Practices that Have Helped Me Move Closer to God

Practices that Have Helped Me Move Closer to God

Practices that Have Helped Me Move Closer to God

I keep the connection to the Holy Spirit open.

This is essential to living in the world while waking up. I talk to the Holy Spirit/Jesus all day long and listen for a response, which I receive in words (thoughts) and sometimes simply feelings. I feel happy, peaceful, and joyful, and these feelings don’t come from the situation at hand but from listening to the small, still Voice within.

I learned to be a better listener over time. Practicing the Rules for Decision helped. I am living in the world while waking up and I can only do this as I listen to the Holy Spirit. As Jesus tells us, we must decide for God and all decisions are made in union. We make our decisions with ego or with the Holy Spirit. No one wakes up listening to ego, so I learned to listen to the Holy Spirit and to ask for help when I failed to do so.

Here is one of my conversations with Jesus that helped to bring me closer to awakening.

Me: Jesus, I got off track yesterday, and it has spilled over into today. I opened my mind to ego thinking, and it came flooding in. I need to shut the floodgates and come back to right-minded thinking. I know the truth is in my mind right under all the nonsense of the world. When this happens, I feel like I am drowning in fear. I can’t imagine living like this anymore; it scares me to think of it.

Jesus: There is nothing happening, honey. Just thoughts in your mind. These are thoughts you don’t even believe. No one drowns in thoughts. Take my hand, and we will look together at this ego attack, and you will see that it is nothing. You are being attacked by shadows. Our light is so bright that the shadows disappear in its intensity. Go back into the silent stillness with me.

Me: Whew! Thank you, Brother.

I would like to put into words what happened, but I don’t know how. One moment, I was drowning, and the next, nothing was happening.

Jesus: That is because nothing was happening. Just thoughts in the mind, and all along, the truth was right there. It had gone nowhere. You brought the dark thoughts to the light, and in the light, they disappeared. This is what will happen to the world. It will transform and then disappear as it is brought to the light. This morning, together, we shined away some of the darkness. Remember that legions upon legions have sighed in relief along with you.

Because of this conversation with Jesus, I hardly ever have those overwhelming thoughts anymore. This morning, when I woke up, I noticed the thoughts ramping up, so I said no very firmly, and they stopped. I am far more peaceful now and very grateful.

²Your gratitude to your brother is the only gift I want. (ACIM, T-4.VI.7:2)

In a Pathways of Light course that I took recently it asked that we use this prayer with people in our lives:

_____, to really know you is to love you. To know you is to know God because you are of the Father. I am grateful for your part in helping me return to the Kingdom where we all are. Thank you for being part of helping me awaken.

I am sure that most of us have people in our lives who support and love us, as well as people who help us awaken by pushing every button we have so that we can forgive and heal our minds. While using this exercise, I thought of my son. I can see the progression I went through to reach where I am now. At first, it was as if his living his life was a deliberate attempt to make me suffer. And it brought to mind how my behavior when I was young must have been pure torture to my mom. I apologized to her from this side to the other side, and I am sure she knows.

Then, I learned that I am not responsible for my son anymore.

I began to trust him to learn from his story just as I am learning from mine. I began to understand that ‘mother’ is just a role I played while it was needed. Now, we are two of the Sons of God, and that is the only role we have while here. It allowed me to open my mind to something even greater in this relationship.

Now, while occasionally slipping back into the story of mother and son and worrying about him, I am more often able to remember who he is. I can see him peeking through Toby at me with all his radiance and beauty, his warmth, love, and gentleness. How can I worry about him when I can see that? I just want to sit in his Presence and love him. 

⁵Leave room for Him, and you will find yourself so filled with power that nothing will prevail against your peace. (ACIM, T-14.XI.15:5)

One day, I was very tired because my mind had been in conflict. I felt weak and vulnerable. But I realized that the more I surrendered my will and the more open I became to another way of seeing, the stronger I felt.

