Good morning again!
OK, well, I have enormous resistance to practicing this lesson, I admit it, readily acknowledge my distress.
I think it’s because we four daughters were brought up by a Mom who adored us, but was so terrified of her own anger and unacceptable emotions, she assured we were too.
Of course, we were brought up in the 50s and 60s, an era overall where little and young girls were taught to suppress, bury, sublimate their emotions/feelings for the good of the whole. To be clear, I realize I am generalizing, please. The first year of baby boomers was 1946, the year my twin sister and I were born. My Dad and Mom were both in the Army, Dad in the Medical Corps as a surgeon, Mom, a nurse who traveled to Africa and Europe to attend to our WW II wounded. They had both been through the depression and a war that was devastating, even though Dad was not on the battlefield. Mom actually lived in tents and shared, over many decades, some of the horrors she had witnessed.
OK, enough of this background.
To say the least, it is almost impossible for me to closely look at the anger/rage/outrage/righteous indignation I feel on any given day as I feel so abjectly guilty about it. I immediately suppress these feelings, I realize I am doing it too because they are so frightening to me.
On a very deep unconscious level, Jesus would tell me I truly believe God will strike me dead if I recognize these heinous thoughts so I had better project them out there as quickly as possible so He will get these others, not me. Yes, this is what we all do when we are too terrified to look at the darkness to allow Him to transform our unloving thoughts and achieve peace, our ultimate goal, yes?
Yes, I do this all the time. I convince myself he/she/it caused my upset. Bill, my parents, my three sisters, my friends, our President, etc. Doesn’t matter who or what, anything will do, if I can be convinced by the ego that all of them or the circumstances are THE CAUSE of my distress, NOT THE EFFECTS OF MY THINKING!
Therefore, I am lulled into this nonsense/baloney that my thoughts mean squat and I am not responsible for what I see/perceive and how I see/perceive it. Our thinking is the CAUSE, always of our distress/malaise, the EFFECTS are what and how we see/perceive it.
To move on, after Mari had read the lesson this morning, I used the first practice period on myself, on my resistance, on my anger and rage toward myself for being so afraid. Yes, I did.
And it did help.
I so often apply the lessons to my upset with others, Bill especially, and I easily forgot to use my own self-hatred as rich fodder for practical application.
That’s it for today.
Happy and peaceful practicing, everyone!
Love,
Gayle
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