As I was working through the daily lesson in A Course In Miracles and recording my thoughts to send to my spiritual accountability partner, I had this profound game changing thought start dancing through my head. It was dancing around like I just won the game on a 60 yard Hail Mary catch and I didn’t care about getting fined by the league.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nBGC0tOimg[/embedyt]
It was lesson number 24 and it stated:
I do not Perceive my own best interests.
1. In no situation that arises do you realize the outcome that would make you happy. Therefore, you have no guide to appropriate action, and no way of judging the result. What you do is determined by your perception of the situation, and that perception is wrong. It is inevitable, then, that you will not serve your own best interests. Yet they are your only goal in any situation which is correctly perceived. Otherwise, you will not recognize what they are.
2. If you realized that you do not perceive your own best interests, you could be taught what they are. But in the presence of your conviction that you do know what they are, you cannot learn. The idea for today is a step toward opening your mind so that learning can begin.
I realized that I really don’t perceive by best interests correctly. I often try and put value on situations in the moment, but my perception is usually coming from my own ego limitations. I started brainstorming some recent challenges and I tried to identify how I worked through them. I would usually get a little frustrated, emotional, or upset. I would tell myself “Why does this keep happening?” I would then try to use my own advice in staying positive and say “It is probably, because this is about happen, etc.” Clarity started coming when I had the realization that both of these methods were holding me back from moving through the challenge with peace and allowing the real truth to come to light.
In my experience the value of what we’re going through won’t be realized until we move forward along our journey. It might be in a week, month, year, or even years before the lesson is properly shown. What I do know is that there is always a lesson. Every single difficult situation I have ever experienced, has proved to provide me a valuable lesson at some point. A lesson that I would later feel blessed to have received. A lesson that was normally something I had no awareness around during the moment. A lesson that actually had me saying “Wow, I am glad that happen to me.” When I have become conscious and aware of the true lesson learned through my difficult situations, it has had me utter the words:
“I am glad I had cancer, 2x.”
“I am glad that I had severe depression.”
These thoughts then pushed me to a place of thinking:
How do we get through these difficult times with more peace, love, and happiness knowing that there will be a lesson learned that often becomes a blessing.
Why sit in negative emotions for too long when I know that the outcome, while not ideal at the moment, will most likely be something I have deep gratitude for down the road.
How do I let go of my ego’s constant need to make sense of things, that I can not accurately define and most likely the perception will hold me back from learning the true lesson .
How many of you have gone through a difficult challenge or situation that later down the road turned into a blessing?
I am going to imagine that If I was on stage asking this question, a majority of you reading this blog would hold your hand up high and proud and potentially even proclaiming with a powerful and intentional “Amen.”
So here is the lesson in this Blog Post. Let’s get through these situations with our best self and best interest in mind. Let’s get through these situations with more peace and less painful and fearful emotions. Let’s get through these situations with more faith that soon the lesson will shine its glorifying light onto us and make this challenge worth it and valuable to our journey.
To ensure that every situation in our life, good or bad, serves our journey; I believe we need to hold these 3 things as Foundational Truths:
- I don’t always perceive my own best interests.
- The evidence suggests that this challenge will turn into a blessing in the form of lessons learned.
- If I show up during this challenge as my best self, my life and the life of those around me will be better served.
We know challenges are going to come in and out of our life. Life is full of ups and downs, but we get to choose how we handle these situations. We get to choose how we move through these challenges. So I will leave you with this last lingering question that I believe we should all spend some time gaining clarity on:
Do you want to move through life with emotions and actions that help us achieve our dreams or do we want to constantly hinder our progress with false perceptions and beliefs that often are untrue?
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