Lesson One: Changing the Way You Choose to Think.

Change your thoughts and you change your world.
-Norman Vincent Peale

Choosing Wrongly.

I felt myself straying from peace today.  I found myself worrying over and resenting some choices my 20 year old son who is still so very young in many ways was making. I have been in this situation with him many, many times over the course of his life.  I know that what I am feeling is fear .  If I had to sum up all the feelings of anxiety, worry, guilt, shame, anger and resentment I felt while I watched him make choices I judged as unhealthy over the years, I know what I am experiencing is really just fear. In a nutshell I fear, induced by a collection of past memories. 

I don't want to feel this way.  I also don't want to project my fear onto him when what he truly deserves and needs from me is love. When I am fearful I judge, blame, assume, accuse, express anger, focus on the negative in behaviour, forgetting and excluding the positive and I growl and yell. This doesn't help him.  It doesn't help me. I get nowhere but down!

Fear is a Choice

I would like to say that my fear is beyond my control, that the circumstances validate the worthiness for fear.  I know people would look at our situation and say, "No wonder why you are afraid.  You would be crazy not to be."  Truth is I am crazy for allowing fear into my life.

I am learning, the hard way, that fear is actually a choice I make.  I and I alone am responsible for the fear I feel right now. "When you are fearful, you have chosen wrongly." (ACIM: Chapter 2:VI: 3: 2). I have chosen wrongly and it is up to me to do something about it.  The correction of fear is my responsibility and that brings me back to today's lesson.

We Need to Change the Way We Choose to Think!

I have said this again and again: the world we perceive is in our minds and in our minds only! I will take you back to that lovely piece of  Sanskrit wisdom shared in Satchidnanada's translation of The Yoga Sutras (2011): So the mind, so the person. Bondage or liberation is in in your own mind."   (page 5)

A Couse in Miracles takes this saying a little farther: The truth is that you are responsible for what you think, because it is only at this level that you can exercise choice. What you do comes from what you think." (ACIM;Chapter 2:VI: 2: 6-7; page 29)

Until we get that, this first lesson may be challenging to understand but understand it we must if we want to step out of a fearful circumstance and embrace the Love that is there and always was there. Our thoughts bring on feelings. Fear, according to A Course  is the opposite of Love and fear and love are really the only two emotions that exist.  We either love or we fear. We act out on one of these two emotions.  Our world is a projection of one of these emotions.  We can choose to see a world that is fearful or a world of Love.  What would you choose?

The Steps to Correction

When you find yourself tensing up, uneasy, worried, guilty, doubtful, ashamed, angry and acting with strain when faced with the behaviour of another or a life circumstance,  there are steps to correction we can follow.  They go like this:

1. When we find ourselves acting out of fear, we must first recognize we are doing so.  We must be aware and willing to accept that at that moment we are allowing fear into our life. 
2. We must see it as a choice.  Choices not only make us accountable, they give us the power to change.
3. We must accept our responsibility for it and its correction.
4. Then we must be willing to choose differently than the way we were thinking: usually like victims of circumstance and the poor choices of others. Our willingness to change the way we choose to think is probably the most crucial step. With that willingness  to choose differently, the correction will be so much easier.
5. We choose Love instead. 
6. We change the way we think. Any thought that brings about Love instead of fear are the thoughts we need to focus on.

A Course sums up these steps beautifully:

Know first that this is fear.
Fear arises from lack of love.
The only remedy for lack of love is perfect love.
Perfect love is Atonement.
(Chapter2:VI:7:5-8, page 30)

What is Atonement?

Of course, I am no expert when it comes to explaining the lessons of  A Course in Miracles.  There are others out there that make its teaching their life purpose and do so brilliantly.  Please check out the work of Marianne Williamson and Alan Cohen, to name a couple. My understanding of Atonement is this: Atonement is the result of undoing our false thinking, getting beyond the clutter of mental modifications in our mind,  and seeing beyond the  ego to what is really there. Atonement happens when we change the way we think.  It will only come if we choose  to think differently... when we choose the real over the unreal; the eternal over the temporary and Love over fear. 

We can change the way we think.  We begin by choosing to.

All is well in my world.

References:

Foundations for Inner Peace (2007) A Course in Miracles: Combined Volume. Third Edition. Mill Valley: Foundations for Inner Peace.

Sri Swami Satchidinanda(2011) The Yoga Sutras. Yogaville: Integral Yoga Publications.