Lesson 5: I am never upset for the reason I think

If you thought Lessons 1-4 were difficult to get your head around, then Lesson 5 will not disappoint! This time we’re focusing on specific “negative” emotions, such as anger, fear, worry or depressed.

The message from this lesson (thanks Pam for helping me out here!) is that life itself is never painful, but rather it’s a mirror of your beliefs.

You may think you’re upset about that mean boss, your broken down car, or the fact that the dude you thought was your “Mr Right” has just announced that he’s opting out of the relationship, but instead, it’s totally about what’s going on inside you.

Have you ever looked in the mirror, noticed your mascara was smudged, then attempted to fix it on the mirror itself? Of course not! That’s because you can’t fix your problems from outside of yourself. Instead you must go within, recognising your problems as something you literally just “made up”, and then shifting your perspective about each problem. This is the perspective which is in fact the actual cause of your feelings! ARGH!

A Course In Miracles gives us the following examples of how we can apply today’s lesson:

When using the idea for today for a specific perceived cause of an upset in any form, use both the name of the form in which you see the upset, and the cause which you ascribe to it. For example:

• I am not angry at ___ for the reason I think
• I am not afraid of ___ for the reason I think
• I am not worried about ___ for the reason I think
• I am not depressed about ___ for the reason I think

The suggestion is to complete this little activity three or four times during the day, just to remind ourselves that our feelings or perspectives about these events are something that we again made up, when we chose to apply a specific meaning to them!

What’s really going on?

I can already imagine what some of you are thinking as you read this! For most of us, this way of thinking is completely foreign.

Since forever, we’ve been reacting to sitautions or events as they occur – no thought has ever been made to what’s going on inside us before these events occurred. Our reactions to these events are therefore based on what was happening before the event even existed!

An example

So let’s say you just lost your job. Many people would feel anger at their boss for sacking them, so let’s go with anger.

You think you’re angry because your boss sacked you, but let’s look at this a little deeper…

Say to yourself, “I feel angry about losing my job because…” and see what answer you get. You may be surprised!

Keep asking yourself this question: “I feel ___ about ___ because…” until you get to the root of the problem.

Here’s an example of how this works:

“I feel angry about losing my job because I no longer have an income to support myself.”

“I don’t have an income to support myself because it’s going to be hard to find another job quickly.”

“I believe it’s going to be hard to find another job quickly because there aren’t many jobs out there right now.”… and keep going until you can’t come up with anything else.

Eventually you’re going to find yourself at the root of what caused the anger in the first place, and I would almost bet my right arm that you’ll end up with something like the emotion of “fear”. Maybe a fear of what could happen if you had no income?

Once you’ve tapped into what this is really about, then you know what you’re dealing with! What’s interesting about this exercise is that it’ll link in nicely to at least one of the earlier Lessons. I’m thinking Lesson 4 is quite relevant here: “This thought (fear) that I’ll never find a job, doesn’t mean anything”.

I’ll leave that with you to think about – or to take a nap! 😀