My energy grew as the night lengthened, even though I would expect the opposite. This is because my exhaustion was mental, not physical. My weakness came from a lack of understanding because my ego could not give me understanding. My lack of understanding left me without peace, and the lack of peace depleted me. But when I turned to the Holy Spirit, I regained both peace and energy.

I learned from this that peace is a choice no matter what the ego mind thinks. It did not always feel that way because my desire for it was not always whole. I can have peace only if peace is all that I want. There is no thing in the world that will give me peace, and if I desire anything except peace, peace is lost to me. I choose peace. Every time. Maybe not right away, but every time.

In this world you can become a spotless mirror, in which the Holiness of your Creator shines forth from you to all around you. (ACIM, T-14.IX.5:1)

There was a time when this seemed impossible to me. I wanted it, but I couldn’t imagine it. Now, the mirror is pretty clear most of the time, and I can easily imagine it will one day be spotless. It didn’t happen all at once, of course. Knowing it was possible encouraged me to become vigilant for dark thoughts that needed to be corrected. I would bring them up into the light, and the Holy Spirit would heal them or remove them from my mind.

I would see an enemy, ask for correction, and see the same person but not as an enemy. I see a call for love. I feel peaceful instead of agitated, and I recognize what a miracle this is. My gratitude overflows. I make up images and assign the body’s eyes the task of showing them to me. But I don’t have to make ugly images; I can make beautiful, loving images. It all depends on what mind I choose to think with: the ego mind or the Holy Spirit Mind.

It takes the same effort either way and as I heal and learn to love myself more, I always choose the Holy Spirit as my mind-healing Partner. Right now, I wish I could just sit here and not move from this spot, just spend the day feeling the love and peace this thought brings me. It is so strong it is almost a physical sensation, and it brings happy tears to my eyes. Since I don’t get paid to do this, I better get to work. LOL. But I will carry this joy with me and share it with my students.

⁴Each instant is a clean, untarnished birth, in which the Son of God emerges from the past into the present. (ACIM, T-15.I.8:4)

That sentence delights, inspires, and motivates me. It can be true right now, and in fact, it can be true ONLY right now because now is the only moment that exists. Time could feel like a real issue for me today if I chose to let it be so. I have a long list of things that seem very important that I feel like I must do. But the list originated in the past and the doing is in the future. So instead, I let a thought rise up in my mind, and I did that one thing until I was through, and then I let another thought rise up in my mind, and I did that thing. When my mind began to wander to other things, I brought it back.

I think about where I am.  I am sitting in this chair in front of my computer. I know I am because I can see that I am. I feel the chair, soft and yet firm, supporting me. I feel my fingers on the keyboard, hard and cool. I see the computer in front of me, the light of it, the color and the pictures, my eyes showing me what I want to see. In this way I anchor myself in the moment, in the now. I let the whole thing go and return to what I am to do right now, and I do it.

My mind wanders to a fearful thought. What if I can’t get everything done? I feel anxious and know I must have asked the ego what this meant, this question about not getting everything done. The ego answers with fear and anxiety. I have no question. I must have forgotten what to decide. There, I am quickly restored to the present moment.

I practice being in this moment and only in this moment.

And I do it every time I notice I need to practice. I believe what Jesus said that I can emerge from the past and into the present. And that the present can extend forever. It hasn’t happened yet, this forever extension of the present, but I believe it can, and so I will continue to practice, and, in the meantime, I am so much more peaceful about my day. Having peace in this moment is good, and I am grateful for it. Over the years of study and practice of the Course, I have learned to live in the world while waking up. I am now vigilant for ego thoughts that I readily forgive. My day consists of this practice, and because of this, everything that happens in my day is a step home.

Every thought of separation is something I want to see corrected. Every grievance is to be released. Every brother is precious to me, and attack is never justified. There is no compromise in this. I am more aware of the tendency for the mind to slip into the past or future. I see the error of this and understand the importance of the practice of being in the now moment. These are some of the practices that help me daily.

This is an article I wrote for Miracle Worker Magazine. There are many great articles by well-known ACIM teachers. If you would like to read more articles from this magazine, email me at revmyron@gmail.com, and I will forward you my copy.