape the body as your own reality, for you have chosen that you want it so. But choose spirit, and all Heaven bends to touch your eyes and bless your holy sight, that you may see the world of flesh no more except to heal and comfort and to bless.” (ACIM CH31 VI. 1:7-8)
And I also love, “Lesson 23: I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts.”
Which states, “The idea for today introduces the thought that you are not trapped in the world you see, because its cause can be changed. This change requires, first, that the cause be identified and then let go, so that it can be replaced. The first two steps in this process require your cooperation. The final one does not.” (Lesson 23 5:1-4)
What this means is that we need to identify all our thoughts about the world – including past events you wish were different, worry over future events, and any personal “body problems.” Once noticed, give them to Christ. You do this merely through recognition of these painful thoughts, and then realize you don’t want these thoughts at all. They are stealing your peace. Acknowledge this, and that’s all. Your part in the process of letting go has been completed and God is now free to take the final step, which is to restore your peace.
Unbelievably, the hardest part of this whole process is understanding why you don’t want such thoughts in the first place. You would think this would be obvious because such thoughts cause you pain, but the ego sees things so insanely it finds ways to justify your anger, pain, and suffering. It wants you to hold onto these thoughts at all costs, even the cost of your inner peace.
We hold onto painful thoughts, because our ego is using them as a distraction from the truth. For while your mind is preoccupied with the world, your mind has no clear space for God’s loving Thoughts. He is literally pushed out of your mind by your painful thoughts about the world. And you will feel, literally, “out of your mind!” Therefore, do not try to control the world. You cannot heal anything alone. However, God can change the world, through you. You allow Him to do this when you give Him all your thoughts about it.
In Lesson 23, we learn this is a three-step process:
First, we recognize the cause of the insanity in this world: our guilty thoughts projected out upon it. Our ego-thoughts are always the engine behind insanity.
Second, we let our ego-thoughts go by recognizing we do not want them; we do not want to see the world as it is, and therefore relinquish all painful thoughts about it to God.
Third, we allow God to be our Guide; we simply allow our mind to be still for a moment. We stop thinking about the world, our relationships, and our own body for a holy instant. This holy instant is all it takes for God to step in and restore our peace. It is this single upward step that sets us on the right path towards being free of the pain and suffering of the ego and its guilt (the body).
So, make it your goal each morning and throughout the day, to have a mind resting in stillness, and you will have a heart at peace. Your motivation will be knowing that you are responsible for your thoughts, and thus what you see and experience.
Never forget what A Course In Miracles tells us, “The secret of salvation is but this: that you are doing this unto yourself.” (ACIM T.CH27 VIII.10:1)
This work is funded entirely by donations alone. If you feel guided to (though not expected) please donate by CLICKING HERE. Thank you for your support!
To WATCH THE VIDEO VERSION (as narrated by Beth) PLEASE CLICK HERE