Solve One Problem...Get Another

The ego loves to keep us immersed in the "reality" of daily living.  It loves to create problems.  Problems distract us from noticing our separation from God.  If we weren't so busy solving all these pesky problems we might have more time to notice how insane this all is and start to pay more attention to solving our one real problem...that we need to get back to God.

(In previous postings, I've been talking about ego set ups.  There's the "I Can't Win No Matter What I Do", see here.  There's also "The Rug Got Pulled Out From Underneath Me", see here.)

One of the ways the ego keeps us wrapped up in worldly living and away from spiritual thinking is by giving us problems.  Lot's and lot's of problems.  In fact, we're never without problems.  If we solve a problem, not to worry, more will show up.  In fact, solve one...get two.  Problems are BIG and important!  They require our immediate attention, or they require ALL of our attention.  They are urgent.  They are critical.  They must be attended to or something TERRIBLE will happen!

Even worse are the never ending problems.  Most of us have at least one problem like this.  They stem from our false beliefs (for more on false beliefs, see here).  These are the kinds of problems that stick around...perhaps for a lifetime.  For some people, these kinds of problems have to do with money.  For others, with relationships, health or a lack of self worth.  We all know someone who has been sick with one illness after another practically from the moment they were born.  Or someone who can never seem to make a relationship stick.  There are also those people who self-destruct their lives on a regular basis because of their deep-seated false belief that they are not worthy, not love-able, and undeserving.

Okay, take a deep breath and let's look at the real "reality".  Problems are only perceptions.  There's nothing really wrong here.  We have air to breath and clothes to keep us warm.  The birds are singing and the sun still shines.  We have water to drink and food to eat.  Right now, right here, in this very moment, there are no problems here.  And in the next moment, and the next moment and the next moment.  There are no problems.  We are safe and we are loved by the divine.

We have the potential to fill our minds with love.  Or we can choose to indulge the ego and fill it with fear.

And since our thoughts are creative, when we fill our minds with fear thoughts, what are we creating in our lives?  Problems, of course!

So what are some good practical ways to end the perpetual problem cycle in our lives?

Well, first we can choose to cast out fear thoughts whenever we become aware of them.  This takes a great deal of strength of character and determination, but it can be done.  Thinking is habit and habits can be changed.  It is within our realm of power to insist on only allowing worthy thoughts in our minds.  And as our thoughts become cleansed, we create less chaos in our lives.  If we focus on loving thoughts and thoughts of gratitude, beautiful things show up in our lives.

The second way to reduce problems in our lives is to release the habit of judging others (see here, here and here.)  When we judge others, we are damaging ourselves.  We get what we give.  It's just how things work.  When we view others harshly, we view ourselves harshly too.  And that creates guilt down deep in our subconscious mind.  Even worse, when we have guilt, we believe that we should be punished.  And how do we punish ourselves?  Why, with problems, of course.

Just as with clearing our minds of fear thinking, ending the habit of judging is challenging.  It takes work and commitment, but it can be done!  Go cold turkey on judging today.  Just stop it.  (See here.)  Stop creating guilt and begin to create peace.

Finally, the third and most effective way to significantly reduce the problems in your life is through forgiveness.  Start by forgiving every problem you have in your present and every person that is even vaguely connected to these problems.  Once you've taken care of today's forgiveness needs, begin to systematically dig into your past and forgive all the hurts, wounds, anger and upset you have from your past problems.  (See here.)  And then go to work on forgiving your mental blocks and false beliefs  (see here.) Again, this may seem like a lot of work, and it is.  However, forgiveness dissipates problems.  As you forgive and release the world you have created, you will have fewer and fewer problems.

It's your choice to make.  Problems or happiness?

