Lesson 215 

I am not a body. I am free. 
For I am still as God created me. 

(195) Love is the way I walk in gratitude. 

The Holy Spirit is my only Guide. He walks with me in love. 
And I give thanks to Him for showing me the way to go. 

I am not a body. I am free. 
For I am still as God created me. 

Review 

I am very grateful for my Guide. I get lots of help on this path, suggestions, teachings, and more, but everything passes through the Holy Spirit. It is in me and part of me and is the Truth and the Light that keeps me on the path to my Self. How could I not be grateful?   

I have facilitated a course on gratitude several times. It is really good for me, doing these courses with other people. We join in teaching and learning with each other. And gratitude is more meaningful to me now than it has ever been. There is a prayer on the back of the booklet that I love and that so perfectly expresses my thoughts on gratitude. 

In Gratitude I Heal 

I let gratitude lead me Home… 

I now appreciate, accept and give thanks for all that I have inherited as a Child of God. 

In gratitude I follow the kind and gentle guidance of my Inner Teacher. 

In gratitude I now extend Love and appreciation to all equally… 

In gratitude I accept the Truth that All is One in the Mind of God… 

I gratefully see and celebrate the wholeness, innocence and perfection of my brother… we are one joined with our Father in Heaven. 

In gratitude I heal. 

A while back while I was still struggling with the process of making Spirit my only guide, I received this message and it was a guiding light for me. Just this morning, I was thinking about several things I need to accomplish today and I started feeling anxious about getting it all done. I stopped and asked for guidance as to what I needed to do now, and I did that. I will keep asking during the day, trusting that I will be led and that what needs to be done will get done. There is no anxiety when I do this and I almost always live like this now.  

Here is what I wrote in my journal. 

You are my Guide, Holy Spirit and I am grateful. Sometimes, though, even now I follow ego and afterward I wish I had not. 

Holy Spirit: Child of God, do not deceive yourself, the choice for ego was not made without your full cooperation. It did not just happen. It was not forced upon you. You are God’s only creation and your desires command the universe. If you are not happy with the choices you have made, choose another Guide. I stand in love, ready to guide you to true happiness. 

You feel discouraged right now because you look behind you at seemingly endless dreams of separation, none of which brought you more than momentary distractions and often left you depressed and disheartened. Look not behind you. The child of God does not live in the past. You look before you with echoes of failure beating the drum of defeat in your head and you see only the certainty of more disappointment. Do not look forward, for the child of God does not live in the future. 

Divine Light of God, you live in this moment and this moment is all there is. You live, not in the illusion, but above it. You decide, in this present moment, the quality of the dream. Through your beliefs and your desires, you create the moment you want. Decide with me, Holy One, and the moment will be full and wholly joyful. Truly, it is not hard and it is your choice. With practice, you can choose to stop prior to every word, every breath, and ask for My guidance. We can walk together through this dream and it will be a happy dream. 

Me: I know this is true. When I have been listening to You, Holy Spirit, I feel light and free. I feel like I have shaken off the shackles I had attached to my own feet. Then I suddenly feel dispirited and begin to question and doubt. I know I must be listening to ego and yet, I don’t remember making that choice. Why did I do that? 

Holy Spirit: You were happy because you made the choice for happiness and this is a choice you are learning to make more and more often. But it is not a choice you fully embrace yet. You sense that if you stay in this kind of joy very long you will not want to leave it, and you still believe there is something to be gained from playing in the illusion you created, some drama you have yet to experience, some possibility you have not yet tasted. You cling to the idea that you can find some kind of satisfaction in the separation story and that you can make something worth having if given one more chance. 

The only good use of the past is to see that thousands of lifetimes have not been enough to reach this strange and undefined goal you have set for yourself. A thousand more will not do it for you, either. This is not a sin and you are still the perfectly free Son of God. You can play in dreams for as long as you want without concern that you have actually done something unforgivable, for, in truth, you have done nothing at all. However, your experience will be one of hellish nightmares interspersed by moments that seem devoid of misery and you call these moments happiness. 

Oh, precious child of God, you were made for so much more than this. Your inheritance waits upon you. For the sake of Love, do not delay any longer. I stand beside you ready to guide you to your truth. Merely ask in any moment, “What would you have me do with this moment?” and the answer will be in your mind. Does that seem too much? Do you think that you cannot take that moment to ask? Think on this: when you do not ask Me, you have just asked the ego. Your mind is split; there is ego and there is the holy mind where I abide, and only I can be said to truly exist. So when you ask for guidance of the ego you ask for guidance of an illusion. You ask for advice from that which does not know. 

Make no decisions without Me. The moment that is before you is the moment of your salvation. See the moment for what it is. This is its purpose, not the purpose the ego would give it. Walk with Me this day, my precious child. Walk with Me in Love for that is what you are and until you choose to recognize your true self, you will feel lost and abandoned. It is just a false perception from a false guide, but because it is your desire it will feel very real and very frightening to you. Walk with Me instead, and spend your day in gratitude for the Love that you are. 

Regina’s Tips

Today, we simply remain in right-gratitude. Right-gratitude is gratitude for awareness-life-presence as it is. When wrong-minded perceptions enter our awareness, we will notice that the wrong-minded perception is caused by judgment; the mind has decided that one thing or circumstance is better than another. After noticing the comparison in the mind, we will relax, let go of comparison and replace it with gratitude for awareness-life-presence. In this way, we walk in love today.

My Thoughts

Refusing to judge and compare is the only way I can imagine being in gratitude consistently. I am aware of the tendency to think that one set of circumstances is good and another is bad. When I notice this in my mind, I let it go. When I do this, I am aware of my Self as what allows thoughts to come and go but that remains untouched by them. It is not something I hold onto yet, but it is precious in those moments of awareness.