Today’s lesson in A Course in Miracles, lesson 68, says “Love holds no grievances”. The meaning is that if we are to be happy and fulfil our purpose of being love, being light, creating and experiencing miracles, we must drop our grievances. It’s the only way. And we’re encouraged to spend time seeking out all of those grievances that we, in fact, we will learn, hold about every single person in our lives.
I found that quite a few grievances came to mind immediately, that I wasn’t even really aware I’d particularly been holding on to. This stuff is so much the norm in our lives that we just live with it all the time, as background noise, and don’t even notice it’s there. Just tiny little things I think or feel about people in my life who I don’t even spend much time with. And it makes me realise how much my life and my relationships are blighted by holding onto these thoughts.
They’re so petty as well and so seemingly inconsequential that I wouldn’t even have really noticed them if this lesson hadn’t specifically asked me to think about them. But the way we do notice these things is through how we feel. I was already aware of never quite feeling comfortable around other people. I’ve always been shy and struggled with social anxiety, and I’ve just accepted, really, that the bad feelings were caused by that and would never go away no matter what. I’ve tried to deal with the more intense feelings, the ones that cause real pain, tears even, a feeling that I just can’t go on unless I deal with some perceived slight from someone else, or perceived wrongdoing or lack of etiquette on my own part.
But what I haven’t realised until today, not really, was just how many of these teeny tiny little thoughts, the teeny perceptions of wrongdoing on the part of others or myself, that have just been happening on an ongoing basis for as long as I can remember and basically preventing me from being happy. I just thought I had to get over it. I thought I was just being a perfectionist. I thought it was just because I spent so many years being a hermit and so I wasn’t used to just how people are. But I couldn’t get over this fact that no matter what I did, there was always another situation cropping up where someone ignored me or was rude to me or even where two people spoke to me at once and I couldn’t avoid having to choose between them and therefore maybe inadvertently hurt someone else’s feelings.
I didn’t know how to deal with it but also I couldn’t understand why this stuff didn’t bother anyone else. Whenever I raised it with people, like my mum or a very close friend, they would always say things like “only YOU would worry about something like that!” And so I’d just in the end have to give up and try to live with these feelings that there was somehow something wrong with me, and that I would never really GET it, and never be able to feel happy around other people.
That was a very lonely place to be, and now for the first time I feel some kind of hope that there might be a way out of it. There might actually be a way to feel good about other people, to feel connected to them, one with them, to feel like I understand them and maybe they actually understand me too.
And that way is forgiveness. Plain and simple, it just comes down to learning to let go of every single petty and not-so-petty grievance. ACIM itself doesn’t give a method for this. It favours sitting in silence and thinking about the people you know and identifying the grievances you still hold against them. I’m more of a paper and pen person so I think I will try the Ho’oponopono approach, writing down my grievances and simply saying I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you. I think the reason for asking for forgiveness instead of giving it, for a perceived slight, is that every time you think something like “that person did this and I’m annoyed about it”, it is you yourself who is doing the wrong, and it is you yourself who needs to request forgiveness. At least that’s the way I understand it, but I guess there’s no harm in also saying “I forgive you” as part of the process.
So I’m off to do the work.