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Forgiveness Offers Everything I Want

This was my reading for this morning in A Course in Miracles.  It's words on forgiveness are so beautiful that I wanted to share them with you.  From Workbook lesson 122:

What could you want forgiveness cannot give?  Do you want peace?  Forgiveness offers it.  Do you want happiness, a quiet mind, a certainty of purpose, and a sense of worth and beauty that transcends the world?  Do you want care and safety, and the warmth of sure protection always?  Do you want a quietness that cannot be disturbed, a gentleness that never can be hurt, a deep abiding comfort, and a rest so perfect it can never be upset?

All this forgiveness offers you and more.  It sparkles on your eyes as you awake, and gives you joy with which to meet the day.  It soothes your forehead while you sleep, and rests upon your eyelids so you see no dreams of fear and evil, malice and attack.  And when you wake again, it offers you another day of happiness and peace.  All this forgiveness offers you, and more.  

Forgiveness lets the veil be lifted up that hides the face of Christ from those who look with unforgiving eyes upon the world.  It lets you recognize the Son of God, and clears your memory of all dead thoughts so that remembrance of your Father can arise across the threshold of your mind.  What would you want forgiveness cannot give?  What gifts but these are worthy to be sought?  What fancied value, trivial effect or transient promise, never to be kept, can hold more hope than what forgiveness brings? 

Why would you seek an answer other than the answer that will answer everything?  Here is the perfect answer, given to imperfect questions, meaningless requests, halfhearted willingness to hear, and less than halfway diligence and partial trust.  Here is the answer!  Seek for it no more.  You will not find another one instead.  

If ever I find myself feeling less than content, I know I have forgiveness work to do.  I search my mind for the source of my unforgiveness.  Who am I feeling annoyed with?  Is there anyone or any thing that is bringing this particular form of fear into my life?

Even if it is only a vague feeling of discomfort, I know it must be forgiven.  I may not understand what it is that is making me feel uncomfortable, but I go ahead and apply one of my forgiveness processes to it anyway.

Then I think.  I look into my past and I look deep into my heart.  What is it about this situation that is unsettling me?  What false beliefs do I hold in my unconsciousness that are causing me to experience fear or anger or hurt or frustration?  How can I tie the feelings I am experiencing this day to experiences in my past?

What do I believe about the world and about myself?  Deep down in the dark recesses of my mind, do I secretly believe that I am not worthy of happiness, love and safety?  Do I believe there is not enough good for the rest of the world and me too?  Do I believe I am unloveable?  Do I believe I am guilty and deserve to be punished?  Beliefs like these and many others silently run our lives, causing us to behave eradically and often in ways that harm ourselves and others.

Looking deep at our beliefs, tracking them down to their source, remembering which events in our lives originally created these beliefs and forgiving, forgiving, forgiving is the way to happiness.  I try to forgive every aspect I can dig up.  I forgive the people and events causing me discomfort today, the people and events from its source in my past, the false belief I have embedded in my unconscious mind and any other experiences or thoughts I can discover in my consciousness that relate to this topic.

Doing this kind of mind cleaning and purifying does take commitment, but it pays off in spades.  As we forgive the world around us, slowly but steadily our trust and comfort in our world begins to build.

Forgive and be forgiven.  As you give you will receive.  --Also from Workbook Lesson 122

Peace flows into our minds and we become happy.

If you are unsure how to begin to forgive on this level, my book, "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness" explains how you can successfully use forgiveness to create happiness in your life.

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Releasing Mental Blocks and False Beliefs

The past wreaks its havoc on our present.  We all live our lives through the filter of our pasts.  We can't avoid it altogether, of course, because our pasts have created who we are today.  However, each of us have experienced certain events in our pasts that effect us negatively today.

Memories of painful events (sometimes these memories are subconscious) define our thinking today.  Often these painful memories create "mental blocks" that cause us to think and act from fear or lack which, in turn, can create significant limitations in our current lives.  Forgiving and releasing these "mental blocks" frees us up to discover the magnificent potential we all have to live beautiful lives.

I don't really love telling personal stories about myself, but I have decided that I will do so here today in order to help you understand how these mental blocks are created and how we can let them go through forgiveness.

