Sean relationships! My relationship was never smooth it was terrible at times,and I didn't know how to deal with it. I couldn't walk away from it because of my upbringing guilt and shame plus my family kept me in it not the proper ingredients for happiness? But we are told all things work together for good Deep down I believed that. And then something happened my wife was diagnosed with alzhemier's I was gutted and shamed as I looked on all the years of my blindness selfishness and hurtful behaviour. I looked at my wife with new eyes and saw love in her heart and instantly resolved to love her as I had never done. A miracle happened i loved and was loved How blind I had been. I sit here reading your post and feel so grateful for you Sean you're insight has helped me open my eyes to the truth
Sean, thank you for sharing this. I am always so grateful for these clear and simple examples of miracles - those shifts in mind that transform our fear into love and pave the way for God. Thank you for being here and sharing, Sean 🙏🙏
Undoing specialness is grueling. I’m reading Tara Singh who points out that we live an overly externalized life with little true awareness--a body seeking sensation and gratification. Turning inward to an impersonal knowledge and God’s love to my ego feels mostly impossible.
But here you are reminding us, guiding us and loving us.
Today I remember, I need do nothing but gently let my gaze follow His.
"Grueling" is a good word. It IS grueling, doing the work of setting aside our inclination to specialness, and undoing the deep structures that support the application of the inclination. Honestly, if we were alone in the work it would be impossible.
But we are not alone.
If I am reminding, guiding and loving it is only because I am reminded, guided and loved by those who will not leave me alone on the trail. In relationship I learn that I am not alone and in relationship I am reminded what to do with my gaze.
This post is really helpful, Sean. An aha with the psychotherapy concept. As I grow in "asking," and heal with the awe of peace-joy-freedom the Holy Spirit brings through correction... I truly see the mortar crumble around my blocks to Love.
Your inSpired writing make every Monday a Holy Day!💝
Thank you Deborah . . . yes the psychotherapy frame is actually very powerful and once I saw it in the material and felt it in the mind it couldn't be forgotten . . . the so-called spiritual language sometimes overwhelms it but the Course is VERY much an extension of psycotherapy, albeit with the divine . . . I'm not sure what version you read but the psychotherapy pamphlet is very interesting if you have access . . . and thanks for the kind words about Mondays . . . It is a beautiful way to connect and I am always - well mostly always :) - writing and then sharing. Thank you always for being here.
Life is relationship then ACIM challenges how relationship is from (at) its very core. I've been finding that quite disturbing of late in that the distance between how ego views the world and how spirit does becomes more apparent in all relationship. There's a lot of internal hissy fitting and mood-swinging-as -defense as a result.
I've realised just how fragile this awareness of disparity is and how easily I swing from peaceful awareness to pricked ego at the slightest of challenges. Maybe this sensitivity is part of the journey, or maybe it's just little old me making excuses :-)
I woke up this morning with a deep sense of dread for no discernible reason. That mood followed me on the short drive to meet my client this morning. I really felt like turning the car round. But I didn't, I handed it over to spirit and got on with it. It turned out when I arrived at my client that he was caught up in something else and couldn't see me, so I arranged to see him on Friday. Turned home, walked the dog, felt some peace, felt some stillness. A miracle? I have no idea.
The Course teaches me that in defenselessness lie my strength and safety. To challenge the self I think I am, leads me to release. Good work, Martin. Appreciate your honesty about our mutual struggle.
Thanks, Martin. Maybe it's both - part of the journey AND little old you making excuses. It happens :)
I think in a specific orthodox ACIM sense the miracle is not a shift in the externals - client canceling yielding space for other peaceful activities - but rather the interior shift from feeling fear (stress/dread/anxiety/etc) to NOT feeling fear, regardless of what's happening externally.
That's the whole reframe of cause-and-effect that's so central to the Course theology.
In application I think that stuff tends to collapse - the inner vs. outer, where's the cause and where's the effect. Tara Singh would write often about not making a big deal about things - what happens, what doesn't, what we like, what we don't. The Course is clear: we are terrible judges of the value and meaning of anything.
