1 – Anxieties
I have long been prone to anxiety, really all of my life. Of course, not feeling “safe,” in that I am secure in my relationships with others, has followed. So I have long appreciated the following passage from the Workbook of A Course in Miracles:
“Love holds no grievances. When I let all my grievances go I will know I am perfectly safe. (W-68)”
2 – Safety
If I let all my grievances go, would I be safe, feel safe? This means resentments of all types, including a lack of forgiveness for apparent wrongs done to me by others in the past. If I let all this baggage go, would I be free of anxiety? I have found that there is some difference in my anxiety level when I am feeling perfectly safe. I do, in fact, feel anxiety-free at such times. I am calm and easy and happy to be a part of this world. I feel loving.
3 – Love
I think that the fact of feeling loving in the most salient point. One does not hold grievances or any resentment as such times. I remember particularly a Christmas Eve with my family. I was very, very peaceful. Yet what happened the next morning? I had an anxiety attack while trying to lie peacefully in bed before time to get up.
4 – Ego-Mind
Why would anxiety have attacked me so viciously at such a time? I think that my mind, my ego-mind, was trying to tell me that I couldn’t be rid of the ego that easily—that it would reassert itself and that I would not be rid of it.
5 – Illusions
Of course, this is an illusion, but illusions seem a lot like the real world when in the grip of them. So I think that the ego is part of the anxiety problem. In my early-morning anxiety attack, I obsessed about a workshop that I was to direct a month after Christmas. I was on the job, fearful that I would not perform well enough. I would fail, even about some minor matter that I had in mind. So obviously the ego was at stake in this fantasy, this illusory future. It is important to note that the anxiety attack did not prompt me to do anything about the particular matter that I had fantasized about when I got back to work in early January. I knew, by then, that the anxiety had been a straw man, an illusion in my attempt to do everything in my job perfectly.
6 – Self
“You who were created by love like itself can hold no grievances and know your Self. (W-68)”
Certainly! This passage is accurate. My Self, as described in both ACIM and A Course of Love, knows no grievances. This Self, the inner Christ, has long ago let all such negativity recede. And I must listen to this inner Christ. I must let go of the negativity of holding things against other people.
7 – Personal Experience
I do not think that I am particularly prone to grievances or resentments. I found out, long ago, that I lived better, I was happier, when I did not retain obsessions about the past, a past that had previously upset me. If others have treated me badly, that is their problem. For some reason, I needed to experience their bad actions, but that is over now. I don’t have to rehash it. I don’t have to re-hurt myself, like a phonograph record going around and around on the turntable.
8 – Grievances
“It is as sure that those who hold grievances will suffer guilt, as it is certain that those who forgive will find peace. It is as sure that those who hold grievances will forget who they are, as it is certain that those who forgive will remember. (W-68)”
We need to remember who we are, and the only way that we can remember the inner Self/Christ is to be sure that grievances do not find a place in our hearts. Of course, that is not the whole change that needs to occur. We need also to loosen the ego’s grip upon us, which means that we will not lapse into egotistical states of mind. In my case, that means that I need not to “plan the workshop” in an egoistic state of mind. As if my whole reputation depended upon it. Yes, all of us fall into such perplexities often, and we stay in those perplexities far longer than we ought.
9 – Guilt
I would not suffer guilt, because I have learned that this is what has made all of us insane. Guilt is insanity, as ACIM says. And the loosening of the bonds of guilt on our frantic minds will pave the road for the coming of Christ-consciousness, or Awakening. There are things that we can do to ready ourselves, though the timing is God’s own.
Affirmation: “I would be safe today, because I know that I walk free of grievances.”
Prayer:
Dear Father/Mother,
I would be perfectly safe today, and for this to be true, I need to let all regrets about the past fall away. Regrets, as such, are not grievances, but they are closely akin. And I would feel perfectly safe, perfectly.
Help me to sense Your presence throughout the day, as I am sensing right now. You are my lodestone, my center in a world that can be difficult—but does not have to be. This world can be Heaven on earth, and such I propose for it to be in my life.
Help this to come true.
Amen.
MIRACLES EACH DAY 