Lesson 19 – The effects of my thoughts

The full name of today’s lesson from A Course in Miracles is “I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts”, which I take to mean that whatever we think is affecting other people.

That’s an interesting one! Does this mean my thoughts are affecting everyone around me?

Are our thoughts affecting everyone around us?

I personally believe that if we are thinking of another person, then it is absolutely affecting that person in some way. Your thoughts affect your reality, and that reality can include the people around you and how they behave around you, for example!

Here’s what I mean

I have a client (let’s call her Sally) who came to me for help with an upsetting work situation. Sally told me that her boss was really quite awful toward her, and she didn’t know what to do.

She explained that her boss was often cold toward her, she was really inflexible with Sally’s requests, and Sally had a belief that her boss didn’t like her at all!

I asked Sally to try an experiment over the following week and to report back to me after the week was done.

The experiment

Here’s what I asked Sally to do:

1. Every morning before work, grab a notebook.
2. At the top of the page, write down the name of your boss.
3. Spend five minutes writing down everything you like about your boss. This could be something such as the nice jacket she was wearing that day, to something kind she said to you or someone else.
4. Each day, observe your boss and try to come up with more things to add to your list the following morning (in other words, I was asking her to constantly look for the good, because this would make her list writing easier the following day).

What happened next?

Sally truly wanted to see some changes, and although the idea of writing nice things about her horrible boss seemed counter intuitive to her, and she wondered how on earth this exercise could change anything, she decided to give this a proper go.

Three days later I heard from Sally. She was amazed to say the least! Not only had her boss started being nice to her, she was literally going over the top nice!

Why did this happen?

Like this lesson states, “I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts”. In other words, my thoughts don’t just affect me – they affect everyone around me, and that can include my friends, my family, my boss, the lady at the checkout and more.

Until I really started to learn how this stuff works, I had no idea how much our thoughts create our reality and therefore our entire world, but this is what happened to Sally.

In changing her perception of her boss, and therefore her thoughts about her boss (remember, her job was to search for and write about only the positive aspects of her boss), it literally changed the way her boss acted toward her because her boss was affected in some way by Sally’s thoughts!

What does Pam think?

In Pam Grout’s book, The Course In Miracles Experiment (you really need to buy this book if the original ACIM book seems too heavy!), her explanation takes a similar road to my interpretation.

Pam likens our brains to cranky old uncles who do not like to be wrong, and they literally make stuff up. She says that they construct reality to fit our beliefs. This in turn creates patterns and fills in blanks to reflect our dominant ideas, wishes and emotions.

In Sally’s case, it believed her boss was mean and horrible toward her, and that’s exactly the reality Sally was going to see. Until Sally changed those thoughts and beliefs through the process of looking for the positive aspects about her boss, her reality could not change.

So when Sally started looking for the positives about her boss and really started to focus on those, not only did Sally’s thoughts change, but her boss had no choice but to change along with them!

Today’s exercise

From the ACIM book:

Spend a minute or so today, thinking of people or situations, and repeat the following:

“I am not alone in experiencing the effects of this thought about ___”

Do this three times throughout the day to remind yourself of this fact!

This is really just a reminder for you that if you are in the midst of “funky” thoughts right now, your world is very likely going to reflect them, and the best way to shift that is to shift your thoughts.

Conclusion

I sat on this lesson for quite a few weeks as I was struggling to understand its meaning, and my interpretation is likely to be different from yours or from the interpretation of somebody else. And that’s ok as long as we get the main message here, which is to watch our thoughts, as they really do create our reality!