Each grievance you hold is a declaration, and an assertion in which you believe, that says “If this were different, I would be saved.” The change of mind necessary for salvation is thus demanded of everyone and everything except yourself (W-pI.71.2:4-5).
Hi Sean, thank you for this weeks read it was very thought provoking.
I have some questions...is it really possible to ask the ego the question what is it's rational for my pain? Also I'd love to find out what need is being met and what need is not being met, but I'm unsure how to do this. Could you please elaborate?
I bring those questions to the Holy Spirit, not the ego. The Holy Spirit is the therapist to whom I turn in an effort to understand the egoic rationale for this or that relationship.
Only the Holy Spirit is capable of the honesty required for effective therapy.
Also, I think one can use Jesus and the Holy Spirit more or less interchangeably here.
So a big prerequisite for this work then is being able to discern between the Holy Spirit and the ego, and to ensure that I know HOW to be in dialogue with the Holy Spirit. Ego is no help in undoing ego :)
I think this discernment between ego and Holy Spirit - and the resultant communion with the Holy Spirit - is very personal and, like most relationships, evolves in and through time, becoming increasingly reliable and stable as one gives attention to it, becomes a servant unto it, et cetera.
The ego's goal is conflict and chaos. Really its goal is just conflict but the chaos often helps perpetuate the conflict and also obscures our role in its production, which is also critical. The ego is undone when we see it and its motives and machinations clearly. So hiding and obscuring is a big goal of the ego, just like revelation and undoing is the only goal of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit helps me untangle the many threads that go into a given relationship. It really is - for me - a kind of therapy, one in which the form frequently changes. Sometimes it's a writing exercise; sometimes it's sitting quietly and reflecting; sometimes it's just crying out from the heart and being instantly heard and responded to.
The form the therapy takes is less important than my willingness to be as honest and vulnerable with the Voice for God as possible.
The thing with the Holy Spirit is that its answers always end the question. They dissolve it. Ego just finds more and more questions. The Holy Spirit KNOWS. And then, when I see as the Holy Spirit sees, I see the relationship as it is - which is to forgive it. And the forgiveness restores peace to my mind, and frees me to connect with my brothers and sisters with less baggage, less secretiveness, and less agenda.
Over the past six months I have been in a couple of relationships - both ending, albeit in different ways - that have been alternately complex, frightening and grief-filled. I have spent a lot of time simply sitting with the Holy Spirit and seeking clarity about each of them.
Seeking clarity means I don't want to hide the relationship. I want to be honest. How does it feel? Where in my body does it feel? Where did I make a mistake? What did I want from this other person? What did they want from me? What did I want them to want from me? What did I ignore that was in plain sight? What did I hide that I should have made explicit?
I actually ask these questions and sit quietly awaiting the Holy Spirit's response. Sometimes it's an answer: "you wanted them to mother you." Sometimes - again, like in good therapy - it's another question. "What other relationship is like this?" Or "how old do you feel in this relationship?"
Where the new question is not designed to perpetuate the conflict but take me deeper into its potential for resolution.
Sometimes I get a long journal entry. Sometimes I get a little urge to raise the issue with an ACIM friend or fellow traveler, and ask what they think.
Sometimes the answer is, we're not going to focus on this now. Go do the dishes and bake bread.
In the end, the "answer" is not really the content of the answer (e.g., bake bread, write two thousand words) but rather the relationship that is created by asking and answering, which is to be present to the process of healing which the Holy Spirit IS.
As my faith in the Holy Spirit increases - because I see its works, feel its effects, know its clarity - then ALL my human relationships are gently healed, because the Holy Spirit guides me in all of them.
What works or doesn't work in a relationship is very specific TO that relationship. But the Holy Spirit takes me ever deeper - into primal places of fear and guilt and, beyond them, an impersonal love that is not concerned about survival.
I begin to understand how there is only the call for love and the response to that call, and that both are in me, and that together they make clear that love holds everything.
Then the surface differences between relationships matter less and I begin to realize the underlying crisis is the same in each of them: I feel separate from God and Creation and am trying to recreate wholeness in relationship with the other. But the other can never do that - they can never be God. But they CAN - with me, for me, through me - show me that I am not ACTUALLY separate from God and Creation.
