One of the wonderful things about the Principles of Miracles in A Course in Miracles, that is that every one of these principles - there are 50 of them - uses the word, "miracles."
Principle 11 says, continuing from where I left off in the previous month's blog post, "Prayer is the medium of miracles. It is a means of communication with the created, communication of the created with the creator. Through prayer, love is received, and through miracles, love is expressed." So my experience of this is that it's like charging up any of our devices. That's really what prayer means here. It's being still in the presence of the divine and building up a charge through that connection. There's like a palpable sense of the divine love radiating into us and we're receiving that love, and then it enables us to extend that love to the problems we perceive in the nightmare or the everyday world we're navigating through.
It's been a very deliberate attempt on my part, and I think through what I've learned in the course, to get away from the talking part of prayer, where I'm talking to God or God is talking to me. I don't think those are excluded from prayer, but the course really emphasizes this idea of a meditative practice in which we're building up love and power and strength.
The second principle for today is Principle 12: "Miracles are thoughts. Thoughts can represent the lower or bodily level of experience, or the higher or spiritual level of experience. One makes the physical and the other creates the spiritual." So here that you get a sense of the course's metaphysics. In other words, it doesn't demonize the body. It doesn't say that the body is evil, but the body is definitely a very limited vehicle compared to the spirit, which is untethered, free from some of the constraints of all the constraints of the body. There's this idea that we want to constantly move to the limitless, which comes to us through the spirit, rather than an obsession with the body, which will limit us into the illusions and nightmares of our physical experience.
So let's say that I'm having an argument with somebody and we're arguing about something political of the day or something in the business news, and I'm doing it from a spiritual perspective, in which case I would be doing it a little bit tongue-in-cheek. The spiritual thought is that this is just a movie we're watching. It's like watching Netflix. The spiritual thought is that it's not actually the most fundamental level of reality for us to be engaged in. So I can look at us having this argument about the news of the day and rather than really take it all that seriously and get all that heated about it, consider that this is just an illusion. It's a movie. There is no need to get all excited about I can express my opinions. We can go back and forth on the subject, but at the end of the day, it's not the make or break part of either of our existence. The people involved in the argument now, the course says, basically, if you learn not to take it seriously and make it real to the person you're engaging with, it will elevate both of you, and it will actually elevate the whole world.
The third principle that I want to touch on is Principle 13, and it says, "Miracles are both beginnings and endings. So they alter the temporal order. There are always affirmations of rebirth which seem to go back, that really go forward. They undo the past in the present and thus release the future." I love that last sentence, especially. Sometimes you'll hear people saying in their own personal lives or on TV when the talking heads are discussing some tragedy that's happened, they'll say, "Well, that's a terrible tragedy from the past and there's nothing you can do about it." And then they'll just leave that hanging. I always think, "Wait, that's believing in the nightmare and being stuck in the nightmare that it's permanent." And I love this principle because it's saying that a miracle is a device to change in the present, to go back and change the past and release the future to a different, more positive outcome. This is a very core principle in Ho'Opponopono, too, which we reference a lot, where Ho'Opponopono says we are entreating the creator to release negative programming. Anything that has happened in our lineage from the beginning of time to the present and to delete all the beef, all the fighting, all the negativity, and that it can all be deleted from the past and really direct art lives to a different future, whether it's in relationships or finances or whatever it might help. There's a lot of discussion about generational trauma, generational wealth, generational health. You hear a lot of that word generational, whether on the positive side or the negative side. So this is part of the ticket to resolving that.
And a Ho'Opponopono practice for those of you joining us for the first time and not familiar with that, is related to this Hawaiian healing practice, hoop on opponent, which means to set things right. And very simply put, there are four affirmations you can repeat to yourself over and over through the day. And these affirmations then help us to clean out the past. So the affirmations are said to higher power inside of you, Creator. Your inner Buddha, Christ, Allah, however you think of it. You say, "I love you. I'm sorry. Please forgive me. And thank you." This practice is by far, the most popular technique in miracle mindset practices that I teach. This is the thing that people just gravitate towards and give good testimonials on.
The last principle for today says, "Each day should be devoted to miracles." There's more to it, but I'm just going to stay with this part of it because each day should be devoted to miracles. A Course of Miracles is authorizing the daily devotion to miracles. I have been obsessed with miracles since 1995. I did my Ph.D work on miracles and psychology and I just do it more and more every day. Every day should be devoted devoted to miracles, So it's just sort of permission giving at the deepest level to go into this topic and stay with it.