Although I am generally very healthy, for my entire life I have had issues with food.  As a tiny baby I had colic and continued to have stomach pain through my teen years.  Then I developed food allergies and sensitivities.  In my early 20's I was diagnosed as pre-diabetic.  Later it was discovered that I had a candida imbalance which means that the bacteria and yeasts in my gut were not in a healthy ratio.  All this eventually led to a very limited diet.  No dairy, wheat or grains, no sugar, no soy, no alcohol and so forth.

In the last year or two I have been working to heal this aspect of my life and I have lately begun to have some significant success with this healing.    Here's how it happened.

I have been working with a mentor, Reverend Penny Macek for some years now.  (She is sensational and if you would like to contact her, email me for her particulars.)  Reverend Penny knows how to dig in deep and she asks pointed questions to get at the root of things.  She also sometimes asks me to close my eyes for a brief moment and drop into my past.  She often asks the question, "When was the very first time that you remember feeling this way?"

One day, with my eyes closed in this manner, I felt myself drifting back to a moment when I was a toddler.  I was sitting in the kitchen in my high chair with my mother.  My father walked into the room all dressed in his business suit looking big, tall, authoritative and just a little scary.  He asked my mother if I had eaten my breakfast and when she told him that I was only playing with my food, he became visibly distressed.  I knew I had greatly disappointed him.

This was very upsetting for me.  I wanted to please my parents and I was well aware that my lack of appetite was concerning them.  However, my stomach hurt a lot whenever I ate and so I tried to avoid eating.  I was in one of those classic situations the ego loves to put us in.  I call it "The You Can't Win" scenario.  If I ate food I felt pain, if I didn't eat food, I was in trouble with my parents and they withheld love from me.

As it turns out, my father had been a very sickly child and was not expected to live.  His own parents went to great lengths to keep him healthy and to build up his strength.  I know now that his upset at my lack of interest in food was tying into his own fears and "mental blocks".  In addition, my mother was extremely slim, less than 100 pounds in those days and at the time was pregnant with my sister.  She ultimately only gained 20 pounds during that pregnancy so he was actually worrying a great deal about all three of us, my mother the unborn baby and me.  Each of us was "undernourished"  and even "sickly" in his mentlally blocked mind.

Anyway, this same scenario played out for a number of years as my father tried to get me to eat and I was mostly only able to pick at food.  I gradually came to believe all kinds of crazy things about food.  Here are some of them.

I am only loved if I eat.
I am punished when I eat.
I am punished when I don't eat.
I can't win. Life is not fair.
My parents approval is conditional.
Love can be taken away.
My good can be taken away.
I am not good enough.
I am abandoned.
I am rejected.

These are all "mental block" themes and we all have these or similar themes creating problems in our lives, usually on a subconscious level.  Once we know what these mental blocks are, we can forgive and release them.  This frees us up to live in greater peace and become more of our true potential.  After all, to use Byron Katie's famous question from "The Work", "What would I be without that thought?"

What would I be without the thought that I am punished when I eat?  Well, I probably wouldn't have food allergies and sensitivities, I probably wouldn't be diabetic, I probably wouldn't have Candida.  As I begin to release my false beliefs, these conditions and their symptoms are leaving my body and I am healing.

Then there are the bigger false beliefs to be dealt with such as "love is conditional" and "can be taken away" or "I am not good enough".  These must each be dealt with too.  I have been using a variety of methods to clear these beliefs from my mind.  The one I like the best is the "Feel the Feelings" technique which is Process # 3 in my book, "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness".  (This process is also presented in my guided meditation, Forgive Your Past NOW for $2.99. )  I have also used a series of releasing prayers which Reverend Penny has given me, conducted some EFT and filled out numerous Radical Forgiveness forms, forgiven both my father and mother as well as food extensively and just taken the time to do some deep thinking and inquiry about this whole issue.