So that's kind of the process and the motivation, as I experience and practice it.
Thank you. Even the 'best' of us have untrained minds: some part of that likes problems and is attracted to them, then analyzes and makes them more and more 'real'. It's part of that ball of seeking Specialness. I have to remind myself every hour as these appearances arise. It's a lot of Un-doing!
Another wonderful post Sean. I think you are right the Holy Spirit is the best therapist I can think of for He can undo our belief in the past in an instant. Most of us are afraid to do this of course, and so He takes it slowly, at a pace we can accept without fear.
And you are also right we don't need to do anything other that to be willing and to ask for Him to undo our belief in the mirror of separation. He will do it for us though, He will reverse cause and effect.
T28.4. Nothing at all has happened but that you have put yourself to sleep, and dreamed a dream in which you were an alien to yourself, and but a part of someone else’s dream. ²The miracle does not awaken you, but merely shows you who the dreamer is. ³It teaches you there is a choice of dreams while you are still asleep, depending on the purpose of your dreaming. ⁴Do you wish for dreams of healing, or for dreams of death? ⁵A dream is like a memory in that it pictures what you wanted shown to you.
We need only to remember to ask with every grievance, every difficult situation to know the Truth of yourself and everyone that walks with you, and that everybody are our companions on this journey until we all remember that only Love is real.
Thank you Sean, you are a gift, Love + Blessings Suzy xx
Sean relationships! My relationship was never smooth it was terrible at times,and I didn't know how to deal with it. I couldn't walk away from it because of my upbringing guilt and shame plus my family kept me in it not the proper ingredients for happiness? But we are told all things work together for good Deep down I believed that. And then something happened my wife was diagnosed with alzhemier's I was gutted and shamed as I looked on all the years of my blindness selfishness and hurtful behaviour. I looked at my wife with new eyes and saw love in her heart and instantly resolved to love her as I had never done. A miracle happened i loved and was loved How blind I had been. I sit here reading your post and feel so grateful for you Sean you're insight has helped me open my eyes to the truth
Sean, thank you for sharing this. I am always so grateful for these clear and simple examples of miracles - those shifts in mind that transform our fear into love and pave the way for God. Thank you for being here and sharing, Sean 🙏🙏
Love,
Sean
Undoing specialness is grueling. I’m reading Tara Singh who points out that we live an overly externalized life with little true awareness--a body seeking sensation and gratification. Turning inward to an impersonal knowledge and God’s love to my ego feels mostly impossible.
But here you are reminding us, guiding us and loving us.
Today I remember, I need do nothing but gently let my gaze follow His.
Hope is coming for me.💕
Thank you.
"Grueling" is a good word. It IS grueling, doing the work of setting aside our inclination to specialness, and undoing the deep structures that support the application of the inclination. Honestly, if we were alone in the work it would be impossible.
But we are not alone.
If I am reminding, guiding and loving it is only because I am reminded, guided and loved by those who will not leave me alone on the trail. In relationship I learn that I am not alone and in relationship I am reminded what to do with my gaze.
Thank you for being here, Kimberley.
Love,
Sean
This post is really helpful, Sean. An aha with the psychotherapy concept. As I grow in "asking," and heal with the awe of peace-joy-freedom the Holy Spirit brings through correction... I truly see the mortar crumble around my blocks to Love.
Your inSpired writing make every Monday a Holy Day!💝
Thank you Deborah . . . yes the psychotherapy frame is actually very powerful and once I saw it in the material and felt it in the mind it couldn't be forgotten . . . the so-called spiritual language sometimes overwhelms it but the Course is VERY much an extension of psycotherapy, albeit with the divine . . . I'm not sure what version you read but the psychotherapy pamphlet is very interesting if you have access . . . and thanks for the kind words about Mondays . . . It is a beautiful way to connect and I am always - well mostly always :) - writing and then sharing. Thank you always for being here.
Love,
Sean
Life is relationship then ACIM challenges how relationship is from (at) its very core. I've been finding that quite disturbing of late in that the distance between how ego views the world and how spirit does becomes more apparent in all relationship. There's a lot of internal hissy fitting and mood-swinging-as -defense as a result.