Now we're going to pivot into chapter one of the book Nightmares to Miracles. The chapter does give some background as to how I came to the three keys, and it was mostly through my PhD work. But suffice it to say that these three keys are the customer facing, user friendly reduction of the more abstract sort of hyper intellectual doctoral process and just sort of bringing it to a place where you can plug and play.
So the three keys are: the practical key in the red circle, the blueprint key in the blue circle, and then the genious key in the green circle. And the way I use these keys with clients is even in a prospective call, a complimentary initial hour long call in which I'm talking with the client and there's no strings attached. After we've done all the preliminaries and what their goals are and their questions for me and how much it costs and all of that, I will then go over the three keys with the client with regard to an issue or a goal they've told me about.
So let's say it's a relationship issue and they're in a difficult relationship and they want to get out of it. In the practical key, we want to know all the best practices that are available to us that we can possibly embrace on how to get out of a bad relationship. What are the books, what are the webinars, what are the courses, what's known about how to get out of a bad relationship? So that's all in the practical area. And then in addition to that, what's the client's goal? What's the time frame? Is it six months from now, a year from now? Is it right away? Is the relationship abusive? In which case there's a danger to them and a threat to them and they have to do it in a certain way? All kinds of things in the practical key, then we go to and so I'm sort of not talking at the client as much as asking them the questions, what do you know in this area? What is it you want? What are your goals? And then in the blueprint key, this is more psychological and what most people might think of as the core of the psychotherapeutic process. But we're doing this very quickly; It's like a five minute overview of things.
At that point I will check with them, and I'll be curious for them to educate me about their main top pain points as a child. So with your parents, we're not bashing them or saying they're to blame for everything in your life, but they're the source of the programming that eventually leads to the nightmare in relationships later on down the road. Or it could be finances, if that's the issue we're talking about. It could be health issues. But keeping to the goal of wanting to get out of a toxic dysfunctional relationship, as an example, say, okay, give me two negative things about your experience of your mom as a parent growing up and then what were two negatives about your dad? Almost right away, when they begin to do that, you can see the correlation between the relationship as it is today and this toxic stuff from childhood. Also, the toxic stuff is not limited to what the parents do. It can also be, for example, your first day in kindergarten or something that happened to you on the volleyball team. You begin to do an inventory of the different pain points you've accumulated through your life.
Then, the real innovation through the things we've been talking about with regard to miracle mindset, is pivoting to a quick exercise with a prospective client to delete negative programming. We now know some of the correlation between what's causing the problem in the here and now and where it came from in the past. So let's quickly do some deleting. And I'll be switching metaphors. I'll become the trainer in the gym, and I'm going to say the affirmations for cleaning and releasing toxic material. The client may ask higher power inside of you to clean up all the way back to when this negative programming started to be a part of what we were absorbing as children, and this is usually a very big epiphany for client, even a prospective client, even if they've been in therapy and done a lot of work on themselves.
The combination of the practical goal together with the connecting between an earlier pain point and what's going on now that's toxic, and then a quick way to start releasing that leads to some quite interesting reactions, and I then know as a potential coach for the client, whether it's a good fit or not. If they're responding to this, some people will disclaim it or push it away. I know that it's probably not the best fit if they're not getting somewhat excited about this. Or on the other hand, it is a good fit if they're really leaning into it. Then the third circle, the green circle, the inner genius part, there is really just about higher power, and that's already invoked when we do the cleaning by saying, "Please delete my negative programming." Here I'll do a quick inventory, asking them to tell me their spiritual background, what it was like growing up, secular, or even atheist? Was it spiritual in some way? Was it overbearing for you? Where are you today? What do you believe in? And then the real rationale for that whole course of inquiry can be compared using a metaphor I came up with: it's like spicy food. "I don't want it spicy," means I don't want any religion whatsoever. "I want it mild," which is I can have a little bit here and there. Or, "I really want it spicy," meaning I really want to get into Buddha and Christ and Allah and whatever the particularities of my faith are. So this is sort of the initial way that I qualify the dynamic of the relationship.
Being able to hold these three keys together is just such a passion, because therapy typically focuses on the blue circle most of the time, without deleting the programming. Having awareness is beneficial, but why not delete the programming if you can? It's like having stuff on a computer and saying, oh, my computer is loaded with a lot of viruses. That's good to know. At the end of the day, it's not enough, right? Then finally, the green circle is the source of that recharging power that we talked about earlier in reference to prayers. So holding all three of these together is just really super exciting as part of the calling into miracle mindsets.
With New Year coming around in a couple of days, you may decide to create some "New Year's resolutions." So just keep these Three Keys to Miracle Success in mind when thinking about some reforms you want to commit to in the upcoming year.