It may sound like a lot of work and bother for all this, but the payoff is my happiness.  Of course, I am much happier, now that I am able to eat more foods comfortably.  However, it's much bigger than that.  My overall happiness comes from the forgiveness work I have done on this subject.  As I forgive, I feel safer and more protected in the world. I am learning that the love that I experience in this life comes from inside me and not from outside sources.  As I begin to live with more love for myself, I find myself increasingly more and more capable of giving more love to the world around me.  This love comes back to me tenfold.  My happiness increases!

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Ways the Ego Sets Us Up

The ego loves to set us up in situations that create chaos in our lives.  The ego loves problems.  After all, while we are busy searching around in our earthly lives for the solutions to problems, we are distracted from our true purpose here, which is love.

Earlier this week I wrote about a classic ego set-up that a lot of us experience.  This is something I call "The rug gets pulled out from underneath me".  See here.  This almost always happens when we are the most elated about our lives.  Just when everything is going great, it all changes in an instant and everything goes horribly bad.

Another common ego set-up is "I can't win no matter what I do".  In this set-up, we have people in our life who are going to be very upset with us if we handle things one way and other people (just as important to us) who are going to be upset if we handle things the other way.  There are no alternative choices that will satisfy everyone.

I have a friend that is in this conundrum right now.  She and her sister receive a modest yearly stipend from her mother's trust.  There seems to be a problem with it.  Her sister has hired an expensive lawyer to fix it and expects my friend to share in the costs. My friend's husband believes that by the time the lawyer fixes the problem, his fees will eat up the stipend.  Her sister is angry at her because her husband is involved.  Her husband is angry because her sister is handling it badly, in his opinion.  If my friend let's her sister handle it, her husband will be hurt and angry with her.  If she gets her husband involved, her sister will be hurt and angry with her.  She can't win.

We all have themes we're working on in life.  I see this same friend in similar situations where she can't win occasionally.  This is her theme.

When you find yourself in ego set-ups, the only thing you can do is turn the whole mess over to Spirit.  You can do this two ways.  The first choice...you can just use words and make a statement something like this, "Holy Spirit, I am giving this whole situation regarding (X) over to you.  I know that you will know what to do with it and I trust you to find a solution that is in everyone's best interest."

Alternatively, if you visualize easily, you can create a big beautiful white marble altar in your mind.  Light it up with divine love.  Make it gorgeous, glowing and brilliant.  Just place your problem on the altar and watch it be consumed with heavenly white flames.

After you turn your problem over, what do you do?  Why, nothing, of course.  Spirit's got your back!  If Spirit decides there is some additional action for you to take, you will be informed.  Until that time, just rest in trust and enjoy the peace of knowing that it is not your problem any longer.   Let it go.  Release and forgive.

Turning your problems over is most definitely a form of forgiveness, but there's more forgiveness work we can do here.  When we find a pattern of ego set-ups in our lives, we need to do some soul searching to figure out why they're happening.  What events occurred early in our lives that caused us to create an unconscious false belief that we can't win?  Until we go back and really look at this false belief, we will continue to experience "can't win" ego set ups on a regular basis.  This will take some deep probing and thought.  However, if we ask Spirit for direction and knowing, we will receive the answers we search for.

Then how do we forgive whatever we find in our past?  For something like this, I like to use the "Feel the Feelings" process in Chapter Three of "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness".   An easy to use download of this process in the form of a guided meditation is available, Forgive Your Past NOW.  For just $2.99 you will be shown a process that you can use over and over to forgive all kinds of wounds and hurts from your past.  These old injuries are wreaking havoc in your present. Why not do a little forgiveness work on your past and make your life work better for you today?

"The Rug Got Pulled Out From Underneath Me"

I spent today leading a forgiveness workshop and afterward one of the participants asked if I might spend a few minutes helping her understand something about an event from her past.