I've realised just how fragile this awareness of disparity is and how easily I swing from peaceful awareness to pricked ego at the slightest of challenges. Maybe this sensitivity is part of the journey, or maybe it's just little old me making excuses :-)
I woke up this morning with a deep sense of dread for no discernible reason. That mood followed me on the short drive to meet my client this morning. I really felt like turning the car round. But I didn't, I handed it over to spirit and got on with it. It turned out when I arrived at my client that he was caught up in something else and couldn't see me, so I arranged to see him on Friday. Turned home, walked the dog, felt some peace, felt some stillness. A miracle? I have no idea.
The Course teaches me that in defenselessness lie my strength and safety. To challenge the self I think I am, leads me to release. Good work, Martin. Appreciate your honesty about our mutual struggle.
Thank you Jim.
Thanks, Martin. Maybe it's both - part of the journey AND little old you making excuses. It happens :)
I think in a specific orthodox ACIM sense the miracle is not a shift in the externals - client canceling yielding space for other peaceful activities - but rather the interior shift from feeling fear (stress/dread/anxiety/etc) to NOT feeling fear, regardless of what's happening externally.
That's the whole reframe of cause-and-effect that's so central to the Course theology.
In application I think that stuff tends to collapse - the inner vs. outer, where's the cause and where's the effect. Tara Singh would write often about not making a big deal about things - what happens, what doesn't, what we like, what we don't. The Course is clear: we are terrible judges of the value and meaning of anything.
Thanks for reading and sharing.
Love,
Sean
Thanks, Sean,
And as I wake this morning, to lesson 71 :-)
Each grievance you hold is a declaration, and an assertion in which you believe, that says “If this were different, I would be saved.” The change of mind necessary for salvation is thus demanded of everyone and everything except yourself (W-pI.71.2:4-5).
Martin
That is a very clear couple of sentences!
Hi Sean, thank you for this weeks read it was very thought provoking.
I have some questions...is it really possible to ask the ego the question what is it's rational for my pain? Also I'd love to find out what need is being met and what need is not being met, but I'm unsure how to do this. Could you please elaborate?
Best wishes, Saira 🙏
Hi Saira,
I bring those questions to the Holy Spirit, not the ego. The Holy Spirit is the therapist to whom I turn in an effort to understand the egoic rationale for this or that relationship.
Only the Holy Spirit is capable of the honesty required for effective therapy.
Also, I think one can use Jesus and the Holy Spirit more or less interchangeably here.
So a big prerequisite for this work then is being able to discern between the Holy Spirit and the ego, and to ensure that I know HOW to be in dialogue with the Holy Spirit. Ego is no help in undoing ego :)
I think this discernment between ego and Holy Spirit - and the resultant communion with the Holy Spirit - is very personal and, like most relationships, evolves in and through time, becoming increasingly reliable and stable as one gives attention to it, becomes a servant unto it, et cetera.
The ego's goal is conflict and chaos. Really its goal is just conflict but the chaos often helps perpetuate the conflict and also obscures our role in its production, which is also critical. The ego is undone when we see it and its motives and machinations clearly. So hiding and obscuring is a big goal of the ego, just like revelation and undoing is the only goal of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit helps me untangle the many threads that go into a given relationship. It really is - for me - a kind of therapy, one in which the form frequently changes. Sometimes it's a writing exercise; sometimes it's sitting quietly and reflecting; sometimes it's just crying out from the heart and being instantly heard and responded to.
The form the therapy takes is less important than my willingness to be as honest and vulnerable with the Voice for God as possible.
The thing with the Holy Spirit is that its answers always end the question. They dissolve it. Ego just finds more and more questions. The Holy Spirit KNOWS. And then, when I see as the Holy Spirit sees, I see the relationship as it is - which is to forgive it. And the forgiveness restores peace to my mind, and frees me to connect with my brothers and sisters with less baggage, less secretiveness, and less agenda.
Over the past six months I have been in a couple of relationships - both ending, albeit in different ways - that have been alternately complex, frightening and grief-filled. I have spent a lot of time simply sitting with the Holy Spirit and seeking clarity about each of them.
