Guiding Thought

I am worth the effort it requires to move my mind into Love. I am worth the time of waiting, in patience, for Knowing to arrive. Every moment, every second that I open to simply being willing for Love to enter is a moment offered to Eternity; a moment offered to healing, a moment offered to Unity.

Love simply settles slowly, quietly, gently, beyond sense-perception. So I must wait in patience and take the effort to move my mind to join the quiet stillness of Love. Here I rest. Here is Peace. Here is all I want and need.

Reflection

I had a bit of a breakthrough today.

Three weeks ago today, I decided to really work at changing my thoughts around a particular situation. I could recognize the thoughts that were perpetuating that situation, and could feel when I would think those thoughts that I would begin a slow descent into territory I did not want to be in–the territory of anger, hoplessness, despair, grief. So I made a commitment to change those thoughts, whenever I recognized them as they came up.

Here are some of the thoughts that were the downward spiral (which I call “distortions”):

• “I have no respect for you”
• “You don’t know what you’re doing”
• “You make bad decisions”
• “No one likes you”
• “You’re not worthy of this”
• “You’re controlling and manipulative”

It’s hard to tell if I was having distorted thoughts about myself, or someone else, isn’t it? That’s one of the points of a really good reason to change thoughts like this. Even if they are directed toward someone else, they are also really about you (or me, in this case).

Here are the thoughts I decided to change these to:

• “I am willing to look upon the light and be saved”
• “Grievance is not my will; I will there be light”
• The prayer to the Holy Spirit, that I mentioned in the Afterword to Journey of Purpose.

Over the past three weeks, as my thoughts have turned downward and I have felt any inkling of the above thoughts, I have quickly recognized them, and thought “I will there be light”, or any or all of the above thoughts to keep my mind in the light.

Stress and duress cause the brain to go into a sort of shell-shock. Under stress, it’s hard to think; it’s hard to remember the choices that I’ve made regarding changing my thoughts. But in this regard, there is a lesson in, those movies where James Bond, or the like, are under torture-stress, and they can keep their head about them. It’s all in the training. In this sense, what I’ve been doing for the past three weeks has been to train my brain to respond to a certain stress in a certain way.

I had a test today. I was confronted head-on with the stimulant to those downward thoughts, and they flared up and up, dragging me down, and down…that is, until my training kicked in, until I realized what I was doing (spiraling downward), and that this was exactly the situation that I had been in training to overcome.

I started changing my thoughts. “I will there be light. I will there be light. I will there be light”. “Grievance is not my will. Grievance is not my will…” “I am my I AM presence and I am One with the I AM presence of all humanity” (I’ve been working with this thought a lot, too, just not specifically regarding this situation).

And I succeeded. I changed my thoughts, and my perception shifted. I can’t say that I could feel a difference; I don’t know what, if anything, I accomplished on the spiritual level. But I know it was a success that in the moment of stress, in the moment of confrontation, I was able to pull myself out of a certain downward spiral, and at least level off.