In today's discussion, we will explore Lesson #78 from A Course in Miracles, titled "Let miracles replace all grievances."
This lesson holds a special place for me personally and in my work with clients. Whenever I find myself harboring grievances or negative emotions towards people or circumstances, I turn to this lesson. It allows me to address and release these grievances by making a list of all the things that bother me about the situation. Similarly, with my clients, I encourage them to vent and let out their frustrations during our sessions. The goal is not to direct these grievances towards the person they're resentful towards, but rather to release them and move forward. Let's delve deeper into this lesson and its significance.
The first paragraph emphasizes that every decision we make is a choice between holding grievances or inviting miracles into our lives. Grievances act as shields that block the light and conceal the miracles waiting for us. It's comparable to a thunderstorm that temporarily obscures the sunlight. By acknowledging and venting our grievances, we create space for the light to return. Just as storms in Barcelona and South Florida quickly give way to sunny skies, this lesson invites us to let it all out, allowing the sun to shine again. This aspect of the lesson, granting us permission to vent, is particularly liberating.
Paragraph one says, "Perhaps it is not yet quite clear to you that each decision that you make is one between a grievance and a miracle. Each grievance stands like a dark shield of hate. Before the miracle it would conceal, and as you raise it up before your eyes, you will not see the miracle beyond, yet all the while it waits for you in light, but you behold your grievances instead." I like to use an analogy for this lesson: consider a flash thunderstorm in a tropical climate. This is like the turbulent emotions, negative, resentful, unforgiving grievances, that cover up the light in us and cover the sunlight. So this lesson is meant to grant us permission to allow the storm to thunder and let out these emotions in a sanitized way. You can do it privately or in a journal. This allows the sun to come back out more quickly.
The permission giving there is liberating, especially compared to the idea of trying to be a "good person" who perhaps doesn't have these types of unacceptable feelings. You can do an exercise of selecting one person you have used as target for your grievances and lay the grievances aside. It may perhaps be someone you fear, someone you hate, or even someone you think you love. A person who angered you, someone you call a friend, but whom you see as difficult at times or hard to please, demanding, irritating or untruth to the ideal he should accept as his according to the role you set for them.
Going further into the text it says,"Through seeing him behind the grievances that you have held against him, you will learn that what lay hidden while you saw him in others, the light saw not is there in everyone and can be seen. He whose enemy is more than friend when he is free to take the holy role. The spirit of the scientific then just one last piece on this inventory. Our longer practice spirit today will see him in this role. You will attempt to hold him in your mind. First, as you now consider him, you will review his faults, the difficulties you'll have with him, the pain he caused you, his neglect and all the little and the larger hurts he gave. You will regard his body with its flaws and better points as well. And you will think of his mistakes and even of his sin."
The lesson says in paragraph seven, "Then let us ask of him who knows the Son of God in his reality and truth, that we may look on him a different way and see our Savior shining in the light." So now we've done the storm and it's time for the sun to come back out. It gives a little bit of a process on how to do the conversion to letting the grievances go so the miracle of light can reappear. Finally it ends the whole section in paragraph eight, when it says, "What you've asked for cannot be denied... God thanks you for these quiet times today in which you laid your images aside and look upon the miracle of love." This brings us into discussion about ho'oponopono, a cleaning process to do incessantly and cleanse from these grievances. It's among the collection to tools we refer to mind training, as opposed to mind wandering. If the mind is not engaged in some consistent, regular incessant activity toward the right direction, it's going to wander into grievances and attacks thoughts.
At the very beginning of this lesson, it says that "every thought is choice between a grievance or a miracle." It's binary. So you're either training your mind to stay obsessively and incessantly on the miracle channel, or your mind is wandering into grievances, which are it's a stormy way of living. It's not peaceful. For me personally, the quest to live a life that is miracle minded all the time is behind the whole Synchromind project. We must stay committed to miracle mindset, and the alternative is grievances of any kind, anything that makes you feel unhappy or annoyed or that is going to block your miracle flow. So if, for instance, you want better health, relationships, or finances, any grievance that you tolerate in your mind is going to block your miracle flow in any of those areas.
Now pivoting into chapter six of my book, Nightmares to Miracles, that discusses a tool I created called the Goals Grid. As we near the end of the book, we're bringing everything we've been working on together. One of the elements we've been tracking from the beginning of the book are the three color-coded areas of the method. There is the practical area, the blueprint area, and the inner genius area. These are three areas that I really try to encourage my clients to keep track of and make an inventory of. This is because a big premise of a lot of psychological methods is that even though these things might be mostly out of your constant awareness, you're going to attract circumstances generated by pain points from the past. When we do an inventory, we have the opportunity to clean them and "undo negative blueprints or programming" that may exist. This leads us to the final key to Miracle success, which is plugging into higher power somehow on a consistent basis.
This omnipotent power can answer questions you may have such as:
How are we going to become profitable in business?
How do I run for election and win my election so I can influence my city for the better?
How do I meet the love of my life?
How do I raise my children to become respectable adults?
I've been given three months to live - how do I turn that around and experience a miracle?
There are three aspects: the practical, the blueprint, and the inner genius. What I help clients to do is fill out their goals grid, which takes approximately 30 minutes or so. Then every day, you're responsible to look at or think about this grid so that you're able to use this as what I call "the pre flight pilot checklist." In doing this, you'll be tracking the different components of the matrix and what the solutions for each of these components might be. The solutions will ultimately be in the practical key, but in order to get there you must work within the blueprint and inner genius keys firstly.
This will help you discover the deeper psychological elements within one's life and how can we clean or delete that negative programming. Then as we're doing that, we can invoke higher power to really transform any grievances into miracles.
Obviously, any of those quadrants or components can be gone into at great length over time. But the Goal's Grid is intended to be something you can carry with you and get a quick snapshot of all the key areas of life. It is crucial not to leave out the blueprint or the inner genius, because then that leads to overcompensating in the physical or the practical. As the Integrated Model of the Psyche illustrates, jumping into the practical as a way of trying to solve your problems and change your reality is actually the least effective way to get things done. You will become burnt out that way. Instead, you want to go into the source and change your reality from within and work from there. Start at the source being the divine power to manifest and also remove the impediments to the manifestation.