Seeking clarity means I don't want to hide the relationship. I want to be honest. How does it feel? Where in my body does it feel? Where did I make a mistake? What did I want from this other person? What did they want from me? What did I want them to want from me? What did I ignore that was in plain sight? What did I hide that I should have made explicit?
I actually ask these questions and sit quietly awaiting the Holy Spirit's response. Sometimes it's an answer: "you wanted them to mother you." Sometimes - again, like in good therapy - it's another question. "What other relationship is like this?" Or "how old do you feel in this relationship?"
Where the new question is not designed to perpetuate the conflict but take me deeper into its potential for resolution.
Sometimes I get a long journal entry. Sometimes I get a little urge to raise the issue with an ACIM friend or fellow traveler, and ask what they think.
Sometimes the answer is, we're not going to focus on this now. Go do the dishes and bake bread.
In the end, the "answer" is not really the content of the answer (e.g., bake bread, write two thousand words) but rather the relationship that is created by asking and answering, which is to be present to the process of healing which the Holy Spirit IS.
As my faith in the Holy Spirit increases - because I see its works, feel its effects, know its clarity - then ALL my human relationships are gently healed, because the Holy Spirit guides me in all of them.
What works or doesn't work in a relationship is very specific TO that relationship. But the Holy Spirit takes me ever deeper - into primal places of fear and guilt and, beyond them, an impersonal love that is not concerned about survival.
I begin to understand how there is only the call for love and the response to that call, and that both are in me, and that together they make clear that love holds everything.
Then the surface differences between relationships matter less and I begin to realize the underlying crisis is the same in each of them: I feel separate from God and Creation and am trying to recreate wholeness in relationship with the other. But the other can never do that - they can never be God. But they CAN - with me, for me, through me - show me that I am not ACTUALLY separate from God and Creation.
So that's kind of the process and the motivation, as I experience and practice it.
Love,
Sean
Wow thank you so much, its so good to get a clear answer. 🙏
I think I understand what you mean and will give it a go ❤️
Thank you for taking the time to clarify that.
Many blessings 🙌
🙏🙏
Thank you. Even the 'best' of us have untrained minds: some part of that likes problems and is attracted to them, then analyzes and makes them more and more 'real'. It's part of that ball of seeking Specialness. I have to remind myself every hour as these appearances arise. It's a lot of Un-doing!
Oh yes! I have found it helps to share the way with fellow travelers but even then . . . lots of undoing 🙏🙏
~ Sean
Vigilant daily undoing, Sean.
Keep the message of God’s grace alive for me. Thank you.
Love Jack
Always! Thank you for being here, Jack. I hope all is well on your end.
Love,
Sean
I’ve been doing all right sometimes I get a little sidetracked. Thanks for asking. Love you thanks.
Another wonderful post Sean. I think you are right the Holy Spirit is the best therapist I can think of for He can undo our belief in the past in an instant. Most of us are afraid to do this of course, and so He takes it slowly, at a pace we can accept without fear.
And you are also right we don't need to do anything other that to be willing and to ask for Him to undo our belief in the mirror of separation. He will do it for us though, He will reverse cause and effect.
T28.4. Nothing at all has happened but that you have put yourself to sleep, and dreamed a dream in which you were an alien to yourself, and but a part of someone else’s dream. ²The miracle does not awaken you, but merely shows you who the dreamer is. ³It teaches you there is a choice of dreams while you are still asleep, depending on the purpose of your dreaming. ⁴Do you wish for dreams of healing, or for dreams of death? ⁵A dream is like a memory in that it pictures what you wanted shown to you.
We need only to remember to ask with every grievance, every difficult situation to know the Truth of yourself and everyone that walks with you, and that everybody are our companions on this journey until we all remember that only Love is real.
Thank you Sean, you are a gift, Love + Blessings Suzy xx
You're wecome, Suzy. And thank you for sharing and being here. I am grateful for your clarity and kindness.
Love,
Sean
Amen Brother! It's just so damn hard to remember to do nothing some days isn't it.......
Yes! But it does get easier :)
Thanks for being here, Larry.
Love,
Sean