Not sure how this is going to work but I thought, for today’s blog post, I would do a commentary on lesson 53 of A Course in Miracles, which is a review of lessons 11 to 15. So lesson 11 is:
My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world
The explanation of that lesson is that my thoughts are insane and not real but that reality is not insane and I have real thoughts as well as insane ones and that if I follow the guidance of my real thoughts, I can see a real world. My question here is immediately how do I know which of my thoughts are real and which are insane. If I had to come up with an answer to that it would probably be (maybe based more on the law of attraction than my reading of ACIM) that the thoughts that make me feel good are the real ones?
I was asking in yesterday’s post about whether the happy thoughts I was having about running were real. And I concluded that the purpose of ACIM was to end up feeling the same bliss that I was feeling when I was thinking happy thoughts about running, all the time. So still feeling bliss and seeing miracles even when things maybe aren’t going the way we want them to? So I immediately kind of was given a chance to practise or experience that, because I had a very bad evening last night, a poor run, I felt exhausted, things didn’t really go my way socially either. Obviously I’m very early in this ACIM journey, and I completely failed to see the good in the situation!
Today I’ve worked through a few things and I don’t feel too bad about it but I’m still left to an extent wondering what my real thoughts are. So for example a worrying thought I’ve been having is that maybe I can’t do the training I feel I need to do to improve my running because I ran really well on Tuesday night and was very happy with it but last night I was just too sore to run well at all. So I feel like that’s clearly a meaningless thought because it feels bad. And I suppose also it’s my interpretation of events.
Another way of looking at this is the past, present, future perspective, in that any thoughts about the past or the future are meaningless and only thoughts about the here and now are real? So that’s really tied up with mindfulness and being present rather than either going over past events OR worrying about a future that you are basically inventing in your own mind. And actually when you go over past events, you’re usually not actually remembering the reality, but rather an image you’ve created in your own mind that very rarely if ever accurately reflects true events.
So my real thoughts would be when I’m completely and utterly present. I feel like that’s how I feel after a really good run, in that, when I run mindfully and really just sink into it, and when I exhaust myself on a run, I’m too spent to be thinking about anything other than how I feel in that moment. That’s really why I think running is so good for me.
Last night’s run actually couldn’t have been further from that. It felt like it was silly season to be honest. And maybe I wasn’t in a silly mood so that was part of the discomfort I was feeling.
Anyway, just to return to the lesson, and the past and future thinking, I think I have been getting a bit ahead of myself thinking about the possibility of PBs and stuff like that. It IS exciting but the work has to be done now, every day, and every run can’t be amazing because you get aches and pains, a hard run requires you to recover properly from it.
I feel like the action points on this are to continue practising meditation. I’ve been doing it daily for quite a while now but I think I maybe missed some days and I ended up going back down to 2 minutes this week and I’ve really been struggling to focus. I do a very simple form of meditation. I simply set a timer, sit in a cross-legged position, close my eyes and try to just keep on returning to the breath and to listening to the sounds around me, but recently I just haven’t been able to let my thoughts go at all. I’ve just ended up sitting there thinking about things. So I definitely can keep working on that and I think I do see the benefits when I do that.
Another point is to keep on writing. I have a pretty good practice for this but I have been really busy recently and it did fall by the wayside a few times and every time that happens it’s harder to get back into it again afterwards. Similarly to keep on studying ACIM, which I find, and I think I may have mentioned this yesterday, but I find it easy to study ACIM when I’m not happy or a bit bored or something, but much harder when my life is full of exciting things. It’s easy to feel like I don’t have time for it or even that it’s not necessary or even stopping me from enjoying my life you know, which links back to what I was saying yesterday about how, when things are going well, I’m a lot less willing to hear that most of what I’m thinking and seeing is not real.
Lesson 12: I’m upset because I see a meaningless world
Lesson 13: a meaningless world produces fear
Lesson 14: a meaningless world doesn’t exist because love didn’t create it
Lesson 15: the unpleasantness I see has been created by me, but if I let love direct my thoughts I will only see the reality of a loving world
I’ve tried to express the last couple of lessons in my own words based on the explanation given in the ACIM lesson.
What I take from this is that I need to let go of my wrong thoughts, of the unhappiness I’ve created for myself, and just let it go, let things be easy, let love shine through.
I feel like I experience this when I just relax and let be what will be.
Recently, I’ve been getting excited about my running again because of a time I did in a half marathon. Then, I suppose I’ve also been watching a lot of running YouTubers and getting influenced by what they say about training and stuff. It’s nice to be excited and motivated, I think. But I think the problems come when life doesn’t live up to your expectations of it. So I might watch a YouTube video of someone seemingly smashing another tough session and then I go to a club training night and I’m not feeling great, the session isn’t really what I should be doing, maybe other people are acting a bit silly, and the whole thing feels like a letdown. What I think I was doing really well over the winter was just going with the flow. I decided that I liked the social side of going to the club training sessions twice a week so I just wasn’t going to worry about how far I ran or whether the session was right for me. I was just going to try on a Tuesday and take it easy on a Thursday. No worries. But now I’m getting excited and serious again. I really want to grab this opportunity to maybe get my times back to where they were a few years ago and I actually think I can do it, I believe I can do it! But it’s just then about not trying to FORCE things to be perfect every time you go out. You still have to listen to your body. You still have to accept that not every run goes well. There are ups and downs. And sometimes you do seem to just have a week or so of feeling amazing but most of the time it’s either average or you get the odd brilliant run and everything else is average to rubbish! That’s how running works. It’s how LIFE works! And in terms of ACIM, when I do just let things be how they are, life just seems to work better.
The tricky thing is figuring out how to let things flow while also hopefully working towards your goals. And I think that’s about making a loose sort of plan but then accepting that you also have to listen to your body, and go with the flow, and for example you might one week be running really well in a session (or doing well in some other area of your life) and it almost seems effortless, but the next week you might struggle, and to just accept that and let it be ok. To just ease back, listen, and trust that, over time, you will still get results. Knowing how to, I guess, thread that needle between overdoing it and not trying hard enough?
Because I got an ok result based on not really pushing myself at all in the run up to my last half marathon, so I think that what I’m now doing is pushing too hard and that’s completely unnecessary and harmful. I only need to make small changes, and small changes will be better absorbed by my body and prevent injury, burnout, illness.
And it all just comes back to the same thing. Let things be easy. Let things just unfold how they will. Not in the sense of giving up and doing nothing but in the sense of setting your course and then letting the winds carry you where they may. So, in terms of running, I turn up for training with a plan for myself but if things don’t work out the way I hoped, I adjust and just let things be. And, for example with writing, I just turn up every day and write what’s on my mind, and I post it and let that be enough.
And just finally returning to the ACIM lessons, letting go of those negative thoughts about the past, worrying thoughts about the future, and allowing the present to make its presence felt, and hopefully heal that pain, that fear.
As I said, I’m still very early on in this journey and I just need to try, and test, and trust that things will become clearer and more miraculous the further I go on this path.