While doing one of the forgiveness meditations, she became aware that there were various elements associated with a particular event and wanted to know why that was.  I let her know that, yes, our bigger forgiveness lessons often have many aspects associated with them.  Big painful events are often complicated and the emotion we feel about them tends to make then seem even more complicated in our minds.

When she began to speak about what happened, her face took on a confused clouded expression and she had a difficult time grasping what we were discussing, even though it was all easily clear and obvious to me. As we were making a list of the aspects of this event that she needed to forgive, she kept asking me to repeat each one over and over so she could write it down.  She would write down a word or two of my sentence and get completely lost and ask me to repeat it again. Now, this is a very smart woman, but her painful memories were creating emotional blocks that were keeping her from thinking in her normal clear head.

Here are the simple facts about the event that transpired in her past.  She was a young girl and she was given her first bicycle.  She was so excited that she could ride it that she wanted to share her joy and rode down the block to show her best friend.  She felt elated that she could ride, proud of her new bike and excited to share with her friend.  When she rode back home, her father greeted her standing on the corner with a willow switch in his hand which he then beat her with it.

Today in the workshop she was able to see for the first time that his response came from his own fear.  After all, she had ridden off without telling him where she was.  She asked me if her understanding of this now was forgiveness.  My answer is that yes, it is, but only partially.

Anytime you flip the switch from fear thinking to love thinking you are forgiving.  In this case, her willingness to put herself in her father's shoes is an offering of love to him.  This is definitely the start of the forgiveness for her.  

However, there's a lot more under the surface.  I said to her, "Let's talk about the fact that here was this incredibly big moment in your life.  Getting a bicycle is a giant step in the progression to becoming BIG, so important to us when we are children.  This was one of the most important, happiest and proudest moments in your childhood.   Here you are absolutely celebrating this big moment and then suddenly it all turned horrible...the rug got pulled out from underneath you."

When I said the words, "the rug got pulled out from underneath you", she looked stunned.  "Oh, my God", she said.  "That is the repeating theme in my life.  Just when things seem to be going their very best, the rug gets pulled out from underneath me."

Of course they do!  When we have an experience this big and emotional in our childhood, it creates subconscious beliefs that color our world throughout our lifetime. In Science of Mind studies, we call these false beliefs.  My friend's belief is that whenever things are going really good, there is going to be a nasty and painful surprise.  The rug will be pulled out from underneath her.

The only way for her to stop reliving this moment in her life is for her to forgive it.  When she accomplishes the forgiveness, the horrible repeating pattern will stop and she will be able to accept happiness knowing that it will not be shockingly, abruptly and painfully taken from her.

Here are some other aspects of this experience which may have created additional false beliefs she can be working to forgive:

I get punished whenever I feel big and free and I fly.
People I love can harm me.
Love has strings attached. Other people love me conditionally.
I am a helpless victim.
I get in trouble even though I do nothing wrong.
I can't trust life.
This is not a safe world.

True forgiveness takes some deep thinking and self discovery.  That's why I like to call it a forgiveness lifestyle.  It sometimes takes months and even years to unravel the emotions, fears and blockages we have created in our minds because of the events in our past.  However, if we ask Spirit to help us receive understanding about our pasts, it will be given to us.  It often comes in fits and starts over a series of weeks and months, but maybe that's because we need the time to process what we are discovering.

Filmed at Lake Tahoe (where I live). 

It's true that forgiveness is a commitment.  However, the process can be fascinating (after all, what's more interesting than ourselves?)  It's also easier than you may think.  Now that my friend has begun to forgive this important event from her past, she'll be given more information and greater understanding about it.  It will become easier and easier for her to forgive each aspect of it.  Pretty soon, she will have released the whole thing.  The emotion of it will leave her body and she will be at peace whenever she remembers it.  This will allow her to open herself up to new possibilities in her life.  Perhaps she will decide to trust the world a little more and open up to new experiences and relationships in a larger way than she has in the past.

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