Life Challenges

Creative Ways to Transform Challenges:
Dealing With Feelings

The Choice to Love Marianne Williamson

The choice to love is not always easy. The ego puts up terrible resistance to giving up fear-laden responses. This is where the Holy Spirit comes in. It's not our job to change our own perceptions, but to remember to ask Him to change them for us.

Let's say your husband has left you for another woman. You can't change other people, and you can't ask God to change them, either. You can, however, ask to see this situation differently. You can ask for peace. You can ask the Holy Spirit to change your perceptions. The miracle is that, as you release judgment of your husband and the other woman, the pain in your gut begins to subside.

The ego might say in that situation that you'll never be at peace until your husband comes back. But peace isn't determined by circumstances outside us. Peace stems from forgiveness. Pain doesn't stem from the love we're denied by others, but rather from the love that we deny them. In a case like that, it feels as though we're hurt by what someone else did. But what really has occurred is that someone else's closed heart has tempted us to close our own, and it is our own denial of love that hurts us. That's why the miracle is a shift in our own thinking: the willingness to keep our own heart open, regardless of what's going on outside us...

A Course in Miracles is not about pouring pink paint over our anger and pretending it doesn't exist... When we're angry, or upset for any reason, we're asked to say, "I'm angry but I'm willing not to be. I'm willing to see this situation differently." We ask the Holy Spirit to enter into the situation and show it to us from a different perspective.

From A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of 'A Course in Miracles' by Marianne Williamson, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY, 1992, pp. 89-91.

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